THE ELEMENT GUARDIANS

Chapter 4: The Watery Depths

Sea Breeze woke up on a beach near the source of his elemental power, a temple larger than Poseidon’s palace. He dusted the sand off his robes and walked to the edge of the surf, where he created a gigantic wave—his means of travel to his base. Once there, Sea Breeze gathered supplies, then dove back into the water and used the current of the ocean to start himself on his quest.

The current led him to the remains of a coral reef, where he found a diamond buried in the sand—the magical guide that would lead him on his journey. Before Sea Breeze could continue, he felt compelled to repair the coral reef to its original beautiful state. When he looked back to his guide, he found the gem glowing bright blue. As he followed the current and the gem, he suddenly saw danger up ahead.

It was a sea serpent, a long, dark shape that was black as ink, scaly and slimy. Sea Breeze realized that it was not possible to control this leviathan without some help. While he reached out to some of his aquatic friends for help handling this dangerous situation, he sent a wave of water toward the beast as a distraction. Sea Breeze’s friends, a legion of dolphins and large octopi, arrived almost instantly and kept the creature occupied while he was trying to conjure up a plan; he couldn’t decide whether to use the monster as a means of travel or destroy him. He gathered handfuls of seaweed and knotted them together, hoping they would be strong enough to tie him up and create a means of containment just in case he could use the creature for travel. He looked to see how his friends were doing—not well. Judging from the injuries the creatures were getting, he decided that the beast had to be demolished!

Sea Breeze used the rope that he had made out of seaweed to suppress the creature. Then he called his guardian animal to finish the job—a gigantic shark cut through the water in an instant to come to his aid. Once that was taken care of, he shadowed the gem as it continued to drift across the ocean floor.

The gem led him to a wrecked submarine. The deck was still intact. Sea Breeze set himself down on the deck and looked around, wondering how a submarine like this could end up at the bottom of the ocean. He lowered himself through the hatch down to the next level, where the engine room was. It was very dark in there, so he decided to come back to check it out later. After all, this sub could be a better means of travel than a sea serpent, if he could get it to run. He saw the glow of his blue gem coming from what may have been the control room of the sub.

Inside, he noticed that the battery’s indicator registered zero power. Sea Breeze floated over to where the gem was hovering—was it trying to tell him something? He reached out his hand and the gem floated to him. He grasped it and at once, the whole area was illuminated in a blaze of blue light.

***

As the light dimmed down, Sea Breeze saw that the gem was shimmering brightly, but slightly dimmer than when he had first found it. Then he looked at the battery indicator again and realized that the diamond was being used as an energy source to power the submarine. All at once, it registered that this powerful gem was somehow putting the submarine back together again—with the addition of the latest technology. Once the submarine was done reassembling itself, an astonished Sea Breeze was left to gaze at the glowing blue console. When he entered the engine room, he saw it was emitting great power. The whole area was filled with the energy that was running his new craft. After checking out the engine room, which Sea Breeze thought would definitely improve his chances of arriving on time at the location of his sword, he went back to the cockpit, sat himself in the captain’s seat, and pressed the ignition button to continue on his journey.

***

Seeing as the blue gem he’d found was controlling the whole operation, Sea Breeze traveled leisurely through the sea in this sub, content to allow the ship to have a mind of its own. The sub had a navigational system which was able to show him the ocean floor, where he was navigating by longitude and latitude on his map. The sub came to a sea inlet littered with weapon remnants from what could have been an undersea battle. Sea Breeze brought these items back aboard the sub and used the scanning equipment to identify their makers, hoping to eventually track them down. As the scanning equipment was compiling the information on the weapons, Sea Breeze continued on the trail from the sea cove to where he knew his sword should be.

