A guest reviewer asked for this, and something in me was inspired, I suppose. Definitely a little late, and definitely out of context, what with the new series being finished and all - but what the hell. That's what a stand-alone is for.

~ Chapter 5 ~

Poseidon

"Ah, god of the sea," she sighs, her breath billowing through the waves. "How long has it been since last I looked upon your face?"

He stands motionless in the water, the sunlit just barely flickering through, the golden glow of his trident bright in the dark waters. "Atlantis," he answers briefly. "Seven thousand years ago. I roused you from your sleep to bring all of the fury of the oceans against the island."

"Ah, yes..." Tethys smiles lazily, arches an eyebrow. "And now, little god of the little seas - do you know why I have awoken again?"

He nods once, his beard billowing in the currents. "Yes."

"Hmm..." Her veil and dress - are they one and the same? - drift outwards, as though reaching for him, though of course she is not. If she was reaching, she would have long since drawn him in, like a fish upon a reeling line.

"You know that you cannot win against me, little god. Against Oceanus? Perhaps, perhaps. The two of you are much alike. You govern the shallows and the shores, the rivers and the lakes. The mortals fear you greatly, and they are right to do so, for it is you who govern their lives, not I."

"They do not know the deeps." His voice is deep and authoritative by habit alone. If he had to think about it, even for an instant, it would have been the the whimper of an infant.

"Indeed..." Her sleepy smile is wide and white and as terrible as it is beautiful. "Has he driven you out, then?"

"I would not come here otherwise, not even for one as beautiful as you."

"Mmm..." She stretches sleepily and drifts a little closer to him, white translucent skin glowing in the water. "I would be content to let you roam, little god, but I am afraid that you will not be able to withstand the deeps. You are a being of imagination. When you are forgotten, you will die, consumed by the creatures who dwell with me in the deeps, in your great fallen city that I called to me, long ago."

"They say you keep monsters, there." His voice is controlled. Casual, even. He runs a gnarled hand across the bronze of his trident, smoothing the metal, buffing the shine.

"Send them to me."

"Oh?" She regards him with sudden vague amusement. "Do you wish to die so soon, god of the shallows?"

His voice is strong as he replies. "Give me a death befitting an ocean,"

She looks at him silently for a moment, eyes clear and bright. Then she smiles again, slowly, and drifts aimlessly backwards. "Then you shall die, in battle, against the creature who has never seen the light of day. Come."

He frowns, puzzled. "Come where?"

Her eyes half-open to regard him with amusement. "Oh, I wasn't speaking to you, little god. I was speaking to him."

She points downwards, and with growing dread, he follows her gaze.

The god of the sea is just in time to see a massive tentacle, thirty feet wide even at its smallest point, coil about his body and drag him downwards, into the darkness. He fights the crushing grip, struggling with the strength of his body against the behemoth, but it was like draining the sea with a bottle. Water screams past him, yanking at his beard and his hair, pulling the trident from his hands.

Useless.

And then it releases him.

He is in darkness. The water is black around him, save that illuminated by the golden glow of his trident and the distant lights where his fallen city lays.

"Behold," her voice murmurs from the darkness, "the kraken."

It is massive. Beyond comprehension. The body would be measured not in meters but in kilometers. The tentacles make the heads of Ladon look like strands of overcooked spaghetti. The suckers that ripple along its length are the size of Olympic swimming pools. The beak that gnashes and snarls in its head is dark and terrible, toothy and dark and hungry.

This, Poseidon knows, was not a creature of this time or place. This is not the sort of thing that the rivers and seas of Earth could ever have given birth to; this was not the sort of creature that an ocean as puny as his own could ever have nurtured. This is the sort of thing that devoured dreams and planets as its sustenance, the sort of being that could gorge itself on starfire and nightmares alone.

The White Lady, floating above the creature, resplendent in her white dress, is tiny by comparison, and yet so very large.

"There was a time when man could be sated with an ocean," Tethys recalls fondly. "When a storm on the banks of the Aegean made men tremble and hide. And then it was the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, the Atlantic and the Indian, and then even the Great Sea itself. But their eyes are restless, my dear Neptune, my little sea-god. They hunger for more than mere gods, now."

