by Liz Kessler
He would solve this. He had to.
As we approached, he held his trident high in the air and called out into the wind.
“I command the falls to cease!”
The ground was still shaking. Trees were still creaking and bending while rocks tumbled down the cliff face. I held on to the side of the chariot, flicking my tail in the water, and watched as the falls slowed and slowed, and eventually stopped.
He’d done it. Neptune had stopped the falls!
The cliffside was bare. Great chasms were exposed, and rocky formations jutted out — round, gaping holes going all the way up the cliff, each one empty and still.
Neptune turned to us. “One hour,” he growled.
An hour. Even if Jeras didn’t come down, maybe it could still work.
Was an hour long enough for me to swim to the rocky bay that was lying there, calm and exposed now that the falls had stopped, run through to the other side, and find Joel and all the others?
Was it long enough for them all to get out?
It had to be!
The ground was still quivering. It wasn’t going to be easy, but they could do it. They could get out. And then, together, we could all get away from here. We could beat it. We could all survive.
But what about the rest of the world? The ones on the other side of the ocean whose lands would be devastated when the tsunami caused by the impending earthquake reached them?
What about them?
It was useless.
And as if to underline how doomed we all were, two seconds later, the ground began to shake. The sea boiled around us. The rocks tumbled — and with a creaking, cracking sound so loud it was as if the heavens were being torn apart, the cliff began to split in half.
The foreshocks were over. The earthquake had begun.
It was really happening: the devastating earthquake that Fortuna had predicted was unfolding, right in front of our eyes.
I had to cover my ears to block out the screeching, creaking sounds coming from the cliff as it started to break. It sounded like an animal in pain. It sounded as if the earth itself was crying out in anguish.
I turned to Neptune. “Do something!”
In his defense, even he had stopped looking as if he didn’t care. “I cannot do anything!” he called back. “I am powerless against the land!”
If Neptune was powerless, we all were.
Except maybe one person, if the thought that was still scratching at the back of my mind was right.
I squinted at the cliffs in front of us. Movement. From here, it looked like an ant making its way down the cliff.
Was it him?
I rubbed my eyes. It couldn’t be. Surely. Could it?
I stared so hard my eyes were soon streaming with salty water. Bobbing about on the furious sea, I tried to hold still enough that I could be sure.
Yes. Yes!
The figure grew bigger as he came closer. It was! It was him!
Jeras.
I jabbed a finger at the cliff. “Neptune — Your Majesty — look!” I cried.
Neptune scowled at the cliff, searching for what I was pointing at. And then he saw it.
“Him!” He raised his trident in the air. “Servants, I have changed my mind. I cannot face this man. Take me away!” he called.
“No! No — you have to stay. Please!”
“Is it not sufficient that I have saved the man’s life — reunited him with a world that he should never have been allowed to be part of again? That is not enough for you?”
“No!”
The idea that had been forming in my head earlier was now rattling around so hard it hurt. Could it work?
Could Fortuna have been right about the giant after all?
Jeras was nearly at the bottom of the cliffs. He was approaching this side of the rocky bay. The split in the land was chasing him downward. The cliffside was separating. He wasn’t going to make it!
“Your Majesty, I’m begging you,” I cried. “It’s not for him. It’s for all of us. Please, Neptune.”
“Please what?” he snapped. “What do you even want me to do?”
I took a breath, let it out, and took another one. Then I looked Neptune in the eyes and said, “I want you to shake his hand.”
Neptune burst out laughing — a nasty, hollow, cackling laugh. “I will never shake that man’s hand. Never!”
I glanced across. Jeras had reached the shore. The cliff face was separating so much a V-shape was starting to form down the middle. Any minute now, half of it would fall into the ocean. When that happened, it would surely be the end of all of us — and the end of goodness knew how many other people on the other side of the ocean. How many thousands of people would lose their lives from the tidal wave such an explosion would cause?
Once the cliff had split, there would be nothing we could do.
I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t.
I figured we had a matter of minutes. Maybe not even that.
Jeras had pulled off his shoes and rolled up his pants. He was getting into the water! Was he thinking the same thing I was thinking?
“Please, Your Majesty. I will never ask anything of you again. Just this. Just this one thing.”
Neptune folded his arms over his chest and didn’t reply.
Jeras was coming closer. He was swimming over to us!
“Please,” I said again.
Still no reply.
And then . . .
“I am here.” Jeras was beside me in the water. Panting and gasping, he swam over to the chariot and looked up at Neptune.
As he spoke, his dark eyes were streaming — with tears or seawater?
“She loved you with all of her heart,” Jeras said, his words coming out as bursts in between sharp, wheezing breaths.
Neptune folded his arms more tightly across his body, swishing his tail angrily from side to side.
“And with all of my heart, I wish I could undo what happened,” Jeras went on. “There is no one on this earth — no one in these oceans — who feels as much regret as I do. We both lost our loves. Both of us lost a wife. I lost a daughter.”
Neptune’s arms had loosened a tiny bit. His tail had stopped flicking from side to side so angrily.
