Guy with cataracts and scarred from an explosion has a fail toymaking shop in front of a rundown temple and he has a crush on a disfigured lowly priestess whom he suspects is a stealth trans guy because she always picks the boy option when they play board games (he’s right btw)
He's from Kalantiaw, but his mom is diaspora, and I thought her to be half "Japanese" (coded) - still trying to figure out how japanese ethnicities come to play.
She was a sailor turned pirate. She didn't know the language spoken in Kalantiaw (more akin to Khmer), and she spoke a different language (more austronesian), and she named him Kahilingan, which means "wish". But in Kalantiaw, where she settled, his name means "curse" or "bad omen" 💀 it doesn't help that her life ended with the beginning of his. So.
Kahi spends much of his life chasing the image of his mom and trying to.... live up to her- because sailing is the most esteemed occupation in their world. Only very very very very very few people have managed to work on "dragonships".
Basically, their world is physically broken (like living on an asteroid belt) and they sail to and fro each sundering / country on specialized stone ships called "dragonships" / "bakunawa"- and the ships themselves are semi-alive? They're like.. Stone ships laminated with the spirits of devas and dragons and other great beings who have all died because of (redacted).
Anyway, his mom, Maaya, was a renowned sailor- she tamed a dragonship that was imbued with an infamously wild dragon called Duksa- Dragonships are Sponsored, but those who sponsor the ships are almost never in command, and they also easily lose ownership to their hired captains- because the ships themselves are sentient, and they never obey anyone who they deem are incapable of commanding them. Only Maaya could control Duksa hehe. So she became known throughout all their world as this wild woman who loved fast boats and only accepted voyage commissions "if they are very fun". Anyways blah blah blah she fell in love w Kahi's other parent (who is nonbinary) and she got pregnet with him. And they eventually settled in Kalantiaw, in it's countryside near the subterranean capital (Kamharik).
Kahi always annoyed his other parent abt his mom because he too wanted to meet Duksa, but his parent kept warning him not to go near the ship because after Maaya died, it went even more mad with grief. Kahi more of an engineer than a captain like his mom, but his goal was simply to acquaintance with Duksa rather than actually captain her. But Duksa did not accept anyone, not even anyone who was part of Maaya's original crew.. Kahi went to an apprenticeship on shipbuilding-
he became somewhat popular for being clever with his hands, and all around Kalantiaw, everyone thought of him as reliable and very creative when it came to problem solving. So he went from normal ships to fixing dragonships.. ..
The Greatest dragonships are ones that are imbued with the spirits of actual ancient dragons and qilin, bc some are imbued with "lesser" dragons or false dragons, and some are with non-dragon albeit great spirits- like minor gods, wind spirits, phoenix,naga, etc etc..
Duksa was a true and great dragon, and Kahi knew that she was suffering from severe neglect, so all he wanted was to patch her up-
Everyone, every single one of Kahi's peers discouraged him, bc it is known that anyone who even approaches her is immediately kilIed by her; but Kahi, he is different. When he approaches Duksa, she was a shadow of herself, a ghost ship- She senses Maaya, and she even thought that Kahi was her at first- so she lets Kahi patch her big crabclaw sails, fixed her boilers and really tried to replicate how she used to look when Maaya lived.. and Duksa didn't know it wasn't her, because her eyes were covered in barnacles.. The "eyes" of a dragonship is its lodestar, and Kahi was purposefully saving it for last because he is frightened of what Duksa could do to him;;
But before that, Duksa spoke to him, joked like "ah beauty, what happened to you?! Your voice sounds like you swallowed a frog.. are you ill? Why did you abandon me?" Fhjsjs
"Why are your hands so gentle now? I want you to be rough!! Stop this at once! I am not old!"
But when Kahi started scraping finally at the lodestar, and he opened Duksa's eyes to the world once more, she cried in great anger because who tf was this intruder! And why did he carry Maaya's spirit with him !!!
Her entire deck creaked so hard the floorboards broke again, and she swayed her whole body so Kahi nearly fell from the lodestar;; he tried to reason with her, and it sort of mirrors how his mom tamed Duksa. She barrelled in head on and confidently, but Kahi was meek and gentle.
Eitherway.. an angry dragonship is like highly radioactive, its like being in a storm in a contained environment, and she started puffing steam- it's like microdosing being in fukushima; And she called Kahi a fool, he'll never measure up to Maaya, he will never be her- aaaah, but she didn't kiIl him. Maybe because she knew he was Maaya's boy. She warned him never to return, and tossed him into the open shallows. So, he was absolutely brokenhearted. He was 19.
~intense lonely lovestory between him and a closeted trans guy raised by mean transphobic priestesses in a cult the antithesis of a loving and wise lesbian death goddess occurs.~
There she is.. her name is Viharana Magayarin
Maaya's name is spelled a certain way in kanji, I want it to mean "True"
Duksa's name is Tagalog, it means "grief"
Kahilingan's name is tagalog- and it means "wish". Inspired from.. in tagalog, "curse" is a contronym of sorts- "curse" and "promise" is the same word ("sumpa")
Kahi's trans boyfriend's name is Tala, and it means "star" 😌
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