Chapter Text
Izzy lays down his pen and waits for the ink to dry. The color is beautiful on the parchment page: black at first glance, but a slight tilt of the book reveals a subtle undertone of purple, a shimmer like starlight upon water. Whenever his fingers become ink-stained he sucks them clean, savors the brine on his tongue, but the hour is early yet. If he works steadily, he’ll finish copying the first four Teachings before taking a break for individual prayer and the shared afternoon meal. Then three or four more Teachings between that and evening services.
Today is an Eighth Day, so it will be his duty to lead the service songs, and he hums the Beseechment Hymn as he waits to turn to a fresh page. This time last year, he recalls, he was only singing on Fifth Days. A year before that, he wasn’t permitted to be alone with an exemplar copy of the Liber Krakenna. Now, he can replicate it almost without reference. The texts are as well-known to him as his own body, as the shape of each note of the hymnsongs in his throat.
“Hold us high away from harm, but to our enemies be cruel,” he sings under his breath. His voice must carry in the little scriptorium, for Sister Anette glances up from her own copying and smiles. “We ask alone for shielding arm, though every sucker grasped a jewel.”
In his austere cell, Izzy draws his blanket over himself and puts out the candle.
His vows have never been a burden to him. His celibacy is purposeful – and he prays for an end to that purpose – but self-pleasure is different. Despite his focus as he painstakingly copied the holy teachings and led his Brothers and Sisters in song, his desire was a constant undercurrent that he tends to now. In the darkness it’s easy to picture his ideal company in the cell with him. The tiny space is too small to contain anything more than a Kraken mantle, if that, let alone twelve snaking, muscular tentacles. But Izzy’s imagination is very large indeed, and as his hand rucks up the long tunic he wears for sleep, he sees a different kind of appendage doing it instead.
The bedframe groans and the thin mattress sags under the impossible weight of a god. His hand gropes for the pot of salve he keeps at his bedside. Its proper use is for soothing the skin after too much sun. There are only two living Vessels, and the memories of their sacred service are their own to keep, but the gelatinous texture on Izzy’s fingers is close enough to what he might imagine the real thing to feel like. Please, lords, he thinks, stifling a sound as he grasps his cock with his slick hand. Choose me. See that I am worthy.
A huge eye looms before him. He can see his own face reflected in it, small and hungry thing that he is, surrounded by shifting colors like the great cosmic ocean itself. The pupil narrows and pressure slides up and down his jutting hardness, making his reflection contort with pleasure. Yes, I welcome you, Creator. I am for you, only for you. Here, see how I have waited for you.
He draws his knees up and pictures strong tentacles slithering over him, holding him down. It is the weight of an embrace, not of shackles, and as his cock pulses his hole clenches with anticipation. He barely ever touches himself there, the tentative rub of a single wet finger if anything. When he gets too eager, he holds himself back with the reminder of how sweet the first time will be. And now, he imagines a thick tentacle sliding under his raised thigh to spread him open, running rows of suckers over his little hole. Izzy bites his lip to keep from crying out. Fleeting sensations of suction, of exploration, as the tentacle glides between his buttocks, around the crease of his hip, over his tight-drawn sack. It joins the first one around his straining prick, making him buck into the touch.
Suckers cling to the tender skin next to his puckered entrance, and another tentacle begins to probe there. Without hesitation or ceremony it delves into him, wet and widening. Izzy’s hand moves furiously upon himself, his other hand flying down to rub over his belly. Nothing there but hair and the soft give of fat over the clench of his abdomen, but he can nearly imagine the touch of his god through the flimsy wall of his own body. Inside of him, using him, taking him for the holiest of purposes.
Everything between his knees and his navel tenses and squeezes as his orgasm crests, and he spills into his own slippery hand with a prayer on his lips.
Days and nights pass in similar routine, but well before dawn on the next Third Day, he is awakened by a pounding on his cell door. Deep in sleep, it takes him a moment to comprehend the message being shared from room to room.
The excitable voice of Brother Marcus rings up and down the hallway. “A sighting, down at the beach!”
“You’re sure?” someone asks sleepily.
“Would I rouse you at this hour over a whale or drifting wreckage? Four of them at least, praises!”
