It took very little effort to convince Floren, Alden and Oren to follow along on the quest. Floren seemed anxious to get out from under her charge to watch the boys, and she imagined, perhaps falsely, that the boys would be more respectful of the older gentleman among them. The boys were bored and ready for the chance to break the tedium of hiding out and eating fish every day. They immediately began to fend off pretend dragons and imaginary monsters in the deep. They tried to get David interested in the game, but for David it started becoming all too real and he felt loath to imagine the dangers that might lie ahead. Still, he felt glad for the company and thought the more, the better; while Inaros, for his part, appeared content to sit comfortably and reminisce about real adventures he had in his younger days, perhaps with Captain Van Dyke, or Lady Margueritte, or some other person of the Kairos. In fact, after a good helping of fish, he easily reminisced himself into a nap.

“Hush.” Floren quieted the boys. “Let him sleep. We are only an hour from the sea and the day is young yet.” The boys hushed for a few minutes, but soon erupted in sword fights with fallen branches and imaginations run amok. Floren took a deep breath, but let it pass. The elder elf did not even twitch.

After Floren cleaned up, and before she could call the boys in and wake the sleeper, the ground began to tremble. The quake came. The boys screamed, and Inaros had no trouble waking.

“Hold on to your feet!” Inaros shouted when his eyes popped open. Floren literally bounced her way to where the boys trembled on their hands and knees. David and Oren looked scared, and rightly so, but also excited as if this shaking, in a way, was fun. Alden appeared simply frightened out of his wits, so it was toward Alden that Floren made her way. She hugged the boy when she got there, and Alden grabbed on for dear life, even as the shaking quit. It rumbled again, and after a few minutes, a third time. It brought an evergreen down not far away, but then it seemed over.

“Everyone still whole or have you all shaken to bits?” Inaros called out since they were out of sight behind some trees.

“Okay.” David yelled.

“All ship shape,” Floren said. She had clearly been thinking about going to sea and no doubt wondered how they were going to go under the sea to the Golden Palace of Amphitrite.

“Glad to hear it.” Inaros appeared tall, leaning on his staff and he grinned at them as they were still splayed across the ground. “I should say we had best get going. No telling when the next ground buster will strike.” Floren agreed and got right up. The boys bounced up, except Alden who did not like the term ground buster. They walked, the boys sometimes out front and sometimes following, but never far away, and always elf quiet, a condition Floren imposed on them lest she magically zipper their mouths.

When she had a moment where Inaros’ ears were all hers, she spoke what pressed on her mind. “That quake felt worse than the night before. I thought aftershocks were supposed to be less intense than the original.”

“Eh?” Inaros spoke rather loudly. Floren had to repeat herself with some volume, and unfortunately, David heard and came to join them. Oren and Alden were not far behind.

“But you see.” Inaros raised his hands, staff and all. “Sometimes there are small preliminaries before the big eruption!” He raised his hands to express such and mimed an explosion, but quickly returned the staff to the ground before he stumbled. That was not what anyone wanted to hear, and after that Floren decided not to ask any more questions.

David did smell the sea before he saw it. It smelled of salt-brine and centuries of seaweed. It remained a good deal below their elevation. He could only hear the dull roar of breakers against rocks in the eternal dance that would one day turn rocks to sand and drag the sand down into the deeps. The small river they followed dropped out of sight at that point into an ever-deepening gorge that it had carved over the centuries and that brought it swiftly to the sea. It looked like an excited lover who could not suffer a gentle slope. David did not know if their path would take them to an easier decline to the sea, but he knew the small river would get there first.

“Ah! The Western Cliffs,” Inaros announced. He took a great whiff of the air. “Sadly, my nose is not as it was.” He touched his nose. “Despite the fact that my nose appears to have grown larger.”

David looked, carefully around. They stood amidst the kind of shrubs and hardy grass that can only prosper in a salty mist, and it appeared that they had indeed come to some cliffs. The sea came in waves, a sheer thirty feet or more below them.

“All I sbell is rotten kelp.” Oren held his nose to exaggerate his expression of disgust.

“Seal People!” Floren interrupted.

“Where?” Oren and Alden together drowned out David’s, “What?” The young elf and brownie nudged right up to the edge to see. David went a bit more careful, and Inaros came to put his arm around the young man and point with his staff while he spoke.

