They ran up the hill, Ma-ek bouncing on his father's shoulders with every heavy, pumping stride. The water roared down the road, smashing through a turn and filling houses in a blink. The ground was highest outside the city, among the dead. The hill contained a wide, manicured plain, with stone cairns dotting it from top to bottom. The top of the hill held the eldest of the city, and the founders of Hekeh lay among them. It was adorned with a platform for ceremonial purposes.

Father sprinted up the hill, his breath coming in deep, athletic gulps, with his grip loosening just enough to allow Ma-ek to look around. He saw groups of people just behind his Father, and his Mother was leading them as sternly as he imagined his father looked. She pointed while running, directing dazed stragglers to follow. His Mother and Father both handled themselves well under pressure. In times of the bad season, they were both always able to keep the three of them fed. During the rainy season, both made choices for the best ways to repair their home. Father was easily two-thirds of the way up the hill, outpacing everyone like a juggernaut on a mission. They reached the top quickly enough for his father to drop him to the ground. Ma and his father both yelled and cheered on the scrambling survivors as they clambered up the hill. So many of them had made it out of the city that a number of them tripped, only to be climbed over themselves like crabs in a barrel.

The wave of water was preceded by a wave of panicked humanity, neither having anywhere to go but both surging forward at breakneck speeds. The cairns on the edge of the hilltop toppled over as the people climbed and scrambled, confused, and terrified. Father and son yelled into the morass, which was thick with the screams and cries of the people. While initially only a few strides behind them, Mother had gotten caught in the whirlpool of mankind. Glimpses of Mother broke through the throng. Her red robes and auburn hair stood in contrast to the mud and soot. She valiantly climbed and scratched over the piles, trying to keep a sense of order in a mass of thousands, as she rushed toward him. She fought, blood-stricken face wild, eyes blazing, locked on him as she advanced.

The water crashed through the city following the streets, flushing out survivors that ran out the northern gate, followed by surges laden with houses and debris. The water was so thick and dark, it acted like a makara, snapping and pushing up the banks. As the song rang in his mind, he kept wondering when the water would stop. When would Napata stop his anger and go back to sleep? Lighting split the sky overhead followed by deep rumbling booms of thunder, shattering the night over and over with its unnatural rock splitting sounds. The back of the crowd was being swept away by the rising of the relentless tide. The sound of the people rose to an otherworldly cry as the first groups of people finally made it to the relative safety of the top of Ancestors Hill.

Father stepped forward, looking to Ma-ek like he was going to dive into the sea of people running up the hill away from the city walls. His mother had closed the distance and at last, seemed within reach as only a handful of strides separated them now. Ma-ek latched onto Father's leg in a panic, the world vibrating within his mind as the waves smacked against the hillside. Father went to run but fell because of Ma-ek's dead weight. Father fell to the ground crying out for Mother in vain. They both looked down the slope of the hill to see the crowd had slowed as the cairns had come apart. The stones littered the hillside as they rolled underfoot and down the hill, some picking up enough speed to dislocate ankles or shatter leg bones. Over the din, they both heard Mother before seeing her. She was getting close to the top, but was still stuck behind what was left of a cairn. She jumped over the remains of the monument before continuing her mad climb.

Behind her, the walls to the northern side of the city finally gave way, allowing a major surge of water and wreckage to be thrown toward the survivors. Lightning crackled all around, forks splitting the night, illuminating the chaos. Pieces of ships and buildings, mixed among the water, created a deadly wall of debris. They both watched in vain as the most prominent woman in their lives was struck.

The remains of a large ship’s mast rose out of the water, broken and barely recognizable. The wood groaned and bent before snapping, a large piece thrown forward like a spear through the air, whistling with incredible force. It struck his Mother mid-back and drove her into the ground, nailing her there to the spot. Her body was smashed to the ground in an instant, the life crushed out of her, before the sea began to drag her backward into Napata’s hungry maw.

Ma-ek stood first, driven by a terror that verged on hysteria, then grabbed his Father's shoulders and pulled him back from the danger. Father allowed Ma-ek to help him stand, after finding his feet, led him by his hand to safety. Father followed limply, eyes hollow and mouth shut tight. Ma-ek led his father the final distance, never once letting go of his hand, to the hallowed grounds atop the hill and away from the water, as he prayed it was far enough from the dangers the never-ending waters yielded.

