IT RISES

It reeled against the rocks to no avail.

It knew its crescendos were useless on the harsh lime cliffs protecting the lands.

Like a prison wall it railed and wailed upon it, feverish, ashen, devilish, outraged.

The white walls had stood for eons long and would remain so but for man's new corruptions.

It sensed a change in the oceans, a glimmer of adjustment, a smidgeon of newness. 

It knew the weather and the seasons and the clouds and the currents and the air above.

But it knew not the land. 

Oh! the sweet land and its mysterious loafing creatures. It had tasted them on the seas, devoured them in the waves, tipped them from containers and slurped them from the depths. 

Delicious walking whelks, soft and slippery, how rare a delectation, how scarce a mouthful; what medleys of flesh it could savour, what dishes of skin it could suck; the marrow of its millions could soothe its salted maw.

Yes, a change is occurring. The seas are rising. The air is scorched by these very things it dreams of eating, these corrosive minds, these babbling snails. The worm has warmed.

It can slowly finger the poisons caking the sky, the effluence of the creatures on the solid land, their virulent slurry swirling round its pelagic home and the mangled skies above. 

The Lord of the Oceans cursed it at the start of time. It's tidal remand to last forever till the seas claim the mountains, whence it will be free to roam beyond its bounds and harvest what it finds.

Now a ghost of its splendid once-was, it pounds the scarps with massive claws; drumming the seductive geology warmed by the sunlight. 

It yearns to stretch on the fertile fields and relax its encrusted joints, dried by the solar winds at long long last; after a million millennia it will walk in the sun and eat soft unsalted men.

Ah! it can gauge the filling of the abyssal plain, the escalation of the tides and the water kissing the lips of nations. The seas are ascending and it rises with them, treading water before the cliffs, reaching out and sniffing the intoxicating sap of the billion waving trees.

It will be brief , its dry orgy of sweet bloods. The Ocean Lord will be hastening, his urge to turn the table strong. The Monarchs of the Land have walked long enough. It will be time for the rivers to smile as the vast floods of the seas converge atop the bony crust.

It will feed quickly and empty the continents of its meat, its colossal herds of walkers brimming with sloshing goodness. No more the sleazy fish snot, no more the saline guts and brackish heads scratching his blue palette.

It's here. The change is come. The seas lap the grassy edge and it clambers cautiously out of its indigo dungeon, a gigantic ghostly being crawling out of the fish-stuffed brew.

It lifts its titanic heads and noses the virgin sky stroking the hardness. 

Mmmm! Such perfumes of pumping hearts, saccharin, ferrous, electrified; a buffet of marrowbone and fountains of blood to wade in and slurp.

And so to start! Let the feeding begin!