Seeing the Light

Era beginning/end

By this time, the civilizations in the depths of the Torvalen Sea were already highly complex. All the valuable territory, that had enough to support abyssal civilization, was occupied. These territories were necessarily vast, given the poor resources available. The intense competition led to the increased use of biomancy by the abyssal queens to make tools and slaves of their offspring and other creatures. Their society became rigid and stagnant. Increasingly complex political games were being played between the queens, sometimes over real resources and other times simply over prestige or more petty reasons. The queens became psychologically inclined towards what would considered in humans as psychopathy, sociopathy and narcissism. Those without this ‘killer instinct’ rarely survived.

But then one daughter, Sharpest-Eye-Quickest-Beak's-Third-Daughter, a low ranking overseer of her mother’s scavenging parties, changed that. Her mother’s realm was in the western Torvalen Sea, some eighty kilometers offshore near the continental slope of northern Kalmasa. Knowing she was not well favored, given her more kind predilections towards her brothers, and would likely be killed eventually by her younger sisters, she planned her escape. When the time was right, she fled with twenty males. With them she established the first coastal ulanid community in eons, beginning the era of the coastal ulan (Ulano lucides).

Her name was Sharpest-Eye-Quickest-Beak's-Third-Daughter, nicknamed Scrounger by her elder sisters. She was born different in a way her mother had heard of before in other queen's demenses. Intelligent, large, strong, but still somehow weak in a subtle way that faintly disgusted her mother and sisters. Scrounger seemed to take little pleasure in anything natural, such as dining on the succulent delicacy of inferior young and eggs of her unborn brothers, in the intricate political games or betting on the male fights in the caves of punishment.   Scrounger tried her best to fit in and be normal, but found it difficult to feign pleasure she did not feel, and she found the constant political games her sisters played for their mother's favor completely exhausting, not exhilarating as she should have. She was constantly consumed by the fear she would be killed as well as guilt for her abnormality, especially the weakness towards the brothers and uncles in her own charge, leading scavenger patrols onto the abyssal plains. She could never bring herself to kill the weak or old, even when they failed in a task. She realized the only reason she was not dead yet is the amusement she gave her sisters and the safety she represented to her youngest sisters, who would never have to worry that she would usurp their positions. They could never sink lower, because Scrounger was already permanently at the bottom.   But she knew in her heart that her mother would not tolerate this situation much longer, and so she began to plan. She stored secret caches of food during scouting missions. She used her biomantic venoms to enhance the strength and intelligence of her most trusted brothers and uncles beyond what was allowed for their stations. Finally, she began to change herself and them, making their bodies more adapted to the lower pressures in the Above. She knew the stories told by countless generations of queens to their daughters, that the Above was nothing but an icy wasteland of death, with only endless void beyond that. But anything was better than the life she led, and far better than dying.   When the time was right, she reported that her long range scouts had come back with information of a vast carcass from the above and used this lie as an excuse to take twelve uncles and eight brothers. They traveled west, throught the trackless, barren abyssal plains, for weeks, successfully avoiding detection by nearby foreign desmenses. Then Scrounger began noticing the seafloor sloping gently upwards. They continued for another week, ever upwards. The lessening pressure was painful for her and her brothers, making them feel like they would explode, but her continued envenomations helped them survive and slowly adapt.   They were starving, their food having run out two weeks ago. Her eldest uncle offered himself to her as food, which she declined. She looked upwards and detected a diffuse green-greyness. She made a decision. There was no more time for caution. She began swimming directly up through the water column, commanded her brothers and uncles to follow. Better to die a quick death from freezing, than starvation.   But it did not become colder as she swam, it became warmer, as warm as the waters near the hydrothermic vents of her mother's desmense. The light was blinding now and there was a strange ripple in the water above and strange sounds. She lifted a tentative arm towards the rippling and felt shock as her fingers breached the surface of the water. It was the Great Void, she knew, but it was somehow not painful, it was pleasant, like the bubbles filled with little voids that rose from the hydrothermic vents.   She ascended, bringing her large eyes out of the water and faced the void above. It was both terrible and beautiful. Above her was a black as deep as that far below, but here it was pierced by tiny motes of white, like little bioluminscent creatures very far away. But what immediately drew her attention were the great lights. Three circles hung near in the void above. One, the largest, was as white as the little motes, one a light blue and the smallest a deep red like cooling magma. Their light stung her eyes, but she did not care. She forgot her hunger, her males, the Great Void and became lost in their beauty.   A quick motion beside her shook her out of her trance and without thinking she lashed out with a hook covered tentacle, grabbing a strange, silvery fish. She looked back at the three lights and thanked them, without knowing why.   Decades of building and planning followed. Scrounger made dangerous forays into the demenses of abyssal queens, stealing males and precious female eggs to grow her new people. In time she renamed herself, as an abyssal queen would upon establishing themselves, calling herself Moonlight-on-Spring-Tide, after she and her family had developed concepts for such alien things as moons and tides. And there, in the coral seas miles west of the shore of northern Kalmasa, she established the first home of the ulan.