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“As the Quill, you shall choose four champions,” the gods explained. “They will represent your people at the Granting. Mark them with the Ink. Once a champion is chosen, their Ink cannot be removed except by their choice or their death. Choose carefully, as the fate of your people will depend upon these four.”
And though he couldn’t remember doing it and would have never made such a pathetic, supplicating gesture of his own accord, an inkwell of gold and a phoenix’s feather nonetheless appeared in the cupped hands of King Mudt. He snorted and glanced from side to side, observing how each of his fellow power brokers had been bestowed a similar quill. Mudt’s lips curled back at the awestruck expression on the quivering King of Infinzel. He sneered at the pyramid shape that had appeared on King Hectore’s neck. King Mudt wanted nothing more than an opportunity to carve that Ink from his rival’s throat, a siege in miniature to satisfy him until the larger one was completed.
Mudt puffed out his chest and turned to the gods. “I am king of my people because my sword arm is strongest. I have washed my hands in the blood of my enemies and rested my ass upon a throne of their bones,” he declared. “None shall fight in my stead.”
“You may take the Ink yourself,” the gods replied. “Should you die, the people of Orvesis shall choose another to wield the Quill.”
King Mudt snorted at the notion of his own death. At his throat, he had already been marked with the flying blackbird of Orvesis. Without hesitation, he dipped his quill in the pitch black Ink and touched the tip to the hollow in his neck beneath the bird’s tail feathers.
Thus, he found himself in the presence of the worm.
--Record of the First Granting and Dawning of the Second Age
Lyus Crodd, Scribe of the Dead Kingdom of Orvesis
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--DRAMATIS PERSONAE—
Red Tide, an oca’em woman of no renown but significant infamy, The Reef, imprisoned
Turtle Jaw, Quill of The Reef, her warden
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4 New Summer, 61 AW
The Grotto, Central Sea
296 days until the next Granting.
There were ways to drown a man that wouldn’t cause the gods to intervene. Red Tide had discovered them herself.
The harp never failed her.
The sailors of Merchant’s Bay passed down tales of the oca'em. Stories about how, if you heard an oca'em playing the harp and tracked her down, she would grant your heart's desire. It was said that some of the high families of Merchant’s Bay had risen to their present station because they’d followed the music to fortune. In the age of wishes, that didn’t seem so implausible. However, in Red Tide’s experience, there weren’t many sailors on the water with grand designs on power.
Most of them just wanted to fuck.
Red Tide assumed that was how the other legends about her people spread. Salacious dockside tavern tales that told how an oca’em only strummed the harp when they were in heat. The music was part invitation and part challenge. The story went that if you could please an oca'em carnally, the reward was a sapphire the size of a lusty sailor's member.
Red Tide wondered how her people had developed such a reputation for generosity. Perhaps, it was because the land-walkers had taken so much from them, and so the dirty little fables soothed their conscience. They could tell themselves that they'd earned the spoils of the ocean with their fast wooden boats and perky little cocks.
Although she was only twenty-three years old, Red Tide knew her history as well as she did the silly land-walkers legends. She knew that the Reef was once four times the size as it was now, with glittering palaces of coral that rose from the ocean’s depths and plunged deep below the surface. She knew that the oca’em had once controlled the sea, aided by their pet leviathans, and that no ship dared travel the waters without permission from the Queen of the Coralline Throne.
But then the fourteen families of Merchant’s Bay and their accomplices had wished that all away.
There were still remnants of the old coral cities floating disconnected from what remained of the Reef. Grasping pillars of salt-hardened sponge, tangles of coral like brambles, embedded with the razor sharp teeth of the extinct leviathans. These fractured reefs were crystalline blue, like the water, virtually impossible to see with land-walker eyes.
Red Tide knew just where to find the most hazardous of these places.
So, because of the stories, the harp worked almost every time. Red Tide would float on her back with the instrument rested across her midsection, breasts just above the surface. She would stroke the strings with her long, sharp fingers. Her shiny gray skin shimmered as she rode the waves, the white patch over her right eye giving the impression that she was perpetually winking. When she played the harp, she wore her black hair loose and spread out and impractical rather than gathered in braids and beaded, because that was how the sailors liked it. Red Tide could play for hours. She made nice music, it turned out. A natural talent. She'd float just a bit off course along one of the Merchant Bay’s shipping currents, those favorable tides that the merchants had wished into existence. They never considered what consequences altering the movement of the ocean might have. But, it was that lack of consideration for consequences that provided Red Tide her advantage.
Red Tide could always feel when a spyglass picked her out. A prickliness went through her and, knowing she was being watched, she made sure to writhe with the music, as if her plucking had stirred something deep within her. The crew would pass around the spyglass and have an ogle. If they had an old salt on board, or a sensible woman with some authority, they would maintain course, enjoying the view without taking the bait. There were those amongst the fourteen merchant families who had heard of Red Tide's tricks and were wise enough to stay away.
