The Travelling Squid

Episode 12 of The

Scene: The Abyssal Plains of Pantassa IV, a Water World Bathed in Perpetual Night

Pantassa IV knew no sun. Its oceans, miles deep, were a realm of absolute black, crushing pressure, and icy calm. Here, in the eternal midnight of the hadal zone, dwelled the Phosphorians. Solitary, ancient, and possessed of vast, cold intellects, they resembled grotesque anglerfish of Terran myth, their bodies little more than distended stomachs and formidable jaws, each crowned with an intricate, bioluminescent esca – a personal lure that pulsed with complex symphonies of light. Through these silent, intricate light-songs, they debated philosophy, mapped the subtle shifts in geothermal currents, and charted the genealogies of deep-sea vents across millennia. Theirs was an ordered existence, a universe understood through the precise language of photon and pattern, each Phosphorian a lonely star of consciousness in the deep. They knew their world, or believed they did, with a certainty born of eons of isolated contemplation.

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The Ephemeral Armada and the Unravelling of Knowns

It was during the designated "Cycle of Quiet Reflection," a period when the light-songs across Pantassa IV typically softened to contemplative murmurs, that they arrived. There was no precursor, no ripple in the usually predictable energy fields, no warning tremor through the planet's crust. One moment, there was only the familiar, crushing dark and the distant, coded flickers of fellow Phosphorians. The next, there was them.

Not creatures of flesh and ichor, not beings that displaced water in any conventional sense. "The Travelling Squid" was a swarm, an ephemeral armada of light-forms that shimmered into existence as if phasing from a dimension folded just beneath their own. They were vaguely cephalopodic in silhouette – trailing tendrils of lambent energy, bell-shaped mantles that pulsed with hues unseen in Pantassa IV’s native spectrum – but they were also undeniably other. Their light was not the warm, communicative glow of bioluminescence; it was colder, sharper, imbued with an intelligence that felt less like thought and more like a fundamental law of some alien physics briefly made visible.

The Phosphorians, from their scattered vantage points across the abyssal floor, could only "watch," their own lures dimming in confusion, then flickering with attempts at communication – questions, warnings, declarations of territory. The light-songs faltered, becoming discordant jumbles of inquiry.

The Squid did not respond. They did not seem to notice the Phosphorians, or if they did, regarded them with the same attention a human might give to dust motes in a sunbeam. Instead, they began their "work," or "dance," or "process" – no Phosphorian term could adequately capture it.

The swarm moved as one, yet with infinite individual complexity. They sculpted the thermal layers of the ocean, creating vast, temporary edifices of warm and cold water that defied known hydrodynamics. They traced enormous, intricate sigils, large, complex, and meaningful (to them, at least) symbols, upon the ocean floor with beams of pure, focused energy, patterns that resonated with no mathematical formula or natural phenomenon the Phosphorians had ever catalogued. Currents were reversed, then braided into impossible knots. Clouds of incandescent particles were released, swirling into intricate, temporary galaxies that glowed with an inner, disturbing sentience before dissolving back into nothingness. It was creation and un-creation on a scale, and with a purpose, that was utterly, terrifyingly opaque. There was no malice, no discernible intent beyond the act itself. It was simply - happening.

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The Echoes in the Silence

And then, as suddenly and inexplicably as they had arrived, "The Travelling Squid" was gone. The alien light winked out of existence. The impossible currents subsided. The strange energies dissipated. The abyssal plains of Pantassa IV returned to their familiar, crushing blackness.

But for the Phosphorians, nothing would ever be the same. Their universe, once a meticulously ordered system understood through logic and light, had been irrevocably breached. The "songs" they had sung for aeons, detailing the predictable grandeur of their isolated world, now seemed like the naïve babblings of children. What was the point of charting geothermal vents when entities could arrive from nowhere and rewrite the very laws of physics for an afternoon, before vanishing without explanation?

The dark humour, if any could be found, was in their utter intellectual impotence. Beings of immense philosophical depth, reduced to stunned, flickering silence. The horror was existential, a cold dread seeping into the very core of their solitary consciousnesses. They were not alone, but their companions in the cosmos were forces of such vast, incomprehensible power and alien nature that "aloneness" now seemed a preferable, almost comforting state.

The light-songs across Pantassa IV became fractured, hesitant. Many Phosphorians extinguished their lures entirely, retreating into a darkness far deeper than the physical absence of light. The intricate web of communication, the very foundation of their ancient, ordered society, began to unravel. A new "song" began to emerge, though few dared give it full voice: a quiet, terrified acknowledgement that their reality was but a fragile bubble, and that at any moment, The, whatever it may be, could simply drift through, observe, act incomprehensibly, and leave them to ponder their infinitesimal place in a universe that did not even notice their terror.