Another creak in the cliffs.
“Please. Neptune. We were once friends. I am sorry. I am more sorry than anyone has ever been.” Jeras pulled himself half out of the water. Leaning on the side of the chariot, he reached an arm up to Neptune. “Please, Your Majesty. Forgive me.”
Neptune looked beaten. His body slackened, and his arms hung limp by his side, trident hanging down from one hand.
“I . . . I don’t know if I can,” he said. “No. I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t forgive you.”
Jeras nodded. “All right,” he said. “I understand. I tried.”
He started to move away.
“Wait!” I yelled at him. “You can’t go!”
“I’ve said my piece. There’s nothing more I can do.”
“What? Of course there is. You have to shake his hand!”
Jeras frowned. “What? Why?”
He didn’t get it. He wasn’t on the same wavelength as I was at all. He wanted to apologize to Neptune, and he’d done that — but that didn’t help the rest of us. It didn’t help anything!
“The story you told us!” I said. “About Terra.”
“What about her?” Jeras asked.
“She told you that when you shook hands with Neptune, you would become big and powerful. And you never did.”
“No . . .”
“Jeras. What can you think of that is big? That is powerful?” I asked.
I waited as the cogs in his brain caught on. Finally, they lit his eyes up from inside. “Oh, my gosh,” he said. “Oh, my word — oh, my —”
He swam back to the chariot. This time, there was no hesitation. He hauled himself over the side.
“What do you think you’re —” Neptune began.
Jeras
didn’t let him continue. “Shake my hand. Forgive me! Do it — now!”
Neptune stared at Jeras’s hand.
“I have suffered more than most,” Jeras said. “And I deserved every bit of it. But it is not right to cause suffering to so many others. Please, do it now. Say you forgive me and shake my hand.”
Neptune hesitated for what felt like an hour. Eventually, he sighed mightily and said, “Oh, well, if it means that much to you, then good grief, all right, I’ll do it!”
He reached out toward Jeras. Jeras clasped Neptune’s fingers hard in his, and finally, finally, they shook hands.
It happened before our eyes. We all saw it. Me, Shona, Neptune. All the others behind us.
Dad had arrived with Aaron. Mom and Millie were on a boat that the hotel had organized to get people away from the hotel. Even from farther out at sea, they saw it, too.
The people from behind the falls who had started to come out from the forest, clinging to trees, stumbling along rocky edges — they saw it.
The moment Jeras let go of Neptune’s hand, he started to change.
He started to grow.
His body lengthened and widened. His legs stretched up and up and up. Taller and taller, bigger and bigger. Soon he was so large I had to crane my neck to see his face. He grew and grew until he was at least ten times as tall as any of us.
Right there, in front of our eyes, the myth of the giant came to life.
Jeras had wanted to be big. He’d wanted to be powerful. And now, at last, he was both. Fortuna’s pictures had gotten everything right.
Without a word, he turned. Walking through water that reached his ankles, like a kid wading through a puddle, he strode back toward the mountain. His legs were like ancient trees, and his head now practically scraped the ring of clouds that still clung to the center of the island like a safety belt.
He’d taken two steps and was halfway there when the earth rumbled again. Another split in the cliff.
I could see the people from behind the falls gathering. As the ground gave way below them, they gripped onto trees and clung onto one another for dear life.
He was one step away when —
C-r-r-r-e-e-e-a-a-a-k!
Another section of the cliff ripped away. Surely this was it. Any second now, the cliff would be in pieces. Half of it would be in the sea, taking all those people with it. And surely none of us could survive the fallout once that happened?
I was about to close my eyes and pray — I didn’t see the point in doing anything else — when Shona grabbed me and said, “Look!”
I looked. So did everyone else. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
With two enormous strides, Jeras the giant had gotten himself halfway up the cliff face that was still standing. Then he threw himself across the chasm in between the two sides, so his feet were still on one side and his arms on the other. Gripping the piece of cliff that was now almost in the ocean, he stretched out across the gap in between, turning his body into a bridge.
The final picture from the Prophecy.
“Come,” Jeras boomed, his voice like thunder. “Run. Get across, all of you. Quick, before it’s too late.”
We watched as, one by one, the people stepped onto his shoulders and ran down his back and along his legs to safety on the other side.
They nearly all made it.
There were three people still on the other side when the earth let out one final, terrible roar. The sea exploded, the cliff face ripped away, rocks tumbled down — and the final three slipped and fell.
Gripping the cliff with one hand, Jeras let go with the other and reached out. They landed in his palm. Still gripping the cliff with his other hand, he carefully placed them on his back and held his position while they ran across to join the others.
Even when they were all across, he stayed where he was.
“Why isn’t he moving?” someone yelled.
“Look!” I called up to them. I pointed at the cliff. The crack had reached all the way down to the bottom. A whole section of cliff had come loose; the giant’s grip was the only thing stopping it from falling into the sea.
As we watched, he looked back over his shoulder to check that everyone had gotten across. Then, slowly, gently, he pulled himself back up and carefully placed the loose section of cliff down in the water, as if planting a small tree.
