In a stuffy chapel, mid-july, a young man and his harrowed wife sit alone in a single pew. Their eyes, though puffy with tears and streaked with bulging red veins in the corners, land upon the priest standing in solemn silence at the front of the church. The red-faced, heavyset cleric blocks a small casket from prying eyes, but only barely. He adjusts his glasses on his bulbous nose, and pulls a crumpled sheet of paper from a small pocket near his chest, but not before lightly dabbing at his forehead with a damp handkerchief. So hot, so relentlessly hot. Sweat clings to the three chapel-goers like a thin film of glitter.305Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvoPoEVM2oS
Once the handkerchief is tucked neatly into the priest's pockets, he smooths out the crumpled piece of paper a foot away from his eyes and glances down through his glasses and over his nose to read the messy text entombed within.
"We gather today to mourn the death of one Judith Snow, taken from us too soon."
The words make the wife begin wailing. She clings to her husband in the pew, sending sickening sobs to the sky, and he muffles her heart-breaking sounds with a tuck of his head atop hers. The priest continues.
"I will now read a eulogy prepared by Judith's father, mister Isaac Snow."
"Judith, you will always be our little girl. You were everything your mother and I could have dreamed of and asked for. We loved everything about you."
A pause as a solemn silence falls across the chapel. Behind the priest and through tall, dusty windows, waves can be seen sloshing with ferocity against the rocky cliffs mere meters away from the church's final bricks.
"I still remember your obsession with the tales of old," continues the priest. "The tired stories about the sea kings and their clutch over the oceans centuries ago. They made you so happy, for some god-forsaken reason. I wish I never told you them."
The once-stoic father begins crying at this point, tears falling from his eyes and into his wife's hair. The priest clears his throat before reading onward. "Perhaps, if I never told you them, you wouldn't have grown curious enough to find the Ruined Shore. Perhaps you never would have been thrown upon the rocks by the very sea kings you admired so."
"Judith, we--"
The priest's voice gets shaken from beneath him as the church's foundations tremble. Shocked, the priest turns, and the husband raises his head from his wife's crown to stare beyond the priest and through the chapel windows. The husband's mouth forms an 'o' shape as he recognizes water shaping into long, billowing tendrils before his very eyes.
Once angry waves become sentient. Long tendrils of bubbling seafoam coagulate into seeking fingers, and waves roar into the hairline of a once-obscure, esoteric being. A seventy-foot tall figure rises from the ocean, given sentience through belief, and when it turns towards the chapel, the priest allows a gasp to fall from his lips. Like two burning pits of coal, the aquatic monster's eyes bore holes into the church's interior.
One hand made of sloshing coral reefs and suspended sharks raises from the cliff face outside of the chapel. The priest, once so invested in the funeral, takes flight, his feet slamming against ancient stone bricks in a desperate bid to escape, but the husband and the wife remain, steadfast and firm.
The Sea King took their daughter. So too will it take her funeral from their grips. At the very least, they will be with their little girl again. Judith, the apple of their eyes, the only thing that has ever mattered.
The Sea King's fist slams down upon the church. In their last moments, the husband and the wife know only defiance, and nothing more. Darkness comes, and then peace.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
