Dark Abyss
The moonlight glistens silently in witness across the vast expanse of the western seas. Vigilant through the dark night, the moon and stars peer down into its mirror depths, reflecting on the rippling images of their own destines shown back to them, lucent and mutable on the rolling waves.
Beneath the surface, the world is still. Oh, to those sensitive to the ebb and flow of solid water, it moves like the winds, zephyrs and storms raging and cool breezes blowing in the various currents of the sea, but compared to the epic tumult above on the frothing surf, the embrace of the water is cold and silent, calm like the grave. the seas above are high, with waves leaping up towards the heavens, bearing blazing ships of metal, wood and bone, the sky flashing in the typhoon, not with lightning, but the gold and silver and chromatic bursts of elemental power of the forces struggling for dominion of the Way Things Are.
But the weight of the world draws everything downward. Eternities pass in the slow fall of the embracing earth, and as the battle fades into memory, the light of the vigilant moon is slowly corroded, leeched away by the blackness of the clinging abyss. The pall of darkness washes color and life from the Moonsilver and steals the glimmer from the hearthstones set into its sockets. The hands in which the weapons sit, divested of their body are claimed as prizes of the primal sharks and beasts who do not know the value of the armaments, and they continue to glide into the deeps until their face is lost to the memory of the sky, and the energizing light that used to smile down upon them.
Through the lightless, lifeless abyss they descend, bound by fate to spiral one another, pulling like lovers and never slipping too far apart. Life and memory dim from them, growing dormant in the heroic shards as the hearthstones themselves melt away in liquid crystal tears of essence, the only glimmers of light to mark their passing.
Hours pass and still they fall. Beyond things with color, beyond things with light. To the crushing depths where the weight of the ocean crush all but the most resilient motes of life. No reefs grow here, nor plants to sway in the currents. No true currents flow here, save at the magma vents where they erupt straight up for the more liberal waters of the middle-deeps. Here the darkness is so still that, if one could see it, a speck of dust on the abyssal shelf would never move for the rest of eternity.
And for a thousand years, Immortal Moonlight and Silver Soul of Luna lay untouched amidst horrors that mock and defy the darkness in which they dwell. For all the stillness and blackness, for all the lack of predation and death, horrible things dwell here, forgotten masses of madness, spawned and cast out by the gods and their masters at the dawn of Life. Sleeping lies the Kraken Mu'Aura, dormant across the living corpse of Shub Anihileth the Ravenous Sand. Watching in the darkness are monsters of nightmare and dream, Faery shadows cast on umbral depths. All embraced by the pall of the deep abyss. For a thousand years they are but one more secret in the grave of mystery.
Until the darkness is broached by light. Until the mad depths are lanced by the searching light that may never have touched these depths. In its presence, the essence of the weapons stir.
The moon had come seeking them, an angel of Luna in the depths of pure darkness.
Before...
At the lip of the trench, where Earth finally gave way to elemental Water and the world plummeted into the depths closest to oblivion, life was abundant. Entire cites were hidden here, in forests of aquatic life. Corals and corpses, sunken ships and ancient relics grew up in wondrous diversity, such that a curious mind might find a million things barred from the weaker examples of humanity; no mortal being could exist at such depths unaided by divine powers.
Fish and like beasts had no problem with such things. For a quarter mile along the edge of the trench, a massive eel wove through the corals. So poisonous was it that the only predators it had (Nothing that lived this deep had none) had need to wait for its sinuous bulk to rise above the jagged spires of the aquatic shoals, or risk being disemboweled on the maze of jagged corals. The pall of death passed over it, but it paid no heed, knowing that the enormous blunt-nosed siaka which drifted without thought, fueled by hunger alone, could not reach it here.
Schools of fish bent the feeble light here into rainbows and flashes of spectacular colour, until one of them darted through a gap in the rocks in their tremendous rush, and to the last fish were ensnared by the great Stonespider which had woven its web across it in anticipation of such a meal. Amorphous jellies, only barely distinguishable from the dense water by the way they cast shadows on themselves drifted through the currents, collecting, digesting and dissolving detritus into base components. Such was the mad, alien system of the sea.
Near enough at hand, the scant remains of a dragon eel were scattered along the bottom of the sea, picked clean now by scavengers, devoid of flesh even what little the master Chef who had killed it left behind. The cave in which it had lived had a new occupant, a tentacled horror that had been spawned in the black trench, and which had drifted into the middle deeps in its youthful instinct to explore. Looking for all the world like a shark that had being raped by an octopus, it had been known in a younger world as a K'Thran shark. Rabidly vicious and unrelenting, incredibly dangerous, save that it so rarely appeared.
