The murmur of voices is like the roar of the sea, in and out, loud and soft, as they chant the name of their god.
He stands before the altar in a crown of coral and a gown of ocean green, looking down at the assembled masses. Their heads are bare, and they are all bowed low to the ground. Men, women, children...they have all crossed the strip of ocean from Onrac to the Water Temple to worship and adore.
The Water Crystal lights up the stone hall like a blue star, shimmering like the sun on the waves. The high priest raises his hands for silence, and the congregation obeys. The masked attendants put their conch horns to their lips in preparation.
"People of Onrac," the high priest says, and his patient face breaks into an ecstatic prophet's smile. "Tonight, we have gathered to bear witness to a heavenly marriage. Tonight, the Sun and the Moon shall meet in the sky and, for one night, the most glorious children of Mother Ocean will consummate their love."
His eyes are blue, like the light of the crystal, and full of anticipation. Unlike the attendants, the high priest wears no mask.
The sky moves, and the moon begins to darken slightly. Five hundred heads tilt up to watch in rapt attention. The attendants blow their horns, and the congregation's silence shatters into a thousand cries of joy. They dance. They sing hymns to Mother Ocean, called Kraken, and the sacred wedding of the Sun and Moon.
The high priest stands still and quiet, silhouetted by the Crystal behind him. He stands like this for a long time - long enough for the sun's passing to stain the moon copper - without moving at all.
Finally, he raises his hands for quiet once more, and once more they obey. Slowly, the high priest picks up a bowl from the altar, filled to the brim with blessed water.
"Children," he says, and his voice echoes through the stone hallways, louder than before. "Tonight, you shall gaze upon the true face of Mother Ocean." Their faces are all turned towards him. They are listening, and waiting.
When he laughs, it is closer to a howl. The bowl slips from hands that are no longer hands and cracks upon the altar, spilling water down the unblinking faces of stone mermaids and leaping dolphins.
Great tentacles, each as thick around as the trunk of a tree, wrap themselves around Crystal of Water, plunging the temple into darkness. The screaming is louder than the singing and dancing was before - but now there is another cry of joy, alien and wordless, that fills the crumbling hall. Outside, the waves roar into a frenzy and throw themselves upon the beach - over the stone steps of the temple, over the frightened heads of the fleeing worshippers, over the peaked roof and marble columns.
The moon above is red, but there is no blood here when the temple falls - only the endless blue-black and silence of the deep.
They are still here, his congregation. He had come to them as their high priest, wearing the shape of a man, and taught them to worship his name; now they served him in one way or another. Some of them had gone to feed the silent legions of the deep, and still their sightless sockets watch the broken altar and the cracked pillars, all lined in neat rows. The rest, the ones who had worshipped best...these he changed, made finned and scaled and pale-eyed. They wander the lightless reefs and carve his likeness into ancient, changeless stones.
His Crystal is gone - carried away by the waves in the churning chaos of the temple's fall. He feels its loss, like a wound that will not close...but it is not destroyed. This, at least, he knows. It is out there, somewhere - on the land, perhaps, and out of his grasp for now.
But the world was once ocean, and it will be again. Someday, the sea will rise and everything will be water, stretching towards an infinite horizon. But Kraken has existed, in spirit at least, since that first clammy thing crawled from the trenches of the deep, and his patience is as vast as his element.
In his broken temple Kraken waits, and dreams of the day when he will be king again.