Suiteonem Prime, Sea of Shattered Teeth, Bathalas, 213923

  It was a bright, sunny day.

  Not a cloud in the sky.

  The better for the battle to be shown to everyone whether they wanted to watch it or not.

  From an archipelago on the other side of the world to the heights of the World Tree to the depths where molten rivers flowed.

  Some failed to keep the dread and terror from squeezing their hearts. Others cheered with joy and excitement at the impending proof of their supremacy.

  Suiteonem rose in the sun’s warmth, accepting its embrace as though a favored son. He raised a fist to his countless subjects watching through his thousands of magic eyes filling horizon to horizon with his overwhelming presence.

  The God opened his hand to reveal a miniature sun of his own. Gold and bright, outshining the yellow orb hanging above.

  To those watching it felt as if the larger shrank away from the smaller.

  Miss Karagatan swam in a rising pillar of water. She reached up, manifesting a coral trident with the swirling Heart of Sinaya where the long haft met the sharp-pronged head. Such a small body to carry the strength of Sinaya and all that dwelt in or on her waters.

  Suiteonem laughed, his massively muscled body bulged as gold rivers beneath his snow-white skin began to race.

  “Try to last longer than the last one!”

  The gold orb in his palm multiplied until thousands filled the sky.

  Silence hung for a split-second until thousands of golden beams ripped it apart.

  The sea boiled, filling the air with billowing steam greater than that from an erupting volcano.

  Hundreds pierced the Karagatan’s pillar like spears from primitive hunters on the sea ice, piercing the blubber-thick hide of a trumpeting tusked behemoth.

  Blue turned violet as the pillar fell apart and crashed back down the hundreds of meters to the roiling surface.

  Hundreds of millions of voices cried out in despair from their homes on countless islands in the light of day to the darkest depths in the trenches.

  Even more roared in triumph.

  “That’s it? My divine blood hasn’t even started to boil.” Suiteonem smirked.

  A very long minute passed.

  The sea calmed.

  Those that knew the sea recognized that it did so unnaturally quick.

  Crimson bloomed on the surface in stark contrast to the cerulean.

  Too much, it seemed, for a body not much larger than the average human teen.

  To those that didn’t know the sea and its life the sight was unsettling, disturbing.

  One expected it to be all blue.

  To see the crimson meant sudden and unexpected death had taken place.

  Two objects bobbed to the red surface.

  The trident and the hand holding it.

  The God chuckled.

  “I know you’re still down there.”

  He raised a finger and pointed dismissively to the west.

  His golden orbs fired.

  Thousands of beams screamed across the clear skies.

  “What did I tell you? Entertain me or I shall have no choice but to speed up the culling of your people.”

  Golden eyes captured the scenes on an island many kilometers away.

  Defenses lasted mere seconds as the God’s attack turned the surface into a blasted wasteland. A rich, vibrant island filled with trees and wildlife rendered into smoking, blackened rock.

  Thousands of Sinaya’s people nothing but ash.

  Their prayers to their true God and her champion answered too late as the calm sea erupted.

  Winged dagger fish filled the sky in a school thick enough to shelter those underneath from the sun.

  Suiteonem let them come.

  The sharp, bony dagger at the end of their snouts could go through steel hulls.

  They broke upon his bare skin.

  Such was his contempt that he did nothing to augment his defense.

  An intentional mistake for he meant what he said when he wanted entertainment. For him and his subjects. His playthings deserved entertaining things from time to time.

  The Karagatan emerged from her hiding place within the swarm.

  Her right arm was gone almost up to the shoulder.

  In its place was an arm of deep ocean blue.

  She thrust the ocean’s hand at the laughing demigod.

  A spear emerged. Colored bright and vivid with all the life of a thriving coral reef.

  The swirling Heart of Sinaya in the space between haft and spearhead exploded into hundreds of hard water spears.

  They struck Suiteonem, drawing golden blood all across his pale skin.

  Laughter.

  “That’s better, Karagatan.”

  She remained silent.

  A defiant child standing beneath a towering giant.

  It felt as if a single step could crush her and with her the secret hope— whether they knew it or not— of Sinaya’s people.

  Freedom.

  The golden God flexed bulging muscles, shattering hard water spears as if they were delicate glass sculptures meant to be kept behind safe displays.