But another boat filled with dumber land-walkers always turned up eventually.
Most often, they'd drop anchor and send out a dinghy with a handful of sailors meant to check on her. They hailed her with shouts, admiring her music, complimenting her markings, asking where she hid the sapphires. She never encouraged them, just kept on with her playing.
It had to be their decision to row their boat into the tangle of coral. The sailors had to choose to crack their hulls against the sharpened sea glass. They had to slip overboard via their own clumsy eagerness. They had to choose to dive in after their companions, or swim back for their home ship, only to be snagged by the hooks of coral.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Red Tide just had to keep on playing and ignore them. The gods made it impossible to kill, but they did not compel assistance.
She had watched a few dozen men cut to ribbons in the coral. Red Tide liked to sink down with them, as the blood from their wounds blossomed free like jellyfish. She swam next to them and watched, flaring her gills to breathe. Some tried to cling to her. She could see the fear in their eyes, the way they opened their mouths to the ocean in an attempt to plead with her.
Red Tide learned from experience not to let them touch her. If she was forced to shrug off a drowning sailor, then suddenly they could breathe in the water as easily as she did. The gods intervened and they would be saved to warn their companions.
It was a delicate thing, maneuvering around the gods. Red Tide had no illusions that her trickery would do any lasting damage to the merchant families. But she was young, and bored, and without a pod. These games were an amusing way to pass the time.
At least until Captain Juseph Grice-Russi came upon her playing the harp.
Red Tide would learn later that Juseph was a conducti between two of the merchant families. She didn’t care about the politics of the fourteen families or their stupid system of arranged marriages. The land-walkers of Merchant’s Bay were all the same to her. Thieves and despoilers. But this Juseph, he was particularly important as a genealogical bridge between two of the families and also particularly stupid. A dandy and a show-off. He hadn’t sent out one of the lifeboats to capture Red Tide. He’d steered his entire gellezza into her trap. A multilevel trading vessel with a crew of sixty-eight. Red Tide has balked at the size of the ship and swam away to avoid its bulk. She assumed the hidden coral would simply snap against the ship’s armored hull.
However, fate worked at odd angles. A few lances of coral penetrated between the plates of the ship’s hull. They speared into the hold. The damage wasn’t severe enough to sink the gellezza. An inconvenience, really. Under normal circumstances, the sailors could’ve spent a few hours bailing and patching, and the ship would’ve limped into port damaged and delayed, but mostly intact.
However, Juseph Grice-Russi had been entrusted with a load of chanic. The substance had been discovered in the Gen’bi desert a decade ago. A dark red and viscous sludge, some claimed that it was the blood of the ge’chan themselves, the gods of magic, spilled at the end of the Final War. The fourteen families of Merchant’s Bay were obsessed with the stuff.
Red Tide had no reason to know any of this. In fact, she only learned of chanic’s existence during her short and swift trial by the Queen of the Coralline Throne. It was highly unstable and required a warded compartment, which the coral lances had damaged. The chanic erupted in a column of fire, incinerating the ship and all aboard, and creating a blight of dark red magma atop the ocean. Red Tide’s back had been badly burned as she tried to swim away.
Red Tide did not regret the dead merchants. She would’ve drowned each of them with her own hands, if the gods allowed it. But she did regret leaving a scar upon the ocean. Although that, too, she blamed upon her enemies, who had extracted what wasn’t meant to be extracted and transported it across waters where they didn’t belong.
So, yes, Red Tide considered herself mostly innocent.
The Queen of the Coralline Throne disagreed. She was a fearful old woman who hadn’t been the queen when the Reef was first decimated, but who had risen into what was left of the oca’em’s power on a policy of appeasement. She was terribly worried what the merchants might do in retaliation.
“Fuck yourself,” had been Red Tide’s defense, “with the charred bones of merchant scum.”
She was declared guilty of murder and despoilment and endangerment of the Reef.
Her sentence was indefinite.
Thus, Red Tide found herself in a cavern cell of the Grotto prison. A lifeless island northeast of the Reef, nothing could survive atop the Grotto’s jagged surface. However, within the island was a honeycomb of tunnels, accessible by only one underwater entrance. The oca’em had used the blasted place as a prison for centuries.
By Red Tide’s best guess, she’d been stuck in this limestone cavern for almost a year. They kept her ankles shackled with a piece of metal that forced her feet apart, preventing her from hooking together the bones that protruded from the insides of every oca’em’s legs. Her people referred to the satisfying connection of those bones as ‘making the tail.’ Red Tide was fast and smooth in the water, but that knowledge provided little comfort. Her cell contained only a shallow bath, barely enough water to sink her ass into. She hadn’t been fully submerged since they’d stashed her here. Oca’em went mad in the Grotto, unable to swim, subsisting on mushrooms, kept apart from the other prisoners. Red Tide had only held it together by remembering the faces of the land-walkers she’d killed, and imagining the ones she’d get next.