The giant had made a new island! Right next to Forgotten Island.
The one picture from the Prophecy that had remained a mystery — it was coming to life in front of us!
As people in the boat cheered, and the people on the cliffside waved, I turned to Shona and gave her a massive thumbs-up. I couldn’t even speak.
The ground was still shaking, but now it was just an occasional shudder rather than a full-on, earth-splitting quake. Aftershocks.
Shona swam to my side. Aaron joined us a minute later, and the three of us threw ourselves into a group hug, jumping up and down in the water.
“You did it,” Aaron said. “You convinced him!”
I pulled away. “We did it,” I corrected him. “This is about us. All of us. Not about me.”
Aaron grinned at both of us. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “We did it. We saved the day.”
“We did it together,” Shona added.
I looked around at the people jumping and whooping and celebrating and cheering. “And we survived,” I said. “All of us survived!”
Daylight was fading as the final group of people were picked up by the transportation that had come to take us away. They’d been sending boats and helicopters for the last few hours.
Mom and Millie had gone ahead. Dad was helping with the clean-up operation. The Majesty Island hotel staff was gathering blankets and hot drinks for the people from Forgotten Island. They were introducing themselves to one another, helping one another, forming the beginnings of bonds with people they had never known existed.
Ella, Joel, and Saul had come to join Shona, Aaron, and me at the water’s edge, near the rocks between the island the giant had planted and the cliffs behind us.
“We’ll call it New Island,” Saul said, pointing at the freshly laid rocks. “It will be where we’ll come to give thanks for all that we have.”
“That sounds good,” Aaron said, smiling at Saul.
“Do you want to plant some stuff on it with me before you go?” Joel asked Aaron.
“Yeah, that would be swishy,” Aaron said.
Joel laughed. “What’s swishy?”
“It means, like, a good thing,” I explained.
“I like it.” Ella laughed.
“We shall all use it from now on,” Saul agreed. “Especially when we are remembering this day.”
“Look.” Aaron pointed at a rainbow reaching across from the cliff out to sea. It looked like a bridge to a new world.
Maybe it was.
Everything looked new. Even the falls themselves had changed. Neptune had held the water back as long as possible, and once they’d started again, they were completely different.
Instead of the angry, ferocious roar, now the waterfall was a stunningly beautiful stream, meandering and trickling through the fissures and cracks as it found a new path, before dropping down in a thin, delicate line into the ocean.
There was just one thing missing from the picture. One big thing.
“What happened to Jeras?” Shona asked as we all stared at the rainbow, lost in our own thoughts.
It seemed odd to think that a giant could disappear — but he had.
“What happened to him?” Aaron echoed.
“We have to find him,” Ella said.
I glanced at Shona.
She smiled. “It’s fine. Go ahead. I’ll stay in the bay.”
“Joel, go with Aaron and Emily,” Saul instructed. “Ella and I will stay with Shona. No one should be left alone today.”
“You sure you don’t mind if I go?” I asked Shona.
She gave me a warm smile that showed me
she meant it. “Positive. I hope you find him.”
Aaron, Joel, and I clambered up to the top of the rocky bay. “You OK?” I asked Aaron as we walked.
“I don’t want to lose him,” Aaron mumbled. “He’s family.”
“We’ll find him, my friend. We’ll find him,” Joel said, patting Aaron on the back.
I hung back and let the two of them go ahead of me as we picked our way along a path that had managed to stay intact. We climbed over fallen trees, leaped over chasms that hadn’t been there before, and hopscotched across rubble.
We came to a lake. “I know this lake,” Joel said. “But I don’t recognize the hill on the other side.”
“What do you mean, you don’t recognize it?”
He shook his head. “Exactly what I say. It was never there before.”
“Wait — Joel.” I stopped in my tracks, staring at the hill. “I’ve seen it.”
“You can’t have. It has never existed.”
“Not in real life. In a picture.”
The giant lying by the lake. Could it be . . . ?
“Joel, can we go and look at it?” I asked. “Aaron and I could just swim across the lake.”
“Go,” Joel replied. “I’ll wait here.”
Without another word, Aaron and I picked our way down to the lake, slipped into it, and let our tails form. Then we swam across to the other side.
I sat on soft, green grass as I waited for my legs to come back. The grass was warm. As if it were breathing.
As if it were alive.
We walked around the edge of the hill. The shape of it — it was like a person. Two long stretches at one end, a ridge on either side, a large hump of a body in the middle.
“It’s him,” I whispered. “It’s really him.”
We walked to the far end.
The giant’s face turned toward us.
“You found me,” he said, smiling softly. “This is her lake. Her favorite place. I buried her beside it. And now, finally, I have kept my promise. I have made things right. At last, I can once again lie down beside my wife.”
And then he closed his eyes.
Aaron fell to his knees. “No!” he cried. “Please — don’t go!”
The giant’s smile remained as he half opened an eye. “It’s time,” he said. As he spoke, the ground below us moved. Soft green leaves rustled against my back.