  The shockwave that followed shattered the entire swarm of winged dagger fish and shoved the Karagatan hundreds of meters away.

  She spun in the air.

  He chased, breaking the air itself in his wake.

  A hand large enough to crush her entire torso reached out, grasping.

  The Karagatan filled the air with hard water spears.

  Suiteonem blasted them with golden beams.

  “Just spears? Most of your predecessors were more imaginative. You, yourself, were more imaginative when killing my empyreal guards.”

  She dived for the sea.

  Flight faster than falling.

  Suiteonem dismissed his miniature gold suns and gave chase.

  Sinaya had shared tens of thousands of years of memories with the Karagatan.

  True to his nature, the angriest God ultimately preferred to use his bare hands. To feel the wet warmth of his opponents slipping beneath his fingernails. To feel it wash between his fingers and drip down his arms in warm rivers.

  Booms followed the two of them.

  Hundreds of meters in less than a few blinks of the eye.

  She pierced the roiling surface without a splash.

  As for the interloper God?

  He plunged into a massive maw filled with whirling teeth.

  A massive sea beast had emerged from nothing.

  The depths filled with whirlpools of the deepest blue. Portals. Out of which dangerous sea creatures, natural and magical, swam.

  Sinaya would not let her champion fight alone.

  …

  “I didn’t know the Karagatan could do that,” Aunty Bilaya said.

  Neither did Ragay.

  Herding the children had been forgotten as they all had been drawn in to the viewing orb.

  They had been forced to watch the fight.

  Something kept their eyes on the projection that filled the common living area.

  Ragay’s aunt had tried to shut the viewing orb and change the channel.

  Neither attempt had worked.

  Then she had tried to take the little ones to their room.

  But the fight had started at that point.

  And the God had taken Miss Karagatan’s arm, making the water look like the scene of a great blue death’s successful hunt.

  Then he had destroyed an island and its people.

  Brothers and sisters of Sinaya.

  Taken in an instant.

  Ragay couldn’t take his blurry eyes off Miss Karagatan’s and Suiteonem.

  The God.

  In the divine flesh.

  “Why didn’t she say anything about this?” he mumbled.

  His body felt like it wasn’t his own.

  “Ragay! Put that away, now!”

  Aunty Bilaya’s voice pierced through the haze over his thoughts.

  “What—”

  He noticed it then.

  His hooked staff was in his hand.

  “This isn’t—”

  He couldn’t remember pulling it out from wherever it went when not being wielded.

  The Heart of Sinaya dangling from the end swirled. Angry, agitated. Spikes erupted and retracted.

  Siar and the other children paid it and him no attention.

  They sat enraptured at the brutal, bloody battle in the Sea of Shattered Teeth.

  It took nearly a Karagatan’s level of will to dismiss his hooked staff.

  “I have to go. I have to help.”

  “No, Ragay. There is nothing for you to do there.” Aunty Bilaya gestured sharply at the projection. “It is half the world away and you cannot fight in that.”

  What could he say to that?

  …

  The sea boiled.

  Creatures of all shapes and sizes emerged from Sinaya’s whirlpools only to be cooked alive.

  Deep singers the size of drylander ships sang their final songs.

  Each venerable animal carried centuries of life roaming the oceans, protecting, teaching in their gargantuan bodies. Serving Sinaya in all ways.

  Millennia of wisdom lost in an instant as Suiteonem, golden bright Suiteonem swam through them.

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  Five. Ten. Twenty.

  Leaving a wake of gold and crimson in his wake through their bodies.

  Sudden ice spread out for hundreds, thousands of meters in all directions with the God encased in the center.

  Miss Karagatan held her spear forward.

  The Heart of Sinaya pulsed and swirled.

  Scared.

  Angry.

  She struggled to control it.

  To let go even as deep singers she had known since they were calves suckling at their mothers’ teats slowly rose to the surface. Their last breaths of life leaving them with the dimming of their soul-filled eyes the size of the orb in her spear.

  “Thank you, my old friends. May you find your way through the currents and return to Sinaya with haste. We shall meet there.”

  The Oath in her thoughts sang in their voices for a moment.

  Ethereal golden eyes in the dark water stared, watching what should not be seen, sharing it with the entire world.

