Ancient Being

Composite image of the Ancient Being

The Venerable One is a massive hagfish, large enough to wrap around the tallest skyscraper and still have plenty of length to spare; such is his size. Like most hagfishes, it can secrete noxious slime around itself, but the Ancient made a slime spiderweb covering most of the craggy seafloor it lives in. This web of ooze extends for kilometres outside its lair in a seamount, trapping whales and ships and slowly bringing it to an audience with the Venerable One as a guest or as meal. It is blind with white eyes, and it does not have a mandible, instead having a mouth with sideways-facing teeth. It lives at the bottom of the ocean, wrapped around coils and coils and coils of itself; until you can no longer tell where it ends or it starts.

Being rungs above almost any being on our planet in the Great Hierarchy of Power, the Ancient Being supposedly possess great knowledge on the nature of the universe and has the power to grant wishes. Nonetheless, it often sees humanity as either annoying botflies, or as a tasty snack.

## A trip to the depths

I've never liked the sea. Its unfathomable darkness where light seldom penetrates has always terrified me, the sheer emptiness of the ocean sucking any speck of life into its cold, dark depths. The sea to me was nothing short of an all-consuming void, with monstrous horrors thriving in the godless water, never to see the sun lest it scorches them.

But I had to see *it* for myself.

The glass of the bathyscaphe had long since shown nothing but dark, and the eerie glow of the submarine's arc lamp. Bubbles rose from beneath, accompanied by specks of what I supposed was plankton. What I hoped was plankton, and not something else entirely like the drool of a forgotten leviathan. Every so often, a red prawn or a pale squid looked over to the glass. Were they curious, to see a denizen of the sun venture so far below? Or were they hungry, judging if I'd make for a good meal? The alien eyes of these abyssal denizens I could not decipher.

The shudder of my submarine told me I arrived.

The vehicle's lamp had finally revealed something, showering with light the seafloor that might have never seen the sun before. Dunes of sand and siliceous ooze spread as far as the lamp could show, before the glow was swallowed by the utter darkness of the depths. Yet the pale streaks of something slimy did not escape my eyes. Leaning on the glass, only with my sharp eyes I could make out the trail of muck barely lighter than the seafloor itself, spreading from somewhere else. Knowing what to look for, I soon found another. And another. It was not long until I realised the ground was covered in this slimy web.

The ropes of muck went taut as I was shaken in my bathyscaphe like a demented snow globe. Shifting the arc lamp around, the pale ooze had risen from the sands, wrapping my submarine with elastic gossamer threads made of the most disgusting of mucus. I saw the strands stretch as if it were rancid cheese; thinning, but never breaking. No matter how hard I pushed my machine, I had been ensnared by whatever had made it.

Hours went by. Any attempt to reach the surface was met with static. Yanks made by the web of muck rattled my head against the cold glass, towing us in an unknown direction. As I travelled, I noticed the slime grew more common, the ooze becoming thicker; until all around me the seafloor was alive with a foot deep layer of noxious slime. Bubbles full of a pale gas rose from the gaps left behind, usually behind rocks, as if the air itself wanted to escape but needed the help of Gaia to do so.

It was then where I saw it. Pink, roiling flesh squirmed around what I presumed was an enormous mountain, motes of slime falling down my submarine as if it were a demented form of snowfall. I could never try to attempt to see it all at once, every time I tried to change the focus of the sub's lamp, it was as if it occupied everything. Purple veins pulsed against the loose skin of the monster in front of me, wrinkles forming and disappearing as it wormed around itself. Knots, coils, braids, it seemed intent in twisting itself into a living Gordian knot. Holes that could be as large as a house gushed yellow mucus, contracting itself before belching out a roiling river of dense and concentrated bile.

I could never make out the head of the monster until it was right on top of me. Its betentacled snout faced me directly, sightless eyes gazing at the darkness it lived in, unaware of my lamp revealing its form for the first time in eons. Its mouth chewed on the web of slime , the skin around it shifting to the sides at it ate, drawing me ever closer. It never even seem to realise I existed as it consumed, until the fleshy antenna below its tube of a mouth twitched. It rose, the water it displaced shaking me in my bathyscaphe as it swam, until it stood over me. I barely had any time to see it jagged, yellowed teeth; two pieces of orange keratin shaped like a saw to the sides of the jawless mouth before it clamped down on the submarine.