In silence they stood, maybe a dozen in total, water slowly dripping off their frames and sharply silhouetted by the hazy early morning glare. The morning mists that would drown ships barely tugged at their waists. In my half-awake stupor I could only stare. A loud knocking at the salt-encrusted door of my home disturbed my reverie, which soon became a panic when I realised the time.
“I’m up, I’m up!” I yelled, rushing over to my closet to begin gathering the thick woollen clothes and oilskins I’d need for a day out on the sea.
“About time Boss, keep me waiting any longer and I might just take off without you,” came the reply from the nasally voice of my co-worker and fireman, Gregor. “I’ve prepared some food already so just haul your ass onto the ship and eat while I untie us from the pier.”
Our fishing operation, such that it was, ran on extremely tight time margins, such that on mornings like these when sleep refused to relinquish its grip on me I didn’t even have time to eat a proper breakfast. Unlike those fishing crews on distant waters we did not have the luxury of staying out on the open sea at night when the mists rolled in. I sprinted out the door and ran along the beach to reach the rotted pier that our modest steamship sat next to. Gregor had clearly been busy warming up the engine while I was sleeping as wisps of steam could be seen rising out of the various vents that sat behind the open bridge.
“Breakfast is where it usually is, Boss. Everything’s ready to go when you are,” Gregor poked his thin head covered in short unkempt black hair out of the engine room’s hatch as I went to take the wheel.
“Thanks Gregor,” I replied, “hopefully those Giants haven’t scared off the fish eh?”
Gregor simply nodded before heading back down into the engine room to begin shovelling more coal into the hungry engine.
“Batton’s Roosting God stirs,” I read aloud, looking at that morning’s soggy, crumpled newspaper.
“Is that the massive statue with all the bats on it?” Gregor asked, taking a long sip of coffee. The catch was slow-going, most of the bountiful harvest we had been enjoying over the previous days seemingly vanished. Hence the two of us sat on the deck, gazing out into an endless expanse of cerulean waves while the trawling net dragged behind us.
“I think so, can’t say I’ve ever been to Batton. It’s a few days out and frankly not worth the risk. How old is this newspaper anyway? I hope the wellermen brought things on time for once.” In Little Spine, our isolated island village, news and supplies beyond what we could gather ourselves had to come from supply ships that were characteristically late and had leaky holds.
“Says there ‘17 April 1915’, all the way back from the Eeling Season,” Gregor said, pointing at the top of the page, the ink barely legible after so much exposure to the salty air. It was August.
“Christ.” I looked back at the nets trailing behind the boat, “let’s see if our luck’s run out.”
The light had dimmed significantly when we returned. Yet even at the border of night I could see that even more Giants had stood up from their ancient resting places. They now numbered in the hundreds from their original dozen, standing tall like dark monuments. Despite the rush we were in, I still soaked in the details of the Giants’ features: faces obscured by layers of barnacles and kelp and skin like bleached coral. Most striking of all was the large hole in their chests, hollow-like structures that led into a seemingly endless void inside each Giant. While there were many bizarre and unknowable things on this Earth, the Giants seemed to exist specifically in spite of common understanding. They hid their secrets behind a stony exterior, no sound breached their lips, time itself seemed to not affect them either, as certainly they had to have been sleeping for an eternity before finally waking.
“We’re back Boss, time to unload,” Gregor’s sharp voice cut through my thoughts.
We had come back to Little Spine and needed to shift all of our stock, barely enough to fill half our hold, to the local fishmonger before they went stale. Even while we were packing the fish into crates, sorting out the damaged and sick, I watched the Giants. So when we finally sold the crates of fish at the end of that day’s hard work, and twilight turned to night, I wasn’t caught off-guard when I saw the Giants slowly turn to face a common direction. When they began moving however, both Gregor and myself sprinted to the docks to get a better view, along with the other townsfolk still out and about at that time. The lamp buoys that surrounded Little Spine allowed us to catch glimpses of their jerky movements as they began walking away to an unknown destination.
“I have to follow them,” I blurted out. Gregor turned to face me with a concerned look on his face.
“Sorry?”
I made up my mind, “I have to follow them Gregor, I have to see where they’re going.”
“At night? Bos- no, Hammond, this is insane. You’ll be dead by morning.”
I began untying the boat from the dock, when I was done I turned to face him
“I have to know, surely you feel it too? These things up and rise out of the sea and then begin moving? Surely you feel the need to know where they’re headed!?”
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Gregor sighed and paced back and forth for a few seconds before finally speaking up.
“Aye, I’m not going to join you in your madness but I’ll make sure the engine’s not going to explode when you start her up again.”
In a matter of hours the engine was reheated and the hold loaded with whatever spare rations I had locked away in my house for the occasional long trip out. Whether I would survive long enough to need them was a different story, for when night arrived the seemingly endless weight of the ocean’s surface that kept its worst inhabitants from rising lifted. What purpose was so powerful that it drove the Giants to break this previously-ironclad barrier keeping us all safe from the sea’s true character?
It had since been two days, two days of watching the Giants meander through parts of the ocean I hadn’t seen in years. I hadn’t managed to sleep of course, for the boiler that kept the steamship running was a hungry beast and even with modern advancements in technology required constant care. If I had slept for even a few minutes the pressure could have climbed to dangerous levels, or maybe the water levels would run low enough to cause overheating. This delicate balancing act is why I had the utmost respect for Gregor and the greatest disdain for the designers of such a nightmarish thing.
