Kraken

"So this thing ate my ships, a few of you morons survived, and what, you can't tell me what it actually looked like?"
"Well, sir, it looked... Looked like death."
"So do you right now, what the hell kind of description is that?!"

— A former fleet owner and his surviving men

 

Terror in the Deep

  It is not the waves you should fear, nor the depths themselves, but the stillness between. For when the sea lies quiet, when the wind forgets its purpose, and the world holds its breath; that is when the Kraken stirs.   The Kraken does not thrash or roar; those are the indulgences of smaller monsters. Instead, it looms. It is a vastness disguised as flesh, an immensity that cannot be contained by shape or sense. It is the pull of the undertow, the shifting weight beneath the keel. Sailors who have seen its silhouette speak of limbs that go on forever, twisting and turning in dark rhytms, as though the sea itself had grown restless fingers.   No one agrees on what the Kraken truly is. A squid, some insist, though no squid has eyes like black suns or tentacles that blot out the horizon. Others call it a god, a cruel and capricious deity that dines on shipwrecks and prayers. The most sensible folk, those with salt in their veins and decades on the water, will tell you it's merely a story, a sailor's fancy spun from too much rum and too little sense. But they don't believe that. Not really.  

They Call It Big Blue

  The Kraken doesn't care what you believe. It doesn't care about ships, or men, or gods. It cares only for hunger, an old and endless hunger that rises from the deep when the world forgets to move. It drags galleons down with a grace that borders on indifference, swallowing whole the dreams of empires and the last screams of their crews.   Some, those who are called insane, would say there is beauty in the way it dances with the sea, each movement a ripple that shifts the world. In the way its shadow is not just a darkness but an absence, a place where the sun dares not shine. It is, after all, a creature of inevitability. A reminder that the sea will never be tamed, that the stories we tell are sometimes all that stand between us and the dark. And somewhere, in the stillness, it waits evermore.