The Artist
Oct. 13th, 2011 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolPresented for your consideration:
**
Ootoo dropped down to the ocean floor with her meal in tow. She had caught a big fish, the kind that needed to breathe air. The air-breathing fish lived up high, where the light was almost too impossibly bright to bear, but that worked to a hunter's advantage. Fish-creatures that breathed air were used to lots of light, which meant they weren't good at seeing something coming up out of the darkness.
Ootoo gripped her meal tightly in four of her arms and walked along the sea bottom with the rest of her limbs. She was huge, with an armspan fifty feet across, and an elongated mantle the size of a station wagon. But she was also young, and small for her kind. The great kraken never stopped growing, and they lived for a very long time.
Ootoo retreated to her cave and methodically devoured the air-breather. The lung tissue she found disgusting and discarded, and the muscles were delicious but difficult to pick off the hard bones. The organ meats were the best, of course, and those she savored. When she was done, she had a pile of bones and a full inner cavity. That was the life of a kraken, for food was plentiful in those parts; with a full belly easy to achieve, Ootoo had plenty of leisure time. And given enough unstructured time, an active mind will find tasks to keep itself occupied.
Ootoo's thoughts turned to mating. It was time to attract a mate, she knew, but she was small and drab, and unskilled in the graceful dances that seemed to come so naturally to her sisters. There was a male she liked – Great Ussuss, four times her size and ten times her age, who Ootoo found to be ruggedly handsome when he emerged from his rift, which was infrequent. But Ootoo despaired of finding a way to draw his attention.
Ootoo idly played with the bones of her lunch as she pondered. The neck bones of the ichthyosaur made an attractive clacking noise when clapped together. Ootoo looked at one closely. It was almost perfectly round, but hollowed in the middle; it looked quite a bit like an oversized arm-sucker.
Ootoo picked up another, and another. She began to have an idea.
Ootoo was rather busy the rest of that day, and the next as well. She skipped the usual waking conclave, where all of her loose kraken community came together at the beginning of each tidal cycle to touch arms and chatter. "I wonder where Ootoo has gone to," mused Urthu, who was Ootoo's best friend.
"Undoubtedly she is feeling shy, or is spending time in contemplation of U-u," suggested Great Oohul. Oohul was a spiritual leader of the community, and was old enough to remember even the lesser known of the tales of the being they regarded as a cross between ancestor and God. She carefully groomed algae from Urthu's mantle, taking care not to be too rough with the young kraken. "Why don't you pay her a visit? Kindness to a friend is…"
"…in the nature of U-u; yes, of course, Great Oohul," said Urthu hastily, yet respectfully. She flushed scarlet and bowed, a universal gesture of parting, and scuttled off to find her friend.
Ootoo wasn't in her hole, and she wasn't playing in the rock gardens. Urthu was about to give up when she saw Ootoo creeping over a distant ledge. She looked almost furtive. Urthu's curiosity was instantly aroused. She stole up on her companion and squeezed her trailing arm. "Hi there!" she said brightly.
"Aaa!" exclaimed Ootoo, her hide reflexively mimicking the surrounding corals. "Urthu, you almost scared me to death!" She maneuvered to try to hide something behind the mass of her body. Urthu wasn't having any of it.
"What have we here?" Urthu asked archly. She grappled her friend, who fought back with surprising intensity, but Urthu was the larger of the two and quickly got the upper hand. Ootoo's burden was revealed: a fish-thing, decapitated.
"Well, what's the big secret?" grumbled Urthu. "There's no need to sneak around if you're feeling hungry."
"I've never been more full in my life," replied Ootoo. "Had breakfast yet?"
"No," replied Urthu, looking at the fish longingly.
"Then come on." The young girls crept down a defile and out onto a broad hollow. Urthu felt nervous. Great Ussuss's rift yawned open on the far side of the open area. He had been known to be territorial, especially when he first wakened. But if Ootoo was similarly scared, she showed no sign of it.
Ootoo set the fish down on an enormous mound of fish bones. "Wow," said Urthu, impressed. "Did you eat all this by yourself?"
