By Srinidhi Ranganathan in Director's Pick — May 17, 2024

The Maaaar: Part 2

That's when he beheld a shocking sight. There, far out from the shoreline, the entire surface of the ocean appeared to be churning and bulging upwards as if something massive was rising from the deep!

The Maaaar

For two decades after the cataclysmic battle, the seas surrounding Aito Island remained relatively calm. The terrible devastation wrought by the Maaaar's awakening had been a harsh reminder of the need for a constant vigil against the primal hunger lurking in the abyss.

Orana, the elder who had summoned the sea gods' intervention all those years ago, passed away a peaceful man. On his deathbed, he smiled and expressed confidence that the ancient rituals would protect the island for generations to come. The title of "Watcher of the Depths" was bestowed upon him and a statue was erected in his honor.

But the very eldest of the islanders had a disquieting feeling that the relative tranquility would not last forever. They knew that the Maaaar, though beaten back tremendously, could never be fully vanquished. It was likely merely recovering its strength, slumbering in the darkest abyssal trenches until its insatiable appetite stirred once more.

Two decades passed in peace. The island's young grew complacent with no lived experience of the horrors their ancestors faced. They dismissed the old tales of the Maaaar as fanciful mythology. A general sense of security and lack of vigilance settled in over time.

That all changed one fateful night when even the deepest sleepers were roused by a terrible rumbling... a sound that started as a low groan from the ocean floor but rapidly increased to an earth-shaking roar that set the very air vibrating.

On the beach, Iaku's great-grandson Hoki awoke with a violent start as his hut's bamboo walls rattled. He scrambled outside just as the tremors intensified, sending him stumbling to his knees as the entire island seemed to convulse.

"Wh-what force could be causing this?" he gasped, panic gripping him.

The villagers poured out in droves as the upheaval intensified. Children screamed and clutched their parents as the ground buckled in waves beneath their feet. At the tsunami watchtower, the sentry rang the alarm bell with trembling hands, his face drained of color.

For above the roiling, foaming waves, a gargantuan shape was emerging from the abyss - a mountain of slimy black flesh, tentacles thicker than tree trunks, and a nightmarish mass of eyes and gnashing maws...

"The Maaaar! It cannot be...!" an elder cried in horror.

The ancient legend, the primordial embodiment of hunger - it had indeed returned once more to plague the islands after twenty years of dormancy. And this time, its ungodly size and fury seemed even more catastrophically immense than the previous awakening.

As the colossus breached higher from the depths, rains of seawater and viscous fluids slammed down upon the cowering villagers like a biblical scourge. Its thunderous roars shook the skies and earth, a primal bellow of surrogate hunger and violence.

After so many years of peace, the dreaded beast had risen once more... and this time, it seemed poised to utterly crush the island that had dared defy its hunger long ago.

For the people of Aito, the battle for survival had only just resumed against an invincible, ancient horror.

As the massive, nightmarish form of the Maaaar breached fully from the depths, a collective primal terror gripped the villagers of Aito Island. Decades had passed since the last cataclysmic awakening, enough time for the tales to fade into remote legends for the younger generations.

But now, as they bore witness to the true, monstrous enormity of this legend made flesh, a cold dread penetrated their very souls. This was no myth to scare disobedient children - this was a force of nature, an unfathomable ancient hunger given relentless, towering form.

The beast's grotesque mass continued ascending from the ocean, tentacles as wide as copses of redwoods bundled together lashing across the turbulent waters. Larger than any creature had any right to be, it dwarfed even the tallest cliffs and peaks of the island itself.

Tremendous walls of water were swept aside with contemptuous ease by the sheer scale of its rising bulk. A virulent, rancid stench like a thousand rotting leviathans wafted through the air, making many villagers gag and retch.

As the Maaaar's multitude of beady black eyes finally emerged above the swells, panicked shrieks erupted from the helpless onlookers. Dozens of unblinking, soulless orbs centred around a mass of chitinous, snapping maws that defied rational shape or purpose. This was the very embodiment of eternal, all-consuming hunger.

