Beneath the Waves

The blood we bleed

Heading into the room felt a lot more ominous the second time. Now that she sort of had an idea of the type of things that might be found down there she was more reluctant to just barge in and clutz around.

Walking in, the air felt different somehow, the hairs on her arms stood on end and she had the nagging feeling that she was being watched. She obviously knew this was just her irrational brain creating some creepiness to accompany the unknown of what was about to happen. She also knew she had been watching one too many horror movies (thanks Chris) at this point and should probably stop doing that for a while.

After some more snooping she discovered what she thought at first were just copies of the same book. As she looked more closely, it seemed that the book she found was one of 8. She found each packed in different boxes, different seals and different Latin names on them. She wasn't sure if these were the only ones in existence, or if some other family somewhere with an unexpecting daughter had a basement with 8 more of these.

She picked up one of the books from its box and turned it over. The seal was a stark emerald color and stood out, raised like an old scar on skin. She ran her fingers over it before turning it over and reading the inside cover. "Liber dracones", she whispered to herself (something she seemed to do more and more lately). Now once again with her very limited knowledge of Latin she was pretty sure that dracones meant dragons (like Draco Malfoy, probably her only ever male crush). "Dragons... first sea monsters now dragons..." she shook her head as if to shake the though from her mind. There was no way in hell that all of these creatures actually existed. No. Way.

She frantically started going through the remaining boxes, "Liber sphinx, liber de chimera... chimera...", she knew that word, she knew what a chimera was and also that she would rather not come across one. She continued " Liber de Unicornis, Liber Phoenix, Liber Centaurs, Liber de Minotaur...", all of these were creatures that she obviously had heard about in stories. In fantasy. Why were these books hidden, and why does she have this gnawing feeling that everything in here was going to turn out to be real?

Sufficiently freaked out by the idea that she might run into a DRAGON on a casual Friday, she decided to explore the rest of the room (which she now realized was not very big at all).

The walls were of old crumbly brick, and a constant layer of dust hung in the room as if to remind her that she was disturbing some sort of peace. Walking around disturbed the very molecules of her surroundings. She wandered over to a corner where there seemed to be a bunch of very big rolled up papers in a box. She took one of them out and unrolled it. Drawings. Imagine the vitruvian man, but an anthropomorphic sea monster. She quickly did the same with the remaining papers (wow 7 others what a surprise) and was quickly surrounded by vitruvian man style drawings of all the creatures from the books she found earlier. All humanoid. Not at all as they were depicted in the fantasy stories of her childhood. Maybe someone was planning on writing a very detailed fantasy book? Or working on new children's story character ideas? There had to be a rational explanation for all of this! The freak out was close, she could feel it, but she had to push through.

She moved on to the center of the room. Where that one single pillar stood, it was carved out of stone. The carvings on the side, she noticed now, were similar to the painted Greek vases she used to be obsessed with, it seemed to be depicting a great battle and mostly featured the sea monsters from the drawing before. As she got closer, she became very aware of her breathing in this tiny room. How the expulsion of air from her lungs shifted the dust particles that floated all around her. She touched the stone tablet at the top, engraved in it stood "Liber de Mari Monstrum"... she whispered it once again, this time as if to someone, " Liber de Mari Monstrum...". The top part of the column looked to be rising up as if being lifted from below. It was a lid... ohhh it was a lid... she lifted the lid carefully and put it aside.