Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Galvin, Aaron (classic fiction txt) 📖

His gaze tracked with the sandy trail as the particles flowed away from the pit floor. The particles carried toward the tunnel gates that Kellen had been forced to walk through innumerable times. Kellen would never forget being chained alongside his fellow slaves, never knowing if he would cross its threshold again. All who walked through the gates left to fight, or die, in the blood-stained sands of the gladiatorial arena.

But no more. Kellen thought, propelling himself away with a swish of his tentacles. Now, you are all free of this place.

The movement of his mammoth form kicked up a wave of white sand, reminding Kellen of the dust storms he used to watch back on land. The thought had him longing for the shore then, even as the haunted voice of Marisa Bourgeois arose with Kellen’s mind with the prophetic words he should never again walk ashore.

Kellen sneered at the memory, even as he knew Marisa’s words for truth with the loss of his legs. For all his want to prove her wrong, his thoughts turned to the prophetic words of another he had met beneath the Salt. How am I to rise, Hypnos? Kellen wondered as he swam, his tentacles again stretching out before him to guide him along the way. How to rise, and why? Why should I rise toward the surface if I can never walk the shore again?

Far before he reached the dungeon gateway, Kellen sent one of his tentacles toward them.

Or have I risen already? He wondered as his tentacle closed around the frigid, iron bar. Is that what my drowning the Knoll was about, Hypnos? Rising from the abyss to find and kill monsters like Roland, Ishmael, and all the other Salt Children? All the ones who abuse your brother’s creation? Or is there some other way to rise?

Kellen imagined the strength with which he grasped its bars like taking hold of a weight and forming a white-knuckled fist to heave it away.

And why would I ever want to go back to the shore now anyway? Why go home when I can rule down here? He jerked the gate free of its hinges, tossing it aside to descend and thud against the empty stone-made audience bleachers that were never to be filled again. Or so Kellen told himself as he entered into the dungeons that had once held him prisoner.

Kellen frowned as he swam over the dark, watery hall in search of any Nomad slavers yet to suffer his wrath. For all his searching of the dungeon levels, Kellen found none living for him to torment. The initial, curious thrill of the hunt that led him inside the dungeons turned sour at the discovery of drowned Selkies instead, the dead trapped inside the same cages that had held them in life.

Most had morphed into their Salt forms in what Kellen imagined as a final, desperate effort to cling to life, the prisoner’s seal bodies possessing the ability to hold their final breath far longer than any human lungs could do. A few had kept to their natural, human forms all the way to the end. Of those, Kellen glanced away when accidentally locking eyes with one of the corpses, the man’s eyes wide and glassy as they stared back at him in empty condemnation.

A ghost of his past named Kellen a coward then, reminding him that no true man would hesitate to look upon the face of death. Especially those made of his own choices.

Kellen forced himself to look at the corpse again, holding its stare until he could tame the ghost of his past into submission once more. You should be thanking me, he thought of the dead Selkie man behind the bars. There are worser ways to die than drowning down here . . .

Moving on, Kellen’s mind ticked off the Selkie types he passed by, noting them each for their varied designs, each of them reminders of others he had fought and won against during his own Selkie life. Harp. Leper. Lion . . . He paused in watch of the drowned Sea Lion, its body and limbs as limp as a puppet without its master to give it life.

Kellen thought of his high school friend, Marrero, then, his one true ally in the fighting pits. The last he had seen of Marrero, his friend had been aboard the same boat their owner, Ishmael, had flung Kellen from. He winced at the pained memory of that which had come after – a bleeding end and seeming death sentence for his defiance.

Kellen reached through the bars with one of his tentacles, tapping the Sea Lion. The movement he had given the animal sent the corpse into a slow spin. And on and on it goes, he thought.

Kellen stayed to watch until the Salt’s stillness overtook again, the Sea Lion left to float endlessly on until time and rot, or scavengers, came to claim the flesh from its bones.

The corners of his eyes stung then, his jaw quivering, hands trembling.

Despite knowing the dead Sea Lion was not Marrero, Kellen could not help but imagine the dread and panic caused among those trapped inside the cages before their end. A tidal wave of memories opened in him, the onslaught like a hammer to his psyche. For all the Selkie dead inside the cages, his mind replaced their faces with those of others he knew and loved, of those he fought beside and bled with. Still others he had killed for the sole reason of keeping his own life.

In place of the dead, wide-eyed prisoner, Kellen saw the pale face of another high school friend, Bryce Tardiff, after both were brought into the Salt, both taken down the Gasping Hole in Crayfish Cavern. Kellen choked too at the memory of the Selkie taskmaster, Tieran, attempting to throttle him in Orphan Knoll. How Tieran had failed, if only because Henry Boucher had come to Kellen’s aid. He gritted his