Izzy’s feet are on the cool floor in an instant, his door flung wide before he even has his cassock pulled fully down over his nightshirt. Brothers and Sisters are emerging from their own cells in varying states of wakefulness, and he passes most of them with a polite yet urgent word, or companionable clasp on the arm. The monastery's bell tolls four times, signaling the group sighting to any still sleeping.
The night air is fresh upon his face, the stone pathway dry and smooth under his bare feet. He hurries along the path to the overlook. It’s a forty-foot drop down to the beach, nothing visible from here but a few others standing or kneeling in silhouette against the grey pre-dawn sky. Izzy finds a gap to stand just shy of the edge, and looks down.
“Glory be,” he whispers. Four great masses break the surface like moving islands, the constant undulation of tentacles seeming like smaller creatures skirting the shorelines. Even in the pale, cloud-filtered moonlight their heaving mantles glisten under the rivulets of water. One sinks below only to rise again closer and larger than before, and Izzy catches a glimpse of a wide, unblinking eye. His throat suddenly feels tight, tears springing to his own eyes. Is it looking back at them? Can it see him?
To his right, Brother Byron is kneeling. “Gloria Krakenna,” his prayer concludes, and Izzy echoes it back, wiping at his eyes. Byron clasps his damp hand for a moment, smiling knowingly up at him, and begins the prayer anew.
A fifth emerges, to a collective gasp and murmur from the assembled, and another toll of the bell. Offshore sightings are common enough – shadows beneath the surface, a purple-white tentacle urging fish closer to shore, the occasional glimpse of mantle. Grandmothers speak of a time when the Kraken sank the approaching vessels of unknown foes. But the gods are deep-divers. For this many to gather so near to shore means only one thing, and Izzy needs to be closer.
There is a stair cut into the side of the cliff, and Izzy moves as swiftly as he can safely do in the darkness until his feet are on soft sand. From the beach, the Kraken look even more like looming islands. And to the west, there is one island that does not move, which Izzy has long prayed to see. One of his order will go there in the coming days.
High Priestess Aredna is one of the few down on the beach, standing near enough to the water that the incoming waves have soaked the hem of her cassock. Heedless, she rubs her dodecagram pendant with her thumb and looks out to sea as one wistfully anticipating the return of old friends.
“High Priestess,” Izzy greets her. As he bows his head he kisses the side of his closed fist, and wiggles his fingers when he pulls it away from his lips.
Aredna returns the sign of Reverence. When she was chosen as Vessel, Izzy was still too young for service in the monastery, even as a novice. But he remembers standing beside his mother and sisters in the village square, watching Aredna process through town on the Kraken liaison’s arm, tall and proud, her golden hair and the shape of her body concealed by veils.
Now her hair is more silver than gold, but she is no less tall or proud. “Brother Israel,” she nods. “Mind the surf.”
“I don’t mind,” he says, though the cold water soon has his toes curling into the sand.
“I thought not.” Surely she knows the reason for his eagerness, but her tone is neither curious nor sly. If a Vessel returns, they return changed.
The waxing moon breaks through a gap in the clouds. Everything shines: the dark mantles given a new depth of color by the pure white light, the thick tentacles throwing a glimmering spray into the night air, and the ever-moving ocean herself. Izzy holds his breath as if it will prevent the moment from passing. The longing he has harbored as far back as he can remember has never been more profound, aching in his chest and in his groin. He wonders if Aredna feels similarly, or if she is above such things now. There are many questions he would like to ask her. Instead he exhales when a cloud flickers over the moon once again, and says, “They’re so beautiful.”
“They are,” she agrees. ”Lords of the lightless fathoms–”
Izzy finishes the sentence with her. “We faithful receive you like the sun.” But the sun has never burned so intently upon him, so hot inside of him. He smooths his cassock over his hips, reminding himself there is no shame here, especially not in the company of a holy Vessel. “What happens next?”
Aredna still looks unwaveringly out to sea. “We prepare to receive the liaison.”
Izzy has never taken part in this sort of preparation. The Kraken are long-lived, and two dodecades may easily pass between their seasons. Neither scholars nor high priests can say for sure what will signify their readiness – if they require a certain number of their kind, or if they await some natural sign from within their own bodies, or perhaps from the sea herself. And so the usual work of the monastery must be carried out, plus readying the buildings and grounds to receive a god among them. In their limited free hours, they watch the gathering gods, leaving offerings upon the beach or the overlook.