  The obscenity of it sent a pulse of anger through her.

  As if in response golden light shined through the chunk of ice larger than many of the islands in the Sea of Shattered Teeth.

  She thought calm thoughts, knowing that the anger, rage only strengthened the God.

  The ice exploded, scattering and clearing the water of tons of dead sea creatures.

  She willed the currents to change their natural course, swirling around her to create a sphere hundreds of meters thick.

  Suiteonem punched through in one blow.

  Golden eyes blazed.

  He laughed in the depths.

  She calmly raised a whirlpool in front of her as he punched fast enough to vaporize the water around his fist.

  A second whirlpool opened up behind his head a fraction of a second after.

  The fist to the back of his head drove him forward and into her spear.

  Despite all the strength given to the Karagatan, despite the magic of Sinaya in the weapon, the jagged coral spear merely penetrated the God’s thick, muscular chest to kiss his breast bone.

  His hands blurred, snapping the coral haft like it was a dead, dry stick.

  Faster than she could react a fist bigger than her head crashed into her face.

  Instinct faster than conscious thought opened a third pool behind her even as her vision turned into a dark sky of twinkling stars.

  She thought that it was strange that she could see beauty in the terror.

  The realm between the physical realm belonged to Sinaya in ways that even the world’s waters did not.

  Comfort and warmth embraced Miss Karagatan.

  She wished she could just lay in the soft, gentle currents. To lay down the burden of carrying everything on her slight shoulders for the last time. But, Sinaya had need of her still.

  A pool opened, disgorging her back into the real world.

  The sudden cold and violent currents woke her muddled mind.

  She spun and with a powerful kick of her webbed feet propelled herself back into the fight faster than the sounds emanating from Suiteonem’s battle with a second wave of Sinaya’s creatures.

  He blazed with golden light from his hands and eyes, turning corrupted trench-dwellers to ash in the hundreds.

  They had been people of Sinaya once but a darkness in the deepest places in the trenches and even beneath the rock and stone had turned them into little better than monsters. They had gone from classed to corrupted class to no class at all.

  Miss Karagatan had fought them directly rarely for they provided a good challenge for Sinaya’s people to level against.

  Even still, she had no idea that there had been so many of them.

  Tens of thousands streamed out of Sinaya’s whirlpools.

  It appeared that despite serving as Karagatan for over two centuries there were still secrets that her true God kept from her.

  The Oath, the constant Oath sang in her thoughts.

  There is a chance.

  Corrupted trench-dwellers were strong. Dangerous because, though they lost their classes, most of their Skills and spells became inherent abilities.

  It had always unnerved her to look at them.

  Like looking into the twisted mirror pools of carnival funhomes.

  One, a wizened crone that could’ve been her progenitor’s progenitor if not for the pulsating barnacles on half her nude body waving their cirri hungrily, thrust her skeletal arms down to the black depths as she began to chant.

  Somehow, Miss Karagatan could hear the words despite the distance and multitude of sound waves polluting the water.

  She grimaced against the foul language.

  A long life meant time to study many things despite the near constant service to Sinaya.

  Ancient language.

  The White Speech.

  Named for the proverbial lone island in the middle of an ocean where no life could survive in its desolation. Where the sun turned its harsh face down to bleach the bones of any living thing that had been cursed to die on it, turning them into the starkest white.

  Suiteonem’s ears leaked golden streams.

  Miss Karagatan was protected by Sinaya, for even the evil White Speech was subject to the true God’s power.

  As for the trench-dwellers in the crone’s vicinity?

  They frenzied like reef rippers in bloody waters.

  Their bodies swelled grotesquely, doubling in size, stretching and tearing pale scales and paler skin.

  They moved faster.

  Foul abilities exploding as they swarmed Suiteonem inside the most terrible of bait balls.

  Gold light flashed in the darkness as they sank into the depths.

  Miss Karagatan thought she could hear laughter amidst the foul White Speech that sought to corrupt and ruin the soul of even a God.

  Hope bloomed in her small chest.

  The corrupted trench-dwellers were a dangerous threat, especially in the numbers they were in, but she could handle them in a way that she couldn’t Suiteonem.

  If they could—

  Gold exploded below, banishing the darkness.

  Suiteonem stood revealed.

