Glin often enjoyed an early morning walk alongside the large Lake Lora near his home. It was the height of winter in his hemisphere of the world, and the vast surface of the lake was frozen thick, complete with a dusting of fresh snowfall on top. Deciding it was about time he headed back, he stopped to rest a few moments on an old bench that had likely been there as long as he had been alive, and basked in the silent tranquillity.
When a loud, sharp whine smashed through the calm and reverberated several times around the surrounding hills, he near enough jumped out of his skin. Disorientated by the sudden assault on his ears, Glin scrambled to his feet, just in time for another whine to cause him to flinch and lose his footing, slamming his left shoulder hard onto the frozen ground with a thump. As he rolled around groaning in pain, several more whines cut through the air in quick succession, all seeming to originate from different locations across the wide lake. Swearing liberally, Glin lifted himself up on his right elbow and looked out across the lake just as the whining chorus abruptly morphed into a cacophony of harsh cracks and scrapes. Scrambling back to his feet, he saw that a small hill of broken and crushed ice was rising in the middle of the lake, with half a dozen similar but small bulges radiating some distance away from it, bitterly cold water pouring out of them all in torrents. With a boom, the central hill exploded in a spray of water that reached all the way to the shore, falling upon Glin in a fine mist. With no shelter around him, Glin closed his eyes and resignedly accepted the freezing shower with a sigh.
A hairy abdomen of near total black heaved itself out of a large rupture in the middle of the lake, rising like a new island. A fair distance from it on either side were the bent tips of four pairs of thin appendages, trembling under the strain of lifting the bulk of the body out of the water. As Glin stared, frozen to the spot both figuratively and perhaps also literally, a second island, attached to and slightly smaller than the first, also appeared. At its front were two gargantuan, obsidian-black claws flanked by a pair of much smaller appendages. Above these, two large black globes for eyes, followed by three more pairs running down the sides behind them, each smaller than the one before it. With its bulk raised fully out of the water, it blocked out the early morning sun, casting a giant spider-shaped shadow across the landscape and Glin, who now began to shiver violently. But even as he willed himself to run as far as he could, his body refused to listen.
It raised one of its segmented legs fully out of the water and placed it cautiously down upon the remaining ice. Thick as a house, the leg sheered straight through the moment the spider tried to place any weight on it, resulting in another booming crash and spray of water. The colossal spider swayed slightly as it lost its balance, but was able to recover quickly courtesy of its seven other legs. Learning its lesson from the experiment, it reached a leg out towards the nearest shore instead, which happened to be exactly where Glin was standing. The leg loomed over him for a moment before it hit solid ground some ways behind, to the sound of several trees being split straight through. Satisfied with the results, another leg reached out. With a yelp, Glin finally broke out of his petrification and scrambled out of the way as the leg landed not far off from where he had been standing, only for the slope to collapse beneath its weight, gouging a deep trench before finding purchase on the flatter ground below. Despite the chaos of sound it had been creating up until this point, the spider itself remained eerily silent as it strained to pull itself closer to the shore with the two legs. Not long after, a second pair of legs followed behind the first, gouging more trenches and felling more trees. Confident in its stability, it lurched forward out of the lake, and made shocking rapidly progress away across the landscape, causing a great shaking and rumbling as it did so, and soaking Glin further with the cascades of water dripping from its body as it passed overhead.
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Gyra pulled on her jacket and, warm tea in hand, walked out to make herself comfortable on the conveniently flat rock a few paces in front of her door. She was looking upon the forests and rolling hills extending beneath her mountain home for the thousandth time, but the sight made her feel no less content than the first. Others would go mad with the seclusion, but Gyra had never been happier. Courtesy of her little vegetable garden and the monthly deliveries, she had more than enough food to keep her by, with several mountain springs providing her ample clean water to drink and wash with. When the weather was too poor for hiking, boredom could be staved off with a collection of books, music, and films even an archivist would be proud of, and on the rare occasion she felt a little lonely, there was always the internet to connect her with the rest of humanity. Electricity was also easy to come by, thanks to the field of slowly crumbling wind turbines and solar panels she was tasked with maintaining, and the wider power grid they were connected to. In recent years, the mountains were one of the few places that could still boast winds strong enough to power such turbines, but the perpetually gloomy sky had condemned the solar panels to being all but useless, allowing Gyra to neglect them entirely in favour of other pursuits.
As she took a sip of her tea, movement on the periphery of her vision dragged Gyra’s gaze upward, and she froze with the mug to her mouth. The monochrome mass of clouds, usually so lifeless, was slowly rotating in a vortex stretching across the entire sky. At its centre, the clouds were violently twisting and rolling, alternating between the darkest grey and purest white. Yet, despite this movement, there was not so much as a gust tickling at Gyra’s hair.