Izzy continues his labor in the scriptorium, adding extra flourishes and illustrations as inspiration strikes. Strong lines burst from his pen; fat glistening shapes coil in the margins. He gets down on his hands and knees and scours the old stone floors, a fitting position to whisper prayers beneath the rasp of the scrub-brush. He hangs kelp garlands that his fellow monastics have woven, and wafts the smoke from burning bundles of seagrass into the corners of each room. All will be clean, all will be made ready.
There is little he can do to prepare himself yet, other than prayer. In his own cell and with others, he sings and meditates on the goodness and mystery of the gods. He studies the special hymns that are only sung in celebration of this time. Anticipation gnaws in his chest such as he has not felt since childhood, when he would await a holy day, or the birth of a sibling or cousin, with the boyish suspicion that time itself was slowing down to spite him. During services he finds his voice choking with emotion, his eyes brimming with the sheer muchness of it all. When he sings, his desire is so great he thinks it might suffocate him.
All accept the possibility of being chosen when they take their vows, but the Kraken will choose the best among the order for their next Vessel according to their own deep wisdom. High Priest Orren, now frail and mostly blind, was soft-spoken and beautiful in his youth. Vessel Damon, martyred in his service, had already been known as a great teacher. And Aredna had a fervor and a clarity to her faith that caught the liaison’s eye. The three could not have been more different, except for their youth and strength.
Izzy has served in the monastery for over half his life. With his vows long behind him, this might be his only chance.
See me, see that which burns in me, Izzy thinks as he tilts his head back against his pillow, sighing into the darkness as if the mighty presences down at the beach were in the dark cell with him, upon his freely offered body. You are already within me.
He dreams of water. Neither warm nor cold, it seems to match the temperature of his body exactly, and it pours into his nostrils and his throat like summer air. The taste of salt is strong, and not just on his tongue. They say the gods can taste with their skin, and so it feels with him, pungent salt settling into his body. The red iron of his blood is washed away and replaced; his eyes roll back into his head as if floating.
It is not a nightmare, but he is afraid, and ashamed of himself for it.
The water enters everywhere it can. He feels himself growing heavier, sinking. In his flooded ears, his muffled heartbeat echoes. The pulse spreads through his gut, pounds in his head, throbs beneath the nail of each finger and toe, until it beats in perfect sympathy with the black fathoms surrounding him.
The resonance spreads through him like a hammer falling upon a great drum, and the thin barrier of his skin begins to dissolve into the lightless ocean.
When he awakes, coughing and gasping, his skin is clammy but intact. A hand through his hair comes back only damp with sweat, not soaked with seawater. Sitting up, he clutches at his dodecagram pendant. “Lords preserve me.” He closes his eyes again and prays in a whisper until the roar of the ocean has faded from his ears, and his heartbeat is steady once more.
Thin dawn light creeps into his cell, the morning of an Eighth Day.
“It may be today,” Brother Byron tells their table over the afternoon meal. His voice is soft but confident, and the rest of the table murmurs their anticipation.
Sister Cloris has barely touched her food, excitement radiating from her. “Why do you say that?” Izzy makes himself chew and swallow. If Cloris thinks she's impressing anyone by not eating, there's no need for that yet.
Whomever the gods select as Vessel will be the right and holy decision. Even disappointment must bow to faith. But Byron is well past his fortieth year, unlikely to be chosen. Cloris is young and beautiful, and the generous curves of her bosom and hips are evident even under the same modest cassock they all wear. Izzy can't help but weigh himself against not just her, but all the Brothers and Sisters in their prime. He is not the tallest of the monks, nor the most handsome; he ranks respectably among them but not the highest. He lacks a womb, though he doesn't know if that makes a difference to the gods – the nuns keep their own mysteries, and it isn't his place to ask.
“It's been six days,” Byron says. “Vessel Aredna was chosen after five, Vessel Damon after only four, may the gods now carry him. Rarely has their moot exceeded half a Twelveday.”
What he does have is knowledge. “It was ten days for Vessel Marlisse, Brother,” Izzy says. “May the gods now carry her.”
If his tone is too strident, Byron doesn't let it show. “Right you are, Brother Israel,” he says, "though that was a long hundred years past. But only a moment in their eyes,” he smiles in gentle concession.
