Sacrificed to appease the sea, Elsie is determined to save her world before nothing remains.
On Elsie Lowell's twenty-first birthday, the seas began to rise. Harsh floods ravaged the lands, and with the floods, came something much worse - much dark...
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WHEN THE SEAS began to rise slowly, nobody thought anything of it. That alone wasn't enough to raise concerns for anyone, not when the onslaught of torrential downpour fell from thick gray clouds for weeks, then months, and eventually never ceased until the seas rose twice their original level.
But even that wasn't particularly alarming to most. With constant rain eventually came the prospect of devastating floods. With devastating floods came something much worse.
Yet still, nobody thought much of the floods either. The raging waters that rose from the sea spread far across the lands, wrecked a multitude of glorious homes, and left great destruction as humanity had never experienced before. The homes in the coastal towns were, of course, hit the hardest, all of them entirely sinking beneath the floodwaters as portions of the human territory became one with the unforgiving sea.
Nobody knew what to do. Nobody could make the floods drain and sink back to their rightful levels. So instead, humans did what they did best - they adapted. That was all anyone could do.
As the floods slowly cut off more land, humans pushed inward to avoid it. The coastal towns could not be recovered again, for nobody dared attempt to venture near the forbidden areas that the sea had claimed as its own, along with the many lives it claimed.
Damaged estates were repaired and built anew atop stilts that kept the persistent floodwaters from penetrating their luxurious homes again. The homes were sturdier and stood confident above the ground so that when the day came that the sea became restless again, they would be prepared.
And that was the end of it. Or they thought that was the end of it - hoped and prayed to their god that was the end of it. How wrong, how horribly naive they all were.
Whispers traveled from town to town, kingdom to kingdom - whispers that doom was imminent, that judgment day was approaching, that a dark force would soon clench its mighty fist over the world and bring forth horrifying punishment.
Those whispers started amongst the lower class that was left to fend for themselves in their damaged hovels, left to drown with the coursing filthy floodwaters that sought them out. The wealthy owners living comfortably in their opulent manors, estates, and castles merely laughed at the poor lunatics and their ridiculous warnings.
Nobody thought anything of the rising sea levels until the otherworldly monsters and beasts sprung straight from nightmares and folklore slithered their way out of the darkest depths of the furious sea and arrived on the sunken coasts. Reconstructed homes were torn apart again, entire towns, families, and most horrifyingly, any human that fell into the creatures' scaly hands was also torn apart.
Word of the strange entities spread fast. The few common folks that were not dragged from their homes ran. They ran as fast as their weak limbs allowed and left their destroyed villages to be overrun by hungry, vile beasts. They ran to the neighboring communities and spoke warnings of monsters with long claws and black beady eyes. Monsters that ripped apart women, men, children, newborns - everyone - with bloodied, jagged rows of razor-sharp teeth until they were skinned alive and their bones were whittled down to be kept as tokens.
The wealthy merely laughed again. But when more people started fleeing each day, appearing with stories that mentioned the same beasts, when the best warriors were sent to the decimated towns only for one to return bruised, bloodied, and on the brink of death - they no longer laughed. Instead, they hid and prayed.
Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before those hellish creatures spread across all the land in search of the fleeing cattle to feast upon. Humans were pushed to fear each passing day as high populations were decimated, while they could do nothing but hide in their homes and wonder if it would finally be the day they went extinct.
When the seas first rose, it was already too late. Humanity was damned. Titles no longer mattered and wealth no longer mattered. At that moment, it was only cowardly humans cornered by something much more sinister that arrived from the darkest depths of the sea to exterminate them.
The sea had awoken with a hearty appetite and it was vengeful. It would spare no one. It did not know mercy.
