I was born into a house of high standing, in a shining sun-kissed city, on a tiny island within the great middle sea. My people referred to our home as Atalantia.
My people were masters of the coastal bounty, and lived a life of contented ease. Our family accumulated wealth by the production of a kind of beaded jewelry of an iridescent white, but reflecting the colors of the rainbow upon close examination. It was the most beautiful ornament our people could produce, and the women of our community valued the trinkets that we called perla above all things. In my service to my father I assisted with the collection of the stone-like creatures we called ostreos, from which the perla were procured. I would submerge to the seabed collecting the ostreos in my fathers net, which I would hand up to him in his tiny skiff. There he would carefully pry open the shells revealing the perla, and he or I would eat the meat of the ostreo before returning the shell to the sea, or on rare occasions, saving the shells for other purposes. As I grew older I became a powerful swimmer with a love and fascination for the sea.
The cycle of the sun to the north and to the south had repeated 15 times when my father presented me with his old skiff and net. You are a man now Aaronius, and in time my net must become your net, my knife your knife, and my skiff your skiff. You must soon choose a wife, and produce a son of your own, so that one day your net may become his. His words were mildy disturbing to me and I was unable to stop thinking about them until I broke thru the quicksilver surface of the water on my first dive to the sea floor. I had never been so grateful to see the old familiar ostreo waiting for me in their simple silence. When my father and I returned home that evening, my mother was waiting for us with the most beautiful strings of perla she had ever produced. When you choose a wife, this ornament will be a symbol to your wife of your ability to protect her and to provide her security and ease. I was starting to feel very anxious and this made my mother smile and my father laugh out loud. Of course you need not choose a wife tonight, my father said. Come and let us eat this feast that your mother has prepared in your honor.
Of course, the phrase choose a wife was a bit of a stretch considering there were only two girls on the island anywhere near my age. Haepha was a few years my senior and lived in the house next door. In my eyes she was the very definition of female beauty and I spent many a spare moment in my yard trying to capture covert glances at her, and feeling very strange indeed. I rarely spoke to her and she rarely even looked in my direction. The only other prospective wife was her annoying younger sister Astree, who was always standing where I needed to walk, always speaking when I needed to think, and always pestering me to attend to some trivial thing. Although I had of course spoken to our neighbors entire family on many occasions, I tended to keep my own company as a child and rarely began conversation with others that did not have a set purpose. I desperately wanted to speak with Haepha, but I found the prospect of asking her to marry me to be absolutely terrifying. Suddenly I found that I was the one standing where she needed to walk, speaking to her when she was working alone, asking her questions that made no sense to either of us. For some reason I could not ask her to marry me, but I went to bed each night in frustration and confusion, swearing that the next day would be the day.
The moon had not completed a single phase of my 15th year when fortune abandoned my village and my destiny was changed forever. You see, my small island was alive beneath our feet. From time to time it would remind us of its discontent with rumblings beneath us and effusions of gas into the air above. On this fateful day our beloved island awoke as never before with rumblings that caused our very walls to crumble. There was a release of smoke and rock and the very blood of the earth itself. I was diving for the perla at the time, collecting the osteos in the small wooden skiff. Words cannot express my fright and confusion. The water became cloudy with filth, and in places nacreous bubbles and heat rose from cracks in the once placid sandy sea floor. The air became choked with smoke and dust, stones of all sizes fell around me, and the surface of the sea became agitated so that water air and earth could hardly be discerned. I survived somehow by clinging to my little skiff and hiding in its shadow from the falling rock.
After what seemed an eternity, perhaps no more than a day, the sun rose again over a desolate and unrecognizable landscape. I tried to return to the shore but vast stores of heated earth lay hidden beneath several feet of the finest black powder. Alas, I could not set foot on land without burning myself, and even so there was no longer any life on the island, nor even much sign that there ever had been. The tide was on the rise, and each wave that lapped the shore excavated vast quantities of the fine black sediment. So much so in fact, that the entire sea was still black and opaque all around me. I did not know what to do or where to go so I sat in my skiff, exhausted in the baking sun, staring at the desolate shoreline that was once my home. As the tide reached further up onto the shore, the waves began excavating bodies. Some bodies crouching where they had been standing, unaware of what to do or where to go. Some bodies seemingly in the act of running, trapped in the soil until freed by the penetrating waves. Other bodies floated in the blackened waters, invisible sometimes until they bumped into me or my skiff. So thick and cloudy was the sea, and so abundant were the bits of floating debris that once made up my homeland. The last body to be excavated by the rising tide was that of my beloved Haepha. Her pose was one of a crawl towards the sea, with her mouth agape and her arm outstretched in desperation. It is an image that will haunt my mind until my dying day
With a heavy heart and a clouded mind I turned away from my island and all that I had ever known. I began to row in the direction of the setting sun.