The Fall and Ascent of Ys

(excerpt from HGOB tie-in novel Ys to Babylon)

It was actually two murders that put Wellish Quimper right where he was that night, in a knee-flooded poor district of lower Ys, in Brittany, in the kingdom under the god Marimorgan. The first slaying was before his time, nearly one hundred years prior. Ninety-seven, all of the ninety-seven-year-olds in the city would point out.

There were quite a few of them, as it wasn’t hard to live that long in such a wealthy place, and with access to two lives you could combine at will, swapping years from one to the other. Inspector Quimper didn’t feel he had all that many years left in either of his bodies, so he filled them with drink instead, even while on the job.

Drowning his sorrows was nothing compared to what Marimorgan did to them every day; he drowned his creations instead. It wasn’t intentional, but Quimper didn’t think intent mattered much when a being was that powerful. Everything they felt had consequences for the world below, so even their emotions were their responsibility.

Marimorgan was a god of the sea who used to spend his time fishing from the clouds, catching the sea monsters that threatened the people. Everyone was happy for him when one day he caught a mermaid and took her up into the sky with him. They fell in love, and he gifted her wing-like fins and flight so they could always be together.

The flying mermaid blessed the towns by flying over them, and it wasn’t long before the gods’ wedded bliss was reflected in the civilizations below. The city of Ys grew under their joy, and at that time it was unrivaled on the Earth. The tallest buildings in the world held between them the tallest dike, which kept the sea from inundating the ‘low city of Brittany’.

Gates in the dikes, both magical and scientifically advanced, could be opened to let only the bounties of the ocean through. Fish of all sizes would pour in when they were opened, contained in bubbles of water so they could stay alive and fresh. Yet not an annoying drop made it through: no puddles to step in, no salt corrosion on the walls, and no damp in the air.

But the flying mermaid was a mortal creature, like those doomed fish in their bubbles, like Quimper and his nearly-emptied glass under a full-to-bursting moon. She aged, and she perished, falling gray into the sea. The life of Marimorgan is as slow as can be, so even her long life passed in a blink of his watery eye and blindsided him.

Never since the formation of the planet had such deep sadness existed. He mourned her day and night, season after season, and he never stopped weeping. His tears fell as rain, sometimes as drops large enough to kill a cow on impact. He also refused to move from the spot where she fell, keeping Ys under his inundations for two generations now. The dikes allowed them to drain some of his tears into the ocean, but never fast enough.

As a result the city was constantly flooded, sometimes just a finger deep and sometimes well over a man’s head. The endless change in the water level forced them to reconstruct everything. Wealthier neighborhoods were placed on pedestals or stilts of stone while the less fortunate simply had to freshen up their swimming ability.

They plead with Marimorgan to feel better, or to at least move his gigantic godly bottom to other parts, but he refused. He took note of their sorrows only once, and gave them one blessing to cope, one that reminded him of his dearly departed beloved. Every person who lived within the city’s walls gained the ability to, at will, transform into a fish of some kind.

The blessing did not come with instructions, and it was unclear who got to be a shark and who had to be a clown fish, but all of them could then navigate the submerged portions of the city with ease. Foundations were hollowed out and filled with smaller passages and chambers: a second smaller city built into the first.

If you didn’t need to transport goods, fish form was the fastest way to travel, allowing you to take nearly straight paths from one point to another through the tunnels and under the walkways that were now technically bridges.

Control of the dikes meant partial control of the water levels, which in turn meant whoever manipulated them could affect the speed and ability of anyone to move throughout the city. It was the greatest power in the land, so naturally it belonged to the king. In Wellish Quimper’s time that was King Gradlon, who would be succeeded by his daughter Dahut, now barely more than an adolescent, and less than one in intellect and dignity.

All of that power was stored in a set of keys, which hopefully never left the belt of the king. Quimper was technically in the man’s employ, though he saw himself as more of a public servant. Normally the public didn’t need that much serving, as disputes tended to be settled discreetly, under the surface, in fish form, sometimes by predation that some argued did not count as cannibalism.

Almost everyone who went missing went missing as a fish, and if a fish went missing it was no great loss. Such was nature. The only reason Quimper had been assigned to this latest death was the victim’s claim, repeated much just prior to his demise, that he had come into contact with something that ruined his ability to transform.

He told friends and neighbors that he was shifting in and out of fish form randomly and had no control over it. There were holes in his story, but only because he couldn’t get through a full sentence without transforming, and failed to account for the missing syllables once he had a proper human mouth again.

