A/N: Whoo. New fic. Sorry, putting TNCS on hold as my style has changed somewhat and my taste in genre has changed. No, it’s still fantasy, but...well, it’s difficult to explain. You’ll see that the mood I try to set in my writing will most likely be much different.

Anyway, please bear with me with the shortness of this. It’s just a prologue. ;; (Shortest chapter I’ve written in my life, too...)

Hidden

Prologue

The waves rolled in their rage, surging up and throwing themselves against the rocks angrily only to break and scatter, licked with white foam.

Relentlessly they continued, each wave higher than the last, each roll of the great expanse angrier and darker than the one that had been before it. Clouds brewed and boiled in the forbidding sky as if imitating the sea.

Shells lying on the sand were lapped up by it and spewed up elsewhere. The sand was no less a victim, being drowned by the great mammoth of salt water as it moved further up the shore.

A lone figure stood on the grains, arms thrown out on either side of his torso, callused palms facing the raging earth.

His eyes were a stormy but empty blue, mimicking the sea, his hair a strange, stark white that stood out vibrantly against the dark surroundings.

“I have been waiting,” he murmured, unmoving as the water lapped up around his ankles.

As if disgusted by touching the young man, the water seemed to twitch and recede off the sand, so far back that fish were left dried and gasping.

His clothes were torn and dirty, his pants worn thin around his knees as if he had once washed them too roughly. Even his skin had a film of dirt over it, smudged in places, only hinting at the pale skin beneath it. His feet were blistered and bare with a thick coating of dust and mud over them.

“You are late,” he said, eyes searching the horizon that seemed to stretch forever as another wave crashed into his legs, halfway up his shins.

His knees buckled slightly at the contact but he stood firm, testing the clumped, wet sand beneath his toes as if teasing the secret that lied beneath it, a secret which the sea wanted to hide...

Each of his toes wiggled, the wet sand building up in between them.

“Are there enough grains for every lie told?” he asked the water as it washed up again, no emotion in his voice, He was not expecting an answer. “Are there enough grains to cover the truth hidden beneath?”

A great shockwave made him falter but he straightened again, knowing that there were not enough lies to cover the truth.

“Rise. I have been waiting...Rise!”

An eerie silence followed as the waves suddenly calmed their rage, retreating, and then a rumble that sounded from the depths of the earth burst forth, the madness of a time once lost.

And he stood, unmoving, the last barrier.

A horror that may as well have been death slammed into him, knocked him backwards, tore with sharpened claws at him as if attempting to take his very soul in its madness. He gasped, his fragile bones breaking underneath the pressure, his eyes bulging before they paled and nothing was left behind them, his last breath spent.

The terrifying nightmare stood over him, its body heaving with each of its pants, feet covered with wet sand as it dripped with blood. Clouds went as fast as they came, the waves calming. It thought while staring at the dead man that perhaps it was not so much taller, but the differences would dominate.

Each red droplet slid down its skin slowly, nearly agonizingly, before it hit the beach, staining it until the tides would wash it away.

It raised its head towards the noonday sun as it baked the blood and dirt and sand onto it, eyes watching the sky in wonder. Briefly, it glanced at the water, which seemed to surge in response as if beckoning it, but it turned away.

It must go forward.

The Free One must die...

And so it continued, leaving a bloody trail behind it, a final sign of death as the body was swept away by a final breath of the ocean, a goodbye whispered on the salty air of the sea.

For a moment it stopped, half-turned its head, then straightened itself and left.