Song of the Deep Read online

  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].

  www.sterlingpublishing.com

  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

  Map

  Praise for the Game

  Letter from the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  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

  The 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 k
eep 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 to
morrow, 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.

  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.

  2

  THE CANDLE AT THE CLIFF

  When I wake up, my father is already gone. I look out the window to see the sky is dark with rain clouds. It’s going to be even worse weather than yesterday.

  There’s a slice of bread with honey waiting for me on the table. The honey is drizzled in the shape of a dandelion. As I eat, I remember the clam shovel. Even if there are no fish today, I can still surprise my father with a whole plate of clams.

  I put on my coat, grab a bucket, and head down the cliff steps. The winds are stronger today. I have to wait for a pause in the gusts before I attempt to jump the gap. When I get to the bottom, I look out at the dock. Even Fergus isn’t out today. Maybe he was angry that there were no fish yesterday and went off to hunt for himself.

  The storm clouds are looking darker already. I grab the clam shovel and set out along the shore. The tide is still out, so I’ve got a wide stretch of sand to search. I walk close to the waterline, looking for the tiny telltale holes. I find a pair of them right away. Putting all my weight on the shovel, I drive the blade into the sand. I lean on the handle to pull it up, and out pops my first razor clam. It’s a big one, too, even longer than my hand. I put it in the bucket and keep going.

  I’ve got five more clams in the bucket when I feel the first drops of rain in my hair. Seconds later, it’s coming down in huge gusting sheets. I can’t stop now. If I wait for the storm to end the tide will come in and I’ll miss my chance. I run from hole to hole, scooping up clams. My hair is soaked all the way through by the time the bucket is half full, but it’s more than enough for a good meal.