BLURB:
The King of the Earthly Kingdom is dying. The man who would take the throne must produce a treasure greater than any other which the young fisherman, Metuaro, thinks definitely leaves him out. But an ancient legend told to his father puts him in the running. First, however, he must visit the lair of a tentacled monster, the lonely guardian of an ancient treasure, who has long loved Metuaro from afar. Submitting to the creature's perverse desires will win the fisherman riches beyond his dreams but can Metuaro bring himself to submit?
EXCERPT:
Metuaro laughed at his friend’s comeback. His first sexual exploration had been with Tai when they were boys and, even now, they would still sometimes play with each other in a laughing, half-mocking way. Nowadays, they never went as far as they’d gone when they were younger. Tai was always the first to pull back and Metuaro never chided him for this nor complained. He swallowed his disappointment and acted as if it didn’t hurt.
Metuaro didn’t understand his feelings and wondered if they were the result of the shyness he sensed in himself. He’d known Tai since they were both little boys. He was more comfortable with him than with almost anyone else on the island, including his own family. He knew Tai felt the same way but it was Tai who’d first turned his attention to girls. And it was Tai, again, who was the first of them to get married.
Both of Metuaro’s parents constantly nagged him about taking a wife, and his sisters teased him unmercifully over his single status. Was he waiting for Hina, the legendary beauty over whom a long and terrible war had been fought in ancient times, to descend from her present home on the moon and consent to be his bride, his sisters wanted to know. Metuaro laughed along with everybody else. What else could he do? The truth was that he didn’t know, himself. Sometimes he wondered if he kept busy every minute of his waking day because he didn’t like where his thoughts led him in his quiet moments. At those times he’d think that he was waiting but he didn’t know for what. Not for Hina, of course. Metuaro knew he was good-looking, taller than most of the other men on the island, his muscles, lean and sinewy, his stomach, flat and hard. Enough girls had told him how they loved his sparkling brown eyes with their long soft lashes and his perfectly-formed lips, but Metuaro knew he’d be foolish to think his looks alone could tempt Hina down from the moon where she’d retreated after the death of her lover. In any case, he didn’t think it was Hina he was waiting on.
For years now, he’d been having the strangest dream. At first, it hadn’t been very detailed. He was in the sea, in some dark underwater cave, and there was something in the cave with him, something that wasn’t human. He could feel it but he could never see it. All he could see was a single, glistening object, gleaming with pale beauty on the sandy floor of the cave. A Tear of the Moon. But, not just any Tear of the Moon, this was the biggest he’d ever seen, as big as a young coconut but perfectly round. Every time he went to pick it up the dream would end and he’d wake, puzzled and confused.
Then, in the last couple of months, the dream had become more and more detailed and explicit. Longer, too, until in his last dream, his hand had just closed around the Tear’s smoothness when the darkness in the cave cleared and, suddenly, he could see the huge and hideous presence that was in the cave with him. As big as a small mountain, many-eyed and multi-tentacled, the monstrous creature looked like some sort of huge black octopus. Metuaro had gibbered in fright at the shock and whirled to run but then the tentacles had shot out to grip his wrists and ankles.
“The Tear and much more can be yours,” a rumbling voice said inside his head. “For a price.”
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