Ripples in the Sea - Hunting Safikma (Part I)

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

"Shinsou," Arius said, tapping the Telgradian on the shoulder, "They're here."

Shinsou cast his eyes down the hill and watched the forms of his two closest friends clambering towards him, chewing up the muddy landscape that separated them. Once they reached him, he afforded them warmer greetings. To Philomel, a brief embrace, and to Joshua a firm, sincere handshake.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Shinsou said, "Welcome to the start of what is going to be a very shitty week."

They would not have been able to survey the carnage before, but now that the pair were with him atop Karak hill, the wreckage was laid bare for them to absorb in full. It was not a pretty view.

"What happened here?" Asked the faun, a hint of disbelief in her tone as her pretty eyes swept across the maw below.

"At first, we weren't sure," The Telgradian swept a hand through his ruffled brown hair, scratching his head, "But we came to the conclusion that it couldn't have been a natural event. You just have to look at the shape of the hole to see that. So, we went down to check out those serrated looking grooves in the coast."

"What did you find?" Asked Cronen pensively.

"Confirmation." Shinsou answered definitively. "The rock was thick with some sort of mucus or saliva. Arius?"

The wiry, bespectacled aide stepped forward, producing a vial of green slime from a pouch in his coat. "Before I worked for Shinsou, I was a marine biologist operating out of Etheria. Whales used to swim close to shore and sometimes they could become stranded and would wash up on shore. Their saliva used to pool in their mouths as they died and we used to take samples to figure out what could have caused them to become distressed. This is very similar to their own saliva, and it is on every single one of those indents."

"So, what you are saying is-" Philomel interjected before tailing off.

"Yeah. Something swallowed the town." Shinsou replied, darkly. "It gets worse, too."

"We picked up a man by the rocks. He was already terminal by the time we reached him, looked like he had been bifurcated by whatever it was that did this. When he described the creature, which, by the way, was harrowing, he mentioned that it had runes on its skin that seemed to be luminous and Thayne-like. In fact," The Telgradian turned and looked directly at Cronen, "They were almost a carbon copy of the ones on Draconus."

When the description of the mythically sized creature had reached Shinsou's ears, a feeling sat in his stomach like a cold lump of lead. This could well have been a revenge attack by the Thaynes. He had been one of the instigators of this fight, playing a key role in defeating the mighty Thayne Droconus with Joshua Cronen. He still had plenty of singed flesh left to show for it; a patch on his chest where a burn from that terrible napalm-like breath had only begun to heal. The memory of that terrible thing wouldn’t soon escape him, either. The cavernous mouth filled with razor sharp teeth, the torrential breath of fire, and the size of the abomination was impressed upon his brain.

Periodically since then, he noticed changes in the sources of power of the world. Being able to feel the presence of powerful magic, Shinsou could sense most swelling energies around and there had been movements across the globe that could not be reasonably explained. Breaker, with his godlike perception, must surely have noticed it too. Yet neither of the two had been alerted to this and neither had seen anything like this coming.

"As the one who seems to be publicly credited for that Draconus shit," He shot a sideways glance at Cronen, the man who had left the Telgradian to soak up the "glory" at Serenti, "I've agreed with the Queen of Scara Brae to handle this," Shinsou sighed, "None of you have any obligation to be here at all, and I won't blame any of you if you decide to do literally anything else, but I for one feel this one is partly on me. Joshua probably feels the same. Philomel, it's up to you, but I reckon you wouldn't let me go this alone even if I wanted to, huh?"

Shinsou did not want to employ a brutal guilt trip on genuine, no-shit heroes like Cronen and Philomel who simply wanted to do the right thing, but the people of Scara Brae were not going to be able to fix this on their own and the Telgradian knew that Cronen would likely feel terrible too. So he stood there, and hoped, and waited for their answers.