  Each punch and kick exploded a trench-dweller.

  One grew his mouth of sharp teeth to thrice its original size to bite down on the side of the pale God’s neck. Even then he barely fit around the massive muscle.

  Teeth chipped and broke as the trench-dweller gnawed.

  Suiteonem flexed his muscle, breaking the jaw and shattering teeth.

  He then used the trench-dweller to smash the others until the body was a broken, bloody mash of meat and bone.

  Miss Karagatan did something she had never expected she’d do.

  With a wave of her bident she granted hundreds of trench-dwellers hard water armor.

  Oh, it didn’t protect them. Not for long.

  One hit to destroy the hard water. One hit to kill the trench-dweller.

  Still, that forced Suiteonem to double the number of strikes he had to make.

  The cursed White Speech filled the sea.

  More crones appeared.

  More trench-dwellers streamed out of Sinaya’s whirlpools.

  The foul language shook Miss Karagatan’s concentration, forcing her to cover her ears with hard water.

  Golden eyes found her through the crush of the melee.

  A flash turned the water into steam and burned the surface of her coral chest armor.

  It cried out in her mind, begging forgiveness for its failure before it died.

  She dived into the darkness to flee the thin streams of burning light.

  “There is no need for forgiveness. You served well.”

  More death.

  A drop in an ocean.

  Some would call her silly to feel the death of the coral protecting her torso and right arm nearly as keenly as the deaths of dozens of deep singers.

  It was as Sinaya willed.

  All living things in Sinaya played the roles she intended.

  None, no matter how small, were insignificant.

  Suiteonem’s laughter chased her.

  The seascape of the Sea of Shattered Teeth was mostly flat outside of the mountains that formed the bases of the many islands. There were no jagged canyons, nor deep trenches. No places for her to hide and evade.

  Thus, she had to use the trench-dwellers and sea creatures.

  She slipped hard water constructs through the gaps in the ball around invading God. Copies of sea serpents and reef eels given the gifts of the originals through Sinaya’s magic. Fangs injected venom and mere touch shocked.

  Suiteonem shrugged, sending a burst of burning gold out in a sphere.

  Dissolving her constructs and trench-dwellers.

  Space cleared.

  A trench-dweller turned her monster fang sword five times its size.

  He let the blow land before shattering the fang with a touch, then shattering her with the next.

  Three trench-dwellers swam in from three directions.

  One bound his limbs with chains from the water that screamed with the faces of long-forgotten victims on each spiked link. One engulfed his head with a hand turned into sharp-toothed light lure hunter on the end of an arm turned into an abyssal octopus’ tentacle. The last bisected her own body to reveal that it was merely a shell for a nightmarish school of mutant fish that appeared to be bladefins with a ring of spiny tentacles and a gnashing beak instead of a proper head. They seemed to multiply out of the husk without end.

  A daunting set of foes for an entire shiver of warriors over Level 40.

  Suiteonem killed them all in the blink of an eye.

  He repeated the domination hundreds of times in seconds.

  Then thousands.

  And tens of thousands.

  Until only a few corrupted trench-dwellers remained.

  Then only the original crone speaker of the foul White Speech.

  Miss Karagatan could see that the crone had the strength of at least a Level 70 in that withered body of skin, scale and bone.

  The White Speech turned foul thought into reality in a way that hurt Miss Karagatan to look at.

  Still, she persevered, striking at the massive God with weapons and creatures of hard water in an effort to distract him from the crone’s vile magic.

  She willed a construct copy of the largest great blue death she had ever seen some fifty decades ago. She had watched the old female tear seven tentacles off a young kraken before he had managed to crush the life out of her. A worthy effort for she had ensured that most of her last litter of pups escaped to carry on her genes.

  The construct of Old Bitter was a poor copy, but it still managed to bite into Suiteonem from chest to thigh before he destroyed it.

  The destruction of her constructs precipitated the deaths of the last remaining trench-dweller.

  Her vile White Speech silenced by his golden burning rage that turned water to steam in a flash.

  Water rushed in to fill the void, threatening to drag Miss Karagatan to the golden God.

  She swam against the currents.

  Fast and far.

  Cutting through the water like a lightning whale after prey.

  Golden beams trailed in her wake, singeing her feet even though they missed.

