"Dorn was out hunting, in the little stretch of wood between the Giant's Toes, for furs for blankets for younger siblings, and Dorn had been hunting for several days. She has heard rumors of things that lurk in the woods, but there were always those people who say that. She has heard rumors of things, plagues and monsters and plagues of monsters, that swallowed little provinces like the one she inhabited whole. But then again, there were always people who said that. All in all, Dorn knew nothing about the current political climate of the human domain, in particular that most of the important politicians had died in what some philosophers called "an alien invasion" and theologicians called "a severe bureaucratic mistake, probably".
It was with this severe lack of context, that Dorn muttered to herself "The gods will make me wait until the end to have this pelt! My youngest brother will be freezing, waiting in his grave for nine hundred years, because his blanket will be full of holes, before I return with the pelt!
She did not know it yet, but her youngest brother was already dead, of causes thoroughly unrelated to the cold. He would never be buried in a grave, and the blanket full of holes was being digested along with his flesh and mortal soul in the belly of a Fractured. "
- Excerpt from From Foam and Fire: A Complete History of Intelligent Life on Earth
"Willy, do you spot any fish?" my father loudly croaked from the cockpit. At one point, his voice would have been described as 'booming', but that was before he returned from the war with a scar across his neck. Now, all he could manage was to loudly croak, though it was a hell of a lot better than being dead, and plenty to wake me from my brief snooze. I shot out of my hammock and grabbed a handful of vials from a pile that had long since transcended from being supported by the table buried somewhere in its depths. "Onnn it… One second lemme get the screeners mixed…" I gave the bubbling solution a hard shake and then carefully poured it onto the electrical grid. While EZ-Alchemy SafetyPro© Screening Solution wouldn't burn you, it stung worse than a lanarkopter- and this I knew from experience.
The solution began to sparkle flits of red light, and so I flicked the grid on and voila, I could see a map of the ocean floor drifting slowly beneath us, painted in elegant glowing red streaks and dark blue voids. The occasional small fish was visible as a little red blob, shifting from place to place as the little fish did whatever it was a little fish would do, completely unaware it was being observed.
"Nothing here, nothing worth anything. Why aren't we in the forest?"
"We always fish in the forest, and we're still dirt poor! These outskirts could be a nice change" my father called back, and I heard the engine begin to whirr back to life as the sand dunes began to drift by faster.
"At least we make enough haul for gas from the forest. Fishing out here will starve us!"
It was at that moment that a huge red streak appeared on the screen from absolutely nowhere, ending in a 3-ish meter oval. I would have chalked it up to interference, but the particularly large fish did not disappear like electrical ghosts normally do. Instead, it simply sat there and spun slowly, which I supposed was not a very fishy thing to do either.
"Hold up for a moment!" I called. In theory, ships used for fishing would have a screen right by the pilot's seat, so that this sort of yelling back and forth across the length of the ship would not be necessary. We had found Big Lumpy, an old military vessel, rusting abandoned in a dock and claimed it as our own, back when father had first decided to give up smithing and sail the seas. It was a bit larger and quite a bit lumpier than a fishing vessel should be, and clearly intended to be piloted by a skilled crew of at least four. I fumbled with some knobs, to get a better read on the object that had supposedly appeared out of nowhere. Perhaps a large eurypterid had leapt entirely out of the sand, just after a bit of static? But the slowly revolving object had none of the standard markers of an eurypterid- the scan show no limbs or narrowed tail, and the only variations in intensity were from two- no, three blobs in the interior. Almost humanoid blobs; it had to be a vessel of some kind, perhaps an emergency torpedo? I wish the screen had a bit better resolution, but we couldn't afford the latest-and-greatest screening potions, and anyways Big Lumpy was probably far too outdated to support them.
"There's an escape torpedo or something, 63 meters, 172 degrees our starboard!"
"You sure it's not a fake? The paper said those damn Drethoms killed twenty of our sailors last year using corpses with explosives up their asses!" he croaked back.
