The Fourth Leviathan - Charybdis - · 10:48am Aug 18th, 2016
The Fourth Leviathan - Charybdis -
A thousand and one existences away, separated by a sliver of thought, an unimaginable distance away covered by a single bound, a world is dying.
It was a world with relatively little struggle. There were no great forces at play, no powers at work, no empires clashing with massive armies or weapons of mass destruction. Wars were settled quickly, the death toll quickly recognized for the senseless tragedy it was. Arms were slow to be picked up and quick to be set down. All in all, a world of peace. A world of reason. A world rich in culture, serenity, and growth.
A world that was ripe.
A world that has been on its death throes for a long, long time.
Standing on a cliff, overlooking the raging sea, stands a woman. She believes herself to be the last one alive. It doesn’t make much difference the way she thinks about it. Even if there was anyone else they would soon be dead too.
The cave where she had squirreled away all those provisions that allowed her to survive these tragic last years stood some distance behind him. It was empty now. The last of the food had been consumed, the last of the water had been drunk. There was nothing left in there but trash and the remains of her waste. Not a good legacy for any proud person to leave behind, but she had no one to leave it to and she no longer had any pride left.
She used to love this place, back when the world was not being devoured.
She had the heart of a fisherman, that’s what her father used to tell her. She did. She loved the sea, she loved the waves, she loved the rich bounty she could claim out of her with a net and her patience. Now, the view every time she exited her cave broke this fisherman’s heart.
She looks down, at the rocks where the waves clash. The water was not so far away a year ago. Before the devourers came there weren’t cliffs in the first place. There was an ocean, wider and richer before. There used to be a lot more of everything before. Not anymore. She took a deep breath that failed to extinguish the burn in her lungs. There used to be even more air. Now she felt like she was slowly drowning on land.
She forced herself to look outwards. It hurt, but she did. She did so every day for years. She would do so this last time too.
A thousand maelstroms, filling the ocean as far as she could see, drank the waters she loved.
No more seaweeds were rooted in the depths. No more fish swam in the deep. No more boats sailed the surface. Still, they ate, still they devoured. All that was left was the water, and they would not rest until they drank it all.
A massive shadow loomed over her. She didn’t look up. Why do so? She could see hundreds more of the monstrosities hover over the maelstroms. Swollen, bloated and ugly, with dozens of long proboscis skimming over the surface of the water, an amalgamation of mosquitoes and bees that looked nothing like either. One of them lowered itself gently, to hover a few meters over one of the maelstroms. It reminded her of a butterfly in its movement, dancing over a flower as it drank its nectar.
The thin tendrils that dangled around the flying titan sunk into the sea. A short time later she could see them bulge as it drank its bounty from its sea brethren. When it had its fill it flew away, heading for land to feed its brothers. The creatures had an ecosystem of their own, a circle that fed each other while feeding off the world at the same time. Nothing was safe. Not animal or plants, not the air, not the sea, not the earth itself. They ate mountains and the ground itself, digging themselves deep, stealing the life and riches of her home.
Their hunger was insatiable. They never stopped. They couldn’t stop. They wouldn’t stop.
But she could. She wasn’t going to die of hunger and thirst while these things gorged themselves around her. Today her torment would stop. She would watch no more.
She jumped, diving into the remains of her oldest, most sacred love. This was the only way she wanted the end to come.
She only hoped she would drown before one of the maelstroms got her.
There was almost nothing left to eat, almost nothing to drink. The Leviathans moved, their prey drained of almost all it had to give. There was no more purpose here. They separated, heading for the tears of creation. They spread themselves apart, reaching a million, million worlds. Alone they had none of the power they had together. They could take seed however. They did not need much all considered. Only enough of their brethren to reach them to begin the cycle or their fathers to take control and propagate them, to nurture them. Even without that, all that one of them really needed was time.
Half of them scattered to the void, clinging to the tiny chance they would find a world they could devour. Some of them were aimed, a vindictive attack, as thoughtless as slapping a mosquito resting against one’s skin.