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“What the hell…” she murmured to herself, fumbling her phone out of her pocket with her free hand to check the weather forecasts. Nothing of note, especially concerning tornado risks or hurricanes forming in the middle of a continent. Of course, it many years had passed since there had been either. The world as a whole had grown largely dormant of late, just like the unbloomed buds that coloured the meadows around her humble mountainside home. As she continued to watched, she noticed small flashes of blue in the swirling centre — rare glimpses of the heavens beyond. Soon, the main mass of tumbling clouds began to reach downwards, bulging out from the otherwise flat blanket and appearing to take on a more defined shape.
Face scrunched in disbelief, Gyra lifted her phone back up and used the camera to zoom in on the mass for a clearer look, making sure to tap the record button in the hope of some short-lived internet fame. Increasingly, the scattered spots of blue sky were merging together, severing the developing shape entirely from the surrounding clouds. Seen on its own, and with the closer view through the camera lens, the clouds were unmistakably taking on the resemblance of a colossal bird in the midst of a dive, its beak pointing downwards and broad wings stretched out behind. Once this shape was settled, the tumbling, rolling clouds grew thicker and darker until, in the blink of an eye, they turned to feathers and keratin.
Gyra watched in silent awe as a fully-formed eagle, several kilometres long from beak to tail, broke from its suspension there in the eye of the storm and entered a smooth glide that carried it out across the horizon.
She stood and turned to walk towards her home, in a daze as her mind ran wild trying to make sense of what she had just witnessed. Reaching the door, she turned one more time to glance at the spot where the eagle passed the horizon, and then gently shut it behind her. She placed her mug on the kitchen table and walked to her bed, slowly lowering herself down onto it.
She lay there staring at the ceiling for some time.
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Garth was sat midway down the steps leading from the bridge to the deck, his head resting in one hand. They had been at sea for three weeks now, and he was fed up with seeing the same old empty horizons. The total absence of a single squawking bird or sea creature riding their wake did little to help break the sense of monotony. With a sigh, he pulled himself to his feet for a few laps of the 400-metre-long deck, hoping that something may catch his eye, or perhaps that he might slip and fall off of the side. That would certainly spice things up, and he was at least half-confident that his shipmates could fish him back out of the water.
The ocean was calm, as it almost always was these past few years, forming a perfect and abrupt line on the horizon between the blue of the sea and the white of the cloudy sky. Hence Garth was caught all the more off guard when the boat suddenly lurched, throwing him against the guardrail. Despite his earlier musings, he was not, in fact, particularly keen on being thrown overboard, and so, despite being mildly winded, managed to cling on for dear life to avoid being flipped over the top of the rail.
He was about to push himself back onto the deck and spend a few moments dramatically hyperventilating over his near-death experience when he noticed the water below the boat was considerably darker than it should have been. Confused, he raised his gaze. Farther out towards the horizon, the water remained the same navy blue it should have been, but it grew significantly darker halfway towards the ship. He looked around to see if the phenomenon was the same in all directions, and noticed that the line of darker water was in fact advancing in front of the ship.
Garth was still struggling to comprehend what he was seeing when the shadow fell away significantly on either side, and the ship found itself in a much thinner sliver of dark water protruding from the main bulk that had pushed on ahead. Garth ran towards the bow in an attempt to get a better view of both of the sliver’s edges, fighting to stay on his feet against the constant rocking of the ship. Immediately upon leaning over the railing, he noticed that the sliver was swaying side to side, its edges occasionally almost touching the ship. Looking farther outward, he could also see what appeared to be similar slivers. As he watched, each of these slivers slowly began to curve and twist, until the ship found itself once again in blue water. Garth instinctively leaned farther over the railing in an attempt to keep the slivers in sight, and had little time to react as the one they had previously been sailing along swung back in an arc towards the ship, its momentum steady and relentless. The lurch as the shadow passed beneath the ship threw the precariously balanced Garth straight over the railing.
His body moved with little conscious input from his brain, hooking his right arm around a lower rung of the railing as it rushed towards him, providing a perfect point of rotation for the momentum of his fall to swing him around until his waist slammed into the edge of the deck, the abrupt stop yanking his shoulder half out of its socket. Garth struggled anxiously to maintain his grip as the continued rocking of the ship kept slamming the deck into his kidney again and again, all the while screaming and shouting a long string of the worst expletives that came to mind. Eventually, the rocking abated, and he was able to use his good arm to pull himself high enough to swing up his legs and throw himself back up over the railing with a kick.
Upon hitting the deck with another sickening thump, he promptly rolled over and vomited up the entire contents of his stomach, and perhaps a little more. Once it seemed the coast was clear and nothing more was due to come up, he slowly dragged himself back towards the railing, half-delirious from pain and with sweat pouring down his face. Pressing his face against the cool metal of the railing, he was unable to suppress a sigh of pleasure. Though his vision was hazy and obscured by dancing black spots, he could see that, clear to the horizon, all was blue — and then he fainted.
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