The Moon and the Tides
warnings: brief mentions of blood manipulation (like bloodbending from ATLA), the darkling (we don’t like the darkling here)
summary: a tidemaker with impressive abilities gains the Darkling’s attention.
notes: I’ve been so intrigued with a tidemaker with the ability to control the water in the human body. tidemakers are so rarely mentioned in the grishaverse books so I’m not sure if this is something they really can do, but it’s been stuck in my head so I wanted to give it a try! also this is not a darkling stan account. fuck the darkling. I just wanted to write a dark/power hungry tidemaker, and I felt the darkling would def take advantage of her power.
She had been six when she had been delivered to the Little Palace. A frail, young thing that was hungry to explore the power in her bones. She was a Tidemaker; she could control water with a flick of her hands.
She had started with large bodies of water– lakes, oceans– then moved to rivers, streams, even puddles. But then she began to draw the water from the air, from the plants around her.
Always eager to learn, hungry for more power. Baghra had been unnerved by her ambition. She was constantly pushing the limits of her powers– attempting to pull water from deep underground, freezing the entire lake beside Baghra’s hut. It did not go unnoticed.
The Darkling was notified of her progress. He saw her in passing at times; palms raised at the lake, sloshing the water onto the banks with a grin; pulling single droplets of water from a blade of grass until it withered and died. He was intrigued, but didn’t intervene. He wanted to see what she was capable of without his influence.
She was sent to the northern front at the age of nineteen; tasked with guarding Ravka’s border from Fjerdan witch hunters. It was there where she learned how to manipulate the water in the human body.
She found she could freeze the water in someone’s veins, turning them a pale shade of blue as they froze from the inside out. She only delved further into the new skill– quickly realizing she could pull the water from the body with relative ease.
Her Grisha brethren were terrified. “It’s pushing the boundaries,” some Heartrenders would whisper. “She’s like a Heartrender,” Squallers would say.
If her fellow Grisha were scared, it was nothing compared to how the Fjerdans received her unnatural abilities. They named her “The Blood Witch.”
When the Darkling finally plucked her from the front lines and placed her at his side, it was no surprise to anyone.
When she finally met him, he had a dangerous twinkle in his dark eyes and a sly grin on his lips.
“You and I are going to change the world.”