And though it now idled in the current of its new lair, it did not sleep. Such beasts could not sleep. It was not in their nature. So, when it sensed the intruder in its preternatural manner, it reacted instantly to the programming it was endowed with, and surged from the shadows of its cavern with the full glory of its horror to devour it.
That would be when it felt the hooks bite in.
Afflicted with its newfound (and remarkably painful) parasite, the K'Thran crashed bodily through a wall of solid rock that had been developing for an age, and sent a sizeable portion of the shelf grinding soundlessly into the abyss of the trench. The eel was dislodged from hiding and was promptly devoured by the siaka. The Stonespider crab found the tangles of its nest weighted down by rock only until the webs snapped, taking half of its meal into oblivion. The shining metal hull of a first age derelict was exposed for the first time in centuries to the dim light at the end of the world, as the primal beast from the fathoms rolled in a vicious dive back for the crushing embrace of its original home.
At its belly, the primarily man-shaped thing gouged mercilessly at its flanks with bone spurs at its heels. Metal meathooks were embedded into the K'Thran's flesh, keeping him tight to its body, away from the flailing, groping tentacles. Those that got close were severed by talon or by tooth, and even still they fought, suckers and talons biting into the parasite, spilling its blood into the water.
Faster than a falling stone, they plummeted as the creature sought to drown its attacker, or to see him crushed by the unrelenting weight of the ocean. It bucked and twirled and jerked and twisted as it plummeted, trailing bloody viscera behind them. Ribbons of the shark-thing's flesh were shorn away to scatter through the emptiness, all unwitnessed by those whose eyes relied on the light as they drew further and further from the living world, and closer to the ancient secrets of a world long dead. More than once, the face of an unscarred vertical cliff burned past them and more than once, the hitch-hiker was almost ripped free by the force of the struggling beast. As light waned from his eyes, as breath fled from his lungs, as the world began to dim from the pressure of the incredible deeps, his eyes began to droop and consciousness began to fade.
In the single moment of darkness that marked his passage into true and undiluted darkness, unnatural depths far beyond mortal means, he felt the minute tug of a memory stirring up in the heart of a metal band of moonlight.
His eyes blazed wide, and the darkness exploded into silver light. New strength and new rage flooded his limbs, and he found himself climbing his ride, scaling the nightmare fish, digging clawed feet into dense flesh. Liquid moonlight flame coursed from his body with an inherent ferocity that stirred up every primal beast for leagues who could perceive it, inciting hunger and wrath.
As he reached the fanged nightmare of a mouth, it opened wide to embrace him, a serrated tongue lashing around helpless while the creatures vestigial eyes rolled around its terrible skull. The Lunar braced himself, tangling legs in writhing tentacles, and took firm grip on the beasts gills, ripping them off in a display of sheer power.
Abruptly, the shark was dying. Madness took it, and it flailed madly, its body thrashing wildly, eyes blind, devoid of sense with pain. In that time while it was thrashing in ruin, the Lunar dug claws into its body again and vaulted into the all encompassing darkness.
Like a star falling through the fabric of heaven, he blazed as the singular source of light in the maw of madness. He felt his mind being stripped of thought, his body stripped of sensation as nothingness loomed before him. He felt himself losing his grip on sanity and individuality as the pressure crushed on him and sought to obliviate him from the world.
Then, he could see it. Finally, something to break the endless blackness of the abyss. The sea floor here was bone white, bleached of color by an eternity lacking purpose. There was nothing clearly alive here, nothing that moved. Half embraced by the near weightless silt of the ocean floor was the faintest glimmer of Moonlight, what he had come seeking.
As his fingers caressed their icy cold metal, the breath screamed in his lungs. The blood screamed in his head. His blood itself ached from the pressure placed on it by the aquatic world on his shoulders. But the jubilance and wonder at finally touching and reclaiming the memories in his heart burned brighter and stronger than even that.
For a thousand years more, his footprints would be etched in the ocean floor, beside the indentations of the two J-Hook swords. Immortal Moonlight and Silver Soul of Luna. in whose place the twin steel meat hooks would slowly rot and decay in their state of impermanence. Filled with that exultation, he rocketed into the darkness, rising towards the distant sky. Scarred, but undefeated, the K'Thran was already leagues away, licking its wounds...
