First, the fish.

Entry to Smorgust's Story Challenge. Day 1

For the writing prompt, please see here.

It was the fishermen who knew about it first. The water had been getting hotter.

“Odd?” they thought. “Only here, nowhere else? Just this small patch of ocean?”

Over the days, the heat grew until the water started to bubble on a rolling boil and the boats could no longer go near because the intensity of the heat was a wall they could not pass through.

Fish that live so deep they are squashed by the pressure of the ocean came to the surface already cooked in their skins. No one dared eat one. You did not know what it might do to you.

“It will boil you from the inside out,” said someone.

“It will curse you. You’ll always be too hot, never can cool down,” said another.

So they waited. They watched from the shore while pacing on the beach, gambling and swigging from glass bottles.

Soon the dragons came. Some of the fishermen left immediately. Others fretted on the sand. Not wanting to leave, but fearing they must go.

“We’ll just go into the water if they fly over here,” said the younger ones.

The old ones sighed. Why did the young ones always think they were the exception to every rule?

“They can boil water,” they said, “they’ll cook you alive.”

“We’ll be fine,” said the younger ones, laughing at how afraid the old ones were. They would never get like that and be scared of their own shadow. Afraid of everything they did not know.

The next morning when they went to the shore, with a hope they now suspected was futile, they saw it. A great dark tower had grown overnight. Projected high into the sky. Water was still running off from its eruption; seaweed, fish, and floatsum and jetsom tumbled from the top. The stench was rank, as it must have churned up the bottom of the ocean and things long dead, long forgotten.

“We have to go,” the young ones said.

The old ones urged caution.

“We do not know what is there. Better to let someone else chase it. Don’t you remember the stories?”

The stories were many, and they had all heard them told in the boats while they bobbed on the star-reflecting ocean, waiting for the right time to cast the nets. There was the one about the fin folk, the one about the evil, the one about the people who went to find a sunken city and did not come back.

“Could it be the sunken city?” the young ones asked each other.

“Maybe, I mean, if something can sink maybe it can… unsink?”

“Rise,” said another. “Maybe it can rise.”

“It was always said they had different technology, better technology. Maybe they found a way to reverse the sinking.”

That evening, when the old ones had gone home and there was no one to argue with, they launched a boat and sailed towards the tower. They never seemed to get closer. It was always far away.

They looked up to see the dragons who circled it. They got there. They would occasionally try to perch on its top, but the tower was too hot even for them to land. They could not understand why they could never get any closer to it.

There they remained, always in the act of trying to reach the tower. Frozen, not aging, just… looking forward, looking at it. Never moving.

The older ones tried to get their boats alongside. They thought they could pull or lift the young ones into theirs. Sure, they would lose a boat, but they’d rather lose a boat than the young ones.

They could not reach them, though. The young one’s boat was always out of reach no matter how they rowed or steered. One of them jumped in the water and tried to swim to the boat, but again, he could never quite reach it. No matter how hard he swam, it was always just too far away. They did not want to be frozen themselves, so eventually they rowed back to shore.

No one could understand it. It was so odd for people from the sea, where everything is flowing, and changing, moving, and slipping from one place to another. It was normally a place where nothing stayed the same. Stasis was for miners, those who battled the rocks and mountains that stood so firm and still, that oversaw all.

No one else tried to reach the tower. That part of the sea remained too hot, and the fish and the gulls avoided it. Only the dragons continued to visit. They were the only things that could get close. They would circle it, and dive, and roar at each other around it, as if they were at play.

It wasn’t possible to make a living there anymore. Families moved further along the coast.

“I’ve got other children to think about and feed,” they would say to each other before packing up their houses on their backs and walking away.

Only a handful remained. Three mothers, two fathers. They had no one else, but the children held on that boat as if they were in jelly. Sometimes they would find a way to go out and see them. A passing boat would take pity on their pathetic group. They would stay as long as they could, trying to discern even the smallest change that might give them hope.

There was nothing. Never a longer hair or fingernail. Never some stubble round a chin. Their skin still shone with the brilliance of youth. No wrinkles, no lines appeared. No grey. Perfectly preserved in their prime.

These parents stayed on the beach and withered. Sand covered their bones, and over time they became the beach. It is now a desolate place. A place people avoid. A place the old ones would tell the young ones about in hushed and whispered voices.

“Don’t go there. It’s not safe.”

Every so often, there would be a young one who just would not listen.