“No one knows where they came from. Like the Centaurs of old, the Were and Mere people and others, some think they came from the stars, you know, another world altogether. See how the young frolic in the shallows. The birthing happened earlier this spring. Look, there.” Inaros raised his staff and pointed, but David was already looking where several of the hundreds that littered the beach, stood up, suddenly having legs and arms, and appeared to be in the shape of men. “Sailors used to fear the seal people, though I suppose that is like saying water is wet. Sailors generally fear anything different and strange. They are a very superstitious lot.”

“But are they seals or people?” David asked.

“Hard to say,” Inaros answered. “They have always kept to themselves and communicating with them has been a rare event. I understand your father, when he was Gerraint, he spoke with them once on an isle off the north coast of Scotland, but that was before my time.”

David looked down at the stone and sand, a very narrow strip at the base of the cliff. It looked gray in appearance, even as gray as the clouds that were beginning to gather overhead to dim the light of the sun. As such, the seals were very hard to see—unless they moved.

“They are also very seal-like.” Inaros appeared to be thinking out loud. “They fall prey to sharks like any seal and have never seen fit to make tools to defend themselves, though from all accounts, they could. But who can know the mind of such a strange creature?” The elf patted David on the shoulder and David thought, look who’s talking.

There came a rumbling sound from down the beach and Alden leapt back from the lip of the cliff in fear that the Earth might start shaking again.

“Cyclops!” Oren shouted and pointed in excitement even as his sister dragged him back from the edge.

David saw the Cyclops. It had to be more than twenty feet tall, and looked human enough, or something like a giant apart from the one bulbous eye in the center of the forehead. It appeared naked, but its hand, three fingers and a thumb, held fast to a club as big as a tree. David needed no encouragement to get back from the edge of the cliff, and on second thought, he imagined even Bert the giant would look like a shrimp next to this monstrosity. In a moment, it got worse.

The Cyclops opened its mouth and let out a glob of drool that fell, a bucketful that strung almost to his feet. Then he spoke. “I smell me seal meat for me supper.” The voice boomed. The eye scanned the rocks where the seal people were already evacuating the beach with all haste. But there were many young among them that could hardly move fast and so Floren moved fast for them. Before the Cyclops could bend down or lift his club for a smashing blow, an arrow shot out from the cliff top and pierced the creature’s ear. The Cyclops swatted at the sting, like a man might swat at an annoying insect, and the second arrow struck like a thorn in his hand. The Cyclops turned his head and David turned to run. He missed seeing the third arrow that just missed the creature’s big eye.

“Waaa! I see me wee folk for me desert.” The Cyclops roared and the club came faster than David would have thought possible for such a lumbering beast. It struck some on the side and some on the top of the cliff and broke loose several David sized boulders that crumbled like dust to the monster’s feet. “I be getting wee folk and eating wee folk.” The Cyclops roared again, but since his head stayed below the cliff top, and since the travelers ran, the impact of that roar did not sound as strong as the first. Then David turned and saw a great hand rise-up and slap down on the cliff top to search for wee ones to grab and gobble. With all his running, David got just barely far enough away so as not to be caught.

“Which way?” Floren asked, the bow still in her hand.

“Inland,” Inaros said. “But it will still follow, and even if we reach the trees, it will simply brush them aside to get at us.” Inaros seemed exceptionally sharp in the face of danger, and while it encouraged David who had been thinking of him as a doddering old man, what Inaros said did not encourage David at all.

“If I may suggest.” The voice came from roughly two feet off the ground in the direction of the river where it first started to carve the gorge down through the cliffs. David looked hopefully at the little man, but Floren held David back. She looked wary. “Old one-eye can’t get his hammy hands down into the gorge in most places and there’s caves near the bottom where we can be out of his reach altogether.”

“Mickey O’Mac!” Inaros knew the little one, and Floren relaxed, but just a little.

Mickey O’Mac leapt to the nearest boulder not yet swallowed by the running river and the boys all laughed because it made him look like his head stuck up out of the ground. “Well?” He disappeared down the gorge.

“Come on,” Inaros said, with a glance at the cliff’s edge.

The Cyclops had both hands up on the top by then with one up to the elbow. It had started to pull itself up and that terrible one eye was about to get a good look. Inaros hurried them, and they stepped out into the river and began to climb down among the rocks. They tried to keep out of the swirls, jetties, and avoid the mini waterfalls that followed the precipitous drop to the sandy beach below.