From the Sea Foam

Prologue - The Abyss

Arcadia. There is a stillness deep within the Abyss, far from the eyes of the sun, beneath miles of cold saltwater and darkness. The stillness is both a lack of light and motion. It is a space between, created from an absence. Like the long pause between a dying breath, it is a stillness that holds nothing, anticipates nothing. There is no hope or thought or wishing. It is only a stillness.

A silence.

A nothingness, and it coats everything. It covers the rocks, the rotten corpses, the ageless dust. Nothing stirs and nothing swims. In this muffled space time has no affect, life has never occurred and death only floats down from above.

It is in this place of stillness that sky and ocean met, long ago. Their meeting is but a faded memory, lost to the above, but not forgotten. Down here, where there is no wind or rain or shifting sands, history permeates. 

Beautiful, intricate layers of volcanic rock, like frozen waves, wrap around the cold saltwater, touching, holding, perhaps even caressing. It is an exquisite dance of sharp edges and frozen pools and striped striations. The pattern of the igneous rock is a natural testament to the powers of the long-ago collision, where saltwater reached out and grasped the hand of the sky. In that moment of contact the earth rolled forth, blooming into orange tangles of magma, bursting into ash and carbon and great tectonic plates. While the remnants of this match, this making, are long since frozen here, up above, the evidence has changed and evolved. Up above, it is a constant blur of movement, of reshaping, but here, the moment of matrimony is forever encapsulated into a thousand frozen rivulets and sharp edges and swirls.

Down in the Abyss, the two forces of earth and ocean are at once joined in a powerful union and are at odds with one another. Great, sharp crags of rock stab into the water, while the saltwater slowly erodes away at the rock. It is a long, slow battle in a world of stillness and nothingness.

Or so it seems. 

At the epicenter of the swirling rock and the Abyss, there is a cave. Beyond its entrance, the cave extends down beyond the edge of the world. It is fathomless, darker than the darkest water, and it is the heart of the stillness, the lack of things. For eons this cave has produced the stillness, or the very least, been its maintainer. The cave (and, more importantly, the thing inside the cave) have forgotten light, forgotten wind and sound and the sway of grass in wind. The cave, for it is as much a thing of interest as the occupant inside, has been absent from everything, emitting only stillness, existing only to be.

But this was not always so.

Once, long, long ago, the cave was the gateway between worlds, between the unknown and creation, between life and immortality, between something and nothing. Infinity entered its walls and left, swinging through, passing by, breathing life. The world had pulsated from its mouth and out and beyond the cave. 

The cave had once been endless, but now, it was only an end.

And it had not always been covered in seawater. For a while the cave and the Abyss had been deep in a mountain, humming with the power of rock and lava and steaming water. The cave had enjoyed the feeling of hard rocks and cave dwellers and diamonds all around. It missed the days where lava pulsed under its rocks. It missed the flap of bat wings and the hum of miners' songs. It missed life. 

Like any good doorway, things would creep up to the cave's boundary and stare down into the unknown, the fathomless. And sometimes the cave would let those creatures through, while sometimes the cave spat things out. It had enjoyed the power of that decision, of opening and closing the worlds from one another. It had been more than a cave and stillness, more than the Abyss with its dust and forgotten sculptures. It had been more than what it was now: a mere cave.