A Single Strand || #Wattys2018

Chapter Five

Hyrna realizes, when she wakes up, that she no longer expects to wake up on Sargada.

She doesn't find this particularly alarming, but it does spook her somewhat. She wants to have some kind of motivation to get home. As much as she is beginning to enjoy life on Maihikiango, it's not Sargada, or even Juxta II, places where she has family, or, at the very least, other sapient species.

Tired and aching, Hyrna rolls over onto her front and spreads her wings up towards the sun. She feels energy rushing to her limbs, but she doesn't want to get up. She instead reaches to her left to grab a slice of ocean pomegranate. She feels around a bit, then spears a piece on her claw and eats it. Dried, the normally sour flesh is more sweet than before.

Slightly more energized, Hyrna pushes herself up and glances over at Haowikaitiya. The horn rests on the stone, some birds perched on it. Hyrna stretches her wings and sends the birds scattering.

She decides to wake herself up by playing Haowikaitiya. She picks it up, carries it to the edge of the cliff, and sits on the edge, gazing out over the water. She puts the horn to her lips and starts toying with different notes. Blowing with less force creates a bassy sound, deep and thrumming. She puckers her lips, and the note remains bassy, but gets somewhat sharper. After playing with the notes for a minute, she takes a breath and tries to make a louder note, like the one produced yesterday. Using more force in her breaths creates the gorgeous, golden sound which so moved her. Just for grins, she growls into the horn, and it comes out as an echoed roar.

She puts Haowikaitiya down and finishes eating the dried fruit, a welcome alternative to a breakfast of fish. Gazing out over the water, she has an idea. Why not explore more of this world?

Hyrna heads down to the shore and dives into the ocean. When her nictitating membrane slides over her eyes, she turns around to see what might be below the island. She expects to see a column of land keeping the island upright. Instead, there's a long, tapering chunk of land, like the bottom of an iceberg on Kathos. Hyrna wonders just how the island remains afloat, even with ocean currents and the possibility of storms.

The answer comes to her when she looks down.

Four giant, metal arms hold the island in place. Metal claws dig into the rock, pulling the island down. The arms trail down to a massive pyramidal structure, the tip of which almost touches the bottom of the island. When Hyrna swims down to the structure, she sees that it only has one way in or out, a triangular porthole blocked off by a shining, blood red layer of film.

Hyrna swims to the surface, disturbed at the sight of the structure. After taking another breath, she descends again to see if any more of the structures lie beneath the other six islands. To her shock, they do, all of them the same type of structure in increasingly smaller sizes.

She knows just by looking at them that these structures are bad news. She wants to know what their purpose might be, if only to figure out how to get rid of them.

Hyrna takes a breath once again and swims below the largest island. She moves among the arms, which remain stationary. When she looks up into the roots of the island, she finds something else she didn't expect: a complex network of caverns and tunnels. At first, she thinks that they were formed naturally. But as she swims closer to get a better look, she realizes that they were also carved this way, evident by the strange claw marks lining some of the tunnels.

Relying on her large lungs and fantastic memory, Hyrna swims through the largest of the tunnels, which runs to the middle of the island.

Though her eyes easily make use of what light is available, bioluminescent algae illuminates the path for her. The ghostly blues and greens lead her through the tunnel. As she swims, she sees odd markings hewn into the stone. They have long since eroded, but they look... familiar. Some kind of script, she guesses.