Shadows on the Skyveil

Living near the skyveil has been dangerous for all of our tribes memory.  As long back as anyone knew the great shadows had been there.  They had been few and far between at first, staying mostly near the edges of the habitable world.  But soon they grew bigger, harder, and roared like mighty beasts.  They were rendered from material unlike any flesh we knew, and when they died they drifted slowly down from the edge of the skyveil to rest in the deep dark.  Never eroding away, remaining huge jagged reminders of the dangers that awaited those who lived under the veil.

We tried to befriend them, they ignored us.  We tried to communicate, they took to violence.  Spearing us from the air and abducting our bodies.  That was when they declared war on us and the waters ran red.  We barely survived, and then there were more of them.  The shadows multiplied, but the violence stopped.  As though they had taught us our lesson and didn’t need to bother with us any longer.

But as time went on, for many generations, the shadows grew larger, spreading over more and more of the skyveil.  Places they had never been seen before became blotted out with their tremendous thundering forms.  Everyone had encountered them, they were no longer stories but a fact of life.  Sometimes they seemed benevolent, sometimes ignorant, sometimes sinister.  Their songs made no sense to us, but were deafening.

The had always roamed.  Now they started to pack solidly over the veil.  Blocking out the sky and the light.  They encroached further with every season deeper into the free waves.  The seal like creatures watched us struggle from clear domes underneath the shadows.  As they spread everything that fell under their darkness started to die… nothing could live without the sun and they had blocked it out.  We could not even breach the veil for air.

Now we gather, in the last cold reaches of free waves.  Surrounded by the ice that the shadows find so unpleasant.  We are planning.  Its time for us to fight back.  Today the whales will take back their oceans.