Song of the Deep
Authors: Brian Hastings
STERLING
CHILDREN’S BOOKS and the distinctive Sterling Children’s Books logo are
trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
© 2016 by
Insomniac Games, Inc.
All rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written
permission from the publisher.
ISBN
978-1-4549-2145-5
For information
about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases,
please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or
[email protected]
.
Text by Brian
Hastings
Illustrations by
Alexis Seabrook
Images on title
page, dedication page, pages 13, 34–35, 41, 42–43,
92–93, and 168
provided by Insomniac Games, Inc.
Interior design
by Lorie Pagnozzi
PRAISE FOR THE
SONG
OF THE DEEP
VIDEO GAME:
“It is a grand adventure featuring
colorful characters and unreal settings, much like those past favorites. But
the team isn’t starting with a blank slate. This is a game that builds its
fantasy amidst the familiar: denizens of the ocean floor.”
—
Mashable
“Whatever the true nature of that magic,
Insomniac has visually captured it with
Song of the Deep
.”
—
Gamespot
“
Song of the Deep
looks to be the
beginning of something special for Insomniac.”
—
Shack News
CONTENTS
FOR FIONA THE ARTIST
AND PATRICK THE ARCHITECT
LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR
When I first started thinking about the story for
Song of the
Deep
, I wanted to create a hero for my daughter to look up to. I had
noticed that when she told me about the female characters she liked in movies,
she would almost always start by saying how pretty they were. Being pretty had
even become a big part of her own identity. She tended to receive more
compliments on her appearance than for being artistic, kind, funny, smart, or
hardworking. I wanted to make a story for her where the main character was
heroic and memorable only because of her inner qualities. And that’s how Merryn
first came to be.
For me, writing this book was a journey in itself. As a child I
had always wanted to be an author. After college I got a job programming video
games, and for twenty-one years I’ve been lucky enough to help create worlds
and characters that are loved by millions of people. Over time I had forgotten
my dreams of being an author. So when the opportunity came to write a book in
conjunction with our latest game, it was both exciting and terrifying. I had
written game stories before, but the idea of writing an actual novel now seemed
impossibly daunting.
In the end, it was an incredible experience. It forced me to think
about the things I value most and the kind of person I want to be. I even got a
little emotional as I wrote the final chapters. Merryn is a character I didn’t
want to say goodbye to. I hope her journey is one that you will enjoy and
remember as well.
—BRIAN HASTINGS
1
SONGS AND SECRETS
T
he first
light of morning is seeping through my seashell curtains. I look down at the
waves below my window. Today will be the day.
I hurry out of bed and throw on an old striped shirt and shorts.
Pulling on my orange felt boots, I see my toes peeking through the ends. I’ll
have to remember to sew them up tonight. It’s windy out there, so I put on my
big blue jacket with the shiny gold buttons. One last thing: my sailor’s hat.
Etched on the front is an upside-down anchor that looks like the letter
M
.
There’s no way he can say
no
today.
I hurry into the kitchen. My father gives me a smile as he hands
me a slice of bread with honey. He knows the game we’re about to play.
“Good morning, Dandelion.”
“Morning, Daddy!” The bread tastes delicious. I can see he’s
eating his own slice plain, so I offer a bite of mine. He takes a step back,
pretending to be afraid of it.
“We sailors can’t touch sweets. It attracts the sea monsters, you
know.”
I keep eating. “Did you notice the holes in your nets are all
fixed?”
“I saw that. Must have been sea pixies. I think I heard them
rustling about last night.”
“And remember how the rudder kept sticking to the left?”
“I do.”
“Not anymore.”
“Really?”
I smile. He has to say
yes
today.
“How are you learning all this?” he asks.
“Library books,” I answer. He raises an eyebrow at me. “And the
sea pixies help sometimes . . . mostly they’re pretty lazy, though.”
“Well, it
is
summer. Maybe they need to take a break and
enjoy themselves,” he replies. But I’m not going to give up that easily.
“Please, can I come out with you today?”
“Merryn, the sea is dangerous enough for someone as big as me.
It’s cold and it’s windy and there are waves taller than our house. It’s not
safe for you to be out there.”
“Maybe I’ll bring you luck. You might catch twice as many fish
with me there.”
He looks down for a moment, and suddenly I feel bad. I know it’s
been a slow month, and there seem to be fewer and fewer fish each day. I change
the subject.
“Have you seen the garden?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen tomatoes so big.”