"No," said Ootoo. "Mostly I've torn the meat away and let the crabs take it."
"But why?" asked Urthu, horrified at the waste of it.
"Because I need the parts," answered Ootoo. "Look!"
Ootoo had sorted out all the vertebrae. She picked up several arms' full and let the bones fall between her fingers and back onto the pile. "I've spread them out here for the crabs to pick clean," she said. "They do a good job of taking everything but the nice, clean white of the bone. And see? The Pattern's starting to come together."
Urthu looked at an arrangement of the round neck-bones of the fish. They had been laid out on the flat silt, round side facing up. She saw a tapering path of them stretching away for many yards. Urthu turned her head this way and that, seeing but not really seeing. In a burst of empathy, Ootoo suddenly understood her friend's discomfort.
"Climb up on top of that promontory and look down on it," Ootoo suggested.
Urthu faithfully scaled the peak and settled herself comfortably at the top. She looked down at Ootoo far below. Ootoo looked ridiculous, she thought, playing some kind of useless game with her piles of nauseating junk. And beyond her, Urthu saw the pure white of the Pattern. It was thick on one end and narrowed to a point, a gently curving path. Interesting, thought Urthu despite herself. If one looks at it just the right way, it almost looks like…
…an arm. A ghostly white arm, suckers and all, belonging to the largest Kraken of all time, reaching out for something just beyond its grasp.
Urthu almost fell off her perch.
**
"Great Oohul," Ootoo asked earnestly at waking conclave, "Tell us about fighting the Leviathan."
"Oh my," said the big female, flattered that any of the young ones would remember any story she told that wasn't about U-u. The children loved the U-u stories, of course, about that very first Kraken who lived the ideal life and showed them all how to exist in a righteous way. It was rare that they showed any signs of remembering that Great Oohul lived a life all her own.
She launched into a telling of the tale – how the great fish, which was so big and fierce as to fear no Kraken, had dived down to the deeps where Great Oohul lived despite the fact it breathed air. It had come to kill, because that was what Leviathans did. Leviathans were the least righteous of creatures in the sea; one knew this because the number of one's arms was a measure of one's sanctity, and while Kraken had ten arms, Leviathans had none. They only had a tail, and flukes, and a bony hard jaw studded with teeth. Leviathans had no arms at all, and hence had no souls, and lived to bite off the arms of Krakens, to kill them or leave them physically and spiritually maimed.
Of course U-u had a thousand arms, and by His guidance Great Oohul fought the Leviathan. She embraced it with all her arms, twisting and tearing and biting while trying to avoid that fearsome mouth. Their battle lasted for hours. The Leviathan was impossibly strong and large, but Great Oohul had the advantage of time, because she did not need to breathe air, and the Leviathan did. As the Leviathan weakened, it attempted to break away and swim back to the surface. Each time Great Oohul grappled it again, forcing it back to the fight, and then it pressed the attack with renewed vigor, but eventually it tried to break off again. In time the Leviathan's vision clouded, and Oohul was able to climb on its back and strangle it there. The Leviathan took almost a day to fully die, but eventually die it did. Then all the Krakens feasted on its flesh, and they left it to rot on the sea bottom, to remind all Kraken that none can defeat those who live in the manner of U-u.
"Take us to see those bones," Ootoo pleaded, and Urthu agreed. Great Oohul acquiesced, and took the young ladies to see the Leviathan remains. They were half-buried in the muck, for Oohul's fight had happened long ago, and there was no flesh left to see. But there were bones, pure white bones jutting from the sea bottom. The enormous curved jaw, in particular, seemed to strike Ootoo's fancy.
"Now I must return to the community," Great Oohul told the girls. "I must prepare for my telling of U-u and the Ten Ways to Clean One's Nest. Are you coming?"
"Not just yet," Ootoo said thoughtfully, sizing up the primordial whale's formidable jawbone. Urthu dug at the muck a little, perhaps thinking to unearth the great bone. Silly Kraken, thought Great Oohul in amusement; there's no meat left on that thing.
