Swamped

You don't get much of a chance to think before you feel something approach you. You fly away just in time to spot a large tentacle striking the spot where you were.

And the tentacle has seen better days. It looks decayed, rotten. It's also filled with the stagnancy you've been detecting.

The kraken it's attached to soon surfaces, and it looks no better. For one, it's not moving much, only as much as it needs to attack. You'd suspect a magically puppeteered corpse, but that would give off traces of ether. Not whatever you're sensing here.

YOUR EFFORTS ARE FUTILE

The voice echoing in your mind is like nothing you've heard before. It's not even so much a voice as it is a presence. Something is in your head, and it doesn't intend to leave.

Then you hear some squawking. It seems to be lifting the pressure, but what's strange is that you can understand it.

Leave.

YOU THINK YOU CAN COMMAND ME

We have already forced you out of this world once. We will do it again.

I WAS WEAKER THEN

I HAVE GROWN STRONGER

But no wiser, it seems. You think yourself clever, hiding in a mockery of life so that I cannot find you. Yet you believe you can swim freely in Nual's ocean.

MY WATERS

MY OCEAN

No. No longer. You have not heeded our warning, and so now we act.

You suddenly feel aware of your surroundings. Whoever was talking, whatever they were talking about, your mind couldn't handle anything else while they were both around. But it seems to have stopped.

The kraken seems to be fighting something, something you can't see or even sense ethereally. You seem to have become superfluous to the struggle.

Then you hear another voice in your head. Thankfully, this one isn't so overpowering - it's Mr. Resk.

Wiz! There you are! I need your help!

I need yours. I'm in flight and don't have a safe way to get back to the ship. And there's something strange going on with what seems to be a reanimated kraken corpse. I mean, strange beyond the fact that it's a reanimated kraken corpse.

Does that have something to do with the gods? Resk asks.

I suspect it might. How did you know?

Because Nual is talking directly through the captain and I really don't like what he's telling me to do.