  She turned and willed another construct from her memories to life.

  A cherished one this time.

  Pagalay.

  A deep singer she had befriended in the first year after she had become the Karagatan.

  After she remembered nothing but faint mists from before that honor.

  His had been a difficult birth.

  The kind that happened occasionally when the calf got turned around in the mother’s womb and twisted in the life cord.

  She had been unprepared, but she managed to help his mother give birth to him and survive the ordeal.

  Their friendship lasted a century when Pagalay had perished in battle with Inkblood, Doom of the Ocean, saving her life and pinning the vampiric kraken to the side of an undersea mountain long enough for her to cut through Inkblood’s side and swim to the diseased heart to plunge the lifewood spear deep.

  “My friend…”

  An unexpected pang gripped her heart at the sight of the majestic behemoth swimming out of her Heart of Sinaya, growing to full, gargantuan size with one flick of his tale.

  “No. Not him.”

  The construct was silent.

  Pagalay had been noisy and constant with his singing.

  The construct rammed headfirst into Suiteonem, driving him down to the sea floor and carving a trench.

  Miss Karagatan swam behind, firing arcing darts of hard water into the God.

  The feral smile never left his face.

  He gripped the construct and roared, tearing it apart with a burst of gold light.

  The sudden destruction caught her off guard, sending spikes of pain through her body, starting in her head and radiating all the way to her toes.

  He was on her in a flash.

  His hand engulfed her head in darkness.

  The strength to crush her like a rotten fruit held her firmly.

  She struck with constructs, but he only laughed louder.

  Pressure changed rapidly in the darkness.

  It would’ve killed anyone else, but she was the Karagatan.

  She was the ocean.

  Unfortunately, he carried her all the way to the surface and beyond.

  Painful sunlight suddenly blinded her.

  It took a moment to realize that she was flying through the clear sky.

  Suiteonem had hurled her.

  Searing pain struck her dead chest armor, melting the blackened remains into her scales and skin.

  Spinning, spinning.

  Heat and light.

  A distant island became a near island frighteningly quick.

  An inhabited island.

  She didn’t know where exactly she was on the Sea of Shattered Teeth.

  She had to get away.

  Lead him away.

  The memories came flooding back.

  Not hers.

  They screamed of the laughing God. Laughing not with joy but with rage as he lay waste to entire towns and cities in his many battles with Karagatans throughout the ages.

  People of Sinaya.

  Child, woman and man.

  None were spared.

  Or one or two or a handful.

  All was enslaved to his whims and plans.

  She crashed through a row of squat, dome-roofed buildings.

  The bubble of hard water kept her safe, but did nothing for her people.

  Crimson smeared her bubble as she rolled through. Until she could no longer see outside.

  Pain spiked through her body with the bubble’s shattering.

  Suiteonem’s wild wide eyes and crazed smile greeted her for a moment before he punched her into the ground.

  Stars in the black sky returned for a moment.

  Still spinning and partially blind, she rolled on instinct.

  A bare foot larger than her torso stomped deep into the crater.

  She cut the back of his ankle with her bident sheathed in hard water.

  He roared and fell to one knee, allowing her to fly away.

  From high in the sky she watched him lash out with his golden beams, laying waste to the small island and its people.

  How many had she just failed?

  Thousands?

  Ten thousand?

  She saw the happy sign on the highest point of the island.

  Sunside.

  A friendly people.

  A good people.

  Now?

  Less than ash.

  Suiteonem disappeared.

  She turned, striking.

  He caught her bident and broke it with a twist of his wrist.

  She still blasted him with hard water blades strong enough to turn a steel-hulled Merquani battleship into hole-filled sink trap.

  Yet again, she pierced his snow-white skin less than a finger’s nail deep.

  He grasped her water arm, looming like a mountain threatening to crush her.

  She willed spikes but failed to force him to let go.

  “The culling customarily comes after, but that feels boring to me right now.” He sneered down at her. “I shall start it now, Karagatan. You will try and fail to save your people. And in that failure, you will learn the true depths of the rage. You will fail your false god and worship your true God. You will supplicate yourself in my temple. Then I shall slay you and consign your soul to an eternity of service in Sunor. In my name, Karagatan.”

  He hurled her across the sky and vanished in a golden flash, streaking toward the next closet island.