Welcome to Gaia! ::

Tavaria D’Mera touched the blade of the knife to the tip of her index finger and felt a satisfying pinch of skin. “Perfect.” She rolled the waterweed melon on the cutting board with her free hand and brought down the knife with a resounding ‘thunk’. Two even halves of melon shifted, the now exposed, juicy portion facing up. Tavaria nodded in satisfaction. Her knife was still pressed firmly to the board when she stepped back. “Tappan, Trilla,” she called up the stairs. They were late; the school had already left, so the pair of them would have to have her escort them to classes. She listened carefully but didn’t hear the thundering footsteps that sounded so much like a whale falling through their ceiling.

She called again, picking up her knife and dipping it in a shell of water boiling in the steam vent. The knife was crudely made from a shark’s lost tooth, but worked effectively enough for her cooking chores. She took great care to make sure the juice was gone before wiping it off on a cloth. Tavaria was proud of this particular knife; she’d helped bring down the shark that had ‘lost’ it. He had fed their entire village for weeks. But that was then, before the birth of her insatiable young fins. They probably could have eaten the thing in days, by themselves. Her ears flexed and she finally heard running upstairs. “It’s about time!”

“Aw, Mom,” Trilla said, automatically grabbing a melon half off of the slate countertop. She leaned against the kitchen wall to look out of the window. “We’ll be on time,” the girl said, digging her dainty fingers into the pulp of the melon.

“Don’t you ‘aw, Mom’ me, young fan,” Tavaria chastised her daughter. “You, more than your brother, need to learn how to set a good example for others. Or have you forgotten-”

“My ancestry? Believe me, mother, I haven’t forgotten.” Trilla rolled her eyes.

“Trilla!” Tavaria spoke in a tone that brooked no argument.

Before Trilla could turn, however, a shadow passed in front of the kitchen window. Tavaria stared. “Goddesses save us,” she said suddenly, grabbing her daughter’s arm and pulling her quickly from the room. The girl looked at her mother in confusion, then back at the kitchen, where a half-eaten waterweed melon now lay wobbling on the floor. “Get upstairs, find your brother, stay there, and don’t make a sound,” she commanded softly, her fear masked by her usual calm leading role. Tavaria watched as her daughter disappeared up the stairs then dashed back to the kitchen.

Opening the pantry, she found her spear, strong and sharp as ever. The weight in her hand felt more reassuring, and she padded softly over to the window to peer out. Her usually colorful coral garden was blanketed in grays; the colors that could be seen were those on some of the most dangerous creatures Tavaria could remember seeing. What she had thought was a single bumbling shark seemed now to be a strange and much more serious event. She whispered a prayer to the goddesses that her husband would return early this day.

Weaving through the reef where she’d tended food for her family were a myriad of sharks, eels, rays, and aggressive smaller fish. Turtles broke through the carefully constructed fences, eating the vegetation. Normally peaceful fish that milled around in schools now looked as if they were being directed towards a single purpose, traveling alongside their usual predators. Tavaria stared at the sight with growing horror. What could cause this horde of creatures to work together? Normally they were solitary, territorial, fighting each other off. The unnatural procession seemed as if it was passing by the house, destroying the garden but leaving them alone.

Her ears wavered, catching light footsteps on the stairs. “Trilla, I thought I told you two to stay upstairs,” she hissed, spinning around to gather the pair of them up. A scream rang out through the house; shell walls rang with the piercing sound. “Trilla, Tappan!” The woman caught a glimpse of tails angling back towards their house before she bolted out of the kitchen.