An Adventurer's Voyage III

## An Adventurer's Voyage

"An Adventurer's Voyage" is a fictional adventure written by a novelist born in Umbraton. It tells the story of a young man who sets out to sea with his kingdom's navy, encountering all manner of monsters and mysteries, eventually finding a legendary treasure and defending his kingdom from a monster from the depths. There are many chapters in the story, but only the following are left in the first volume.

## Introduction

The Grand Parrot and her crew are ambushed by an enormous, tentacled sea monster, and are all dragged down into the briny depths. "The Undersea Kingdom," the fourth chapter of the tale, tells the story of how Colin and the others wake up after the attack and find themselves in a mysterious, underwater kingdom.

## Volume III: The Undersea Kingdom (IV)

Colin the Brave woke up and found himself lying on hard ground. Groggily, he reached out a hand. It was cold and smooth, like a huge stone. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, and began to look around. What he saw took his breath away. Water flowed high above his head, blurry and blue, as if he were at the bottom of the sea. A pale dot of light shone overhead, as well. Was it the sun? He realized he was breathing, but no bubbles came out of his mouth. He wanted to make a sound, but his surroundings were too quiet for comfort.

Getting up, he realized he was in the middle of what appeared to be a road, flanked on both sides by strange statues. Drawn by his curiosity, he inspected the statues more closely. They resembled monsters sculpted out of some sort of mud.

Colin reached out to touch one, and its eerily gritty surface caused him to pull his hand away, as if he had been shocked.

Beyond the stone statues, he saw an ordinary road stretching out in the distance, terminating in what appeared to be a disproportionately large stairway. He looked up towards the top. At the end of the stairway, there appeared to be the remains of a massive stone gate, mostly collapsed now.

He looked behind him and found the stairway terminated at the edge of an undersea trench not far away, leaving Colin with only one way forward. After passing a stone pillar, however, he noted a change in his surroundings... He felt as if he were being watched by countless eyes, but there was nothing around him. Losing his nerve, he began to run. He desperately wanted to leave this place, even if he had to crawl his way up those massive stairs before him. Glancing back, he realized with horror that the gazes he felt seemed to be coming from the abyss. Every hair on his body stood erect, every instinct in his body telling him to flee for his life.

He scrambled up dozens of the huge stone steps almost effortlessly, but then he noted a strange characteristic of these steps: they seemed to grow taller and wider as he went up.

Arriving at the collapsed gate, he saw a grotesque figure etched into one of the fragments: a monster of some sort, with gigantic eyes and tentacles.

Colin shuddered, either from fear or excitement. He felt his heart urging him to keep moving forward. Crawling over the stone gate's rubble, he was stunned at the sight before him. Situated in a vast, undersea plain were the ruins of a massive kingdom.

Colin's mind practically buzzed with questions, but one thought in particular nagged at him. At the bottom of the stairway he had just scaled, the steps were befitting of an average human's size. As he ascended, however, they grew larger and larger until he had no choice but to climb with his hands and feet. How strange, that even though this kingdom once worshipped by everyone now lies in ruins, its visitors must still crawl towards it as though prostrating themselves...

Colin felt that familiar, unsettling gaze behind him, and quickly turned around... But when he came to, he found himself lying on a warm, sandy beach. Assured by the cool waves lapping at his feet that he was no longer dreaming, he began to explore his surroundings. He found nothing unusual, aside from some strange drag marks left in the sand.

Suddenly, Colin recalled the last thing he saw in the sea: a huge monster with grayish-white tentacles...