The Secret Sea - (Chaptered Version)

* 65

The aliens return the scroll to the simple table. Eve fishes the ancient fountain pen out of her bag and hands it to me. "As soon as you finish writing, jump away. Amihan will only have a few seconds to blast the scroll out into space before the waters explode from it."

"Jesus," I say. The messiah doesn't show up this time. "What do I write?"

"It will come to you...hurry up!" says Eve.

"Something's coming," says my alien friend. "Something fast. We can't jettison the scroll while we're in motion."

I hunch over the paper with the pen in my hand, brimming with the blood of the Antecedents. I put the nib on the page. "Nothing—"

"Don't think, just write!"

My hand moves, seemingly on its own. It's an unsettling feeling. When the pen stops, Eve pulls me away from the scroll as it sinks through the bottom of the ship in an instant. The vacuum of space pulls us off our feet before the floor seals again.

"What did you write?" asks Eve.

"It just looked like gibberish. I couldn't even begin to tell you what language it was." I run with Eve to the back of the craft as it rockets away at full speed. Peering through a window, we watch as an impossible amount of water erupts from the scroll, expanding into a colossal, shimmering sphere. The globular mass of liquid tears apart into increasingly smaller orbs until it becomes nothing but a fine mist stretching across a massive expanse of the void.

"Insane," I mutter. "It actually worked."