The other half were massed and they left together, an army of titanic flesh. They had elsewhere to be. They would not scatter. They would not separate.
There was a world waiting for them. A world that had known war. A world of massive powers and weapons of cleansing fire. A world that had a chance of fighting them off. The Leviathans were meant to feed, not fight. Even they could fall before the massive weaponry wielded by worlds out there, despite their own prestigious power.
Even if the Leviathans had the capacity for fear, they felt none. The world had already been visited. The plagues had been spread and taken root, and the enders had passed through, ripping off the persistent remains of resistance, leaving them nothing to defend themselves with.
The world was ripe.
They arrived and fed.
Charybdis is but a single cog in a monumental machine of flesh, a moving ecosystem of sorts with the scourging of worlds their only purpose and intent. In that environment Charybdis is positioned in the lower positions of the pyramid, weaker and less dangerous than her fellow Leviathans, yet numerous and direly needed.
Her main purpose is to cleanse the seas of everything of worth or danger to her and her brethren, fueling the chain that enables the rest of them to fulfil their own tasks in turn. Her main defense lies in her prodigious size. Each Charybdis hosts a simple ecosystem of her own inside her. Most of it simple bacterial organisms that help her function, but also her drones.
Charybdis’ drones are her keepers, her guards, her digestive system, and her seeds. Large tentacled monstrosities, they can leave their mother when the time is ready and grow into a Charybdis themselves, though this is usually done mostly when the environment is harmful to the current Charybdis. Her children jettison out of her, and through their growth they manage to condition themselves to survive where their mother did not. Poisons, temperatures, or even predators that could endanger even her, she will find a way to survive through her progeny.
Charybdis’ extreme size is imperative not only due to what she has to do, but also her secondary function as a tanker of sorts. She stores everything she consumes, be it metals, gasses, or biological matter, slowly expanding in size if she has to. Everything is broken down to its base components, ready to be used by the Leviathans in the higher rungs of the ladder.
Mostly plant like in nature, she survives on a mix of her own stores and photosynthesis, the massive cells she uses for this purpose located atop her flower. The flower she is crowned with is also what she used to create the maelstrom she feeds with. She creates a void inside her, slowly blooming open and letting the water flow, feeding it with the gasses of her store until it becomes self sustainable. When the time comes to close the maelstrom she simply folds the petals close again.
Even Charybdis is not able to process the quantities of water that pass through her. She focuses on ridding the oceans of biological matter and ocean vessels first. The excess seawater is funneled off through large tentacle like extrusions she also uses for movement. These tentacles, along with dexterous fins and anchoring claws are also what enables her to move.
The average Charybdis’ diameter of her “neck” is about 300 meters. In general size, her main mass has a diameter of a little over two kilometers at its widest.
She is a creature of terror, yet even with all that she can do there are two things that are the most terrifying about her.
First; Despite the danger she poses, as even her alone can destroy worlds by ravaging the oceanic ecosystems, she is one of the bottom feeders of her brethren.
Second; According to myth, Charybdis was transformed to what she is by a god as punishment. If the part of the myth about her drinking the sea is true, what about the rest?
Now I'm beginning to be terrified by the Leviathans.
What if some of the drones "abandoned ship" before the explosion. Could there be more Leviathans in the future?
4156033 There is quite some chance that they did. Whether they'll survive long enough to manage the transformation is another issue. In the confines of this particular story it does not matter if they did or not as their "gestating period" would be too long to matter.
Now we wait for the God of True Order to show up.
For through life in all of its forms there will be a single universal truth, life, is chaos.
The pinnacle of absolute order is that all mortal beings simply cease to be.
I want to know more of these horrors.
Holy guacamole, everyone's fucked. And there are like, what? Half a dozen more of these leviathans? One in the Badlands, one deep in the earth, another near the Minotaur capital?
I'm rather surprised they haven't encountered a galactic empire or something if they're that infinite. But, I guess if they did, or even if they just encountered a powerful enough world that did wipe out those that appeared, they wouldn't know or bother going back to reap their revenge, seeing as it's so infinite.
Definitely a blog worthy of your current work! Keep it up!