ft. discussions of the pirate gods between a young alexei and an even younger sajaa.
The Noveran port was always a busy, bustling affair. Every trade route from Nioro to Valais and out to the warm, wet land of Sajaa’s own home country passed through it, forming a nexus where merchants met to swap gold for brass, silk for coffee and dyes. Workers thronged along the shore, and more moved along the long wooden docks that jutted deep into the harbor. Billows of white sails rose above them like clouds laid low on the horizon. Even from Sajaa’s perch on one of the empty piers, yards away, the sound was deafening, the cries of sailors and hawkers and ordinary citizens forming a storm of sound that rolled and crashed over the entire city.
She ignored it all. It was not the docks that captured her attention but the water they were built on: the waves dark as wine and foaming with magic, capped with white spray that glistened when it was flung into the air. Movement flickered beneath the water. A scale here, a luminous eye there, a flash of teeth, serrated and razor-sharp, glimpsed in a break between waves.
Creatures, only. Not gods.
She had made that mistake when she’d first arrived, and gales of laughter had haunted her for weeks afterwards. Here, the gods were amorphous, fluctuating beings shrouded in legend, glimpsed only by their chosen few. There were no temples, no paintings. Even the Archives’ vaults held nothing crafted in their likeness.
The lack only whetted her curiosity, made her want to try and fashion her own image. They would be something wild, she thought, as free and untamed and strange as the ocean. Her mind conjured a body of smashed kindling and bones stripped pale and shining, seaweed threading through it like veins. Perhaps its smile was formed of teeth plucked from the carcasses of sea monsters.
She’d just bent forward to try and examine one of the creatures for a more accurate rendering when—
“Plotting your escape from here?”
Sajaa startled upright so quickly that she nearly fell off of the quay. A hand caught her sleeve, pulling her away from the edge and then lingering, warm on her elbow. It was Alexei, his mouth in a small smile, the hood of his robes thrown back to expose his face to the sun. The light turned his fair hair impossibly fairer, the strands a halo of white around his face.
“Careful, Sajaa,” he chided gently. “If you fall in I’d have to come in after you, and I can’t swim.”
A blush rose in her cheeks, painfully hot. She ducked her head forward and prayed the robes hid her face. “Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking.”
“Deep thoughts, I’m sure. May I join you?”
The quay was deserted save for the two of them and some squabbling gulls, but she moved aside regardless. Alexei stepped up beside her, matching her pose—arms folded into the trailing sleeves of his robes, his shoulder brushing hers companionably. He didn’t ask for the real reason she was out here. He never did. Just stared out across the water and waited, as if he had nothing else more pressing to do than to watch the tide go out with her.
The silence stretched, and stretched, and stretched, until she was desperate to break it and its imagined awkwardness.
“I’d like to meet one of the pirate gods,” she blurted. The moment the words escaped her she wished to draw them back; they were so childish, so young. Surely Alexei, with his calmness and gravity of manner, had never contemplated such things.
He didn’t seem to mind, though; only tilted his head to one side. “Which one?”
“Any of them.” She searched her mind, grasping for the tales she’d overheard. “The Salted Lady, perhaps.”
“Our Lady of Salt,” Alexei corrected. “She’s not a drink. I didn’t realize you had any interest in them, Sajaa.”
No judgment hid in his words, his voice smooth and gentle as it had been when he’d coaxed her out of hiding after the other initiates had laughed her from the hall. He had been the only who had not mocked her. Who had explained to her, later, in the hushed quiet of the library, how the gods of the sea functioned in Novera.
She gave him a shy shrug.
“The ocean is strange. I want to see what gods it would spawn. Or who would spawn the ocean,” she amended, conscientious of differing theologies. “I’m sure it’s not very interesting to you, though.”
“Not necessarily. When I was a child, I was very fond of stories about one of the pirate gods.” Alexei’s voice was low, almost swallowed by the distant clamor. When she glanced at him his eyes were fixed on the long, blue line of the horizon, narrowed against the sun. “My mother’s sister was a sailor, once, years before I was born. She used to claim she’d traveled all the way to the end of the world and peered over the edge. Certainly she’d met enough pirates to bring tales of their gods back to us.”
