Prompt Lost
Gone Fishing
You flip over the cryptic paper and on the back are a set a runes, drawn with an oozing liquid. The ink does not drip or streak, but it looks wet to the eye. When you reach out to touch a runic symbol some of the “ink” comes off on your fingertip and where it touches burns like a hot candle.
You are on your fishing boat and house boat, the same strange, combined vessel your father lived in, the same his father built by hand a century ago. You wash your finger calmly in the salty waters of the bay and watch as the strange ink flows off your finger into the water in streams. Ribbons of ink coalesce in the water before you, much more, impossibly more ink then was on your finger.
As you watch the still waters fill with symbols in ink, the same symbols on the the back of the blood image of a fish. Except now, inexplicably, you find you can read them.
You say aloud, on the stern edge of your boat, “Karathu, Egpora, Jyanatee.”
You finish the final word and shake your head as if casting off a spell. The world brightens around you, a fog clears, and only then do you realize the fog was there in the first place.
All at once, in a fifty meter circle around your boat, the water begins to bubble. You lean over the edge of the ship and look down into the roiling blue-green of the bay and hot steam hits your face. You realize the water is beginning to boil. Terrified you try to get to the dock but your tether has come undone somehow and your ship has floated far away. Impossibly far, impossibly quickly. The dock is almost a half mile in the distance.
As you reel from this discovery the ship rocks to one side, dangerously, taking on water as it does so. You attempt to avoid the splashing water, terrified of being scalded, but some of it hits you on your bare arm and you find it is ice cold bay water again – except it’s color is off. It leaves a ruddy stain where it touches. You lean down to smell your forearm and a waft of bloody iron assaults your nostrils.
You look up and the water, as far as you can see out to the mouth of ocean is blood red and thick. It sloshes against the sides of your ship, rising in heavy globs, denser than sea water. The smell of iron is strong in the air around you and you heave, the first of your long line of fisherman family ever to lose their stomach on a boat.
As you wipe your mouth clean, a noise garners your attention from the other side of the ship. You straighten out and slowly make your way around the central living space until your view is clear.
A fish, larger than two school buses, stands beside the boat. It’s scaly blue skin shines, unstained by the bloody waters. Its fins expand majestically to the side of its body, each as large as a small sedan. It faces you so that its giant left eyeball faces you. Aside from its bizarre size and behavior it is in every respect a normal looking fish, its eye dead and unmoving.
Although the fish does not change at all you hear a bass rumble begin from its direction, and then the same runic language fills the air.
“Latzia kra gratoon, pajul?”
You find, to your astonishment that you understand every word. You respond in English.
“I didn’t mean to. What are you?
The fish does not move.
“Sor da Hajecra Pestal. Damm at fer pajul acrat mé.”
The Fish King, Doom to the sea hunter who encounters me. The words translate in your head seamlessly. Then the Fish King begins to vibrate and an energy grows at his single exposed eye, a small pulsing ball of power.
You have a terrible feeling of impending doom. The Fish King speaks again. “Krak, pajul.”
Die, sea hunter.
The energy begins to coalesce into a solid ball of light and in a split second decision you take the blood illustration you found in your father’s trunk and hold it up in front of you.
An earsplitting sound emanates from everywhere at once, sending you to your knees on the deck. You cover you ears and find it does nothing. The Fish King leaps high into the air and fires a beam of pure purple energy into the distant sea, leaving behind a vapor cloud so huge that it coalesces almost immediately into a summer storm, filling the expansive blue sky, blocking the sun and bringing a cool rain.
You stand just in time to see the Fish King dive into the sea without so much as a splash. He does not reappear, but you hear the bass rumble of runic speak from the ocean deep. Your mind translates it by means you do not understand.
The blood pact continues, descendant of the Sea Hunter Prince.
The voice disappears and as you watch the rain clouds part, the sea turns to water again and the dock reappears right beside the ship, as though revealed from a dense fog.
Astonished, confused, you look down at the paper and, after a moment, fold it very neatly into squares and hide it back deep in your fathers chest.
As you go back to the deck to get some fresh air, you hear a rumble coming from inside you vessel. You listen carefully, follow the sound, and find that it’s coming from the catch freezer.
When you open the trapdoor leading in, a fish leaps out at you. A gorgeous sea bass, round about the middle and with a perfect blue sheen. You stare at it in amazement. You have not been fishing in a week and there have not been sea bass in these waters for a generation.
Astounded you stand there holding the fish in both hands even as a dozen others squeeze out of the packed hold and dance their asphyxiating ballet all over the deck of your father’s father’s ship.
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