To Be the First to Drown
By Victoria Ashleigh Rose
The last thoughts of an unnamed girl contemplating time and destruction as the sea-fairing region of Marea crashes into the mouth of the subterranean Grotto of Vromia, the only home she’s ever known.
I have lived just to watch a civilization drown.
I grew up playing games between the crystals and biolumes from the wild crevasses of our terrain; little gardens of glowing flora that grew throughout the cracks of rocks in the dark Grotto, so immune to the passing of time. I still have no concept of it, myself. Didn’t get enough time to process what time really is. Seventeen years in a stagnant city; being underground is limiting that way. Everything changes so slowly down here. Stalactites don’t age, they just glow, and drip, and then one day I learned how to speak, and how to jump from spire to spire to play hide and seek, and how to mine them for salt and precious minerals, and eventually I notice that they are bigger than before, and I listen to my boring teacher lecture us on reading the layers of taper to determine how much time a stalactite has lived for. Longer than me, in any case. Just long enough to watch my death, only to crumble under the same currents—at least the spires that haven’t already come crashing down on our houses and through our skulls from the descent. There are so many dead bodies.
A stagnant city collapses all at once, and yet us survivors know that destruction doesn’t come in one stage, but three. Our king falls, and then our kingdom, and then the sky bleeds out.
Marea and Edenia were our legendary protectors, once. I’ve never been to the opening before, but I’ve been told all my life that we were safe so long as they were in the sky above us… I guess that was true in the end. Now the sea floods into our gaping mouth. We had never learned to bite down on the hand that feeds us before. We never thought we’d have to. My mother never trusted our king—she called him a false god—but we all trusted our sky.
My family doesn’t know where I am now. They buried themselves deep in the cave hoping to find trenches that won’t get flushed out or filled whole by salty seawater. I am among the people wrestling and climbing over each other to get a glimpse at the falling corpse of our world, only to be death-swept by the first wave. We know what’s coming. We’ve heard the echoing screams bounce through cavernous streets, and we wanted to be among the first. Make it easy, and painless, and beautiful. Take me out after I’ve finally seen what life looks like beyond our dark hole, and yet just before I see it destroyed forever. I don’t want to be among the last of us… to wait achingly to drown, watching as everything else sinks first. Let the stalactites have the final view of our colony.
I’m at the edge now, desperately squinting my eyes as they strain to adjust with unpracticed calibration. It’s hard to comprehend a view like this. Everything is glimmering off of the water’s surface and colliding all at once. Mysteries of the ocean region spill out before us, eager to let us join in their secrets; to become more of the stories untold, and yet the sky is so vast beyond us. It’s my first time ever seeing the sun. There are colours on the horizon that I’ve only ever seen in art books, and they’re so bright, and so impossible to look at when unshaded by Edenia’s underbelly. I’ve never known weather before. I’ve known natural disasters only by their name in echoed prophecies; scrolls kept in our vaults alongside our treaties with Interres. If the rumours are true—if they took down our god-king to bring our salvation—they forsook my people knowingly. Though I suppose our paper promises will deteriorate as we do.
The tsunamis of Marea are moments away from their destined overflow into our caves and mines, into our streets, and homes, and valleys of crystal and stone. There’s no god protecting us against gravity anymore, false in his name, or otherwise. There is no tyrannical mage left to tame the unabashed temper of the storm. The planet’s core summons us all, and there’s no stopping it. But I stand mighty against the blue impending velocity of the ocean as if I alone could create a wall to break the crashing waves, as though I can halt their impact and stop the destruction in their wake—or perhaps I stand now at the edge of my home—of my whole short life—to make the same gesture as my people around me…
a surrender.
