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Excerpts and Illustrations from The Anastasia Project by Loren John Presley
The following narratives and illustrations are taken from the chapters of The Anastasia Project by Loren John Presley, now republished by Dolphin Star Publishing.
Chapter One
-The Voices in the Water-
“Anastasia! Anastasia!” she heard.
She was faint and weary, but she tried to open her eyes and listen
to the voices that were stirring her awake. As her consciousness slowly
returned, she felt the cool ocean water all around her. The voices were
growing even more insistent, and she groaned as she struggled to wake. In her mind, she could hear the strange sounds of deep echoes ringing in vast spaces and the roaring of thrusters. She could feel the drift…the drift across deepness and darkness.
As she steadily came around, however, she forgot about the sounds
in her head and the drift. The voices called again and again. She was not
yet conscious enough to understand what they were saying, but their tone of urgency hurried her to awaken.
At last, the dolphin opened her small dark eyes, blinking several
times. She was in a shallow sea garden. The light of day gave the water an aqua hue. Bubbles rose to the surface above from strange cracks in the floor. Plants swayed gently and a few fish passed in the distance. All of these sights frightened her because she did not know where she was.
The voices had grown faint. Some stormy crackling noise was
muffling them. “What?” the dolphin tried to say, still rather stupefied.
They muttered on just the same. Who were they? Where were they? She turned around. “Hello?” she called again.
Her call was answered abruptly by a high-pitched ringing in her
ear and a slight vibration over her left eye. She groaned and shook herself to full consciousness, but the voices had vanished.
She looked around and listened. Although a sense of serenity and
beauty suffused the water and the reef, a disquieting tremor of fear began
to swell in her spirits; she found that she was alone. She could find no one
around her. More disturbing still was a desolate silence in the water. She
could even hear it when she listened far beyond the reef’s edges. For a
dolphin, an ocean should never be silent.
For a frightful moment, she turned her glance from one direction
after another in the serene waters.
“Where is this place?” she asked herself aloud. “How did I get
here?”
Chapter Two
The Mirrors in the Cleft
It was not too dark inside the cleft, but the light was fairly
dimmed. The interior was made of curious large, smooth stones. Dark
green algae grew between them.
What surprised her most about the stones was that she found her
reflection on their surfaces. Her image was very clear. She opened her
mouth just enough to show her teeth in wonder, and her eyes glanced back
at her in many places.
Her gaze fell to the floor of the cleft in thought. "All right," she
told herself. "I know I've seen my reflection before. I must be close to a
breakthrough!"
Even though she was familiar with seeing her reflection, she found
she could not recall where or when she had seen it.
The dolphin swam from mirror to mirror, stone to stone, looking
into them and watching herself with curiosity while the light outside the
cleft danced and the plants waved in the shadows between the mirrors
around her. The silvery material of the stones was curious to her, and she
spent much of her time examining it as well.
Just as she eyed one mirror closely, she thought she saw something
odd in her reflection. She examined it more carefully. Maybe it was just a
part of the stone. No, it was there. There was a small, delicate, complex looking
metal object just behind her eye. Three long, silver wires reached
back across her head from it. She looked even more closely.
Was it? It was! It was embedded in her skin!
Her long, toothy jaw began to tremble. What was that thing? What
put it there? Had she gone through something painful to have it put there?
Why couldn’t she remember? She fixed her head in several positions and
postures to examine the instrument, her mystified and frightful expression
reflected in the mirror.
All her previous worries and confusion returned, knotting with a
sickening fear inside her. She was lost. She was alone, and she did not her
way home. Even her memory was void. She closed her eyes in frustration
and let her head drop, quivering by herself in the cleft. Her reflection in the
mirrors surrounding her drooped as well.
Then, as she lay in her inner strife, she felt a change in the water.
The temperature in the water was getting colder at a very fast rate. She
groaned and looked outside the cleft to see what was happening.
A great shadow was soaring across the water. A shadow that
reached out for miles. She widened her eyes with astonishment.
“What...what is that?” she whispered.
Tremors shook the water. Slightly at
first, and then the vibrations began to grow more intense. She retreated
into the cleft, watching the shadow travel across the water, its darkness
growing more sinister and its colossal size creeping closer. Strange,
frightful sounds manifested outside. Great, repetitive banging sounds
accompanied by a deep, resonant rumbling.
The dolphin felt the vibrations in the water grow stronger. The
eerie, awful sounds grew clearer as the shadow darkened the entire sea.
She thought it treacherous to venture outside, but sensed also
that the cleft was no longer safe for her.
Chapter 7
The Colony
Anastasia faced forward again and caught up with Levit. He led
her down into the depths of the floor until the two of them were so deep
that the light had nearly disappeared, making it difficult to see. She sensed that the caverns they were traveling in now were more desolate than the others they had passed through. Their atmosphere made them seem void of inhabitants.
“What place is this, Levit?” Anastasia asked, looking from side to
side in the dimness.
“This is a deeper part of the colony,” Levit replied. “It gets very
dark down here.”
Before long, it was so dark that Anastasia could see nothing in
front of her. She impulsively wanted to use her sonar to navigate her way, but she was afraid other hydralets would notice her. She listened carefully for Levit’s claws scratching the walls of the tunnel. The only light she could see was a dim, blue glow up ahead. The glow puzzled her.
Anastasia continued to look from side to side in the darkness,
keeping an ear out for Levit. “Does anyone live down here?” she asked.
Just then, she felt something brush her head, and she jerked back gasping
in the startle. When she looked to see what it was, she could barely make
out some wilted plants hanging from the ceiling of the tunnel.
Levit turned his head to her, the blue glow now very clear behind
his silhouette. He lifted one of his hind appendages and brushed the
plants aside for her. “No one lives down here anymore,” he said. “Few of us still know it even exists.”
Anastasia hesitated, but then quickly swam through the parted
foliage. Levit turned around and crept into the small chamber where he
assumed a blank expression. “There’s not much down here anymore,” he
said with disappointment. “Just empty, dark tunnels, chambers and plants
growing all about.”
When Anastasia followed him into the chamber she watched him
settle down by a wall. The wall had a familiar blue phosphorescent glow.
She realized that she had seen it before in the cavern where she had first
encountered Levit.
These dark places were not as ominous or foreboding as she
thought it would be. Instead it was all rather exciting. She swam a little
around the chamber, looking about. There were several pitch-dark
passages branching out from the chamber, visible only by the blue glow.
When she eyed Levit he was crouched gently. He turned his eyes
to the floor and fiddled with something in his hands. “I often come down
here to escape the world,” he said. “The ocean, the colony, everything.”
Anastasia listened to him for a second, then curiously clicked her
sonar down a set of dark passages leading even farther down. “Do these
tunnels go down any deeper?” she asked him.
“Much, much deeper,” Levit answered, glancing at her. He peered
at the floor in thought. “There were once hydralets who lived all the way
down here, and much deeper than this. This whole nest used to be filled
with us.”
Anastasia listened with concern. “Your colony must have been
very grand,” she replied, looking up and around.
“It was once a very proud and prosperous colony,” Levit said
while nodding. “We like to think it was the largest colony on the planet.
We were once a colony of thousands….Now, because of the Pontuses,
we’re almost less than a hundred.”