Alexei so rarely spoke of home, and even less of childhood. Sometimes it was difficult to remember he had been a child, a boy with scraped knees and tousled hair. No—even as the image took place she corrected it, rewriting the details. Alexei would never have scraped his knees. He was too careful for that by far. The hair, though, yes; and perhaps a book clasped in one hand, the sharp knife of his nose buried deep in its pages.
The thought made her smile.
“Which one?” she asked.
“The Mariner.” He laughed, and the sound of it settled to burn, warm and low, in Sajaa’s stomach. “Although our name for him is closer to ‘Ferryman,’ or perhaps ‘Guider.’”
He fell silent and Sajaa watched a clump of seaweed drift past (hair for her god-body), waiting patiently for him to gather his yarn. When he spoke again his voice had taken on the sing-song slant it gained when he spoke to her of history, or the culture of this strange country.
“According to the stories, he travels the sea on a raft fashioned from a boat so old that the name of it has passed out of history. He has a lantern that burns through any fog and that, if followed, will guide even the most lost of pirates home. The pirates believe every storm survived, every fall that does not end with death, every rope that holds and guard avoided and passage successfully navigated is due to his influence.
“They also say,” he added, voice taking on a wry quality, “that he binds the souls of sailors in knots of ribbons to keep them safe from harm. I never understood that one; I’d bother my aunt about what he did with them until she made up some lie to appease me and sent me out to play.”
“He sounds nice.”
“Not everyone who guides, Sajaa, can be trusted. Least of all a pirate.”
There was a bitter edge to his words that surprised her, and when she looked up at him she found a stranger, instead, one with a face remote as a marble statue, his mouth flat and unsmiling. It unsettled her. She wanted, suddenly, desperately, to bring him back to her, to put a smile on his face and a laugh in his words. To turn him back into her friend.
“I will meet the Mariner, then,” she told him, “And I will ask him what he does with the ribbons, so that I may tell you the truth.”
He didn’t laugh at that. But he did smile again, the right side of it higher than the left, the corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Come, Sajaa. Enough talk of pirates and their gods.” Alexei flung his arm around her, drawing her to him until the red of their robes bled together and they were a single creature of two heads, one dark and one light, reflected wavering back in the water. “I have a task that needs doing in the real world, and I could use your assistance.”
One last glance at the ocean, at the deep, luring dark of the waves, and then she turned her back on it and pushed deeper into the mundane hum of the docks, steered by Alexei’s arm sure around her shoulders.
three phone calls, for the prompt “who do you call when it’s late at night.” ft. tselel/caym, rys/natalya, sajaa/alexei. tw: mild sexual implication.
Midnight broke coolly over the city. Not even broke; more a soft sort of splintering, a finger, perhaps, or a toe—something easily snapped and even more easily ignored. A darkening in the already dark shadows. A faint chill creeping into the air, just behind the even fainter chill of the wind. The Ways yawned a little wider, luring and lurid and so, so easy to stumble into, one missed cross street or misplaced step on the curb away from plunging into a nightmaric paradise.
Tselel walked down one of them, effortlessly weaving her way along the border. One foot in Faerie and one in Humane, the both of them tugging at her ankles like two feral cats fighting over a piece of meat. The only difference was that Faerie wasn’t afraid to use its claws.
If she took sixty-one steps down this Way, one for every midnight moment and an extra for luck, she’d find a park bench stranded exactly between the two realms. It was said if you put your head in Faerie and your feet in Humane and took a nap, you’d dream of your heart’s desire. It was said if you put your feet in Faerie and your head in Humane, you’d get about as good of a night’s rest as you could expect from sleeping on hard wood outside. That, or end up abducted. Bit of a dice toss with that one.
Tselel was willing to roll those dice.
Forty-two, fifty-seven, sixty-one steps and there it was: splintery white wood held together with rivets of brass, parked right where the two ways wound into each other.
She plopped down on it. It was damp, because rain had passed through earlier, and cold, because it was dead winter and things tended to get a bit frigid around that time. Power prickled against her skin, the bench’s magic brushing up against her own and trying to assert dominance.
Tselel closed her eyes and made a stab at sleep. Opened them again. Balled her jacket up beneath her head to serve as a pillow. Drummed her feet against the bench until it made an alarming creaking noise. Gave in and pulled out her phone, which helpfully informed her it was twenty past and thirty-one degrees out, as if she couldn’t tell that from the angle of the moon and her breath collecting, pale-white and steaming, before her face.