Yet now I had a different problem: I was running out of coal and night had fallen. Whatever protection the Giants had granted me thus far would surely fail if they left me behind. Sleep-deprived as I was, only one option made sense: I needed to take a length of rope and tie my ship to the legs of the nearest Giant. After dousing the ship’s firebox I raced up to the bow of the ship where the long, thick length of rope used to tie my boat to piers sat. All the while I was shucking off all my clothes except my undergarments, for while they kept me adequately warm and dry on the deck, the thick wool and sailcloth would lead to a miserable end in the water. I kicked down a rope ladder that softly splashed into the ocean.
With the length of rope in hand, I looked out to the nearest Giant, whose shaky yet enduring gait caused shadows to dance across the deck illuminated by sickly lamplight. The water below however, as I looked down, denied any attempt to reveal its contents. I stared at the calm water for a few moments, shaking slightly and unblinking.
I jumped. The sound of my impact was like an explosion in the otherwise silent night and the cold rattled my nerves. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the stinging pain of salt, but I could see a short distance away was the leg I needed to tie the rope around… as well as the ink-like stains of the Squirming Somethings reaching out in the darkness. I would argue that the bottomless mass beneath me that represented the Somethings was secondarily horrifying to the hands that were reaching out. All of them were deformed, the fingers were too long or too fat, or the hands had too many fingers or too few. The arms the hands were attached to were spindly and weak, more like trails of ink than any biological structure. I felt one hand brush against my leg, I wanted to scream even if water rushed through my lungs. I felt its fingers begin to curl around my ankle. I wanted to cry out. But it let go.
With an agility that would surprise fish I raced towards the Giant, careless of the ripples that would surely alert the Squirming Somethings to my presence. The instant my outstretched hand found the barnacle-ridden flesh of the Giant’s leg I burst my head above the surface and wrapped my legs around it. Every moment above the surface the cold threatened to make me drop the rope, or fail to tie a knot strong enough to keep the ship attached. Occasionally I would again feel the slick hand of a Squirming Something brush against my leg, but I continued to tie the knot.
When the rope was firmly wrapped around the Giant I swam back to the ship with haste; it was barely visible as a dark shape in the night. The lanterns must have run out of oil while I was in the sea. Blindly grasping, I found the rope ladder I kicked down earlier and scrambled onto the deck.
I spent the rest of the night staring at the wine-dark ocean. I wondered if, in the face of the things I had just experienced, this whole venture of mine was but a symptom of madness. When I once again looked out to the silhouettes of the Giants I could not accept that answer. As far as I was aware, I was the only person bold enough to follow the Giants in their silent pilgrimage. So… what if the Giants were moving towards their home? I could be the first person to discover an ancient civilisation in this previously-thought untouched eighth sea! I fell asleep on the deck dreaming of a bright future.
Finally, after five days we entered the shallows of the Great Nest Shores and I could see that the mountain-sized Roosting God was no longer present. Great tracks of disturbed earth led further inland away from Batton.
With a tremendous crunching sound and wild shaking I felt my boat run aground as the Giant it was attached to began wading up onto the shore. Indeed, now that the furthermost parts of the procession had reached land they didn’t seem to stop, instead increasing their pace as if whatever purpose had driven them to march such a long way was close to being fulfilled. I lept off the boat and began running to keep up with the column of Giants.
While dashing through the prairies leading up to Batton’s hills I noticed one more thing about the Giants: their legs were completely savaged. I had not wished to think about why my ship was not destroyed by the Horrors over my nights of travel and here was the proof: the Giants’ flesh was enough of a morsel to save me. Yet still they walked, despite all possible logic saying that they should have fallen over on legs with bone exposed. By the time I got to the top of the hills I was exhausted, incapable of following them further.
Yet, at the top of the hill I could see down into a nearby valley, and there was where both the Roosting God and the Giants had stopped.
It’s hard to describe precisely what happened next. When I had stopped, physically incapable of moving further, the last of the Giants moved in to complete a formation of concentric circles around the God. The Roosting God itself laid on its side, humanoid in appearance and made of thousands of carved stone blocks, its face sculpted to resemble a lobster or some other crustacean. Its hands moved to cover its face and amidst the sound of creaking stone I heard something new: a low rumbling drone coming from the Giants. For the first time I heard them speaking; an unknown language that seemed to resonate from deep within them, emanating from the void in their chest. Then the first Giant, almost invisible amongst the crowd, began to move.
It scaled the stony exterior of the God, up and up until it reached the side of its head… and plunged its fist into the God, tearing out a chunk of the being’s concealed, ruddy flesh. Then they all moved, every Giant clambering the Roosting God, breaking its stony exterior and ripping out strips of its flesh. Mixing into the sound of cracking stone was the horrific noise of long-sealed mouths breaking open, revealing jagged, chipped teeth that had to saw away at the God’s filaments and fibres rather than take clean bites. The chanting had long since turned into an impossibly loud, mindless wailing intermingled with the cries of pain that emerged from the God. When the voids inside the Giants were filled with blood and offal, only the sobbing of the Roosting God remained.
In a matter of hours, the divinity in those stone blocks was ignobly snuffed out. I don’t know for how long afterwards I simply knelt on that hill weeping.