"They hunger for the deep," said Poseidon wistfully.

"And they are not ready for it," Tethys adds, amusement heavy in her voice. "It will destroy them. They are a small-minded people, to turn so easily from their gods, are they not?"

"Perhaps," says the Sea God. He stretches out a hand, and the muscles ripple in his powerful body, the water humming as it turns from black to green about his arm. "But perhaps there always comes a time for reality to fall short. Perhaps it is not wrong to seek solace in sleep and dreams of the deeps."

Power shoots from him, and the kraken flinches away from him as the water ripples, shockwaves oscillating the image of Atlantis in the water. The gleaming trident falls from the waters above him, and he catches it, point-down, and lets it rise again to face the monstrosity before him, heedless of ten trillion tons of water pressing down upon his head.

"But," he says, "in the end, even that dream must die."

"Ah..." she breathes. "I will miss you, my little god of the sea. Truly. I will."

"Take care of them, Tethys," he says. "Give them the sense of awe that I could not. Teach them what it is to love and to honor. Remind them what it is to fear. Remind them what it is to feel for. Remind them what it is to feel wonder."

"We shall."

"You will destroy them," he accuses without fervor.

"No," she says wanly. "They will have destroyed themselves."

"Perhaps," he acknowledges. "But truly, my lady - what else would you have us seek, if not immortality?"

"Perhaps all of you should simply embrace your mortality, my dear god of the sea," she says dreamily. "That is the only thing left to you and your human race."

Her creature lashes out with a tentacle that makes the oceans scream as it hurtles through the water. The God who awaits it does not flinch away - no, he meets it with all of the force that three thousand years of imagination and hope have granted him, and the oceans rise from their beds in furious protest.

"Do not take me lightly," he warns the creature.

No, it whispers in a roar. Reefs and fish and rent aside from the blast of its silent voice. No, it says, we will not.

He does not see the tentacle until it is upon him, falling from the skies like a bolt of his brother's own lightning - but it is not lightning, and even thunder is nothing to the sea. He catches it with one of his mighty hands, a mere two hundred feet to the monster's two thousand - but he catches it all the some, and stops it dead. Roaring, he stabs, and the tentacle thrashes away.

And five more snake out to meet him.

The trident whirls, and he draws the waters of the ocean around him in a spinning typhoon of movement and fury, deflecting the might blows; he lunges, and leaves spear-marks like an gnat's bite in the flesh of the tentacle.

And then it pulls away,

Goodbye, it whispers harshly. Goodbye.

"I can still fight you," he shouts at it. "I can still win. I have not lost yet!"

No, it says softly. No. You have already lost.

The last blow from the tentacle had pushed him deeper into the water, and suddenly, he is floating amid turrets and towers of the lost city. The fell aura of the place gnaws at the edges of his mind with screams and pleas, and it is all he can do to shake them off and stand tall.

No.

It is more than he can do.

"You," says the white lady dreamily. She is staring at him with closed eyes, smiling faintly, like a bride waiting for her beloved, never knowing that he will not arrive. The ghost, he thinks suddenly, of a bride that never was. "Have we met?"

Goodbye, little sea god, whispers the monster. We will not meet again.

He tries to call out, but darkness has already enveloped him, and even the shining lights of the shining city have fallen away, somewhere far below him, or perhaps far above, though it truly doesn't matter, now, because everything is above him and below him, just like Schrodinger and his cat might say - it is everywhere and nowhere all at once because it is neither and both, and the cold clarity of salt and sand is lost to the silt and smoky dark of the deeps -

I just wanted to die as a god, he sighs. Really, was that too much to ask?

But this is how a god dies.

Oh. I see.

He sighs heavily and allows the darkness to drag him down.

I see.

The voice of the kraken is the last thing the god of the the sea ever hears, and he does not know if it is laughing or sobbing as it is whispering, goodbye, my god, my god -

I pray we never meet again.