The tide comes in.
It sweeps over everything. Every overturned rock, every felled tree, every machete-whacked bush, every torn-and-trampled birdnest. Every plundered batless cave, every defeathered griffin roost, each and every deerpath turned to mudtrench from aeons of boots. Saline, salt, brine — it's all the same, to the worms in the ground: they curdle, shrivel and die, moist skin unable to tolerate the cleansing burn. The plants, too, cannot handle the water leaching from their bodies, and they die too. The tide comes in, and it froths and pools in the mud.
The water rises higher.
The broken-off treebranches. The chain-crusted trunks, and the scraped-sides boulders, and the wash, the wash — the water washes it all, too fast to see it all like it had the first time around, already onrushing, ongoing, the sweep a churn of brown sticks and mud and branches and yes, silt and pebbles and now tyres and boots and rooftiles all mixed into one thick wave, a tidal wave, a bore-wave because it bores its way through the forest, the houses, the streets, lifting layers of heavy asphalt with the deft brush of a strongman who has forgotten how to open a door. It claims to land.
Nobody is spared. Nothing is sacred: the church grounds, the cats, the children on the playground. Friends, family, gender, ethnicity — nothing matters. It's all the same: the sea is here, and the tide is coming in.
It's exhausting. Do you know that? Exhausting to talk with children who refuse to accept boundaries. A correction to bigotry should not be met with reprimand; when explaining that we are staff and should be better than that, one should not be met with claims of insanity, derailment, going off the edge, out of line, over the top, too emotional, too reactive. It should not be met with people trying to explain to you how your own problems and sensitivities work, and it should not be met with the original instigator telling you that it was just a joke and doesn't matter or mean anything. That's never an excuse. So I walked away, didn't say anything more, and watched the scene unfold as they told the empty space that I needed to sleep, that I was delusional, that staff didn't need to be kind to others when in a staff-only channel. The tide is coming in. Will come in. Has come.
I'm tired.
It explodes out through the trees, through the buildings, into the city as a titanic wave. It is a true wall of water, higher than most buildings and heavier than all of them combined, even if they were multiplied by a thousand. This is a true titan wave. The wave of the gods that came before.
It crushes. It curdles. It turns momentarily red as people in office buildings are liquefied, then blissfully clear as the water rushes onwards, never ceasing, never stilling. It does not end. It continues, it fills the city now turned into rubble and carried in pieces in the wave. The mountains are ahead. The mountains are ahead. The wave is not stopping. The mountains are ahead—
The wave calms. Slows in its surge, and then at first it's a stilling, and then it's a tiny, almost imperceptible lessening. It reduces by a centimeter.
Then a meter, then two, then ten. Then a kilometer, then half again that. It was a truly monumental wave. Larger than life. Larger than real.
And then it is done.
And the tide is gone. Not returned, not reduced, not gone in. The sea is still out there, far in the distance; the water disconnected long ago. It's like the tide is cut from the world. It simply disappears into the earth.
Into the ground.
Briny puddles cover the landscape. A flattened muddy expanse crushed by the unanticipated, unprepared, unadjusted weight of water. Pools like the footprints of elephants dot the earth; rocks and boulders lie cracked and crushed; tiny-by-comparison fishes, sharks, dolphins, orca whales flop and gasp across the landscape.
Rescue workers are the first to arrive, followed by animal support, followed by scientists and geostatisticers. Those that lived — not the people; the rescue workers end up working for the animal control people, once it's found that nobody survived — are airlifted back to sea: sharks, whales, nets of fishes — all colours and species corralled into the same haul, tuna and minnows and the larger krill sharing the same saltwater-sprayed bags. It's a miracle, in the end, that so few die. Not the gobies. Not even the lumpsuckers. A blessing of the tide, one murmurs, and they are right. The scientists come and are shocked because the landscape is a devastation, a true flattening, an unrecognizable travesty. The homes, the city, the scraps of forest — all gone. It's like a glacier, one of them says. And it is indeed like a glacier had scraped a fifteen-kilometer-wide expanse across the landscape. Great swathes of land have been obliterated, cut horizontally and top half carried away, remains smeared across the flattened waste that remains. It’s unthinkable. It happened.
Everything is gone.
Except for the wave. The tide. It may not be visible here anymore, but it’s still out there. Nobody from the city can see it now. Not even the scientists from their mechanical vantage points.
The tide is gone because it finally found its home, back in the mountains — it remembered, in that moment of hate and pain and registering finally that something had been wrong for so very long, where it found itself at peace, and it returned, then, to its love and solace. And now, at the base of the mountains, among the swordferns and the redwoods, the tide begins, slowly, to sing.
Written in passion after a minecraft server faction invited me to their faction and discord server and I broke my vow to never join one of these again because they tend to be filled with toxic 13-year-olds who think saying slurs is the funniest shit ever and joined it and was made a moderator for being good at buildng and having human decency in chat and once I was around enough that I felt I could say something and after being called a slur in the staff chat I invited them to stop calling each other slurs and making fatphobic comments in the staff chat and was subsequently yelled at by the present staff. I left on my own volition and those people and I are no longer on speaking terms and I have learned my lesson yet again that I must never join a minecraft discord server. And then I remembered that I love wl and never want to leave and returned here in haste