"Suit yourselves," said Great Oohul, and she strolled back to the rock gardens, humming to herself the song of U-u tricking the Giant Eel.
**
After many tidal cycles, at last the Pattern was finished. Ootoo and Urthu shared the perch atop the promontory and looked down on it. Urthu, who didn't have Ootoo's aesthetic touch, was absolutely gobsmacked.
"How did you do that?" she asked, marveling at the image of an enormous white kraken that seemed to walk and converse with some unseen companion. "How did you see a pile of bones, and see within them a picture if you arranged them in a certain way?"
"I don't know," admitted Ootoo. "It just came to me one day." She admired her own handiwork. It was, she thought, pretty darned good. She might never fight a Leviathan, but she had told her own tale now, after a fashion.
"I bet Great Ussuss will want to talk with you when he sees this," Urthu said, nudging her friend.
"You know what? I don’t even care about that anymore," Ootoo said. "This Pattern-making has taken on a life of its own. I don't want to have a mate; I want to do this. I never want to do anything but make Patterns, Patterns that can show things and mean things and last forever. This is important."
Urthu agreed. "Say," she said seriously, "we need to show this to Great Oohul and the others."
This was such an appropriate idea that there was no stopping for debate. They went to find the rest of the community straightaway. They found Great Oohul telling a story about U-u to a collection of youngsters.
"Ootoo has made something," Urthu said. "Something very clever." Suddenly Ootoo found herself turning a sickly green out of embarrassment.
"Oh, well, it's really nothing," she mumbled.
"Nonsense," said Great Oohul, rising up from her hollow and dusting herself off. "Come along, children; let's have a look at something Ootoo has made for us to see!"
The odd procession climbed the promontory, with Great Oohul taking the position of honor at the peak, and the smaller Kraken arrayed at various points along the slope. They looked down at the pure white Pattern on the plain below. The children made appreciative noises of wonderment and approval; Great Oohul mostly seemed just struck dumb.
"It's like the biggest Kraken ever!" said a child, and its playmates agreed.
"U-u is the biggest Kraken ever," said Oohul faintly. Ootoo dutifully nodded.
"I love it," said another Kraken. "It looks exactly like one of us. So very lifelike!"
"And look at how she made the beak!" exclaimed still another. "Why, she used the curved jaw of a Leviathan to do it! How could she possibly have thought to do that?"
Great Oohul started. "My Leviathan," she murmured.
"I like how it looks like it's talking," said a baby Kraken.
"That's right. Who's it talking to, Ootoo?" asked another.
"I don't know," said Ootoo.
"It's like a story, or part of a story," said the baby. "Tell the rest of the story!"
"Yes, Ootoo!" pressed the other small Kraken. "This is a good, new kind of story! Tell us more!"
Ootoo stirred to reply, but she never got the chance. With sudden violence Great Oohul reared herself up. Her arms flailed, knocking the small Kraken off the slope, including Ootoo and Urthu, who rolled off the promontory and collapsed in a writhing heap of tentacles.
The mighty Kraken attacked the promontory with her enormous, horny arms, tearing loose chunks of rock and rubble. In a fury she rained coral and muck and silt down, throwing piece after piece down from the peak. Her arms scooped up piles of mud and hurled them down, one after another, and she tore loose entire boulders as she methodically chewed down through the outcropping. Ootoo caught the look of fury that transfixed Great Oohul's face, and she knew how the mighty Kraken must have looked when she fought the Leviathan.
Soon the promontory was gone, nothing but a stub of a pedestal overlooking the plain. Great Oohul's rage was spent, and she squatted quiescently on the ragged edge of the outcropping looking upon her handiwork. Frightened, but driven by need, Ootoo crept up to join her. Large Kraken and small looked down into the hollow.
The Pattern was gone. It had been entirely covered over in a thick layer of rock and mud and rubble. Ootoo's work had been erased entirely, as if it had never been there.
"This thing you have done," whispered Great Oohul huskily, "is not righteous in the eyes of U-u." Then she turned and trundled away back to the rock gardens. Timidly, the young Kraken followed her.
