The Vanished Sea

Wind whipped over the sandy desert under a teal sky riddled with heat waves and low-lying clouds. The dunes seemed to go on forever, interspersed only with the occasional rock formation or rolling tumbleweed, stretching out until the fog of airborne sand caused them to fade away in the far distance. Far above, in the brightening sky, a few stars lingered, battling the rising sun. Suddenly one of them flashed, and then it was falling through the purple dawn, gathering speed until it was plummeting, a form enrobed in shimmering white flames, a falling star glittering amidst the clouds as it grew ever closer to earth. It was hitting the ground, crashing into the orange dunes, kicking up rolling clouds of dust as the impact dug a crater into the fine sand.

Struggling through the shifting grains, a young girl managed to claw herself out of the sand pit, heaving and choking on the small grains, which cascaded off her with every movement. White flames flickered off her skin and along the edges of the ripped dress draped in delicate pleats across her small form. She took a moment to recover her breath, small crystals of sand tumbling off her and returning to the sea of sand surrounding her. With the dust scratching her throat, she didn’t notice as silvery threads looped and tightened around her neck, chain-like, before fading into a white line etched across her skin. Once she caught her breath, the girl leaned back on her hips, pale bangs brushing her nose, which twitched at the ticklish sensation. Raising her gaze to her surroundings, she blanched at the vast desert. The sun glared overhead as her expression darkened. She scooped up some of the coppery sand, allowing it to fall through her hands like fine silk. This wasn’t a dream… but this wasn’t the last thing she remembered either… the last thing she remembered was—battle, someone with a sword, coming toward her, she had been disarmed, she was backing away—

Asteria struggled to her feet on shaky limbs, still aching from the impact of hitting the earth, spinning around to scan her surroundings for any sign of attack. When there was no sound or movement except the gentle rustle of wind flowing along the dunes, Asteria relaxed.

Asteria ran a hand through her hair, grimacing as it caught in knots and scratchy sand, trying to sort through her foggy memories. She had been in battle, she was sure—but then, the very last thing she remembered was—It had not been a battle, had it? It had been a war. But why? Against who? Asteria tugged on a loose wave, twirling the messy curl around her hand anxiously. Her head spun, thoughts fleeting and without reason, frantically trying to gain coherence. What had happened to her? She’d been fighting, in the midst of a major battle, heart racing, ichor dripping down her arms from various nicks and scratches. Then she had been injured, and she had been disarmed. She was backing away, but who—her throat tightened, sudden clarity shocking through her mind as she remembered the golden eyes staring down at her as she nervously backed away, the way she had yelled, heart pounding, anger, fear, and desperation racing through her—he had yelled back, she remembered, angrier than she had ever seen him.

He had turned away, turned to a man clad in a gold mask shaped like half a skull—Asteria stopped pacing in realization. That had been Kronos, but he had been killed in the battle against the gods, hadn’t he? So how was he—why couldn’t she remember?

She struggled, searching her memories, trying to turn back time in her mind when sudden lancing pain seared through her chest. She gasped, hand darting to grasp at the source of the pain. Asteria paused as she felt the ridges of an old scar below her collarbone. Craning her chin down, she stared at the mark and trailed her fingers over the harsh edges of the pale, strangely shaped scar: a sharp diamond shape with jagged edges fanning out like a starburst, right over the center of her chest.

The glimmer of golden thread flashed through her mind, and pain lanced once again through her head, even more sharply this time.

Memories of Περσης flashed through her mind, his tall figure standing in front of her, tan skin and light hair, always smiling, always doing anything to avoid the destruction his domain harkened. He hadn’t been smiling as he buried the dagger into her heart. She could remember his face above her, hand tight on the dagger embedded in her chest. She could remember the sharp pain of bleeding out, ichor spilling, flooding the ground, turning to mortal blood as he watched her die. She could remember him turning away, silhouetted in the moonlight. She had trusted him with everything, and he had betrayed her, had murdered her-

“Asteria” The girl blinked as she finally registered the voices that had been ringing in her head for the past few minutes. It was a voice layered three times over, echoing and discordant, with the weight of the sky behind them. “Asteria, titaness of falling stars, hear us now."

“Eh?”

“Head North,” the echoed voices continued, not acknowledging her.

“What are you—hey, Moirai, what is this about? What has happened?” Asteria yelled to the wide planes of the desert. Only silence answered, and Asteria pushed down her frustration—it was typical of the trio to reach out so cryptically. “Auspicious assholes,” she muttered, kicking at a small crest in the sand.

She had never cared for the Fates or their adherence to the rules Khaos had set for them—and they had never cared for her, which made it all the more strange that they would specifically seek her out. Yet still… it was obvious there were gaps in her memory. Περσης may have killed her, but it didn’t explain why she’d ended up here, how her soul had been reborn, reformed from stardust into what seemed to be a mortal—human—body. Death at Περσης’s hands was always permanent; and disregarding that: even if reforming after a few millennia was possible for a god, returning as a mortal was not. And—the battle, the one he had killed her in… she had no memory of it.