“Be careful out there today,” I say. I give him a hug and then
wave good-bye as he heads out the door and down the steps toward the shore.
Our house sits at the edge of a cliff, one hundred feet above the
sea. Winding rocky steps lead down to a patch of sand where my father docks his
small wooden fishing boat. We have a beautiful view of the sea to the west; on
a clear day I can see tiny islands in the far distance. Behind our house are
two acres of green garden where I can plant anything I want. Beyond the garden
is an old dirt road that leads out toward town, but there’s never anyone on it.
The nearest house is more than a mile away, and no people come out to our road
unless they’re lost.
I walk outside toward the cliff
edge. Down below I see my father’s boat heading out into the sea. I pick up a
rock and toss it gently down toward the waves below. My friend Bree and I used
to sit and talk for hours at the edge of this cliff. We’d both throw rocks and
watch which one made the farthest splash. We’d tell each other stories about
pirates and hidden treasure. We’d hunt for frogs in the tall grass. Those
summers seemed to go on for ages. I pick up another stone and roll it over in
my hand. Bree has a lot of friends in town now, so she doesn’t come out here as
often.
I throw the stone as far as I can and watch it fall down, down,
down until it disappears into the foam of a wave.
Turning around, I look out at the garden. It really does look beautiful.
Row after row of leafy plants is decorated with big red and green tomatoes. The
potatoes, turnips, and carrots all look healthy too. I start gathering up the
soil around each potato plant to form tiny hills around the stems, so I’ll have
more potatoes by the end of the summer. When we get dry spells, I sometimes
have to make the trip down the dirt road to the well twenty times per day just
to keep the garden alive. But we’ve been getting rain the last two weeks, so
today the soil is moist and everything is looking healthy. I gather up a
handful of carrots and turnips and three of the biggest tomatoes to take back
to the house.
I leave the vegetables on the table and walk back out to the
cliffs to the north. The rocky steps are still slick from last night’s rain.
I’m extra careful today, because I scraped my knee on the steps yesterday, and
my father doesn’t want me using the steps at all. They’re pretty steep and
uneven, and there’s no railing, so if you do lose your balance, you could fall
all the way down to the rocks along the shore. I know all the broken steps and
loose rocks by heart, so I’m not in any real danger. There’s just one tricky
part: I have to jump over a five-foot gap where the steps got washed out during
a storm.
The gap proves to be a little
trickier than usual today. The wind coming off the sea is blowing hard, and I
need to jump straight into it to clear the gap. I take a tiny running start and
push off from the very edge of the gap. My boots slide a little bit on the
landing, but I clear the gap with room to spare. The rest of the way down is
pretty easy. I lean close to the wall on the long straightaway where the stairs
narrow down to a single boot’s width. Rounding the last turn, I quicken my pace
and hurry down over the jumble of boulders at the base of the stairs.
A huge white pelican sits on the edge of our dock. He looks over
at me as I walk past, lifting up his wings as if he’s going to fly away.
“It’s just me, Fergus. You see me every single day.”
He settles his wings back down
and looks back out at the sea. My father always throws him a fish when he gets
home—when he’s caught one, that is.
The tide is in now, so there’s only a narrow path of sand between
the rocks and the water as I walk over to the work shed. It’s not really a shed
so much as a little wooden roof that covers the tools and the supplies we use
for repairing the boat. It’s also where I keep all the treasures that my father
brings home from the sea.
His nets catch all sorts of metal scraps and driftwood. Sometimes
he brings home truly bizarre objects I’ve never seen before. He makes up
stories about them, telling me how they were part of a forgotten world deep
beneath the waves. Once he brought back a golden claw arm connected to a
tangled mess of gears. It looked like somebody’s weird failed invention. My
father said it was part of a gem harvester that collected the precious jewels
from the darkest sea caves and brought them to a hidden city of gold under the
sea.
I’ve kept every treasure he has ever brought back. There are piles
of metal and wood scraps and the remains of mysterious machines lined along the
rock wall behind the shed. Sometimes I try to fix the old machines and figure
out what they were used for. Today I don’t need anything fancy. I’m working on a
present as a surprise for my father.
It’s a clam shovel, and it’s almost done. It took a while to find
a sturdy piece of wood that was just the right size. Now I just need to finish
shaping the metal blade. If I had a way to heat the metal up, my work would be
a lot easier, but I’m still making steady progress. I hammer the metal blade
into a nice long groove. It’s a little longer than my forearm, so it should be
deep enough to reach the razor clams. I wedge the shovel blade into the wood
and bolt it into place. I’ll give it to him tomorrow morning.