Urthu joined Ootoo at the edge of the hollow. "I'm sorry," she said. Ootoo said nothing.
An enormous pale arm reached over the edge of the rift. Great Ussuss pulled himself up, having just woken up cranky. He critically surveyed the change in topography just outside his doorstep. "What in all the ocean is going on here?" he demanded.
"Nothing," said Ootoo frostily. "Nothing at all." She turned and swam away from the rock gardens. Urthu had to struggle to keep up.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Away," said Ootoo.
"What are you going to do, then?" pressed Urthu.
"Go somewhere else," replied Ootoo, flushed with anger. "Somewhere where I can make Patterns. And if U-u doesn't like it, may the Leviathan bite off his thousand arms."
Urthu gasped and drew up short at this heresy. She watched her friend retreat into the glimmering of the deep waters, and she never saw her again.
**
Tides passed. Years passed. Centuries, ages, aeons.
The world changed. The sea floor shifted. And a glow came down from above. It came slowly but inexorably, driving the creatures of the deep away.
It was the air. The air was coming down to meet the sea floor.
The seas dried up. The mud became as hard as a rock, then became covered in volcanic soil. Layers upon layers of dirt built up over the sea floor, becoming mountainous, miles thick, the weight of the ages pressing down. Muck became stone. In the darkness it waited, undisturbed.
And then the weight lifted. Glaciers scraped, wind and rain and rivers weathered, and slowly the blanket of soil and rock was worn away. The layers below them were exposed, and with only a very little help from new arms, arms guided by clever eyes and minds, were their secrets revealed.
The Pattern came to light then, its form revealed for the first time in untold millions of years. The viewers marveled at what they saw, just as the krakens had done previously, and like the krakens they wondered how such things were possible.
But Art is never a surprise. It is the absence of Art that is rare, because it is in the nature of hearts and minds to express themselves, and to give voice by whatever means make themselves available, to increase the total amount of wonder upon the Earth.
Somewhere, I am certain, U-u agrees, regardless of what anybody says.
**
Ootoo dropped down to the ocean floor with her meal in tow. She had caught a big fish, the kind that needed to breathe air. The air-breathing fish lived up high, where the light was almost too impossibly bright to bear, but that worked to a hunter's advantage. Fish-creatures that breathed air were used to lots of light, which meant they weren't good at seeing something coming up out of the darkness.
Ootoo gripped her meal tightly in four of her arms and walked along the sea bottom with the rest of her limbs. She was huge, with an armspan fifty feet across, and an elongated mantle the size of a station wagon. But she was also young, and small for her kind. The great kraken never stopped growing, and they lived for a very long time.
Ootoo retreated to her cave and methodically devoured the air-breather. The lung tissue she found disgusting and discarded, and the muscles were delicious but difficult to pick off the hard bones. The organ meats were the best, of course, and those she savored. When she was done, she had a pile of bones and a full inner cavity. That was the life of a kraken, for food was plentiful in those parts; with a full belly easy to achieve, Ootoo had plenty of leisure time. And given enough unstructured time, an active mind will find tasks to keep itself occupied.
Ootoo's thoughts turned to mating. It was time to attract a mate, she knew, but she was small and drab, and unskilled in the graceful dances that seemed to come so naturally to her sisters. There was a male she liked – Great Ussuss, four times her size and ten times her age, who Ootoo found to be ruggedly handsome when he emerged from his rift, which was infrequent. But Ootoo despaired of finding a way to draw his attention.
Ootoo idly played with the bones of her lunch as she pondered. The neck bones of the ichthyosaur made an attractive clacking noise when clapped together. Ootoo looked at one closely. It was almost perfectly round, but hollowed in the middle; it looked quite a bit like an oversized arm-sucker.
Ootoo picked up another, and another. She began to have an idea.
Ootoo was rather busy the rest of that day, and the next as well. She skipped the usual waking conclave, where all of her loose kraken community came together at the beginning of each tidal cycle to touch arms and chatter. "I wonder where Ootoo has gone to," mused Urthu, who was Ootoo's best friend.
