The voice of Mother Hawk emanated from the deep below. It came in a ghostly pained and shrill moaning that wavered and rose up in high-pitched waves of anguish over and over again.
It was all that Father Hawk could register in the darkness. He could see nothing.
Then it hit him. The weight of roaring, gurgling water shaking and pushing down on him. Dark viscous bubbles, almost as dark as the black water seething from below, rose up in torrents that rumbled collectively.
Many neared Father Hawk, grazing him, burning him. They warped and bent, molding around Father Hawk’s body before rising above him, folding outwards, back into their original spherical matter.
They all fizzed and joined in a clustered hissing, echoing from the surface, filtering pale grey light. Father Hawk’s head lolled as he grew limper, his gurgling for breath became lost to him in the thunder around him.
The light filtering through cast a dim glow on the bubbles closest to the surface. They looked like dull grey planets clustered against a black expanse of space. But the light faded to the darkness around Father Hawk, the farther down it reached.
The sound of endlessly bursting bubbles at the surface was a cacophony of pounding thunder. It coalesced with the fizzing bubbles around him and the rumbling from deep below.
The further Father Hawk sank, the closer to the sound of his wife’s wailing he got.
It came in warbles, sometimes by bubbles, but always returning in faint trills that reverberated through the waves and torrents of water. It was a sad and torturous song, grieving Father Hawk with a constricting pressure in his chest. The feeling overwhelmed and choked him alongside the constricting sensation of drawing in volumes upon volumes of soaking water.
A soft ball of yellow glowed to life at the bottom of the lake. It became the focal point of Father Hawk’s attention in his glazed eyes. He lost control of his body as water continued to seep into him and constrict him in his drowning.
He wound up focused on the pulsing light that radiated pale yellow and periodically shaded to a darker pulsing orange before reverting back. It breathed in different shades, pulsing from paleness to darkness.
Father Hawk flet consumed by the light, despite it and the ball’s shape being warped by nearing rising bubbles of dark matter.
The anguished wailing seemed to pulse through from the heart of the light. The ball’s corona of surrounding edging rays of light wavered with each dimming and then expanded with ever colored brightening, drawing the size of the ball out with it.
The dimming drew it inwards. It slightly receded in size, but every brightened expansion drew it outwards. The ball’s breathing of light and hugeness was slowly turning it into a pool of unexpected warmth in the cold of the Shadowlands.
No matter that it receded with each dimming. Each inevitable drawing out and expansion created a larger sun at the center of Father Hawk’s descent.
The closer Father Hawk descended, the slower the rising bubbles of dark matter became.
The water rumbled, almost quaking. The glowing ball shuddered and the darkly rising balls vibrated in their slow flight.
The wailing seemed to emanate from directly below the ball’s surface.
It inflated directly below Father Hawk, bent and warped outwards, turning into the molding of a creature, coated in the hot glowing magma of light. It stretched and dripped over the wailing creature as it protruded out of it.
Slowly, the light washed over and sank back into the sun. Mother Hawk emerged out of the liquid cocoon of light.
Hers was a charred body; her feathers were crisped, bloodied and bent. Her beak oozed molten light and her eyes were reddened and clamped shut in agony.
Her screams were deafening.
Flames danced over her feathers, charring them and they turned into dark wisps of heat that fell down, floating and descending until they reached a small sphere below, where they became the sulfurous clouds of a new planet.
G.R. Nanda 