Her lives had refilled in Diner Dash; she played them through, and after all the breakfast truck levels, then tucked it back into her pocket. Sleep still felt far away. Civilization felt further still, the night hollowed of life, even the typical sounds of the city coming to her muffled, unreal and dream-like, having to pick their way through the different paths before they could be perceived. Borders were such lonely places.
Perhaps she could call Caym. It was an unbidden thought, rising too fast for her to avoid it, and unwelcome, too.
Tselel didn’t need him. She never needed anybody, especially not to help her do something as simple as fall asleep, but she did want him, with a sudden, desperate seizing of her lungs. Him, and the quiet of his office, and the strains of techno music that drifted just below it all. Not the familiar litany of questions she could count on if she did call—where are you, who are you with, what are you on, what do you need, shall I come fetch you, in that order—but him. Just him.
She re-fished out her phone and played a few rounds of Solitaire but that didn’t kill the wanting, either.
Before she could talk herself out of it she was dialing. There was just enough time to hear the first tinny ‘brrring’ before Caym picked up, already speaking.
“Where—”
“Don’t talk,” she interrupted. “Don’t ask questions. Don’t think questions. Literally, not a fucking word.”
The silence tipped from interrogative to inquiring, then over to accepting. There was a click as he placed his phone down on the desk; the sudden, heightened hiss of static as he switched to speaker. And then the soft scratch of his pen against paper, filling the pre-morning, the sound of his breath just beneath, in-out, in-out, so clockwork regular she could think him a fae.
Tselel closed her eyes and breathed along. Eventually, she dreamed.
o.O.o
Midnight broke coolly over the city. Natalya watched the numbers on her stove flip from 11:59 to 12:00. They were neon green and the brightest thing in her apartment aside from her phone screen, lending her kitchen a faintly radioactive air.
A few moments later her phone’s clock followed behind. That was worrying; she might need to replace it. She made a mental note about looking into what newer models were worth the expense, and, after that, which dealer to buy it from to dodge as much of market price as she could, and then went back to staring at her contacts list.
Karla’s number sat right at the top. She was probably awake—Natalya didn’t think that woman ever slept, not really—and she’d even more probably pick up, sleeping or not. Maybe she’d want to hang out. They could get takeout. Have that marathon of Fast and Furious they kept meaning to have before it got pushed by another order, another job. If nothing else, she’d show up, if she asked for her to.
Natalya allowed herself a second to picture it: Karla standing in the doorway, sure as anything, a crate of Monster in one hand for Natalya and a crate of Red Bull in the other for herself, sleeves rolled up to flash those fang-mouthed tattoos. Then she scrolled a little further down and hit the contact marked only with a spider emoji.
The line rang and rang and rang, on and on until she thought it was sure to go to voicemail and then, just before she could hang up and pretend it was an accidental dial and call Karla, it stopped.
“Natalya.” The voice on the other end was cool and sticky-soft, the faintest ribbon of amusement running through it. She closed her eyes at the sound.
“Rys.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I need…” She didn’t know what she needed. She hadn’t planned this far ahead; had only been thinking of the itching beneath her skin, of the desperate, driving need to call someone do something now now now now. “Something,” she decided on.
A hum came down the line. Another picture replaced Karla—Rys with his many eyes crescented, his head tilted in that particular way of his when he was deciding whether to indulge her or leave her to drown. When he spoke, teeth carved that image up to slivers thinner than the amusement and twice as deadly.
“I’m at a club,” he said, and then, “I’ll send you the address.” And then, a laughing postscript, “Don’t wear your jacket.”
And then, “Or your underwear.”
And then, “Or your glasses.”
o.O.o
Midnight broke coolly over the city, a flood of shadow and starlight, seeping into every inch of the neighborhood. ‘The Wrecks,’ the inhabitants affectionately called it. A ramshackle collection of houses and shops scrounged up from the forgotten edges of the city, creaking and tilting and one good gust of wind away from shattering into so much plywood and glass. Sajaa loved it with a fierceness that nearly stopped her heart.
But that was when it was the Wrecks, when she could look out at the piecemeal, piercing buildings and see it in all its shambling glory. In the dark it was just another room. Another building. Another not-home.