"Undoubtedly she is feeling shy, or is spending time in contemplation of U-u," suggested Great Oohul. Oohul was a spiritual leader of the community, and was old enough to remember even the lesser known of the tales of the being they regarded as a cross between ancestor and God. She carefully groomed algae from Urthu's mantle, taking care not to be too rough with the young kraken. "Why don't you pay her a visit? Kindness to a friend is…"
"…in the nature of U-u; yes, of course, Great Oohul," said Urthu hastily, yet respectfully. She flushed scarlet and bowed, a universal gesture of parting, and scuttled off to find her friend.
Ootoo wasn't in her hole, and she wasn't playing in the rock gardens. Urthu was about to give up when she saw Ootoo creeping over a distant ledge. She looked almost furtive. Urthu's curiosity was instantly aroused. She stole up on her companion and squeezed her trailing arm. "Hi there!" she said brightly.
"Aaa!" exclaimed Ootoo, her hide reflexively mimicking the surrounding corals. "Urthu, you almost scared me to death!" She maneuvered to try to hide something behind the mass of her body. Urthu wasn't having any of it.
"What have we here?" Urthu asked archly. She grappled her friend, who fought back with surprising intensity, but Urthu was the larger of the two and quickly got the upper hand. Ootoo's burden was revealed: a fish-thing, decapitated.
"Well, what's the big secret?" grumbled Urthu. "There's no need to sneak around if you're feeling hungry."
"I've never been more full in my life," replied Ootoo. "Had breakfast yet?"
"No," replied Urthu, looking at the fish longingly.
"Then come on." The young girls crept down a defile and out onto a broad hollow. Urthu felt nervous. Great Ussuss's rift yawned open on the far side of the open area. He had been known to be territorial, especially when he first wakened. But if Ootoo was similarly scared, she showed no sign of it.
Ootoo set the fish down on an enormous mound of fish bones. "Wow," said Urthu, impressed. "Did you eat all this by yourself?"
"No," said Ootoo. "Mostly I've torn the meat away and let the crabs take it."
"But why?" asked Urthu, horrified at the waste of it.
"Because I need the parts," answered Ootoo. "Look!"
Ootoo had sorted out all the vertebrae. She picked up several arms' full and let the bones fall between her fingers and back onto the pile. "I've spread them out here for the crabs to pick clean," she said. "They do a good job of taking everything but the nice, clean white of the bone. And see? The Pattern's starting to come together."
Urthu looked at an arrangement of the round neck-bones of the fish. They had been laid out on the flat silt, round side facing up. She saw a tapering path of them stretching away for many yards. Urthu turned her head this way and that, seeing but not really seeing. In a burst of empathy, Ootoo suddenly understood her friend's discomfort.
"Climb up on top of that promontory and look down on it," Ootoo suggested.
Urthu faithfully scaled the peak and settled herself comfortably at the top. She looked down at Ootoo far below. Ootoo looked ridiculous, she thought, playing some kind of useless game with her piles of nauseating junk. And beyond her, Urthu saw the pure white of the Pattern. It was thick on one end and narrowed to a point, a gently curving path. Interesting, thought Urthu despite herself. If one looks at it just the right way, it almost looks like…
…an arm. A ghostly white arm, suckers and all, belonging to the largest Kraken of all time, reaching out for something just beyond its grasp.
Urthu almost fell off her perch.
**
"Great Oohul," Ootoo asked earnestly at waking conclave, "Tell us about fighting the Leviathan."
"Oh my," said the big female, flattered that any of the young ones would remember any story she told that wasn't about U-u. The children loved the U-u stories, of course, about that very first Kraken who lived the ideal life and showed them all how to exist in a righteous way. It was rare that they showed any signs of remembering that Great Oohul lived a life all her own.
