Since Redwall is in the public consciousness again, I thought I'd share some art! Ublaz Mad Eyes and Grath Longfletch from the book The Pearls of Lutra drawn about 9 years apart. I've actually started rereading the series recently and really want to draw more characters, likely leaning closer to how they appear in the books than my usual style.
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Grath: People underestimate me because I'm a woman. What they don't understand is I am a strong woman.
Grath: And that strength comes from my values, my courage, and my dogged pursuit of vengeance.
“my family was murdered by pirates so now I obsessively hunt down all searats and corsairs in vengeance by shooting them with my special bow and arrows”
The only (proper) sea otter character in the series I genuinely liked, and never grated on me. XD Most of the other real Sea Otters in the series were too... brutal to a hypocritical degree. Way too many of them reminded me of pirate and viking raiders in everything but their in-universe title and standing with the Redwallers and whatnot--maybe the Redwallverse sea otters are half family groups, the other half "privateers", aka the legal pirates that those in power like to hire for their dirtiest works. <_<; Would explain why they tag-team up with the Long Patrol so readily.
Most of the Redwall sea otters appear to be just River Otters who happen to be near the ocean at the moment. XD A common occurrence amongst real otters! By her description, it appears Grath and her family were some of the few actual sea otters (Enhydra lutris) in the series. She broke so many molds! Not giving off sea-otter pirate vibes--not just mushable into the river-otter character stereotype from most of the books--a scarred-up and tenacious badass butch bowbeast on a mission against pirate-y types. 8D Wonderful. Favorite sea otter.
This is written for @autobot-scout-riella for the @redwall-secret-santa gift exchange. It’s probably not as sweet or as happy as you probably wanted, but I hope you like it anyway.
The full story is below the cut.
Grath Longfletch knew there were days when she forgot half her life, when she woke up to the smell of shrimp and hotroot soup and expected to see her mother and sisters tending the fire and stirring a large pot, or some of the gossipy ottermums chattering away at one another while they wove their mats and baskets. She always woke disappointed, the less familiar voices of Holt Rudderwake jarring her awake from the dreams of living with her family in Holt Lutra.
Of course, there were also days when she was catapulted from sleep with the memory of pain and death and the taste of blood on her tongue and the burn in her muscles as she dragged herself out of the tomb that had once been her home. These dreams were harder to wake up from, harder to realize they were just dreams and she hadn't been found again and had another home stolen from her.
That had been this morning, and she wasn't sure what to do. The other otters in Holt Rudderwake knew where she came from, they had learned her story in the season she had been with them, but it wasn't as real for them as it was for her. To them, the destruction of Holt Lutra was just another ghost story, one that they had little connection to. She was suffering from the memory of it on her own. She hadn't been sure she would ever feel safe somewhere again. She still wasn't.
The dreams had woken her early, before even the ottermums roused to set about preparing food for the day. There had been much talk recently of the winter festival, and a feast was planned for the early evening. Grath wasn't sure if she would be good company for a feast.
It was easy enough to slip out of the cave, making for the highest point she could reach on the island without too much climbing. She always went for higher ground when she needed to think, desperate for the air and the loneliness where she was normally surrounded by otters who had never encountered true pain in their lives.
She didn't begrudge them for their happy lives, but she was jealous. If ill fortune hadn't been brought down on her own holt, she might have been celebrating the winter feast with them.
Her mind conjured up the smells and sounds of her lost home, taunting her with the things she had missed and would never have again. She recalled playing games with her brothers and sisters, how her father taught her how to fire a bow, how her mother taught her how to weave cords into string, how to cure it against the weather and make it into something beautiful.
She was forgetting their faces. Every time she thought of her parents or her siblings, their faces were more out of focus than the last time she thought of them. She had tried to draw them, but sketching was not one of her skills. Slowly, they were becoming the one feature she remembered best about them. Sunya had the prettiest singing voice, the twins Keenan and Rhys had a patch of white fur under one of their eyes but she could never remember which was which, Felis was the eldest and told the best stories, Marine was obsessed with collecting pretty shells for her collection. Her father's paws were hard and callused for as long as she could remember, but her mother's were only callused in places where her weaving crossed her paws. She wondered if, on her path for revenge, she had left behind some of her memories to lie with the rest of her family.
They were like ghost stories to her too now, half-remembered and distorted in ways she had no idea how to fix.
"Grath?"
She looked up, having heard Inbar coming, his sleep-heavy paws scraping against the stone. Inbar Trueflight was perhaps the best thing that had happened to her since her family was killed. She hated that she had been the one to teach him what true cruelty looked like when they stormed the island of Sampetra. The darker part of her, the part that had fueled her need for revenge on the searats who killed her holt, wasn't sorry about it, though. She had spoken no less than the truth when she told him what searats would do if they ever gained access to Ruddaring. Not that she thought they would. She hoped they wouldn't. She liked that they were safe here. Even if she wasn't sure she could trust its safety any more than she had been able to trust the safety of Holt Lutra when the searats attacked it.