Hoki, the great-grandson of the legendary Chief Iaku, stood frozen in numb shock and disbelief. His mouth hung open, just barely able to rasp, "By all the gods...no stories could prepare us for this..."

In that moment of dawning realization, the Maaaar unleashed a bellow so tremendously powerful that it blasted the very air itself in percussive waves of utter cosmic hunger. It was a roar that seemed to echo through time itself, shaking Aito Island to its roots and foundations.

That primordial rallying cry signaled the beginning of the ancient beast's full onslaught. With a series of deafening smashes, its colossal tentacles began raining down onto the shoreline. The first few strikes obliterated the beach itself, sending huge gouts of water, coral and debris in all directions.

The villagers scrambled in abject terror, screams and wails cutting through the thunderous chaos as homes and structures were annihilated within seconds. The initial tentacle barrage was like a vengeful god pounding the island itself into submission.

And this was just the prelude, the precursor to the Maaaar's true objective - the systematic eradication and consumption of every living thing its countless hungering mouths could locate.

On the outskirts of the devastation zone, Hoki clung to awareness through sheer adrenaline, his senses overloaded by the sheer carnage unfolding. As another timber-thick tentacle swept away a row of homes, he caught sight of villagers trapped beneath the wreckage - men, women and even small children pinned by splintered debris.

"We must evacuate further inland immediately!" he managed to shout over the din to the remaining fighters. "Save who you can and make for the volcano's slopes! Quickly, before it seizes full control of the shoreline!"

It was a desperate, uphill battle for survival against an opponent so incomprehensibly titanic. But the people of Aito Island had no choice except to flock and fight or be utterly crushed and devoured by the remorseless Maaaar's ancient hunger.

As the Maaaar's terrifying onslaught intensified, laying waste to the coastal village, Hoki and the warriors of Aito Island rushed to carry out the evacuation. Moving with a sense of urgency bordering on panic, they hurriedly pulled survivors from the wreckage left in the wake of those first thunderous tentacle strikes.

All the while, more and more of the colossal monster continued emerging from the depths. Its sheer, incomprehensible mass seemed to blot out the horizon itself as larger and larger portions breached the surface amid widespread devastation. The villagers could not tear their eyes away from the unholy, grotesque sight - an entire landscape of eyes, greedy grasping mouths and slick, pulsating flesh.

The thunderous roars and impact tremors shook the very air and earth relentlessly. Hoki knew they had to move quickly before the primordial titan focused the full force of its eternal hunger upon them.

"To the high slopes! Don't pause, don't look back!" he shouted over the din, helping an elder to their feet. "We make for the old shelters and ride this out until..."

His voice trailed off as he realized there was no contingency, no strategy that could definitively brace them against this biblically-sized return of the Maaaar. All they could do was seek the highest ground and weather the storm of its insatiable appetite, just as their ancestors had.

But the old tales had not prepared him for the genuine all-encompassing dread of being in this existential besieger's presence. As another massive tentacle lashed down, flattening homes and vegetation alike, Hoki's breath caught in his throat. This was a force of utter, ceaseless hunger, older than the oceans themselves.

Somehow, they had to hold their faltering faith that there was a way to push back this nightmare as their forebears had. If not...their entire ancestral line would be scoured from existence, swallowed up by the eternal gullet of the Maaaar.

Reaching the rallying point on the volcano's slopes, Hoki looked out over the remaining warriors and civilians in grim trepidation. Their numbers had already been culled, and their homes were instantly erased from existence. If they were to have any hope of driving back this all-consuming horror, they would need to fight with every scrap of bravery and ingenuity they could muster.

Drawing his ancestral bone-carved spear, the young chief lifted his voice over the dooming roars echoing across the shaking land.

"Warriors of Aito! The blood of those who turned back the Maaaar long ago courses through our veins. Our ancestors were not cowed by this abhorrent manifestation of violence and gluttony - and neither shall we cower!"