The system brought up a great quantity of information about each weapon, including to whom they belonged. He brought it up on a bigger screen in the cockpit, and the evidence he assembled for each weapon indicated that they had definitely been used in a fight. Sea Breeze saw that they had been used against what seemed to be more serpents, like the creature that he encountered when he started this quest. Data output from the computer indicated that the owners of these weapons had been defeated, but Sea Breeze didn’t need a computer to see that. These strange creatures seemed to be more dominant, much stronger than most other things in the ocean. The computer did not say how the losers had been defeated. The losing warriors must have tried to escape, but somehow, they could still be tracked. The data provided to Sea Breeze indicated that they were not far from here, and even closer to where he was heading.

***

When Sea Breeze arrived at the location that the computers had pointed out, he was looking at an ancient temple whose existence preceded at least one of the Element Guardians. He hid the sub behind a rock, but before he got out from the sub, he noticed a button located in the main control room that said: “Shrink.” He did not know what this command meant, but his intuition was telling him to push that button, thus assuring that whatever he might have to deal with, at least he wouldn’t have to wonder any longer. Thus, Sea Breeze firmly pressed the mysterious button. Immediately, the sub’s walls began to close in, and Sea Breeze felt himself begin to get squashed.

A few seconds later, he was blasted out of the sub, and he found himself in the middle of the ocean. Looking around for the sub, he swam toward the rock where the submarine had once been docked. Unpredictably, the sub had disappeared entirely, and now only an odd small-size battery with three buttons on it remained. Sea Breeze’s mind started clearing up then, and he realized that at the time when he was being blasted into the ocean, the sub had been shrinking and taking on a whole new form. Reassured, he stored the thing in his belt pocket. While still thinking about what to do next, he saw strange-looking creatures advancing toward him. They were scaly like a fish and the combination of coral and seaweed for skin all in a humanoid form indescribably ugly, and looked more powerful than the serpent he had encountered when he’d first started this journey. Suddenly, he felt the battery hum. He pulled it out, thinking to himself, this thing is trying to tell me something.

As if he’d known what to do all along, he pressed the middle button, and in an instant, it changed into a gun. Sea Breeze had no idea what was going on, but if that strange battery wanted him to use some type of gun to fight strange and terrible creatures, then he was ready to bring the pain.

He swam next to the rock and said, “Hey! You guys looking for a fight? If so, I’m going to bring it to you.”

The creatures were astounded and stared at him with stupefied looks on their faces. After five seconds, he started clashing with the creatures. He did not know it at the time, but the gun was a self-pressurizing water gun. He found that out very quickly when he first used the weapon. The moment he pressed the trigger, he felt the water around him flowing into the gun, and when the weapon was pointed at the creatures, he felt the pressure of the liquid that had been absorbed into the gun being turned into a bright blue water blast.

As he collided with the scummy creatures, he realized that his weapon was not going to be useful for much longer. Somehow, the water gun could sense that he needed some other type of armament and, out of nowhere; it transformed itself again into a long metal rod with a humming, glowing blue aura around it. This was a special staff because it was capable of slicing throats as well as creating powerful waves that could take down more creatures. However, it seemed that not all of these features were good enough, because more creatures appeared. Sea Breeze realized that he would not be Able to fight these creatures with just an armament.

Then, out of nowhere, the slicer turned back into that odd battery. The third button was humming, and suddenly he knew what to do again—he flung it into the deep, dark blue sea in front of the creatures. He felt something closing around him, and he realized that he was wearing armor. The remaining creatures looked on in a terrified state, but Sea Breeze wanted to see what this bad boy could do. As if on cue, the armor took action. All he needed was to think of what he wanted, and the ocean did the rest. He was able to drown the first two creatures, but the last one was going to need special destroying.

“I think it’s time for some bigger backup,” he said to himself, or maybe to the armor. He quickly thought of the battery and the armor shrunk back into it. He pressed the first button and as he threw it again, it enlarged back into his brand-spanking-new sub. The hatch unlocked. Sea Breeze jumped into the sub and landed himself in the captain’s seat. With that, he found that the console was ready to be used for battle.