"Are you okay?" Inbar asked. He moved slowly, tiredly, nearer and sat down on the low rock beside her. "You left the sleeping den."
"It's almost a year now," she whispered, knowing he of all beasts would know what she was talking about. "Just after the winter feast."
"So, no, then. You're not okay." He didn't touch her yet, and she was grateful for that. The way her fur felt like it was too tight, she was sure his touch would only make it feel like she was burning.
He didn't say anything else for a long time and they just sat there, watching light slowly bleed into the sky above them over the top of the ring that protected the island. They had wasted so much time sitting there when they could have been doing something else, but she couldn't bring herself to get up and move. She fingered the long, green-fletched shaft she had left jutting out of a crack in the rock up here. She always came here when she was upset, so that was how he always knew to look for her.
"What would you be doing?" he asked suddenly, his tone hushed. "If you were with your holt?"
Grath frowned. "Why do you want t' know that?"
He shrugged, the fidgeting in his paws evidence enough of his nervousness. "Your traditions are part of you. I know what we do here. What would you do?"
She didn't think that was a good enough reason to ask, but she wasn't going to say so aloud. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine what it was like last winter, when none of what had happened had happened yet. Somehow, remembering her family's traditions was easier than trying to recall their faces. "My sisters and I gathered twigs to weave together into wreaths. Mum would pick the best for the feast table. The rest would be given to anybeast we knew nearby. Mum picked Sunya's last year."
As Grath thought about it, she could see Sunya's radiant smile as the wreath, decorated with pine fronds and dark red holly berries, was placed at the feast table around a bowl with a large candle in it. It was clearer than any other memory she had tried to grasp, and Grath could feel her eyes burning.
"What else?" Inbar prompted gently. He still hadn't touched her, and briefly, she opened her eyes and took his paw in hers, desperate for something to ground her.
The memories ached as much as they were sweet to remember. "My father took my brothers with him to catch a large trout. One year, he brought back a fish that was almost as big as I was, but I was little then and everything looks bigger than it is." Still, she could remember that fish, and looking up at her father with awe that he had caught such a thing. He had promised to catch a bigger one the next year, but it never seemed quite as large to her as the one when she was only two seasons old.
Inbar was smoothing down the fur on her paw, the gentle steady motion doing more for her sense of safety and security than the ring of stone that protected the island. She was safe with him. Her paws that had learned to kill were safe in his paws, which had learned to protect.
"We would share the trout at the feast, and other members of the holt brought other dishes. Mum Rosella brought the best hotroot soup I'd ever tasted, and she only ever brought it to feast days. Mum Olvine baked sweetbreads that melted like butter in your mouth." Now that she was talking, she found she couldn't stop, the words spilling out of her faster and faster as she tried to share an entire experience of life with him, everything that had built her, everything she had lost. She opened her eyes to stare into his and know whether or not he understood. She was almost shocked to see that he did.
There were tears spilling down her cheeks in earnest now, wetting her fur and starting to soak into the collar of her tunic, but she refused to raise a paw to wipe them away herself because she remembered. She could see the names and faces of everyone she had lost so clearly in her mind, and Inbar had given her that. He had made her ghost stories real again. Grath hadn't even known she was still carrying around the guilt and the anger and the soul-deep desire for revenge until she had let it all go to remember what a winter feast was supposed to look like.
"I can't give back your family," Inbar said, still stroking the fur on her paw gently. "But I can give you mine. I can give you our traditions, and you can bring yours with you and we can do this together."
Together. There was some part of her that was slowly uncurling at the sound of that word, some quiet, hidden, young part of her that had been waiting for someone to hold out that paw and actually mean it. 'Together' was a safety more complete than the whole of Ruddaring. It was a peace that could settle in her soul and finally put to sleep the desire for revenge. It was something that would make her whole again in a way she never thought she could be.
She had been angry and alone for seasons, blind to the help being offered to her. When she thought about the future, the only thing she had been able to see was blood. She couldn't see past her revenge and, since coming to Holt Rudderwake to stay, she hadn't been sure what to do with herself. Still, she had been resolved to do it alone.
But she wasn't alone. Inbar had been there with her for as long as she had been there. He had held out his paw again and again even when she slapped it away, not seeing what he was really offering.
"I want that," she whispered, squeezing the paw that was holding her, grounding her. She wanted it more than she had words to say. She wanted to share her history, her family, her life with him because she knew he could understand.
Slowly, she could feel herself coming back together. There were scars on her heart that would never fully heal, absences that could never be completely filled, but she wasn't dwelling in those empty spaces anymore. She was on her way to becoming whole again.
For perhaps the first time in a year, Grath tried a true smile, one that was neither forced nor fake nor full of menace, and she let Inbar lead her back inside. Her family would have wanted her to be happy above all else, and perhaps now she was willing to allow herself to be happy too. Because her past wasn't a ghost story she had to suffer through, nor was it meant to destroy her. Her past was a path leading always to a future, and she had finally come out of the forest and into the light.
And with Inbar beside her, she could trust that her future would be safe between them.