She launched into a telling of the tale – how the great fish, which was so big and fierce as to fear no Kraken, had dived down to the deeps where Great Oohul lived despite the fact it breathed air. It had come to kill, because that was what Leviathans did. Leviathans were the least righteous of creatures in the sea; one knew this because the number of one's arms was a measure of one's sanctity, and while Kraken had ten arms, Leviathans had none. They only had a tail, and flukes, and a bony hard jaw studded with teeth. Leviathans had no arms at all, and hence had no souls, and lived to bite off the arms of Krakens, to kill them or leave them physically and spiritually maimed.
Of course U-u had a thousand arms, and by His guidance Great Oohul fought the Leviathan. She embraced it with all her arms, twisting and tearing and biting while trying to avoid that fearsome mouth. Their battle lasted for hours. The Leviathan was impossibly strong and large, but Great Oohul had the advantage of time, because she did not need to breathe air, and the Leviathan did. As the Leviathan weakened, it attempted to break away and swim back to the surface. Each time Great Oohul grappled it again, forcing it back to the fight, and then it pressed the attack with renewed vigor, but eventually it tried to break off again. In time the Leviathan's vision clouded, and Oohul was able to climb on its back and strangle it there. The Leviathan took almost a day to fully die, but eventually die it did. Then all the Krakens feasted on its flesh, and they left it to rot on the sea bottom, to remind all Kraken that none can defeat those who live in the manner of U-u.
"Take us to see those bones," Ootoo pleaded, and Urthu agreed. Great Oohul acquiesced, and took the young ladies to see the Leviathan remains. They were half-buried in the muck, for Oohul's fight had happened long ago, and there was no flesh left to see. But there were bones, pure white bones jutting from the sea bottom. The enormous curved jaw, in particular, seemed to strike Ootoo's fancy.
"Now I must return to the community," Great Oohul told the girls. "I must prepare for my telling of U-u and the Ten Ways to Clean One's Nest. Are you coming?"
"Not just yet," Ootoo said thoughtfully, sizing up the primordial whale's formidable jawbone. Urthu dug at the muck a little, perhaps thinking to unearth the great bone. Silly Kraken, thought Great Oohul in amusement; there's no meat left on that thing.
"Suit yourselves," said Great Oohul, and she strolled back to the rock gardens, humming to herself the song of U-u tricking the Giant Eel.
**
After many tidal cycles, at last the Pattern was finished. Ootoo and Urthu shared the perch atop the promontory and looked down on it. Urthu, who didn't have Ootoo's aesthetic touch, was absolutely gobsmacked.
"How did you do that?" she asked, marveling at the image of an enormous white kraken that seemed to walk and converse with some unseen companion. "How did you see a pile of bones, and see within them a picture if you arranged them in a certain way?"
"I don't know," admitted Ootoo. "It just came to me one day." She admired her own handiwork. It was, she thought, pretty darned good. She might never fight a Leviathan, but she had told her own tale now, after a fashion.
"I bet Great Ussuss will want to talk with you when he sees this," Urthu said, nudging her friend.
"You know what? I don’t even care about that anymore," Ootoo said. "This Pattern-making has taken on a life of its own. I don't want to have a mate; I want to do this. I never want to do anything but make Patterns, Patterns that can show things and mean things and last forever. This is important."
Urthu agreed. "Say," she said seriously, "we need to show this to Great Oohul and the others."
This was such an appropriate idea that there was no stopping for debate. They went to find the rest of the community straightaway. They found Great Oohul telling a story about U-u to a collection of youngsters.
"Ootoo has made something," Urthu said. "Something very clever." Suddenly Ootoo found herself turning a sickly green out of embarrassment.
"Oh, well, it's really nothing," she mumbled.
"Nonsense," said Great Oohul, rising up from her hollow and dusting herself off. "Come along, children; let's have a look at something Ootoo has made for us to see!"
The odd procession climbed the promontory, with Great Oohul taking the position of honor at the peak, and the smaller Kraken arrayed at various points along the slope. They looked down at the pure white Pattern on the plain below. The children made appreciative noises of wonderment and approval; Great Oohul mostly seemed just struck dumb.
"It's like the biggest Kraken ever!" said a child, and its playmates agreed.