When the corpse was found it couldn’t be mistaken for an ordinary animal’s or another person’s. He had been killed by the bite of a small shark mid-transformation, and was thus frozen in that state until he rotted away. Quimper had viewed the body: scaly skin, webbed fingers, gills upon the neck, and lidless flat eyes like glass, frozen in his final moment of disbelieving terror.

As far as he was concerned, unusual factors aside, there was no way to solve the murder. Hundreds of citizens took the forms of sharks and dogfish. A cast of the wound could be taken and compared to their jaws, but such a tactic was pointless. Sharks lost their teeth constantly, changing their smiles every week. There were more shark teeth littering the gutters than there had been smoking papers before Marimorgan’s sorrow monsoons.

Still, he had to make a show of investigating to keep himself employed, so Quimper was drinking like a fish, even though he wasn’t one at the moment, at the stall nearest the scene where the body was found. Officially he was staking out the location, keeping an eye out for suspicious activity.

The moon was full, and the people were celebrating the end of the season despite the high water levels. Music echoed from different stages in every neighborhood. People danced in and out of alleys, occasionally disappearing under the water to reemerge as a spinning fish for the finale of their routine.

All of this disturbed the water around Quimper’s legs as they dangled off the stool, keeping a chill active in his joints that were just old enough to hate that sort of thing. He adjusted his knees under the bar, crossed them, but the top one struck something that broke loose and fell into the water.

With one hand he reached and felt the underside of the wood. A few more things fell, but most held firm. Quimper grabbed one and wrenched it loose to take a look: a shark tooth. He freed several more and piled them on the bar, which caused the keeper of the establishment to take notice.

“By merman’s beard,” the man grumbled. “I keep telling him not to do that.”

“Who?” the investigator asked, showing the insignia on his ring that marked him as an authority.

“Cybilla. He’s a regular, just another one of those people with a nervous habit, in this case sticking all of his loose teeth into my bar. I’m putting the replacement wood on his tab.” He raised his voice. “Aren’t I you disrespectful bastard?” They both looked down to the end, where another man, thinner than his raggedy coat cut short to keep it away from the water, was downing his second glass.

“If I could pay in shark teeth I’d be living up there,” the man shouted back at them, pointing to the tower far above, the lighthouse and keep of King Gradlon. A device of spinning glass plates dyed different colors had been installed for the celebration, which now shot out rays of magenta, blue, and green. “Instead I’m stuck drinking your swill. Almost as good as drinking one of the tide pools outside the whorehouse.”

“He’s just upset ‘cause you took his usual seat,” the barkeep whispered to Quimper.

“Did I?” The investigator turned to the man at the end. “Since you come here so much you wouldn’t mind telling me if you saw anything unusual exactly ten days ago, would you?” The man stared, so Quimper flashed his ring again. The man’s eyes widened, and widened, and widened until they were those of a dogfish.

He flopped backward off the stool with a spine gone cartilaginous, his body reduced to a forearm in length by the time he slapped against the water. A tan fin cut through the dancers’ waves as he fled.

“Damn,” Quimper said through gritted teeth as they started disappearing into his gums, “I accidentally solved it.” He quickly became the second man to not pay for his drinks that night as he entered the familiar form of a silver sided mackerel and plunged into the disturbed waters of lower Ys.

Tan. He was after a tan dogfish. That was easy enough to remember, but not easy enough to find in the chaos. There were bubble trails everywhere as those celebrating moved in and out of their fishy forms. Bare feet and ankles danced all around him too, and he just barely made it between a pair before they would’ve crossed and crushed him.

A catch would’ve been a good start to a new season, or in his case a good excuse to not catch anyone for the rest of it. Still, something else had to be propelling him, as he felt even faster than usual. There was something in the water, but he couldn’t put his fin on it. A sort of anticipation.

After Quimper made it out of the dancers he spotted a flick of his target’s tail as it disappeared into a stone slot underneath one of the buildings. It was a fish entrance, but to what he had no idea. It could’ve been a trap, but he trusted his instincts. A fellow who ran even at the sight of his ring, without waiting to hear the topic of conversation, surely wasn’t the brightest, not the sort to set up ambush nets.

The mackerel pursued through the slot and into the foundation. They must’ve been beneath a restaurant, for he now glided over shallow pits with scummy rope netting over top of them. Inside crabs and giant prawns crawled all over each other. They were being farmed so the eatery could always have a fresh supply.

