When we learnt the ocean was almost entirely salt, we didn’t question it. We didn’t wonder if all that salt was there for a reason. It was simply there— just another facet of nature that we worked to destroy for our own betterment.

When our ancestors needed a way to ward off shadows and wild beasts, they did as we’ve always done— they returned to the water, to the home of their own ancestors’ ancestors. And they found salt on the shore.

We wondered how to remove the salt and convert all of that water into something we could use, but we never wondered if we should. We never thought it was there because it was supposed to be.

And we never thought we should have been afraid of the depths for reasons much deeper than pressure or darkness— we never gave the shaking murmurs of dying divers much thought.

When we sapped the salt out of the ocean, though we said otherwise, we were not surprised to find all the fish dead. We knew it would kill everything, but we did not care loud enough until it was too late. Survivors leapt onto land, desperately flapping their fins in the air, and we had thought it was simply insanity. That it was just their minds cracking at the sight of so much death and at their world changing so vastly. But we know now this was not true— we know they had seen something worse.

The air stunk of their decay for weeks. We hadn’t known it would be the last ones we’d ever live, or the last scent we’d ever choke on.

Death pulled itself out of the ocean one day, tentacled and blood-eyed, colossal, having eaten every last bit of detritus we left behind yet still remaining starved. It was not the cosmic end we imagined for ourselves, the explosion of the sun and the neat incineration of all we knew. Rather, it was simple consumption.

The Kraken tore it’s beak into our coast, ripped apart towns and cities, engulfed us, fed on us all.

But it was still not satisfied. It continued to grow, and continued to reach into the yolk of our homes to try and fill a bottomless hunger.

We understand that feeling all too well.

Now, as we are hunted, we leave this warning for whatever is left: eat only what is offered to you.