Revenge Tastes Sweetest When Found At The Bottom Of The Mariana Trench: The Hunt for the Many-Winged Amethyst Reverie

The Mariana Trench. Devourer of explorers, keeper of secrets, enigma of the sea. The riddle that cannot be answered - and yet, we keep trying.

This is my last chance, my last attempt at finding the creature that will make my name. I refuse to be the first Marine Folklorist to never discover  a new species since the infamous Araminta Eyebright. Eccentric to some, an inconvenience to others. But to me? She was my mentor and the person I admired above all others.

Araminta went missing exactly 50 years ago, lost to the depths of the Mariana Trench. She was searching for a creature that no-one else believed existed: the Many-Winged Amethyst Reverie. I remember the way her eyes would sparkle with excitement whenever she described it to me: an enormous creature with diaphanous, amethyst-coloured fins, soft and fluttering in the way of angel’s wings. Ivory and silver patterns scattered like a handful of moon-dust across its back.

Figure 1 - 'A Many-Winged Amethyst Reverie' by Araminta Eyebright.

It was a gentle giant, she said, unlike so many of the deep-sea creatures that seized and grabbed and killed without remorse. She couldn’t wait to explore the depths of the Mariana Trench, to find the Reverie and prove its existence to the Marine Folklorist’s Cabinet. It was going to make her name; it was going to make her life complete.

But she never returned. I waited months and months for her to come back, hanging aimlessly around her London apartment like a Ghost-Of-The-Ruins fish. The Cabinet’s hatred for Araminta was already thinly-veiled; now she was gone, they let their true feelings out. They wrote obsessively about her legacy (or lack of) in the papers, scathing accounts from ‘the people who really knew her’ (though they never asked me, of course), obituaries full of scorn, and put advertisements in for a house sale as soon as they were sure she wouldn’t be back to haunt them.

Or so they thought. Araminta might not be back, but I am.

That was all a long time ago. It’s fitting, I suppose, that I find myself on the S.S Falmouth’s most recent expedition to the very place that swallowed her. I’m older now than she was when she embarked on that fateful expedition 50 years ago – and she wasn’t young when she went. So, it’s my last chance, the Cabinet tell me, to finally make myself useful, to make myself into something other than another one of Araminta’s failed spawn. The Marine Folklorist’s Cabinet have always been cruel and discriminating, but there is no other organisation left for Marine Folklorists like me. It’s fallen so out of fashion that the younger members of the crew have never even heard of Marine Folklore. They must think I’m a real old crone huddled here in my corner of the submarine, my hair bleached white like washed-out coral. Not that I’m a stranger to prejudice; whenever you go on these types of expeditions as a Marine Folklorist, you must prepare for every other faculty aboard the ship to snub you. They’ll call your profession child’s play, the type of research that involves ‘searching for phantoms, creatures that are made to entertain children and nothing more,’ to quote one engineer I had the misfortune to travel with.

None of that will matter when I find the Many-Winged Amethyst Reverie. And I will – watch this space.

I’ve created a new ‘about’ page for Araminta on the Marine Folklorist Cabinet’s website – no-one should be talked about the way she was – and I’d really appreciate you taking the time to visit it at: https://marinefolkloristscabinet.ac.uk/about/members/ARAMINTA EYEBRIGHT/. Thank you.