A claw shot up through a hole and nearly got him in the eye, always a danger when there was no eyelid to blink defensively, but Quimper twisted onto his side and avoided it without losing any speed. Others got the same idea, reaching for him, creating a thorny garden of snapping pincers.

Bravery was never his strong suit, but if the coward dogfish, fleeing with his tail fin between his legs, could do it then so could he. He hugged the ceiling on his side to avoid all but those with the longest reach, and in so doing spotted the murderer past them. He looked trapped up against the establishment’s back bricks, but then a heavenly light appeared from above.

Heavenly to a fish, but really just the lamplight from the jovial atmosphere of the kitchen. Someone in human form had lifted a hinged hatch on the floor; their arm reached down into the waters to open a net and take one of the crabs.

The dogfish seized the opportunity, leaping up through the opening. This clearly surprised the arm, which flailed and nearly slapped Quimper. The investigator avoided it by leaping up and out as well, already mid-transformation since he was confident the perpetrator was doing the same. Halfway between fish and man, but still mostly the size of the former, Quimper scurried up the poor cook’s arm on squat webbed limbs like a salamander before springing off of her shoulder and landing on the two feet he was born with.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He was immediately grabbed by the other trespasser in the kitchen, and they wrestled back and forth, knocking steaming pots and pans from their places over the fires. The investigator growled that he was under arrest, but the man slipped out of his shirt and jumped out an open window with no regard for his own safety.

Quimper stuck his head out and swore. Instead of falling to his death he had landed in a sluice that took waste water, animal guts, and inedible vegetable stalks toward the disposal holes in the outer wall. The sluice was only as wide and deep as one of the pots they’d just overturned, so he returned to a dogfish between leap and landing.

Rather than watch him slide away around a corner, Quimper leapt in after him, immediately put off by the taste of the water on his fishy lips. Where did this fool think he was escaping to? All sluices eventually dumped right next to the wall, where pressure sucked out the refuse and it fell a great distance into the sea.

The sea was a bad place for an Ys citizen in their scaly form. All the creatures met out there were wild, aquatic from moment one of their birth, and they knew only the doctrine of eat or be eaten. Every mouth you came across that was larger than your own was a death sentence, and that was only if you successfully spotted all the transparent jellyfish tentacles drifting by in front of you, loaded with paralyzing poisons. He could of course turn back into a man, but that made for a long swim around the walls, and some of the denizens of the deep were large enough to take notice of the ungainly splashing of the fatted folk of civilization.

The sluice ended even quicker than Quimper would have guessed. Both fish were dumped with the garbage into a murky reservoir of salty and rotten odors. Decomposing fruit and vegetable buoys put a maze between them; the mackerel barged through them with his head rather than navigating around.

The current was strong. It was likely less than a minute before they would be sucked out and dumped into the ocean. Quimper considered going back to human, which would make him too large to be evacuated, but then he would lose the fish form’s watery awareness, and with it any trace of a dogfish that might’ve been gliding right underneath his kicking feet.

After pushing through an apple core the two fish collided. The mackerel tried to muscle the dogfish into changing his path, but the dogfish was bigger, stronger. He pushed back, right into the suction. They saw the hole, endlessly swallowing, and felt its tug. Both turned and swam against the current, but it was too late. The force had them.

Inches from the opening in the stone, Quimper was about to turn human and block it with his back so the dogfish couldn’t escape through it, but he was preempted. It was the water itself that made an unexpected maneuver. Suction was instantly reversed into an outpour. The investigator was stunned as he rode the new direction.

That shouldn’t have been possible. The water level would have to rise over the disposal opening, and do so in an instant of flooding. The only way that could’ve happened was if… the city gates had been opened completely. Then the invading ocean, unable to flood the city fast enough, would ride along the outer perimeter, crest over every man-made structure in Ys.

King Gradlon had the keys. Only he could bring the gates down. But why? He’d be destroying his own kingdom, his own people. The water level overtook the sluice. It was now under them. Quimper tried to resist the wave with his tail fin, but he couldn’t even bend it in the direction he wanted.

The water forced him higher and higher, and he was horrified to see it swallowing neighborhoods below him. The bottom was torn open, turned into rubble and silt and panicked bodies disappearing in bursts of bubbles only for panicked fish to dart out of them and get caught up just like he was.

Then the torrent got to the taller buildings. The stilts providing the framework for the fish thoroughfares snapped like twigs. They’d eaten through the integrity of their own city, turned it into a termite mound, and now it was all falling down on itself. Quimper couldn’t bare to watch the buildings settle on his friends and family, so he angled himself upward, with the surging direction of the waves.