The spear lanced up towards the looming monstrosity now razing coastal homes and earth alike with each moment passing.

"We are the last line of defence against this force that would see our entire legacy erased! Our families, our lineage has endured through countless spans against this ageless evil...and we will endure once more!"

A roar of defiance and determination rose up from the remaining villagers. Fists tightened around weapons, eyes narrowed in bitter resolution. If this was to be their final stand to protect all that they knew from the infinite maw of the Maaaar...then they would give them all to ensure some fragment lived on.

Hoki felt a swell of pride and purpose straighten his shoulders despite the existential despair weighing down upon them. He was the voice and embodiment of an unbreakable, multi-generational will that refused to be consumed without a fight.

Raising the spear sky-wards once more, he bellowed out the eternal rallying cry of their ancestral home:

"FOR THE LIFE OF AITO!"

The resulting unified roar of their defiance echoed across the ravaged islands...and even caused the uppermost eyes of the Maaaar to turn the direction of these insignificantly small, yet stubbornly resilient creators.

The battle for Aito, for their very survival, was only just beginning against the remorseless hunger of the ancient depths.

The defiant war cries of the Aito warriors seemed to hang defiantly in the air for a few visceral moments. But just as quickly as their chorus of determination rang out, a deafening bellow from the incomprehensibly massive Maaaar drowned it out with terrifying ease.

The archaic beast's bone-rattling roar caused the very air to distort and crackle as if the sound waves themselves carried a tangible, malicious force. The island's very roots and stone foundations quaked violently in the sonic assault's wake.

For a stretching, soul-chilling instant, the innumerable black pits that served as the Maaaar's eyes all seemed to swivel and fix their soulless gazes directly upon the gathering of Aito's defenders. A frisson of primal dread shivered through each of them as they saw those depthless orbs, older than civilization itself, regard them with what could only be described as pique interest.

It was as if an eldritch presence, something far transcending mere physicality, had become fleetingly cognizant of their defiance against its inexorable hunger. The sheer psychic force behind that collective Stare made Hoki's arms break out in gooseflesh, his gripped spear wavering slightly.

Then, calamity struck once again as several enormous tentacles as wide as jungle canopies lashed down towards the slopes where they had gathered. The Maaaar clearly intended to effortlessly crush this insolent flicker of resistance before resuming its rapacious feeding across the entire island.

"Incoming! Brace for impact!" Hoki managed to shout over the thunderous cacophony of earthen impact and splintering debris that followed.

Rock, soil, and shattered trees exploded everywhere as the titanic appendages slammed down all around the villagers' position. Many were violently thrown aside, battered by shockwaves and shrapnel alike. Hoki felt the wind crushed from his lungs by the atmospheric concussions alone.

When the terrible impacts subsided, the warriors looked around in shocked horror. What remained of their gathered numbers were now scattered and dazed, many critically injured by the Maaaar's indiscriminate strikes. Screams of agony and panic cut through the ringing in Hoki's ears.

He shakily pulled himself to his feet, ears still ringing, feeling warm blood matting his hair from a glancing blow by a fist-sized rock fragment. All around the impacts zones, the earth had been gouged deeply, trees uprooted, and the landscape rendered in blasted ruination.

But incredibly...they yet lived. Somehow, miraculously, the Maaaar's tentacle strikes, as utterly destructive as they were, had not directly flattened any villagers. It was as if some force had guided the blind, hungry swipes just enough to avoid outright massacring them.

Hoki looked upwards, straining against the wind billowing from the Maaaar's heaving bulk. And what he saw made his breath catch his disbelieving throat.

The colossal, nightmarish entity seemed to be...drawing its focus away from the interior. Its innumerable lidless eyes ceased fixing upon them hungrily. With a series of deafening shifts and undulations of its mountainous form, the Maaaar began turning its bloated, armageddon-sized mass away from Aito's inland.

Its horrible, fanged maws unleashed another soul-rending bellow that shook the skies. But this roar seemed one of angered resignation rather than consumptive desire focused upon them specifically.

