Eit'ka's Lament

You have your counting tentacle double check. Two jagged agates, 1 large smooth stone and 2 pebbles. Yes, it has been nearly a full year since you have been trapped here, just a few days shy.

Any other year you'd be at the bottom of your lake, enjoying the delicious anticipation, letting the dull ritual drumbeats from the village thrumb over you. It is the closest your kind knows to contentment.

You are awoken out of your lazy daydream by something nibbling on tentacle #8. You flail it as much as the encasing stone and silt allow, which is a momentary reprieve. It takes less than a minute for the small rodent to realize your true impotence. It begins nibbling again, this time closer to where the rock presses down upon the tentacle. It takes you an hour of tricky maneuvering to get #6 and #7 over to throttle the beast.

All the movement leaves you in pain. While there is moist silt about, it is nothing compared to full immersion in your lake. Your normally slick skin now resembles the dry scales of a land beast, it hurts to move anything, and your tentacles scratch easily when wrestling with the rock.

You replay the infamous day of your defeat over and over. In a way it is the only thing you can do. There were so many other ways it could have gone.

In one daydream you simply hand back the maiden to the angered boy. "Tell your village to send another, as long as she is covered with lavender scented oils it matters not to me." The warrior drops his stone axe in joy, they embrace, and she makes a mess of the paint upon his face. "You are a most wise and kind god great Eit'ka, I shall convince the town elders to send you thrice as many maidens to thank you!", he responds.

The thought of three maidens when you will assuredly be getting none this year enrages you to a point beyond your control. You intone primal curses that would have made an expectant mother bathing in your lake miscarry. But here in cramped and airy acoustics of land they only sound like the pathetic hissing of a fallen tree consumed by fire.

This further angers you, and for the thousandth time you rage against the stones enclosing you. Working together your tentacles can hurl boulders twice this size, but individually pinned down they are weak. Like the jaws of your brother alligator which can be held shut by a babe, your tentacles were designed for whipping and constricting, not free lifting.

The rocks, this is all their fault. You were so blind. You were here when the land jutted up, you watched as the rain blunted it, as the chaotic streamlets carved their paths that eventually became the boulders set up on high. They were old friend to you, like a human who doesn't notice the gradual aging of an acquaintance, it never occurred to you that there would be so many loose rocks atop the river's canyon walls. Sure they would fall someday, but you never foresaw the audacity of the humans to speed a one-hundred year process into a span of a few seconds.

The rocks patiently weather your flailing. Their steady pressure seem to soothingly coo to you. "No, it is not us grand one, it is the boy. That smelly trickster boy, he is your undoing.

You had brought the village's offering to the north side of the lake, where the canyon river can wash over you, but your treat can still breathe. It is a special place. You think back to the first few bites. Not physical ones of course, you taste her memories, not her flesh. You lazily pluck the flower of her mind petal by petal your limbs spasm with joy for several seconds after each taste.

And then the boy appeared, unanointed so that his musk and stench seemed to permeate the very air. To his chest he seemed to clutch one of your smooth white eggs from your nest deep in the lake. Your children take thousands upon thousands of years to hatch, seeing it in the spider grip of such an unworthy creature was enraging.

He barked an insult you did not understand and ran down the riverbed into the canyon. You stopped thinking, you dropped your delicacy so that all 13 might assist in the pursuit.

He was infuriatingly quick. Hopping from slick stone to stone like the bastard child of rabbit and otter. The river frothed and reversed course as you surged after him.

Just when it seemed you almost had him, the tip of two of your tentacles kissing his back and theigh, he tossed your "egg" back and away, towards the canyon wall, you had to shift your whole body to intercept it in time. Three of your tentacles reached out, forming a cradle and plucked it from the air just in time, but you instantly knew something was wrong. It was far too heavy, and tasted wrong, and now that it was separated from the stench of the boy you could tell it was not yours, it was merely a stone replica!

You puzzled over this for months, eventually you realized that the shaman who visited you in dreams to communicate your desires to the village must have been more powerful than you imagined. He must have seen details that you had not meant him to see, such as what your precious nest of eggs looks like. You spend nights trying to reach out to his mind, and when that fails you plan the intricate flayings you would perform upon him if he was ever so foolish enough to initiate the ritual... But he never does.

Your memories end upon the realization of the fraud. Things happened quickly after that, with, presumably stone upon stone falling upon you. When you woke the river had already begun depositing silt and routing around you. Eventually no water would touch you, whether it was the work of the humans or the thieving beavers you'll never know.

This cycle of remembrance and rage ends, you remind yourself that you are immortal, indestructible, older than the world, and like everything else the rocks atop you will eventually erode away. This will keep you calm and give you solace... For awhile.