Even in this chaos, the dogfish murderer was still trying to get somewhere. The mackerel spotted him, riding with the forces as much as he could, heading for the royal tower. He might even make it to the top if the gates were fully down. Why would he go there? It didn’t seem likely a skittish pup like that would have friends in high places, but then again he never thought the king would slaughter everyone with the turn of a key either.

Quimper found some energy in fury, forced it into his fins. He powered forward and up, gaining on the tan tail of the dogfish. Together they circled the tower as the waters rose around it. There was a sky bridge near its peak that led to a station for launching transportation balloons and baskets, but it was about to become a regular old bridge barely rising out of the murk.

That was where the dogfish was headed. Even if the ocean was unleashed, that bridge was built high enough to remain above the water. The royal family was probably up there, their celebration interrupted by the cataclysm under their feet.

Quimper looked at the bottom of the bridge each time they swam under it, seeing only the mosaic installed for the benefit of the people below, which depicted the flying mermaid scattering fish into the sea from a basket over her arm. He didn’t want to see the artwork; he wanted to see people diving off the side. He wanted to see them turning into fish and heading deeper to help those getting battered and broken by the disaster.

Not a single body, in one form or another, went over the side, not that he saw. He reasoned they were all inside already, hunkering down until the destruction of the greatest city on Earth was complete.

If they were locked away the dogfish’s struggle was pointless. They weren’t going to open the doors for the likes of him. Yet he swam like they would, and Quimper’s heart had already vowed to overtake. Time was short; they were close enough for attempts now.

The dogfish leapt out of the water, trying for the edge of the stone bridge. He initiated transformation but couldn’t reach the ledge, so he slapped against the side as a half-fish monstrosity, clawed at the crevices, and plunged back in. He had to return fully to dogfish in order to build up speed for another attempt.

With the water still rising he was sure to make it on the next jump, so Quimper changed course. He dove and turned, creating room to build up his own momentum. While he did he watched, trying to predict each of their lines of trajectory. They would intersect if he did it correctly, and, as he realized halfway along, it would be in midair.

Both fish breached. Both fish attained the necessary height to see what was happening on the bridge. Both fish developed splitting headaches when they collided with each other. With the sense knocked out of them, neither had the presence of mind to transform before they flopped and bounced onto the dry stone.

Quimper’s vision blurred, his fishy eyes never meant to see the world through anything but water. He felt something against his side before he felt his fins and gills. Something cold. Some metal. It wasn’t sharp, but it still seemed to cut, cutting him off from something internal.

He made every effort to return to human form so he could breathe once more, and none of them stuck. His mouth gasped, speechless. His heart refused to grow back the chambers it had lost. Whatever that thing was, its touch had trapped him as an asphyxiating mackerel.

All he could do was look at the object as the person holding it moved two steps over, to the dogfish. The murderer already had his knees back, and was the size of a small dog, but when the item was pressed against his side he reverted fully back to fish.

It looked like a large iron key, but it was in the shape of a scaled tail fin. It was attached to a ring of several other keys, all practically aglow with what had to be magical properties. Quimper recognized only one from the set, but it marked them all as the keys to the kingdom. The teeth of one was made of sapphire, shaped into the curl of a wave. It raised and lowered the gates of Ys.

That meant it should have been in the hands of the king, but these hands were far too dainty. Quimper saw a woman in a fabulous gown, reflecting like copper in the moonlight, bent over the dogfish. She grabbed him by the middle, stood, and tossed him. The investigator watched helplessly as his quarry landed inside a massive glass bowl balanced atop a servant woman’s head.

Inside it were dozens of other fish, including a few identical dogfish. That was it. He was back in his pack, and he never had to reveal himself again if he didn’t want to. The implications of that bowl were even worse, he realized as the servant marched, with immaculate balance, toward the open door of the tower.

Each fish in the bowl was likely trapped in the same fashion he was. Prisoners all, but why? One of the dainty hands wrapped around Quimper’s middle. He was brought to their owner’s face. She smirked at him with shining full lips, kissed the side of his gills, and placed him inside the bag hanging off her shoulder by a long strap.

The bag was leather, but filled with water, and there was a glass fish-eye porthole out the back that allowed him to see where they were going. The water sloshed, and the edge of the bridge grew distant. She was following the woman with the bowl, walking casually into the tower as if nothing was happening.

Quimper wasn’t alone in the bag, which he didn’t realize at first since the other occupant was pressed against the bottom. It was a flatfish, and Quimper had spent enough time in the animal kingdom to learn the difference between the sexes even if he couldn’t delineate them, so he knew it was a woman.