"Isn't Drethom a hundred leagues in the opposite direction? And I don't think they'd need to trick us, the scrappers took our shielding and our torpedo pits have a frickin reef growing on them" He seemed to consider this for a few seconds.
"Fair point, fair point my boy. Prepare to deploy The Claw"- there was a jerk, and a terrible clanking sound, as he throttled the ship into reverse and turned on the auxiliary line for The Claw (it had some other, fancier, name, but neither of us could remember what the professional term was). Last time we had used it was about two months ago, when we made the mistake of trying to loot a whalefall, and it still smelled worse than Kraken Shit©️ energy drink. Hopefully The Claw still worked fine. Once Big Lumpy had waddled into position and executed a three-and-a-half-point turn (the rudder mobility is… limited, to say the least), I slammed the big red button with "THE CLAW" written in sharpie as hard as I could, and my father came over to make sure nothing was going to explode. The Claw descended as I let out the chain in sort of a jerky motion, and dad tried his best to tell the machine to grasp with care and minimize the chance of anyone being crushed.
"almost… almost…. got it! They're secure- Willy, hoist?"
"Hoisting commenced!"
And next thing I knew I was in the holding bay, standing over the strangest object I had ever seen. It was almost three meters long and its diameter was about half that. It was perfectly circular in forward profile, and was sharply pointed at the ends. Other than that, it had no distinguishing features whatsoever- the surface was an off-white with thin variations in height layered thickly with a bubbly, web-like pattern. I couldn't tell if it was the surface slowly undulating or if I was nauseous from the strangeness of it all. I noticed that a small bass's head was coming out of the object on one side, the fish still struggling, as though trying to swim in some dense liquid. My heart was beating fast- was this some kind of fey creature? A jellyfish that had eaten three people? Were we the next unwitting victims of The Blob? I looked to my father, and I could immediately tell he had none of the answers I needed right now. I opted to take a step back. My father whispered "do you think it's safe to poke?" in shock.
Then, the oblong jellyblob gurgled its belly and gave birth to a little girl, its skin parting along sharp, invisible fissures. The completely naked child crawled out on all fours, excessive hair trailing far behind her, eyes wide open and tracking us from the moment she emerged. I took a few steps back and felt my arm trembling. The child stood up, opened its mouth wide, and emitted some kind of vaguely rhythmic, high-pitched clicking noise with a quickly oscillating tone, which in retrospect reminds me of the feedback that old transceivers sometimes make. At the time, however, I was too busy letting out a little shriek and a little pee, turning around, and scampering up the ladder before whatever that was could eat my soul, to think of any suitable analogies. My father was close behind.
"fuck fuck fuck fuck oh my fucking gods what the fuck what the fucking fuck…" my father was murmuring and staring at the ladder, his arms apparantly scrounging around blindly for anything useful as a weapon of their own free will. Our eyes met for a brief second and then we both froze, unable to focus on anything but that small hole in the floor, that ladder that was the delicate veil between safety and death itself. We were silent, beings of only wide eyes and open ears. I wished I had a knife to cling to, instead of the small charm I always kept on me. But perhaps it really was just a small child in distress? Whose vessel had sank, and just had really, really strange escape pods? It was only a child- or at least something that looked like one- after all, it couldn't really be possessed, like in all those plays and history books- the Fractured feared water and stuck to the surface, finding one down here would be unheard of.
To my horror, I heard a deep, unpracticed voice echoing from below:
"Jade, we can speak human now! remember?"
another voice commented snidely, "yeah Jade, I bet they're getting the barbecue stick right now"
"will we get barbecue?" said the young one, voice full of innocent malevolence with undertones of the unmistakable hunger for human flesh. Perhaps we could manage to injure that one, if it was the one that came up to kill us. But I doubted the small size and voice was any actual indication of the demon's true strength. Images of my flesh rendered by the searing flames of hell came easily to mind. It would emerge from the child's mouth and leave my twisted, molten bone and guts splayed all across the metal flooring. I was the barbecue.