You don't remember much. But you remember the wave.
You remember clutching tightly to a stuffed doll as you are awoken in the dead of night in the palace of the southern capital, huddled in darkness beside your grieving mother as servants burst the door open into your room to rouse you from your dreams just in time to face a nightmare. They tell you both to dress yourself and flee while you still can. All around you people are holding their loved ones close or in a panic to move farther inland before it's too late. Away from the sea. That is all they tell you over and over again.
Away from the sea. Away from the sea. Like a silent prayer they hope will save them.
"We're safe this far inland, your nanny tells you with a reassuring smile, away from the coast, but it wouldn't hurt to take extra precautions." But it won't matter. She is a kind old artic fox who you love dearly, having played with her beside the hearth many times with more toys than you can count. Yet despite her promises that all will be well and decades of living on this earth, she is wrong. She will not live beyond this day. So few will.
Your mother dresses you both in nightclothes, not wasting precious time you don't have on extravagance. She packs quickly, taking jewels and wealth, and anything she can to help start a new life. She may not have much to live for anymore. But she will live to ensure you do. Her only daughter. You're tired and groggy and still not understanding of everything around you that is happening. All this chaos. You ask questions as you rub your weary eyes. But she can't waste time on an answer. Bored, you wind your favorite music box of two birds and watch as it plays its soft simple melody, arms folded while the adults work. The last sliver of happiness as the world burns around you.
She drags you by the arm in a final desperate dash for life across a grand hall to reach the shuttle in time or at least the bunker with more soldiers than you've ever seen before accompanying you both. As you sprint, still half dazed from being roused, you can see the familiar towering stained glass windows of past emperors staring down at you both. Your winged ancestors stare down in disapproval at their dynasty coming to an end due to the incompetence of their descendants. Everything they worked so hard to maintain will come crashing down today. It is inevitable. Inescapable. There is no escaping what is coming today. The reckoning that is due. No matter how far you run or even fly, safety will elude you by just a feather's breadth. So close, and yet not nearly close enough.
Suddenly, you all are knocked to your feet as a sound like thunder rattles the world beneath you and sends cracks throughout the walls. It rattles your bones. You stare beyond the cold glass monarchs as they shake from the impact out across the vast icy city landscape, which pales in comparison to what is coming. Far away, a lone speck is dropped from a passing plane and is swallowed into the sea. Hardly anybody sees it.
A crater revealing the ocean floor that can be seen from space is formed. In an instant it sends shockwaves and moves faster than the speed of sound in every direction, pushing seawater up and outward as far as it will reach until it casts everything in its shadowed veil. It covers miles in mere seconds. There is no outrunning it now. It is a force of nature perfected. Your mother and the soldiers rush to shield you with their bodies and wings as the hammer is finally brought down upon you all as punishment for your hubris. As you are all cast in this final darkness, you stare in confused awe and terror at why this is happening as the wall of water swallows the world before you before finally hitting its intended target. Everything that has been built must come crashing down. Today this war ends. Everything must go with it.
It all happens so fast, yet to you it seems eternity as all time freezes around you. The wave is etched into your memory forever, and there it will remain forever still.
You hear your mother call your name as the water rushes in through the windows to engulf and food the halls you know like a torrential beast, filling every room, every bedchamber, every crevice it can reach. In one final act, the sheer impact sends the broken shards of your family legacy to hurl through the air towards you like thousands of reflective daggers.
It is the last thing you ever see. Your doll swallowed by the darkness of the sea and lost to you forever.