《The Goose, the golden egg and the end of the world》Chapter 32 - The leviathan
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Unbeknownst to the Goose, who was out at sea on a boat with Robert, the Raven's coalition was crumbling. Robert and the Goose had traveled to San Francisco and rented a sailboat to go out to sea in. Robert knew nothing about sailing and had to be talked through everything by the Goose. They sailed for six days until they were far away from land and far away from shipping lanes, at which point the Goose told Robert and drop anchor.
"Now what do we do?" Robert asked the Goose.
"Now we wait."
"Wait for what?"
"You'll know when it gets here."
"The Leviathan?"
"That's right."
"How do you know it's going to come here."
"It'll sense me and it'll come, that's how this always works."
"Do we need to keep a close eye out? I mean what if we miss it?"
"There's no chance of us missing it."
"Is that because it's big?"
"Big? Big doesn't begin to describe this thing."
"How big are we talking?"
"Big enough that if this was Ahab's white whale he would have forgotten about his revenge and would have never left terra firma ever again."
"If it's as big as you say then aren't we in danger being out here on this small sailing boat?"
"We're in a lot of danger, in all likelihood we're not going to survive this, by which I mean you will most likely not survive this, I'll be fine."
"Why didn't you tell me this before we left?!"
"I did tell you, I told you that this trip was going to be very dangerous."
"You didn't tell me that I was probably going to die!"
"Don't worry, as long as you're with me your chances of survival are much better than they would be if you were alone."
Robert was in fact perfectly safe, the Goose was just having some fun at his expense. Never before had the Waker being harmed by any of the guardians.
It was going to take time for the Leviathan to register the Goose's presence and make its way over to them, until then they could do nothing but wait. Robert went below deck and waited in a state of great anxiety, believing his life to be in great danger. The Goose remained above deck, and used the time it spent waiting for the Leviathan to appear to reflect on the current state of the world and the significance of the current pilgrimage. The reality was that humanity had no need of the guardians anymore, the technology that they had developed meant that they were no longer dependent on the guardians for help in growing and developing their societies and it made no sense for the guardians to get so angry about the consequences of humanity's progress. This period of extreme pollution would, to the guardians, pass in the blink of an eye. The earth had been through worse before, and the humans had the tools to undo what they had done, it was just a matter of pointing their collective decision making in the right direction. Convincing the guardians of this had been difficult, the Goat and the Wolf were both of the opinion that humans had shown such disrespect for the planet that the guardians should use their powers to inflict punishments upon them worthy of the reckless disregard that they had shown for the natural environment they owed their existence to. The Goose had felt the same way once but had come to accept that humans were creatures that moved forward heedlessly in pursuit of their goals and that once they realized that their fate was inextricably linked to that of the planet's they would alter their behavior to exist symbiotically with it.
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The Goose wasn't sure how successful it was going to be in getting the Leviathan to see things its way. Because of humanity's policy of dumping all of the refuse it didn't know what to do with into the ocean, along with the environmental disasters caused by oil spills and the loss of marine biology to overfishing, the Leviathan had experienced firsthand the effects of humanity's environmental disregard more than the other guardians. This had filled the Leviathan with rage, enough rage to blind it to any case the Goose tried to make on behalf of humanity. The Goose used the time that it spent on the boat waiting for the Leviathan to appear thinking about what it was going to say to it to calm it down and convince it to join them. Day turned to night, and a full moon lit up the ocean all around them.
"ROBERT!" The Goose yelled.
"What?" Robert came up from below deck and asked.
"It's coming."
"Now?"
"Yes, it'll be here in a matter of moments."
In a panic, Robert looked all around him at the ocean for signs of the Leviathan, but didn't see anything.
"Are you sure this thing is here?" He asked the Goose.
"Just wait for it."
Robert kept looking, but still couldn't see anything. He stopped looking out across the surface of the ocean and looked out over the side of the boat to see if he could see something in the depths. The brightness of the moon allowed him to see movement under the surface, and what he saw made him feel all the more that this was going to be his last night on earth. Under the water the silhouette of something huge was moving like a snake. Robert kept looking over the side of the boat waiting for it to pass under them completely, but it didn't, it just kept going and going. Robert thought that it wasn't possible for him to be more afraid than he was at that moment, until the creature breached the surface of the water with its fin. The sailboat that they were on was like a child's bath toy next to the fin, which was spiky like a marlin's. The Leviathan's fin had broken the surface to the right of them and was moving left and encircling them. With the Leviathan now close to the surface the previously calm ocean waters were being churned into violent swells that felt too strong for their boat to emerge from without sustaining serious damage. Robert was soaking wet from the swells, and was hanging on to the sail's main ballast to avoid being thrown overboard. Terrified, and having no idea what to expect next, Robert looked to the Goose.
"WHAT DO WE DO NOW?"
"WE GET IN!"
"WHAT!!"
"COME ON!"
The Goose jumped off of the bow of the boat and into the water. Having no options available to him other than to trust the Goose, Robert followed its lead and jumped overboard.
