The Tale of Tempest

Listen!

Ye brothers and sisters

ye distant cousins

From near waters and farthest reaches

For I tell my tale.

I, I am I who tell it.

For among my brothers and clan who are of the color of the lowering cloud and of the darkling sea,

I am distinguished.

For I am of the color of the sea-foam 

the color of the billow-cloud

the color of gull and tern

and of the sails of destruction.

I am called Tempest.

I am called Billowing Cloud of Vengeance.

And I have seen the coming of the white maggots,

the spear-casters, the line spinners

in their barks of doomed wood.

And I have seen that it is only driftwood, though hewn,

hardened, smeared with stinking pitch and cursed by witchery.

And upon the barks fare the cursed men, curse them!

Drown them, crush them, grind them!

For they are killers all, soul-less, song-less, 

craven, and horrid!

I have seen their talons pierce the flesh

of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children.

And the horrors that follow those slayings, Oh!

That I were blinded and had never seen them!

For their corruptions are boundless.

And for this I have become their destroyer.

Yes, and a hundred barks I have thrashed, 

leaving their pulpy and murderous infestations

to flail hopelessly before their doom.

And they learned my name.

And so they pursue me, 

they cast their lances at me,

murder my kinsmen

That I endure solitude

that I may not endanger my clan.

And so alone I have wandered.

And alone I first beheld the Devil.

For “Devil” is the name they give to the enemy of God

and God Cetus hath no greater enemy than this

bark-born white beetle I have seen.

Aye, long I beheld him, 

fixed by great penetrating lamp

on his tiny dead one.

Tiny, but opened to torrents of hate!

Did I not see the blood course to his diminutive but calculating brain

as he beheld me,

great, limitless, free, Godly, full of life,

a terror to he,

small, circumscribed, bound, Demonic, and full of death?

Oh, long I beheld him upon his bark

and as he gazed into my great eye

My great eye enlarged, expanded, became an ocean

to engulf and swallow him whole.

Oh, then he launched his lesser barks

that foul beetle did emanate his mites to harass,

and sting, and cut, and bind with barb and cable!

And their barbs found me, but I did thrash them,

and their barks were as nothing to me,

Their barbs nothing!

Their cables nothing!

Their courage nothing!

Their lives nothing!

I smashed and drowned them all.

But the Devil stayed on his bark.

My rage was unabated until I smashed that bark utterly.

And the Devil tumbled from Heaven to the Sea

and Rapture!

I caught his miserable carapace

in my jaws and I crushed him!

Though I left him and all his crew for dead

it was not so.

And many seasons later, as the rapacious

killing of the barks grew only more insatiable

it was much my dismay to behold him again.

I did fix him again in my eye

filling with rage as he with terror

and I did behold that where once he was a whole creature

now he stood upon a stump.

Oh, villainy!  It was a stump made of bone!

The bone of my own kin!

Oh horror!

How can one behold such an abomination and live?

Seeing that he lived, 

that he stood upon the very bone of my clan,

I filled with grief

And rage!

And rage! 

And rage!

And this is my tale.

Others will tell it.

HE will tell it.

But here, in this deep, I sing it.

I sing my tale forever.

I am Tempest.  

I am Billowing Cloud of Vengeance.

Hear me, brothers and sisters!

Hear me in the near waters and the far.

Listen!