It didn’t take long at all. Once the creatures had been finished off, he was traveling through the sea in his sub when he encountered something mystical, puzzling, and downright unexplainable. A bright glowing blue-green path appeared in front of the sub. Although Sea Breeze could not see it well, it seemed that the gem that was powering the sub was able to follow such otherworldly light. The pathway led him to the remains of an older temple; the sub stopped in front of its door. While he was thinking how to get in, all of a sudden, he felt the sub begin to shrink again. He was blasted out of the sub like before and once again saw the strange battery hovering in the ocean. He swam to it, grabbed it, and put it back in his belt. He then swam to the rusty temple’s locked door—the keyhole looked to be in the shape of the battery. Carefully, he placed his new tool inside it.

The lock shimmered blue, and after a while, the door opened. He walked in through the corridors; the only light he saw was coming from the flashlight he had created from his little battery, an ever-useful tool. As he searched the area, he wondered how old the place was. Sea Breeze checked every room to see if he could find any clues as to why the sub had brought him there. Suddenly, he came to a stop in front of a wall—something had caught his eye, some type of symbol. As he got closer, he saw that it was the symbol for the element of water. The flashlight transformed in his hands into a smaller version of what he was looking at on the wall.

As he placed the shape inside the engraving on the wall, a light blue liquid floated onto the outline of the symbol until the whole thing was shining with light. The wall crumbled, leaving behind the symbol, which floated away from Sea Breeze on unseen water current. When he approached, it shrunk back into a flashlight and he continued.

He came to a room that had a stone table. It had ancient writing and pictures engraved throughout—there was seashells etched in the stone along with the ancient script. Sea Breeze’s attention was diverted to something behind this stone table. He walked around it to get a better look, and his curiosity paid off—looking closer, he saw another carving. There was an image in the center that looked to be some type of canvas. He thought it might act as a sundial, but something was missing.

He put a hand in his pocket, took out the battery gadget, and pressed the middle button. It immediately turned into the tool that Sea Breeze needed. As he placed it on the canvas, he felt a gush of “sea breeze,” an ocean current blowing through the room. When he looked down from the table, he saw that the canvas was shining—not blue, but different colors this time: red, green, brown, and silver. All the engraved pictures were glowing as well, revealing that inside the seashells were the symbols of each Guardian’s element—all except water. He observed the canvas, turning and matching the pictures with their proper section of script. When he felt the final click of the sundial located in the center of the beautiful stone table, Sea Breeze watched as it crumbled into the floor. At the same time, the tool flew back to him from the deep hole where the table had been in the form of the battery—a new button had been added on, and it was glowing. When he pressed it, the tool transformed back into the gem that he had found back when he started this quest. Sea Breeze watched as it floated down into the giant hole. He could sense that it was waiting for him to follow it down, so he did.

When he got down there, the gem illuminated the whole space with blue light. What he saw was incredible. A sculpture of a warrior wore shining armor and held a sword that was wrapped in a sheath. The gem was glowing even brighter now, which meant that Sea Breeze had found what he was looking for. The sword itself seemed to be gray, as if someone had taken away its color. It also looked to be wedged in the statue rather securely.

I might need some help to remove this sword from this statue, thought Sea Breeze. He called for his animal guardian. In a matter of seconds, his great white shark had arrived. Sea Breeze explained to the animal what he had to do. Fortunately, his shark had brought friends: a hammerhead shark, a dolphin, a manta ray, and a stingray. Sea Breeze instructed the animal’s of their individual tasks. The hammerhead and the great white slowly and carefully chewed off bits of the rock as the stingray and the manta used their tails to loosen the hilt. In a couple of minutes, the sword was free from the statue. The sea animals laid the weapon down on the seafloor. As Sea Breeze watched, the gem turned into light blue glowing energy, and then disappeared into the sword, giving it its original color back. As the sword finished absorbing the gem’s energy, it started humming with power. Sea Breeze was unsure what to do, but his sea animals encouraged him to take it, for he had earned it. After all, he had come all this way to retrieve it. When he took possession of the sword, he felt the power of the ocean pulsing from within it.

Feeling reassured, Sea Breeze and his ocean creatures knew it was time to start their journey back home. The hardest part of their mission was yet to come.