The truth is I’m a bit worn out trying to make sense of the insanity we’re living through—climate change ignored, history rewritten in broad daylight. Today I’m taking a break from fact-checked journalism and tipping my hat to Homer, Dante, Tolkien, and Orwell. Every age invents monsters to explain its fears—sometimes squids, sometimes unicorns, sometimes sirens calling to sailors from the deep.
The monsters today are men in suits, gilded by pleasure derived from cruelty and greed. The following is fiction. Perhaps.
The first thing anyone remembered was the light. Not dawn’s light, but a glare sharp as shattered glass, a golden blaze that struck roofs and set ponds on fire. Cattle startled in their pens. A shepherd shaded his eyes, muttering, “Not natural, that glow.” He was right. The light came from the mane of the Chimera, striding out of rumor into flesh. His mane looked like spun straw, his voice rough as gravel under tires. He adored gold’s gleam, surrounding himself with gilt as though shine alone could prove power. He admired cruelty, calling it strength, and stripped the weak to display spoils before the rich. What he stole he paraded as triumph, and they applauded. Each lie he spoke returned in chorus until repetition polished it into truth.
It was an illusion. We chose to believe it.
Long ago, sailors swore the sea itself rose against them. One frigid night a lookout clutched the mast, his fingers raw, and shouted from the crow’s nest: “Arms! God help us, arms!” Men scrambled from hammocks, boots half-laced, crucifixes clutched, salt freezing in their beards. They swore the ship shuddered as white coils thicker than tree trunks broke the surface. A deckhand fell to his knees, whispering a prayer too fast to hear. Another dropped his rope, mumbling, “The Kraken.”
Back in port, the story spilled into taverns. The lookout’s voice grew hoarser in every retelling, the coils grew longer, the sea more vengeful. By the third telling, the Kraken could devour a fleet. Generations later, a Danish professor placed a squid’s beak on a table, black and sharp, wide as a handspan—strange, yes, but smaller than legend.