Ice Ice Baby

Flash fiction originally published as a part of "Building Beyond," Sarah Gailey's world-building series over on Stone Soup, another blog you should absolutely follow.

It started with a sound. At first, it was just a whisper, a sighing as the thick mantle of ice somewhere above shifted, and the entity below it had long since learned how little that meant. She had dreamt in the depths of the cold, lightless sea for millennia, and little disturbed Her rest. But gradually, the whisper grew louder, became a series of sharp snicks, became a cracking that ripped along the surface of the shelf above, became a deafening roar, and then —

LIGHT

— and it had been so long since the being imprisoned beneath it had known anything but the darkness. The blazing sky brought pain, and with it a consuming rage, and She added Her voice to the thunder of snapping, grinding, disintegrating ice above them. The ice exploded. The seas rose, and bore Her up with them, out of the primordial dark, and into a bright new dawn. Her dawn.

The ones who drowned beneath the rising waves, or were crushed inside the rubble of collapsing buildings, as Her voice shook the world in those first moments were the lucky ones. When the dust cleared, the survivors woke to a world they barely recognized — a world where they no longer enjoyed a comfortable perch at the top of the food chain. For as soon as She was free, She set about liberating Her children from the chains that bound Them in the earth. Her children wore countless faces, both beautiful and terrible. They were numberless, and They were hungry.