She crept from her bed, smoothing the sheets to erase her presence, then made her way down the winding halls and up the wrought-iron stairs to the roof. A dim moon was shining and a few stars scattered the sky, battling with light pollution for a place. Wind nipped at her hands and cheeks. With a shiver she pulled her robe tighter around herself—a protection, a hiding place—and leaned up against one of the chimneys dotting the roof.
Then she called Alexei.
He picked up on the third ring; his voice, when it came, was breathless, as if he’d run across the room to answer. “Sajaa? Is everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine. I just wanted to call.”
“It’s late.”
There was no reproach in his words, only a statement of facts. She blushed regardless, tucking her head further back into her hood as if she could shield herself from his non-existent gaze, her eyes falling to the concrete beneath her boots.
“I wanted to call,” she repeated. “I wanted— I wanted to hear your voice.”
“And now you’ve heard it.” He laughed. A moment later she echoed the sound, the wind snatching it away before it was fully out. “I’m joking, Sajaa; I’ve missed your voice too. How is it there? Strange, I imagine. No wonder you’re not sleeping.”
“It… Yes. It is strange.”
More than strange, it was marvelous. Awe-inspring. In the scarce few weeks she’d been with Rin’s crew, Sajaa had seen more miracles than she knew how to process—girls halted on the brink of death; an enclave raised by godly hands; storms made of magic that swept through in minutes, leaving everything changed in their wake.
Now she found herself grasping for the mundane (in contrast) confines of her old life. The silence on the line was heavy with what she didn’t say, the end of her sentence gaping around the lacuna of all that she wanted to tell him: how it scared her, how it thrilled her, how she wasn’t calling him to remind her of home but to remind her of him, to give her something to cling to that wasn’t the Archive’s doctrine or the mission or the promise of greatness her future held. To give her a reason to come back.
She swallowed. The sound echoed. The words remained unsaid.
“Can you go out to the roof?” she asked.
No answer came but the rustle of fabric, the click-click of a door unlocking and then re-locking just as quickly. Footsteps echoed through the phone. Another door creaked open and then the rush of wind filled the speaker, drowning out Alexei’s movements.
“I’m there,” he said, a moment later.
The Archive’s territory was a spine of glass and light on the horizon; Sajaa searched it desperately, seeking the towers of the building she’d lived in. Was that a red smudge she saw? Probably nothing more than a trick of the light, but she could still pretend it was him, looking back at her across all those dark miles.
She kept her eyes fixed on it, scared to blink lest it vanish. “Tell me a story, Alexei.”
“About the Salted Lady?” Another laugh, this one softer, truer, and Sajaa’s mouth twitched in an answering smile.
“She’s not a drink,” she told him primly. “But, no. I’ve heard too much about the pirate gods lately. Tell me about one of yours. Your favorite.”
Eyes open, watering against the cold and the strain, she stood there and let him spin her a tale of the Frostbitten Queen and her silver scythe until the night had passed and dawn lit the horizon with a pale glow.
Ringlanced once more at the deck, but Sajaa had turned her attention to the ocean,her fathomless gaze fixed on the horizon, the sea breeze whipping tendrils ofdark hair out behind her.
salt
In a century she had yet to draw a breath that did not taste of salt.
lights (the closest I have)
Rin made no move to stop her; in the half-light her eyes weredark and lazy, her mouth curled into a satisfied smile.
forest
none
moon
In the dim glow of the moonlight Rin was not a legend but a girl, her pale cheeks still flushed with laughter, her hair loose and wind-swept around her face.
send me a word, and if it’s in one of my WIPs I’ll answer with the sentence the word appears in.
Sajaa was suddenly very aware ofhow close Rin stood, of how Sajaa’s fingers still rested on her cheek, thumbbrushing the corner of her mouth. In the half-light Rin’s eyes were a gray sodark they looked almost black, –
kitten
none
beach
She found him down on the beach, staring out at the waves, strange shadows dancing around his feet.
The dying light had turned his blue hair almost black, and he looked younger, almost vulnerable, the cool sea breeze filing the sharp planes of his face down into something resembling human.
send me a word, and if it’s in one of my WIPs I’ll answer with the sentence the word appears in.
Rin tipped her head back and let the sea swallow her whole.
I was tagged by @goldentailedmermaids, @histcria, and @forever-and-almost-always to post the last sentence I wrote, thank you! I’m tagging whoever wants to do this.
