A Monster, A Ghost, And The Mysterious Dark Void That Accounts For All Matter In The Universe…With Some Romance Because, Why Not?

The wild pitching was familiar and frightening. She was in a rowboat. A very small rowboat. A very small rowboat reeking of mildew and rot. She looked out over the turbulent black water that heaved the little boat from valley to swell and accepted dread into her heart. There was no going back. There never was.

Rule #1: There was never any going back.

She gripped in terror at the heavy oars that lolled in the black water like paralyzed limbs and frantically tried to turn the bucking vessel back to shore. But of course, there was no shore.

A scream began to take shape in her mind. If she could only give voice to the terror, it would become real, and reality was always preferable to the surreal waterscape in which she floundered helplessly. This watery void offered neither escape nor respite. Only terror. As the silent howl erupted in her head, the oars were ripped savagely from her hands by the wind that battered the little boat with fury.

The little boat slid down the back of another tumbling wave and she reached out wildly for anything to hold onto.

Rule #2: There is never anything to hold on to. Your act is performed without a net or not at all.

The boat rolled again, and she was drenched in the chilling water. Hugging herself, she saw to her horror that her body seemed glow with a ghastly blue sheen in the night that lacked both sky and moon, as if it were something inanimate. Something dead.

And then she heard it. Distant thunder that wasn’t thunder. A moment of silence followed as the churning water began to calm. The waves diminished in size until she could almost perceive a horizon where black water met the black of the abyss in which she was trapped. The abyss in which she had been trapped for the last ten years.

            It's just a dream...

But the flash of lucidity instantly surrendered to the familiar psychic resonance of the nightmare. The surreal was real once again.

She heard it again. Not thunder, not at all. The genesis of the distant rumbling was a throat. A huge, cavernous maw. And it was getting closer.

A thundering, primal bellow shook the battered craft with a puissant fury that sent her sprawling across the soggy boards. Her heart seized and then began to pummel her ribcage in a frantic effort to escape.

            He’s coming!

Swimming through the impossibility of evolutionary magic, he was real. He had always been there, waiting, biding his time. Drifting through ages, the furnace of his fury kept stoked by a single desire: to swallow her whole.

She searched the little boat for anything, anything that might help to put some distance between her and the thing that charged toward her with the force of a Trident Missile. Of course, there was nothing. See Rule #2. No net. No Anything Ex Machina. Nada.

The darkness exploded with another roar, this one closer and promising violence. With a cry she pressed her hands against her ears in a futile effort to block the terrible noise, but it was useless. The bellow had permeated her pores and reverberated in her bones. He was coming for her; coming to swallow her whole.

The boat began to pitch and rock in violent eddies as the monster threatened to materialize from the depths of the black water. His body was huge beyond reason and his appetite a thing so enflamed that she could feel its fire in her own belly. His hunger burned through her soul in a firestorm of nuclear wrath and she clutched at her flesh in a pitiful effort to save herself from whatever was about to explode from the water.

The monster's body began to rise from the black depths...

            you should probably wake up now

            ...its massive head sliding silently from the water supported by a neck that was roughly the size of a redwood...

            yes, now is a good time...wake up     

            ...the body that followed was large enough to host a modest civilization...

            wake up wake up wake up

            ...and she knew that the beast could never be seen in its entirety, that its existence was an abomination...

            WAKE UP!    

            ...and then the thing she feared the most happened: the monster opened its eyes and the light that shone there was as brilliant and as cold as diamonds packed in ice. She couldn’t turn from the beast’s dazzling countenance. His eyes held her fast, compelling her to look and see...to look and see the thing she most dreaded...to look and see that the image reflected in the monster's glittering gaze was herself...