It’s starting to rain a little bit. I look back over at Fergus.
“See you tomorrow, lazy bird.” He just turns away and looks back
toward the sea, waiting for my father. It’s starting to get dark as I make my
way back up the cliff steps. I have the wind at my back as I jump the gap. Two
feet to spare, easily.
Only the top of the sun is
visible above the horizon. I get the candle from my room and light it. When my
father is out past dark, I like to hold a candle up for him at the cliff edge
to guide him home. I stand and watch for the lantern on his boat to come toward
me, and he watches for the tiny light above the cliffs. I put the glass shield
around the candle and walk out to the cliffs, watching the lights of the boats
below.
My father’s boat is one of the smallest ones out there, with only
a single lantern. I scan the sea for a single bobbing light and at last I see
it. I wave my candle back and forth, and my father waves the lantern in return.
I follow the light as it gets closer and closer to the shore and finally
disappears behind the cliff edge.
Back inside, I start chopping up vegetables for a fish stew. I
hear the wind howling outside and listen for my father’s heavy steps up the
cliff stairs. When he comes in his head is low, and I see his bag is empty.
Sometimes on the windy days the fish are hard to catch.
“I was thinking of seashell soup, tonight. What do you think?” My
smile seems to make him feel a little better, but he knows that seashell soup
is something I make when there’s nothing else to cook.
“That does sound tasty. Here, let me help.” He takes the knife and
starts chopping up the turnips. He won’t admit it, but I can tell he doesn’t
like me using the sharp knives. I’ve known how to clean a fish since I was
eight years old, but he still insists on doing it himself. I take one of the
duller knives and start chopping up the carrots.
When the vegetables are cut, I add in some rosemary and thyme from
the garden and a few colorful seashells and stir it up. We sit down at the
table, each with our own bowl of seashell soup.
“It’s like my own secret tide pool,” I say, stirring up my soup
and watching the seashells swirl around.
“Tastiest tide pool I’ve ever
had. Must be something magic in your seasonings.” He picks up one of the orange
seashells with a spoon and holds it up as if he’s thinking about something. I
notice there’s sadness in his eyes, and then I remember that it’s June. He
always gets a little sad at the start of summer. June is the month that my
mother died.
It was seven years ago. I was only five years old when it
happened. When I try to remember that day I can only see tiny fragments of it.
I remember rowing out into the waves with her. I remember the sun shining in
her dark hair. Everything else is just blank.
We finish our soup. I try to think of something to cheer up my
father.
“Any sea monsters out there today?”
“Huge ones. Queen leviathans. Where do you think all those waves
were coming from?”
“Good thing you didn’t eat that honey.”
“That’s true. I saw three other boats get swallowed whole.
Probably had marmalade aboard. Leviathans can’t get enough marmalade.”
“Speaking of leviathans, you haven’t sung me a lullaby in a long
time.”
“Aren’t you tired of hearing them?”
“Never.”
He used to sing me lullabies every night. They were originally my
mother’s songs that she sang to me when I was a baby. I think she learned them
from her own parents. The songs sound very old somehow, like they’re from a
different time. I don’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice, but my
father’s voice is deep and gravelly. Even so, there’s a strange kind of beauty
about the way he sings. When his voice catches on some of the notes, I know
he’s thinking about my mother.
As I’m getting ready for bed I start thinking about how each of
the songs tells a story. When I was younger I actually believed they were all
true. The ancient explorers who conquered the sea and created underwater
cities. The city of gold hidden at the bottom of the sea. The giant sea
monsters that would snatch boats and leave their broken remains in a watery
mountain of wreckage. Most of all I loved the stories of the brave merrow men
and merrow maidens, half fish and half human, who defended the sea from those
who stole its treasures.
I can’t remember when I stopped believing in all of it. There was
no single moment when I realized it was imaginary. Over time I just grew up,
and I knew. But sometimes, like tonight, I wish I could still believe there was
an undiscovered world of secrets out there. I wish I could listen to my
father’s songs and dream of exploring the unknown.
My father tucks me in and pulls up a chair by the side of my bed.
“Got to get an early start tomorrow, try to beat the winds.”
“Just one song?”
“Hmmm . . . let’s see. You might need to help me if I forget the
words.” He starts to hum a tune to himself to remember how it goes. Then he
begins.
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My father’s voice is echoing and distant. For a moment I feel that
I am there, in that strange undersea world . . . and then I am asleep.