And because the warden had taken an interest in her.
The rusted gate of her cell screeched against stone. Speak of the devil. Turtle Jaw ducked his head to enter. The warden of the Grotto was a big man, with square features and study shoulders. Although he was twice her age, Red Tide wouldn’t have minded if he’d ever decided to take advantage of his position. But that wasn’t really the thrust of Turtle Jaw’s interest. His oca’em name had vibrations of honor and nobility, unlike Red Tide whose oca’em naming song mostly invoked the way she’d ripped her way out of her mother. In the early days of her imprisonment, Turtle Jaw had begun taking the occasional meal in Red Tide’s cell and she got the impression that he was as bored with this assignment as she was with being here. After a year of that, she almost considered the warden her friend.
“Are you here to set me free at last?” Red Tide asked. “Ready to swim away together? Proper outlaws…?” She trailed off, tilting her head. She made similar jokes whenever Turtle Jaw showed up, but this time he’d come without food.
He carried something else instead.
“In a way, I am here for that,” Turtle Jaw said solemnly. “Yes.”
Red Tide stood up, the stone cool against her scarred back. "Clemency for me already, Turtle Jaw?"
"I'd hardly call it that, Red.”
“That’s what the queen says, isn’t it?”
“Do I look like the queen to you?”
Red Tide swallowed. She eyed the gold inkwell and its feather, held delicately in Turtle Jaw’s thick hands. Her stomach turned over. Was that excitement or dread?
“I'm here to make you the offer,” he said. “You know how it works?"
"I know other places see that gunk in your hands like an honor,” she replied. “Merchant land-walkers spend fortunes to get their pink sons and daughters a little color. Not how it works for us, though, is it?"
"Maybe back in the day. Before my time."
Red Tide rubbed a hand over her tight braids. “I didn’t even realize the year had changed.”
“Four days gone.”
“How many came back from the last one?”
"None came back. All killed."
"And the one before that?"
"All killed."
"And...?"
Turtle Jaw sighed. "We haven't had a survivor going on ten years, alright? And she got herself killed the year after."
Red Tide scoffed. “Some dumb bitch went back? I thought this was supposed to be a one-time deal.”
“She caught a case of patriotism,” Turtle Jaw said. “Thought she was going to restore the Reef’s dominion over the sea.”
“Yeah? That what you wished for?”
Turtle Jaw grimaced for a moment, but quickly made his expression neutral. “The Queen of the Coralline’s Throne’s instruction is that we wish only for a bountiful harvest.”
Red Tide gathered spit in her mouth with a sucking noise, then let it dribble out in a long string onto the cavern floor. “Dumbest shit I ever heard.”
“The Ministry of Sulk—”
“Who the fuck are they?”
Turtle Jaw rolled his eyes. “Knights from the southern continent. They say anyone who wishes for only a bountiful harvest fall under their protection and should be left alone by the great powers.”
“So how come we keep getting killed?”
“Because the merchants like to hunt us,” Turtle Jaw said flatly. “Because the queen agreed to only send our worst, so it’s no loss to the Reef when they don’t come back.”
“You wouldn’t consider me a loss, Turtle Jaw?”
The warden looked away. “I’ll miss your company either way. You don’t have to go.” He turned as if to leave. “There are others I’m supposed to ask…”
Red Tide hopped across the cavern as fast as her manacled legs could carry her. She stood in front of Turtle Jaw and lifted her chin, slapping the Ink symbol of a dolphin that marked her allegiance to the Reef. “Don’t be hasty now.”
“This is the offer, let me lay it out right,” Turtle Jaw intoned. “You will take the Ink and represent the Reef at the next Granting. If you survive, you will be given clemency for your crimes. If you want, you can remove the Ink then. However, you’ll probably be dead.”
“Probably isn’t definitely,” Red Tide said. “I accept.”
Turtle Jaw smiled. Red Tide could tell that he was happy she’d accepted, and not because he wanted to free up her cell. There were some out in the Reef who enjoyed the stories of Red Tide and her harp. She suspected Turtle Jaw might be one of them.
Turtle Jaw dipped his quill in the Ink and touched it lightly to Red Tide’s chest.
“You’re about to have a very strange experience,” he said.
She felt a whisper against her skin. The gods spoke to her through the Ink.
You have been chosen as a champion, Red Tide, the voice said. Do you desire a consultation with the symbologist?
“Huh?” she replied.
“Say yes,” Turtle Jaw said.
Red Tide grinned. Certain death or not, pretty soon she’d be free. Out in the water again. Once there, anything could happen.
“Fuck yes,” she declared.
And everything went black as Ink.
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