"U-u is the biggest Kraken ever," said Oohul faintly. Ootoo dutifully nodded.
"I love it," said another Kraken. "It looks exactly like one of us. So very lifelike!"
"And look at how she made the beak!" exclaimed still another. "Why, she used the curved jaw of a Leviathan to do it! How could she possibly have thought to do that?"
Great Oohul started. "My Leviathan," she murmured.
"I like how it looks like it's talking," said a baby Kraken.
"That's right. Who's it talking to, Ootoo?" asked another.
"I don't know," said Ootoo.
"It's like a story, or part of a story," said the baby. "Tell the rest of the story!"
"Yes, Ootoo!" pressed the other small Kraken. "This is a good, new kind of story! Tell us more!"
Ootoo stirred to reply, but she never got the chance. With sudden violence Great Oohul reared herself up. Her arms flailed, knocking the small Kraken off the slope, including Ootoo and Urthu, who rolled off the promontory and collapsed in a writhing heap of tentacles.
The mighty Kraken attacked the promontory with her enormous, horny arms, tearing loose chunks of rock and rubble. In a fury she rained coral and muck and silt down, throwing piece after piece down from the peak. Her arms scooped up piles of mud and hurled them down, one after another, and she tore loose entire boulders as she methodically chewed down through the outcropping. Ootoo caught the look of fury that transfixed Great Oohul's face, and she knew how the mighty Kraken must have looked when she fought the Leviathan.
Soon the promontory was gone, nothing but a stub of a pedestal overlooking the plain. Great Oohul's rage was spent, and she squatted quiescently on the ragged edge of the outcropping looking upon her handiwork. Frightened, but driven by need, Ootoo crept up to join her. Large Kraken and small looked down into the hollow.
The Pattern was gone. It had been entirely covered over in a thick layer of rock and mud and rubble. Ootoo's work had been erased entirely, as if it had never been there.
"This thing you have done," whispered Great Oohul huskily, "is not righteous in the eyes of U-u." Then she turned and trundled away back to the rock gardens. Timidly, the young Kraken followed her.
Urthu joined Ootoo at the edge of the hollow. "I'm sorry," she said. Ootoo said nothing.
An enormous pale arm reached over the edge of the rift. Great Ussuss pulled himself up, having just woken up cranky. He critically surveyed the change in topography just outside his doorstep. "What in all the ocean is going on here?" he demanded.
"Nothing," said Ootoo frostily. "Nothing at all." She turned and swam away from the rock gardens. Urthu had to struggle to keep up.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Away," said Ootoo.
"What are you going to do, then?" pressed Urthu.
"Go somewhere else," replied Ootoo, flushed with anger. "Somewhere where I can make Patterns. And if U-u doesn't like it, may the Leviathan bite off his thousand arms."
Urthu gasped and drew up short at this heresy. She watched her friend retreat into the glimmering of the deep waters, and she never saw her again.
**
Tides passed. Years passed. Centuries, ages, aeons.
The world changed. The sea floor shifted. And a glow came down from above. It came slowly but inexorably, driving the creatures of the deep away.
It was the air. The air was coming down to meet the sea floor.
The seas dried up. The mud became as hard as a rock, then became covered in volcanic soil. Layers upon layers of dirt built up over the sea floor, becoming mountainous, miles thick, the weight of the ages pressing down. Muck became stone. In the darkness it waited, undisturbed.
And then the weight lifted. Glaciers scraped, wind and rain and rivers weathered, and slowly the blanket of soil and rock was worn away. The layers below them were exposed, and with only a very little help from new arms, arms guided by clever eyes and minds, were their secrets revealed.
The Pattern came to light then, its form revealed for the first time in untold millions of years. The viewers marveled at what they saw, just as the krakens had done previously, and like the krakens they wondered how such things were possible.
But Art is never a surprise. It is the absence of Art that is rare, because it is in the nature of hearts and minds to express themselves, and to give voice by whatever means make themselves available, to increase the total amount of wonder upon the Earth.
Somewhere, I am certain, U-u agrees, regardless of what anybody says.
