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    Visus
    Visus
    Visus
    Ebook84 pages1 hour

    Visus

    By William C. Walker

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “Eternity and nature combine to create a unique balance beneath the waters of the Pacific Ocean.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateFeb 28, 2015
    ISBN9781483550695
    Visus

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      Book preview

      Visus - William C. Walker

      13  EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER 1

      NATURES SILENT CALLING

      The Pacific Ocean lay calm and serene once again, heeding a silent calling that had governed her actions both, violent and majestic, for millions of years. The rhythmic gentle lapping of her deep cool waters created a musical backdrop for the sound of a lone cream colored gull screeching his complaint over the lack of surface fish with which to fill his empty and aching stomach as he rode a cushion of air high above, as yet unaware, of his close proximity to the pod of sleeping, black and white killer whales that lay submerged in the pre-dawn darkness below. As the moments passed, along with the heavy saturated air, it came as no great surprise to the gull when a golden shaft of light began to unfold from behind him. The birth of a new sun-cycle was now upon him.

      The hungry gull, encouraged that the increasing warmth might help to lure the elusive fish below to the surface, watched and waited as the darkness began to slowly erode and fall away. It wasn’t until the sun had risen to full view behind him that he heard the sharp popping burst of gas escaping from a killer whale’s blow hole below that he began to understand what his instinctive mind had been trying to tell him all along, and that was, that there would be no fish in this seemingly empty abyss for quite some time to come as he spotted a black saddled whale break water below him. Soaring upward the gull caught a brisk easterly current of air and faded into the brightening sun.

      ***

      The first member of the pod to break the oceans surface was the female Bright Night. Unlike the rest of the pod she was wide awake. She had spent most of this rest period watching the moon cross from one distant horizon to the other. The very same spherical moon that had provided her parents with the inspiration for her signal call some thirty-three cycles of the seasons before. As she lay on the surface, she couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something of significance that bound these two nights, separated by time, together? The answer to her question came far too swiftly for her liking.

      A shudder from deep inside her body reminded her to blow her expended air supply. As she did, a small plume of deoxygenated gas, interspersed with tiny droplets of salty acidic ocean water spiraled upward into the crossing breeze above her thinning black saddled frame. The extreme pain that had accompanied this exchange of gasses had been a severe reminder to her of the disease that grew within her body, a disease that she now realized would accompany her, to her end.

      The second member of the pod to break the surface was the pod leader Great Hunter. Her massive dorsal fin no longer supported by the buoyancy of the water bent with gravity’s force back in the direction from which she had just arrived. Only in viewing her immense girth and length could one totally appreciate the mountain of a fin that now lay sagging sideways atop her back. There had been a time when many of her own species had envied her awesome and powerful horizontal structure though now the old pod leader knew; they would not feel so envious, if they were her. Her size, combined with her age of sixty-five plus seasonal cycles, had worked in tandem to strip her of all her former grace, beauty, and speed. What was left, the old one considered, was little more than a shell filled with a mucus-like material that weighed heavily on her joints made worse by the hot stinging arthritis that surged unabated through her huge jellyfish like body.

      Great Hunter found the chore of becoming fully awake more difficult than she had anticipated though the reason for her lethargic semi- conscious state was not hard to pin point. The sudden storm of a few sun cycles now past had been one of both immense size and intense power. In many ways she was surprised that the entire pod had survived this enraged demon from the skies that had set down upon them. More amazing still was the survival of the sick female who was her oldest son’s lifetime mate. It wasn’t often that she misjudged another’s will to survive. But in this case she was more than willing to acknowledge that her intuition and second sight had not been totally accurate. Unfortunately, she also realized, that The Silent Calling of Nature would wait only so long before it would intercede in their lives and take the daughter, that was rightfully its own in the first place, back to the waters of a far different ocean.

      Great Hunter found these thoughts to be much too burdensome to consider for the moment. And besides, there were equally pressing matters that had to be considered for the well-being of the whole pod, the most urgent of which was reaching their destination. And the chill of these waters with their deep swirling arctic currents gave more than enough information as to just how close they really were to achieving this goal. Great Hunter let the cold water stimulate her memory of what lay ahead. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, an image behind a shrouded foggy veil began to form within her mind.

      The image she reconstructed was of two distinct land formations that had, millions upon millions of cycles of the seasons before, reached upward from the waters of her own watery universe until they sat surrounded by the sky above. The smaller of these two land formations sat out by it self separated from the larger one by a small strip of water that flowed briskly through and around its shores. This the old one knew of as Rock Surrounded by Water a piece of land that the old had easily circumnavigated on many occasions in the past. The other formation, the larger one, was an entirely different story. It was so massive in its structure that the old one imagined the ocean herself screaming for mercy from the stars above as it bore out from her womb. The old pod leader felt her body shuddering at the thought of the ocean’s pain as it was split down the middle by this monolithic giant before she finally dismissed these thoughts altogether.

      Great Hunter’s attention traveled back to the strip of water that separated these two land masses for this was

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