Izzy nods, and returns the courtesy. “I pray it will be today.”
And he does. Perhaps it will be today, but if not, he prays for patience. He raises his cassock and kneels in his cell, rocking in place upon the hard floor until he feels the ache of bruises forming on his bare skin, and remains there longer still. The discomfort should inspire humility, yet a jealous voice at the back of his mind still whispers. See what I will endure for you, lords, it says. And I am glad for it. Let me serve you as ardently as I may.
The hours in the scriptorium pass slowly. The brine of the god-gifted ink makes him yearn to see them from the overlook again. How many are gathered there now? Three more had joined since the initial arrival, eight in total now, and all will have a role to play with the one chosen.
At last, the bell tolls for the evening service. Usually the High Priestess would give the word to begin; in her absence they begin as one. His knees are still sore from the penitent afternoon, but he murmurs his prayers along with the rest of the monastics, and reminds himself that most of his order will never lead the hymns during a moot. He recognizes the privilege as he rises to stand in front of them.
The pulpit is recessed into the stone wall, which itself is carved with many tentacles as if they embraced the speaker, as if his or her words came from the gods themselves. It is designed not for placing oneself high over a congregation, but to amplify the voice through clever techniques in the architecture. Even his breaths seem louder here.
“Sisters, Brothers,” Izzy says. “The Orison for the Vessel.” He knows the words well by now, and the group repeats each Twelveword after him.
“As foam clings to the shore, as it froths upon the wave,
Let it crest upon one body, that all bodies may be saved.”
The desire in the chapel is thick as the sweet-scented wax of the candles and the clouds of burning incense. If there is anyone under that roof who does not wish to be that one body, no one listening would be able to pick them out, so impassioned are the voices of the gathered singers. With rising fervor, Izzy continues the hymn.
“As the ocean swells in answer to the calling of the moon,
How you call the rising tide to grant your Vessel's holy boon.”
The door at the back of the chapel opens on silent hinges. Only Izzy can see what walks through, and he grabs the pulpit with white knuckles to keep himself from prostrating on the spot.
Aredna, silver-haired and proud, wearing her finest vestments: the purple-black chasuble, intricately embroidered with white thread, and the circlet laid with delicate shells and twelve large pearls. The elderly High Priest Orren, dressed in the same clothing of their shared station, using a staff for support. And not just a staff, but an arm, the human-looking arm of something not human at all.
Between the two of them, a god. This is how they move on land, Izzy recalls from his youth, the upper body taking a humanlike shape, though proportioned larger than even the tallest among them. The lower body still resembles their natural form. The dozen dark tentacles move in a viscous, unpredictable flow, curling up to reveal white undersides with grasping suckers, then hauling the bulky body forward. The upper half is like that of a man well beyond Izzy's years but still strong and hardy, broad chest and navel-less belly, hair and beard nearly white.
Izzy's stomach churns like the crash of a great wave, and his voice quavers – is it disrespectful to remain standing in such a presence? But Aredna gestures for him to continue. The god does not speak to her, nor to Orren, but these are the only living souls to have communed with the gods, to have carried gods within their own bodies. Izzy has practiced well, and the words still flow joyfully from his lips. That he should sing not only during these beautiful days of faithful preparation, but for one of the holy lords himself! Grateful tears flood his eyes, and he sings through the great rising of emotion in his mortal body.
Perhaps the look on his face gives it away, or perhaps his fellow believers can sense the great presence behind them. One by one, then all at once, heads turn. Some fall to their knees; gasps and cries of awe replace some of the voices. “Gloria Krakenna,” they sigh. “Gloria Krakenna.”
Izzy will continue to sing the glory to completion, or until struck dumb.
“For ready is your cradle, in your humble Vessel make a nest,
All gifts received, all will surrendered, all is precious, all are blessed.”
The final words of the Orison echo in the chapel like the images of a fading dream. Izzy dares at last to really look upon the assumed visage of the god. Even from the other side of the room, he feels the pressure of the god’s gaze back upon him. He steps out from behind the pulpit and sinks to his knees. His breath, kept under control long enough to complete the hymn, now comes fast and shallow, and he marvels at the way Aredna and Orren are permitted to walk beside him like sentries, like beloved children.