She looked up at him with her twisted face. After transformation a fish often had a gasp of air, their residual human breath, stored in their mouth. The flatfish used some of hers to produce a bubble of a very particular shape. Quimper watched it rise and wobble in front of him.

Fish couldn’t speak, but the people of Ys had developed a system for rudimentary communication based on bubble shape and behavior. Each one was a word. The flounder’s first word to him was trapped. He had to swim lower to get his mouth close enough to her eyes; then he bubbled out a response.

Why?

Prisoners. Pets. Quimper deduced that he was picked up solely because the woman was impressed with his ability to make it to the pinnacle of Ys in the middle of the cataclysmic flood. Apparently he deserved to survive, or his survival was at least deemed entertaining. He rolled another question around in his mouth until it was the right shape.

Flood?

Intentional. Plan. Sacrifice. This was followed by a bubble he didn’t recognize; it had the most complex shape he had ever seen. Its idiosyncrasies were the result of implications spanning not just civilizations, but worlds. He did not yet know its translation was ‘Babylon’.

King?

Complicit. Princess. Mastermind. God. Irrelevant. Unaware.

Wellish Quimper started piecing it together; he had nothing better to do in the dark leather bag like a wine skin of his own drowned sorrows. He already knew the princess was involved, because he recognized her face when she picked him up, kissed him, and stowed him away. She was their method of transport at that very moment.

Gradlon’s daughter Dahut had not only the key to the gates, but the heretofore unknown key to the human form. The investigator remembered the partially transformed state of the murder victim, and his claims prior to death that he was losing control of the ability. In retrospect the culprit had to be contact with this fish-tail key.

A key he was now touched by himself. There was no telling when, or if, he would be able to smack himself in the head with a flat palm and curse his own foolishness. The dogfish had been working on behalf of Princess Dahut. He never would’ve thought such a lowlife would work with the king, but it was the childish princess running things.

Whatever this plan was, it was hers. The crime he had been lazily investigating was part of a cover-up. The victims must have known some aspects of this night were coming, and had to be silenced so the ‘sacrifice’ could happen as planned.

At some point Princess Dahut flipped the bag around. They were already inside the tower. Rumbling and clanking sounds shook his pocket of water, telling him chains and gates and doors had all been closed and locked. He saw fish being dumped from the large bowl into a chamber beneath the floor. Quimper guessed it was a tank for keeping all the servants they wanted safely and compactly stored during the transition.

The last dogfish slipped out of his sight. Now, just like everything outside the tower, it was just one of the things he wasn’t allowed to see. Whatever happened, it disturbed the water inside the bag too much for the two fish to communicate with each other. All their bubbles ended up looking like dying breaths.

So they stuck close, fin to fin, in it together without a choice, while they guessed what every sensation meant. They correctly guessed the tower was moving, but not how. A magical geyser, born of a mechanism at the tower’s base crafted by the dark minds of the king’s advisers, and fueled by the pounding ocean and desperate deaths of thousands, launched them skyward.

They couldn’t guess that on their way they punched through a layer of thick clouds that Marimorgan was resting on. The god used its edge to dab at his watering eyes. He stopped to stare, but only because he thought the missile to the heavens might have been his dear flying mermaid come back to him.

Alas, it was just people, just those small things that liked to hurt each other, which was why he rarely found cause to help them. They undid everything given them eventually, as if they forgot how bad pain could be each time they encountered it. Not him. His pain was forever, so he quickly got back to it.

Wellish Quimper wouldn’t forget. His pain was a sticky one, that of humiliation. It was all over him, thickening and clouding the water. He had to be human again, if only to feel like he could move freely.

There was only one thing to be done with that freedom. Find his killer. His vengeance was the only belonging he could take with him from Ys, the paradise he had taken for granted and yet somehow survived. The dogfish was not just the killer of one to him, but the killer of a whole people.

One of his correct guesses was that, wherever they were going, the princess and the king would be protected. He would never even get close to them, certainly not as close as he was in that leather bag. But the dogfish was expendable. They would give him up in a heartbeat.

The trick was finding him. He would blend into the others, pretend he deserved a second chance. Quimper realized right there that he didn’t believe in second chances. It didn’t matter that the dogfish was going to reach the hanging gardens of Babylon. The corruption he brought with him would always bleed through, and the investigator would point it out to everyone. The dogfish would understand that the pain he had caused was permanent.