They made it to the safety of a raised platform that was used for seasonal celebrations and funeral rites. Sitting dumbly on the steps leading to the three-foot-high raised platform, they watched the last of the survivors run upward past them. The sea continued to rise higher and higher, threatening to quash any hope of survival on this sacred point. As if Napata’s appetite were suddenly quenched, the toll of the destruction laid bare, the water rose no higher.

The people were forced to wait for the waters to recede at the top of the hill. The cairns of the oldest stared at them accusingly, as if they had somehow failed. Ma-ek was concerned by none of that; he stood, watching his father rooted to the same spot where he witnessed Mother die. The look on Father's face was one of sorrow and fear. The flashes of lingering lightning illuminated his weary features in splashes. Some parts of Father died that day, and Ma-ek lost both of his parents. The world was a crueler and darker place, and neither of them would be the same.

Ma-ek blinked, his eyes refocusing back on the fort and the present. His thoughts that just a minute ago had felt like cold stone, now felt like warm sands running through the fingers of his mind. The load on his shoulder was still limp, so he did his best to get moving towards the Fort. He walked up the mostly empty street, realizing his mind must have been astray for longer than he was comfortable with. What was once an empty market had started to fill with more and more patrons. The tranquil quiet of the early morning had given way to the hustle and bustle of citizens, ready to start their day with the customary haggling over the day's catch.

Ma-ek redoubled his efforts to try to make up lost time. While not on a particular schedule, the jail guards liked to get all new prisoners locked away and accounted for before the morning meal. The throngs and crowds of people accumulating in the streets started to press in on Ma-ek, the sun straining to penetrate the smoke and acrid air of the many stoves and cooking fires around him. He coughed when the crowd started to push into him, heating the air around him with their bodies and turning the smoke into a humid blanket atop the streets. The closer the people came to him, the more he thought about his mother laying there in the mud among the bodies. The streets felt like they were going to swallow Ma-ek whole if he didn’t do something.

Ma-ek squared his jaw and looked around, searching for a way out of the crowd. He took his first opportunity and jumped into an open lane that had cleared of people scurrying from stall to stall. Once he had momentum, he did his best to mimic the warriors from days earlier, on the beach, lowering his shoulders like the keel of the ship slicing the waves. Anyone who dared to attempt to push in front of him in his current nervous state was met with an angry look and a loud bark of a command to move or be moved. When finally through the crowded market, Ma-ek wound his way up the staircases cut into the side of the yellow rock. The stairs were old and weathered, but with little in the way of damage to them. Stairs left from the original use of the island fortress were scattered all across the town. The town had grown up around the original gatehouse of Megarkos. To Ma-ek, it was exactly what he needed, a quiet and quick way to the Head Guard for the fort.

The trip up the secluded stairs left little time to reflect, as Ma-ek’s focus was on the stairs and their damp moss-covered stones. He always did enjoy this way to the fort, even as a child. The shadowed walls only received direct sunlight a few hours a day, making it very hospitable to the plush layer of greenish moss growing in the nooks and crannies. His footsteps echoed off the raised walls around the steps. While disorienting to some, they made for an excellent way to covertly move goods and people around the fortress in times of attack or duress. He ran his hands over the rough walls, feeling the familiar, rough, craggy rock face. Time and weather had done little to soften the chisel marks left over from construction ages ago.

Ma-ek got to the top of the stairs, winded slightly and red from the effort. He thought to himself, “Stairs, my worst enemy. In all of the sea voyages and the brief combat, I barely register a sweat, but now, add some gods blasted heat and some stairs, and I’m sweating worse than a boar over a fire.”

Shaking his head ruefully, he readjusted his load and carried on around the inside of the outer wall of the fortress. He inspected the walls as he went, the height of two grown men, with thick uniformly carved stones mortared together with concrete. The materials appeared to be made on-site, as shells poked out of the mortar in some spots, similar to those found on the beach near the port. The stones themselves had imprints left by Arktos, shapes of sea animals from a different reality littered the blocks of the citadel walls.