As the behemoth gradually pivoted away, Hoki discerned the source of its shift - across the northern sea approach to the island, swirling clouds and roiling storm systems were rapidly amassing. From this turbulent maelstrom of wind and water vapour, titanic statues and silhouettes began taking nebulous shape...

Forms as immense and eternal as the Maaaar itself were manifesting. The primal embodiments of the sea itself, the ancient gods that had battled the world-devouring monster aeons before, were massing their titanic presences once more.

The air became stiflingly charged with primordial energy, raising the hairs on the villagers' arms and causing their skin to prickle with static. It was as if the fundamental forces of nature were pressing in around them, converging for an apocalyptic confrontation.

And at the gathering's epicentre, the Maaaar had turned the majority of its hellish, mountainous mass outward to face this existential threat to its dominance over the ancient depths.

A profound, revelatory truth struck Hoki like a physical blow at that moment. He and the warriors of Aito were not the target, the focus of the eldritch monster's hunger. They were mere insignificant specks to the Maaaar - an afterthought in the face of an existential battle against the primal deities that had humbled it before.

This was little more than a predestined, cyclical confrontation written into the very fabric of the ocean's primaeval consciousness. The Maaaar existed as insatiable eternal hunger manifest, a universal force that devoured all until challenged on the cosmic scale by its antithesis - the living progenitors of the seas themselves.

And in that epiphanic realization, Hoki knew that Aito was simply the current arena, the happenstance stage for this ancient struggle between irresistible hunger and the untamed energies that enabled life to persist beyond it.

Whether they lived or died in the wake of the coming apocalypse was irrelevant to the terrible beauties and obscenities playing out before them. They were humanity reduced to mere witnesses, of no more cosmic consequence than grains of sand.

Exhaling slowly with this humbling revelation, Hoki turned his battered gaze to his surviving people. They looked to him desperately, seeking guidance and strength in the face of annihilation soon to come.

"My brothers and sisters...we are but fleeting shadows in the eternal light," he said, voice quavering yet resolute. "What unfolds before us transcends our reckoning or defiance. We can only bear witness to the cyclical struggle that enables existence to endure."

He grasped his bone spear overhead, its intricate carvings depicting every generation of Aito Chiefs that had come before him.

"We must seek shelter and survive the coming conflict, no matter how cataclysmic. Our duty to our ancestors and kin yet to be is to persevere through this cosmic reordering..."

With those words ringing through the charged, storm-tossed air, the warriors of Aito Island turned to flee inward. For even as the apocalyptic struggle between the sentient hunger of the ancient world remade the landscapes around them, their indomitable human will to endure would remain unbroken.

The Maaaar had turned its wrath upon the returning sea gods, granting Aito a momentary reprieve from its insatiable devastation.

But none could foresee what cosmic state would be left in this realm when the dust and tides finally settled...

For what felt like an eternity bound within the seeming temporariness of a mere day, Aito Island was beset by a cyclonic onslaught that shook the very fundamentals of reality. Titanic forces converged upon the once-idyllic shores, remaking the entire vicinity into an apocalyptic vista of churning devastation.

The Maaaar, the primordial embodiment of hunger itself, slammed its incomprehensibly vast bulk against an assemblage of sea gods and elemental incarnations that rose to counter its presence. Mountains of living ocean lashed back with jagged terrains of solid water serpents and frozen tsunamis.

The air Itself became an abattoir of mystical forces, roiling with the atmospheric turmoil kicked up by such stupendous entities engaged in battle. Deific visages twisted in the storm clouds, gale-force winds that could shear rock and steel intermingling with deep reverberating impacts that made the ground itself convulse.

Through it all, the warriors of Aito Island could only cling to what meagre shelters they could fortify and pray to every known ancestral spirit for deliverance. Even as the cosmic conflict raged unabated, Hoki led efforts to tend to the injured and provide what protective refuge they could muster.