A tentacle curls into the air. “Rise,” says the god. Even the single word seems to pull itself up from an unknowable depth. Izzy uses the pulpit to steady himself as he stands.
“Presentation,” Aredna says softly, impossibly serene. This god was not her own liaison – unless he chose a different shape all those years ago – but the connection between them is palpable. Even old Orren seems to move with an ease long forgotten by his frail body.
Izzy smooths his cassock down and swallows, finding a place within the circle of bodies around the perimeter of the chapel floor. The god moves through the room on winding limbs, and the same vaults and arches that caught Izzy’s voice now amplify the gentle sucks and slaps of tentacles upon the stone. Does the dryness vex his sea-suited skin? Does a god pay any mind to such a thing as physical sensation?
The briny scent of him drifts closer as he shambles his path around the circle. Beside Izzy, someone whimpers. Across the circle, a Sister clutches her pendant, lips moving in silent prayer. Izzy cannot think, cannot fear, cannot even hope. As the final line of the Orison dictates, he surrenders.
The god pauses before him. The weight of his presence presses down, the taste of salt in the air nearly enough to stop Izzy's lungs from drawing any in, lest he drown.
“Your cantor,” says a voice like bones resting under a desert of silt.
“Brother Israel,” Aredna replies.
“My lord,” Izzy whispers. The thick purple flesh of the god’s lower body glistens; flashes of white curl around Izzy’s ankles as if the ocean itself has been poured into a shape that still instinctively forms currents and waves. Izzy tilts his chin slowly up and sees flickers like the barest reaches of sunlight moving under the human-like skin. Further up, and–
The tentacles circle his calves and climb up his thighs. Warm limbs fill his cassock. Some flatten to slip under his cincture and probe his stomach and chest; others grip his thighs as if to hold him steady. Izzy turns his eyes heavenward and finds a face with pale eyes and flat pupils staring back down at him in judgement. The tentacles caress his belly, his bottom, his genitals. “Aah–” he gasps. One slides from the inside of his thigh to the small of his back, suckers clinging to the cleft of his buttocks as they pass softly over his hole.
The sound of his own voice surprises him. “Lord,” he blurts, unable to hold back his praise. “Ready is your cradle. Gloria Krakenna.”
The god smiles. Between his pinkish lips, his teeth seem to merge and divide like the winking colors on his skin. “Not yet, little one. But you will be.”
Izzy feels his heart crumble. If not for the strong limbs supporting his own, he might collapse from shame on the spot.
The god still holds him.
“This one.”
Old Orren and beautiful Aredna nod. “We will prepare him, lord,” she says. Her hand clasps Izzy’s upper arm.
The god's eyes are the same pale blue-green of shallow waters in the sun, so beautiful Izzy cannot speak, not for confirmation nor gratitude for what he thinks is happening.
“In three days,” the god says, “I shall return for him.”
Those eyes transfix him, still and unblinking in a face that blurs and flickers with the effort of maintaining the humanoid form. Tiny wrinkles furrow into the skin and smooth out again, individual hairs in the beard blend and split in hypnotic motion. It finally occurs to Izzy that he should answer. “Thank you, lord, thank you.” He makes the sign of Reverence, kissing his fist and waving his fingers.
A tentacle catches him at the wrist, even as the others recede from beneath his cassock. It curls over his palm and twines between his fingers, in movements as subtle as the drift of smoke upon the air, and as strong as an iron chain. “You will sing for me again, little one. For all of us.”
Izzy nods. Without the tentacles holding the fabric away from his skin, he can feel his hardness tenting the cassock. “I am at your command, lord.”
And then this last tentacle too pulls away, and the god turns from him. “Three days,” the god says again. He offers Orren his arm.
Aredna still holds Izzy’s. “A new Vessel has been chosen! Gloria Krakenna!” she cries. His Sisters and Brothers repeat the cry as the god drags himself away on ever-moving limbs. And Izzy's own lips speak the words he has said thousands of times, as he watches the god vanish through the door, the praise now ripe with new meaning.
Aredna cups his cheek in her hand. It's warm, as the god’s limbs had been warm. Rarely does any person touch him. She reminds him of his mother in some ways; in others, not at all. “With me, Vessel Israel,” she says. “We must begin now.”