Asteria hated when the Fates toyed with her, but regardless, the Oracle of Delphi would likely have answers. The prophetess, mortal though the Pythia may be, had the ability to read the threads of gods and mortals alike, parsing through the way their fate was woven into the fabric of the universe.

Eyeing the stars for guidance, which peeked through the dawn sky, Asteria turned north, facing endless hills of ever-shifting, sparkling sand, hiked up the hem of her ragged dress, and began her march to Delphi.

A few days later, the heat and dehydration were beginning to get to her. She was no longer tracking through dunes, as it had flattened out and become an area of cracked earth and strange, skeletal bushes interspersed throughout rock clusters and formations. She gulped past the scratchy dryness of her throat and lifted her long hair, as if that would relieve some of the endless dry heat. Grimacing at the feel of the sand caked to her scalp and tangled into knots, and the hot sun raking against her pale skin, Asteria was struggling to keep her eyes open as her throat ached for water. For a moment, she wondered if she had hallucinated the Fates reaching out to her. It was equally possible they, having long hated her, sent her in the wrong direction so she would die.

“I pray not,” she muttered out loud, wiping off the sweat forming on her forehead. At least, she considered, frowning down at the sandy ground, it was nearing dusk once again.

A sudden lump hidden under the sand caused her to trip, and as she steadied herself, her gaze lifted upward. Jolting backward, she stared at the huge, weathered bones poking out of the sand to meet in a colossal rib cage blotting out the sky and casting mottled shadows against the sand. Dark cracks wrapped their way across the sand-buffed, yellowed bones; broken chunks were strewn across the landscape, and jagged shards poked up like the giant cragged teeth of Charybdis, gaping jaws opened to swallow the masses of sand. Rather than the skeleton of some great beast, Asteria recognized it as, to her confusion, an aged whale carcass.

Asteria trekked forward under the rib cage, observing the dark tan of the aged boneas the staccato pattern of shadows and sunlight danced across her face.

A sense of great unease filled Asteria’s chest as she stepped further within the skeleton, a tightness lying against her shoulders and an overwhelming sense of wrong, and she paused as realization hit her—this was a displaced soul. Flaws in the fabric of fate were unusual, and someone being born or dying in error was even rarer. Yet that specific feeling of ungodliness, a dark miasma of defied fate, vibrated off the entirety of the enormous creature. She stepped up to its head, having finally traversed the whole whale, and laid a hand across its rostrum, feeling the smoothness of the sanded bone under her palm.

“How did you end up in this land?” She asked the whale, relating to it as a dehydrated husk herself, from days in the desert. A sea creature ending up in a place that was dry sand for miles and miles was almost as unusual as it becoming a displaced soul. If only… hmm. Asteria searched inside for the words to her favorite funeral rites, sure the creature’s departing soul would share its final moments.

“Allow me to send you to the stars where you belong,” Asteria told the whale as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, casting sudden shadows across the flat land. “I hope you can rest peacefully from now on.” She closed her eyes, continuing the words of the funeral rite. “May your memory be eternal, αιώνια η μνήμη.”

A glittering wall of dark mist fell across the desert, revealing a small collection of stars glowing in the shape of a whale. Asteria opened her eyes; they seemed to glow with the light of those stars for a single moment as she gazed above her at the colossal form of the whale, swimming through the starry mist. The spirit swam past, singing in happiness, clicking and sending pulsing vocalizations as it reveled in freedom from its long-decayed corpse. As the ripples of light through the phantasmal water fell over her, Asteria reached up a hand. The whale trilled as it came over, allowing her to brush her fingers across the same part she had patted on its skull earlier.

At contact, the whale’s memories ran through her mind: swimming through cool waters, brushing along the sandy bottom of the ocean until all of a sudden it wasn’t. The water was gone, and even as the creature breathed, its lungs began to crush under its own weight, painfully heaving as ribs cracked, and it slowly, slowly heated up as the blubber that kept it warm in water trapped in heat as it built and built and overheated the whale, mind fogging over and dying in agony. She watched its trapped soul sing mournfully from the bones it could not leave as its body fell apart and filled the air with the scent of rotting flesh, and trapped it remained, stuck within its corpse even as flesh decayed away and bones were picked clean by scavenging birds and crabs, years passing at an achingly slow pace as its bones dried and cracked and fell away and grew yellowed under the beating sun that had killed it years ago. Blinking the visions away, Asteria found the whale gazing back at her before it chirped and began to turn away.

It whistled a farewell as it swam up to the stars, breaching the shimmering surface, and disappearing. The misty illusion of water trickled away, leaving nothing behind but dry desert and an empty corpse. Even as Asteria watched, a few of the skeleton’s ribs cracked and crumbled, falling to the ground, splintering against the sand. She smiled at the sight and turned back to the skull.

“Rest well,” she told the empty bone, running one final hand across the smoothed, disintegrating surface as images of its death ran through her mind. The water had simply vanished one day, but how could such a thing happen? She frowned, rubbing at the aching space in her chest.

Something catastrophic had happened to the world while she was gone.