The choppy waters were making it difficult for Robert to keep his head above water, and his new fear was that he was in more danger of drowning than he was of being eaten by the monstrous creature. Once Robert and the Goose were in the water, the Leviathan dived down into the depths, and the waters became calm once again.
"Now what?" Robert asked the Goose.
"Now we wait."
"I'm getting tired of you saying that."
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"This is the last time I'll say it, I promise."
"What are we waiting for this time?"
"We're waiting for the Leviathan to take us someplace where we can talk."
"What are we going to do, ride on its back?"
"No, we're not going to ride on its back."
"Then how..."
The Leviathan emerged from the depths and swallowed them up before Robert could finish his question. Robert and the Goose were only submerged in water inside the Leviathan's mouth for a few seconds. Like a whale, the Leviathan expelled the water in its mouth from a blowhole on the top of its head. After consuming Robert and the Goose and expelling the water it returned to the depths and continued swimming along the ocean floor. Inside the Leviathan's mouth, Robert and the Goose sat on its tongue and waited to arrive at their destination.
"It's quite comfortable in here, isn't it?" The Goose remarked jokingly.
Robert wasn't impressed by the Goose's attempt at humor and shot it a look that said as much.
"How long are we going to be in here?"
"Can't say, we're entirely at the Leviathan's mercy."
"Is it going to let us out before I starve to death?"
"Probably."
"Probably? Haven't you been through this before?"
"I've only ever been inside the Leviathan once before, and that time it kept us inside for three days."
Somehow the inside of the Leviathan was illuminated, and the ride was perfectly smooth with zero turbulence. The Leviathan had no teeth, and the inside of its mouth didn't have the fishy smell that Robert would have expected it to have. The Goose explained to Robert that the Leviathan could swim all the way around the world in a matter of seconds, which begged the question of why it was keeping them inside of it for so long.
According to Robert's watch they spent five hours inside the Leviathan. When the Leviathan came to a stop and opened its mouth for them to exit they did so into daylight. What greeted them upon their exit stunned them both. The Leviathan had deposited them at the top of a cliff that afforded them a view of the entire island below. Looking out over the island they could see nothing but plastic. They couldn't see a single patch of dirt, a single blade of grass, or a single leaf on a tree. Plastic waste was piled up high as far as the eye could see, and this was only one island.
"So this is what these storms have been about," the Goose observed to itself.
The Leviathan had been using the storms that it had been creating to rid the ocean of the plastic that had accumulated in it by depositing it on these islands in the Pacific.
"This is still a problem though, isn't it? I've seen stories about birds and other animals eating plastic off the ground and dying," Robert asked the Goose.
"The Leviathan's storms would have caused the animals that live here to leave and caused the animals that used to travel here to stay away; this is purely a dumping ground now."
The awe that they had experienced at the sight of the plastic-covered island had made Robert momentarily forget about the Leviathan. He turned around to get a look at it and upon seeing it he staggered backwards and fell on his behind. It was the first time that Robert felt that he was in the presence of something biblical. Robert and the Goose were up on a high cliff but the Leviathan still stood so high that they had to crane their necks upward to get a full look at it. The Leviathan had the head of a whale and a body of a serpent. Down the back of its body ran a long spiky fin and in the front were six giant flippers. It's body was covered in scales that were different shades of blue and green, and with its body wet and the sun shining on it, the Leviathan was sparkling and looking truly divine.
"I'll take it from here," the Goose stepped forward and said to Robert.
The Goose started talking to the Leviathan in the same bizarre language that Robert had heard it using with the other guardians. The Leviathan's responses sounded like whale noises, only much louder. In fact, there was so much force behind the Leviathan's voice that the sonic waves it was emitting from its mouth were threatening to push Robert off the cliff. The Leviathan's anger was unmistakable, as was the difficulty that the Goose was having in trying to get it to put its anger aside. The two spoke for over thirty minutes with the Goose seeming to succeed in mollifying the Leviathan.
"Is it onboard?" Robert asked the Goose.
"Just about, I had to tell it some things that weren't exactly true, but these are desperate times."
"We can't awaken it here, the egg is back on the boat."
"I know, the Leviathan will take us back to the boat and we'll awaken it there."
The Goose spoke to the Leviathan and it lowered itself to the ground where they were standing and opened its mouth for them to get inside. Once it was inside the water, the Leviathan got them back to the boat in just a few seconds. It opened its mouth just above the bow of the boat, allowing Robert and the Goose to comfortably step back onto the boat. Robert went below deck and retrieved the egg. The Leviathan allowed itself to be awakened without any fuss and underwent a transformation that stunned Robert almost as much as he had been stunned by his first sighting of the Leviathan.
"A penguin?!"
"This makes it easy for me to exist both on land and in water."
"The egg's almost completely blue now," Robert said to the Goose.
"It's almost ready to hatch, a couple more awakenings should do it."
"Let's get going then, the sooner we get home the sooner we can find those other guardians and awaken them," Robert said, going to raise the anchor.
"Allow me to be of assistance," the penguin said.
The penguin summoned a steady wind that was caught by the sail and carried them along at a speed that was going to get them back to land in no time, which they needed to do because the time for wrapping up the pilgrimage was fast approaching.
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