It looked to Ma-ek like a picture of the seafloor caught in stone, beautiful yet frightening. The outline of scorpions the size of sharks with claws bigger than Ma-ek’s hand made him shudder. The forgotten times of Napata looked to be terrifying and strange in equal measure. At that moment, Ma-ek was glad to be alive when Napata deemed that Men should rule, and not when or where that thing did.

The doors to the individual cells were set into the outer edge of the wall, facing the city and docks on the edge of a steep twenty-foot drop. The wind here gently tugged on any loose garments, warm and pleasant with the smell of the sea. Ma-ek followed a route he had known since he was a child. The stairs led Ma-ek to a hallway within the wall which ended at a door through which wind and seabirds could be heard. Ma-ek opened the door and stepped out onto a windblown path. The path lined the outside of the wall. Windblown of all small stones, it was perfectly cut into the hill face overlooking Megarkos. He decided to stop and stand for a moment, truly taking in the sight of the town and just how much it had changed during his life. The town blurred as his eyes drifted and he let his mind relax after being so taxed by the crowd. The market always gave him anxiety.

Ma-ek drifted back into his memories. He was sitting awake when the sun rose over the altar, as he and his fellow Hekeh survivors faced their collective reality. The water had long since receded into the sea, the brackish black liquid leaving behind the true horror of last night's apocalypse. The sea had exhumed entire clans of cairns. The bodies of the dead, new and old, littered the hillside. In some places, it was impossible to distinguish victims of last night's wave next to loved ones buried on the hill from natural causes. Some dead were half-buried in the liquid earth, faces barely exposed and locked in an eternal scream.

With purpose, Ma-ek went to look for his mother. He looked out over the edge of the Altar before climbing the stairs down. He was offered his first real look at what remained. The walls of his once-great city lay crumbled, with only a few of the guard towers surviving the strain of the water. Inside of the walls was one large rubble pile, no distinction could be made between the rich areas or the poor, Napata judged us equally. Stone or wood, nothing can stop the rage of the sea.

Ma-ek had witnessed the destruction of one of the greatest cities in the world. He had heard with his own ears and seen with his own eyes the death of Great Hekeh. The bestial cry of the city as it was ripped asunder from all sides. Hekeh was slain in its prime, like a calf to slaughter on the ancient altar where he now stood. Ma-ek stared out into the abyss where his life once grew, contemplating things no child should.

As the spell of his memory faded, Ma-ek shook the ghosts from his vision, the sight replaced by a much happier albeit smaller one. It wasn't Grand Hekeh, the trade capital of the southern seas of Napat, but it was home. It had grown considerably since his time as a boy here after escaping the ruins of Hekeh. What started as tents in a field under the watch of a fort, Megarkos had expanded into a town of wood and stone. Every year, with the help of animals and beasts of burden, the island city of Megarkos looked more and more like its Parent of Hekeh.

It would be wrong to say all the survivors were Hekian, as the mainland of Jumba was also devastated. The Doomsayer, the dark man that had upset Enkha so, was a skilled captain and had survived the cataclysm at sea on his ship. He was the one who rescued us, and with Father's knowledge of this fort, we set sail North. We did our best to save and collect as many survivors as we could, some floating on debris and some stranded on small islands.

Those were the first days Ma-ek got a good look at the Trolls and Orcs of stories. As they sailed north, they found others who had been affected by the wrath of Napata and the giant waves. Bodies of what seemed to be men and women were floating and bobbing on the current, sunbaked and cracked, mixed intermittently with the debris of other buildings and foliage. It was in those days that the stories of the Northern Peoples stopped being a running joke for the children and something to believe in and explore. If there were people unlike us, maybe they could teach us something or better yet: What if they have things that we want?

Ma-ek shook his head in an attempt to clear his thoughts and tried his best to focus on now. The lack of sleep and the long voyage was catching up to him. He opened the first cell door, placing the lump down in the center of the room. It was cramped, but not so badly that Ma-ek felt uncomfortable. Room to stand and sit up, space enough for the interloper until he can talk to Father about that other Orc, Besteb. The two of them were both orcs who must share a common tongue, and if they can communicate, then we can too.