Ran, Ocean Goddess

Norsemen against the sea: caked white with salt rime and crusts of northern spray, frozen into crackling coats of armor, driving their Viking longships, their nameless U-boats, their arcane dirigible sky-machines against darkness, against Ran, who rules the regions of watery sleep.

Ran, Teutonic goddess whose name means theft, Ran, sleek with oceanic shadows, swings her net skyward and hauls down, drowns the intruders from the regions of the sun, capturing paltry human treasures.

Iron decays in the halls of rust. Woods crumbles in the beds of rot. Sails shred and scatter. Keels crumple like ribbon. Brass cannon and human bones tumble in the subaqueous murkland deeps. Gold, here, is mere glittering gravel. Pharmaceutical white gold dissolves instantly like salt or snowflakes.

Ran wears a fringe of shimmering kelp and phantom plankton sheathes more precious than any silks. She breathes black swirls of tentacle ink. Jewels are trash compared to her living beads of sea foam. Platinum is no better than coal, soft and useless where no sunlight can make it shine. Uranium ore - unrefined - has barely a glow.

Heavy water congeals around the goddess as a luminous cape, bending gravity. When Ran reaches from the waves, trammels man, tangles science, when Ran steals the living from the sun, she needs no temptress siren song or golden Lorelei locks. Her hair, a black glimmering swirl, makes men bone-weak with desire. She merely reaches out a naked arm and drags Northmen to her breast with strong beautiful hands.

In her realm, there is no line between sky and sea. Water evaporates and rises. Water condenses and falls as freezing rain, coating the bomb-heavy zeppelins with glittering armor, burdening them with tons of sky-ice, dragging them downward to Ran’s arms, drowning in hydrogen flames and North Sea shadow tide.