He had known battle and had trained his entire life to fight with the ferocity and honour befitting a descendant of Iaku's legendary chiefs. But nothing could have prepared him for bearing witness to the sheer enormity of what cataclysmic struggle now raged across their home.

Those wise village elders who yet lived whispered hushed chronicles speaking of the inevitability of this eruption into their reality. They wove tales implying that the Maaaar's manifestation as an insatiable hunger, and the responsive arising of the sea gods, was akin to a cosmic regime of checks and balances upon the cosmos itself.

"It is the way of things playing out as they always have and always must," sage words counselled against the backdrop of storms that made the very air thrash and groan like a living thing. "Equilibrium is maintained through cycles of destruction and forcible opposition to those primal urges."

Clutching his bone-carved ancestral spear, Hoki spoke quiet prayers for guidance in the face of annihilation. His trembling warriors gathered around glowing braziers, sharing meagre watered-down provisions portioned from their rapidly dwindling stores.

All the while, the earth-shattering impacts, sweeping blasts of cosmic fallout, and thunderous distortions of reality continued unabated. There was no way to track the progression of time, only vague demarcations of when the tremors and impacts reached unbearable crescendos before subsiding into comparative lulls of chaos.

Then, between one of these reprieves where it seemed the worst convulsions of the metaphysical war had expended themselves...a profound and weighty silence settled upon them. A quiet more profound and unsettling than any of the cyclonic devastation they had endured.

Hoki felt it first - a gradual cessation of the atmospheric forces clawing at them. The stinging, particulate-laden winds fell still. No more roars or apocalyptic impacts rippled through the air or tremored across the blasted landscape.

Eventually, the eerie quiet enabled more distinct assessments of their surroundings. Emerging from their shelter, Hoki's breath caught in his lungs as he beheld the full scope of the aftermath.

What once was an idyllic, thriving ecosystem of jungle and shorelines now existed as a mangled, barren hellscape of raked gouges, destroyed flora, dried-up brackish seas and detritus scattered in every direction. As far as the eye could strain, little remained recognizable of the island's former natural beauty.

It was as if a planet-killing cosmic force had scoured Aito clean of life. Even the village dwellings and structures lay in shattered, splinted ruins. Nothing erected by human hands had been spared the senseless destruction.

But worse than the harrowing, apocalyptic scenery revealing itself...was the profound absence of any sign of the cosmic behemoths that were interminably locked in that cataclysm.

There were no remnants of the sea gods' mountain-sized entities. No trace of the Maaaar's colossal, unfathomable bulk. Nothing at all to belie the incomprehensible scales of power and hunger that had manifested upon the island.

All at once, the abject silence took on a maddening, unsettling dimension. In the stillness, it was as if all events had simply been...unmade. Time and context themselves had been razed along with the landscape.

Hoki strained his senses for any signal, any faint rumbling or visual distortion to indicate the war between ancient forces persisting. But there was nothing except that oppressive, tomb-like quietude.

A plume of ash and pulverized debris wafted past on the faintest stir of breeze, stinging Hoki's eyes until he was forced to blink them fully clear. As his vision refocused, the village chief felt that disorienting absence of the Maaaar's presence like a physical void in his psyche.

Raising the ancient spear overhead, its intricate carvings depicturing an unbroken lineage of his island's guardianship, Hoki turned slowly with a deep frown. Something felt immensely...off...about this eerie aftermath. As if the slate of reality itself had been wiped clean rather than merely battleground obliterated.

Had the very forces commanding such an upheaval between primal hunger and living elementals simply been banished somehow? Had the manifestations of nature's checks and balances annihilated each other into utter singularity?

As the first rays of morning sunlight began cresting over the horizon, stabbing streaks of pallid illumination across the ashen wasteland around them, Hoki's frown deepened further.

One thing was sickeningly, existentially certain - the ancient chronicles nor any tales of ancestors' past could have prepared the people of Aito Island for the profound silence, that unbearable void of absence where cosmic ruling forces so recently held raging dominion.

For good or ill, until that looming question found an answer, their home's reality had been irreversibly...unmade.

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