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83. [Red Tide] The Lurker in the Smoke
🕑 Added 2025-01-16 23:45:09 +0000 UTCRed Tide, Enchantress of the 4th Renown, The Reef, high
Esoteric, the trolkin mage, a tour guide
Mockery, Knife Master of the 8th Renown and Quill of the Trolkin, it was all her idea
***
25 Meltzend, 61 AW
The Crown, North Continent
95 days until the next Granting
Warm water reached up to Red Tide’s waist. A small gasp escaped her lips—not a sound she’d normally allow herself to make, but she was alone. The tension in her muscles, the brittle chill in her bones, both loosened as the gentle waves lapped against her. She dipped down lower, letting the water caress her chest, and slide over her shoulders. The gills on her ribs, unused for months now, greedily puckered.
Red Tide wanted to throw herself all the way under. She wanted to be fully submerged. She wanted to click the delicate bones in her ankles together and make the fin. Yet, something in her mind blocked these urges, like a ghost limb that she couldn’t quite will to working. A strange feeling, that resistance, but one that oddly didn’t frighten her. She could be perfectly content wading here.
The sea floor beneath her feet felt like smooth stone, though she could see sand squeezed between her toes. The horizon stretched on forever, the sky a rosy pink. There must have been land behind her somewhere. She didn’t turn to check. When she raised her arms, the water beaded and clung like syrup.
The little worm man came to mind. The symbologist. When she’d been introduced to Ink, that creature had brought her to a place not unlike this. An ocean that wasn’t. Because this couldn’t be real, right? Red Tide knew, in some detached part of her mind, that this place was just a trick.
A trick of the smoke.
Even though the temperature here was balmy, Red Tide’s breath misted into curls. Her mouth tasted like pine needles. She sucked saliva through her teeth and spit into the water.
As the ripples from her spit dissolved, Red Tide saw a school of thumb-sized fish the shape and color of rubies dart between her legs. They made some kind of stupid fish game of dancing figure eights through and around her knees. Red Tide laughed. She remembered this. Her father had brought her here when she was just a girl. This was a beach on the south continent, a short swim east of the city called Beacon. There were Gadgeteers there who made a habit of leaving valuable debris strewn about where they tested their inventions, and they never put up much of a fuss when her father and his cohort decided to take from them. Red Tide was still too young to participate in the raids, though her father had given her a knife last summer, and shown her where to cut a man to stop him from chasing.
He would yell for her soon, she remembered, and she’d be reluctant to leave the fish behind, feeling that she was on the verge of understanding their game. He’d slap her for being slow to respond, and make her carry some half-built contraption on her back, which he would then fail to sell at the Reef because the salt water gummed up the gears.
But that idiot hadn’t called to her yet. She could enjoy the peace, the wet, the dance of the fish. She could stay here for as long as—
“What a lovely memory,” Esoteric said. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”
Red Tide’s gaze twitched to where the trolkin stood beside her. Although he’d interrupted her train of thought, she wasn’t surprised by his presence. It was as if he’d been standing there all along. Esoteric’s elongated body appeared somehow taller in the shallows, his long beard combed into a stately curl that dangled just above the water like a fish hook.
“I didn’t share shit with you,” Red Tide said. “You’re just here.”
Esoteric rolled his shoulders. “I had forgotten warm. All my visions are cold now, it seems.”
Red Tide squinted at him. “Why are you here? How?”
“To guide you, of course,” the trolkin answered. “The smoke connects us. Your past, your possibilities, the giants experienced life thusly and—”
“I don’t know you,” Red Tide interrupted. “I don’t want you looking at my past.”
“I am but a passenger. I can only see what you show me.”
Red Tide eyed the trolkin. She supposed it wasn’t a bad idea to have a guide in this situation. The rational thought made her smirk, especially as the trolkin’s slender legs made no disturbance in the water—as if anything in this cloud made sense.
She looked down at her palms, searching for signs of blue amidst the light gray lines. There was a sensation of new strength that Red Tide didn’t think was entirely hallucinatory. She curled her arms and felt her biceps stretch and harden.
“Stronger,” she said. “That real?”
“Yes, but for you, short-lived,” Esoteric replied. “Do not worry, my dear. You will not transform into one of us. Years of use are required.”
“I wasn’t fucking worried,” Red Tide muttered.
“No. Of course not.”
Red Tide felt a prickling on the back of her neck. That would be her father, on the beach behind her. Any moment now, he would shout for her and she would be wise, this time, and take off running at his call. In anticipation, she turned around to look for him.
There was a beach behind her, but her father wasn’t there. No city, no Gadgeteer testing ground, either. The landscape looked unfinished, like a painting abandoned before adding the background. But there was something—something far, far off in the distance.
A deep blue dot. A pinprick, really, like a hole had been poked in the air and the night sky had come pouring out. For something so far off, the blue felt impossibly in focus. A shimmering silver corona surrounded the dark sapphire, rippling like a coat of fur on a charging animal. Red Tide’s palms felt suddenly clammy, and a cold sweat popped on her back. The sensation was like being followed.
“You see it, then,” Esoteric said. “The lurker in the smoke.”
Red Tide shuddered. The longer she looked at the looming hole in the world, the worse her shivers became, until her whole body vibrated with an unnatural chill.
“What’s wrong with her? What have you done?” Throne Gazer’s voice came through muffled. Though she couldn’t see him, Red Tide felt his hand squeezing her shoulder.
“She is fine,” Esoteric said, directing these words to the empty space behind Red Tide. “Do not look too hard at the lurker, my dear,” the trolkin then said to her. “It looks back.”
Digging the heels of her hands against her eyes, Red Tide spun forward. The cold that had overtaken her vanished immediately, and she could again appreciate the warm water sloshing against her legs. Still, there remained a distant inkling of something foreign and unknowable behind her.
“The fuck is that?” she asked. “Explain.”
“A curse upon the giants and all who share their blood,” Esoteric said. “The lurker catches up with all of us, eventually. When that day comes, it must be mastered. Or else, our bodies become vessels for its hunger.”
As Red Tide tried to make sense of this, Esoteric strode purposefully ahead of her. Now, she could see a dark blue, silver-furred snake coiled up and down his spine. She had no doubt this was made of the same substance as the entity that hovered behind her, though on Esoteric it did not hurt to look at. Without quite understanding how, Red Tide could tell that it was this sliver of the lurker that had stretched and reshaped his body. Esoteric had willed it so.
“Crazy bastards,” Red Tide muttered.
“Power comes at a price,” Esoteric replied. “I spent decades in the Magelab toying with the old ways. But there are bargains beyond even what the ge’chan and ge’ema can offer us.”
Gods of magic and gods of men. These were not Red Tide’s gods. Again, she thought of the island the symbologist brought her to, and how the encounter had been preceded by a visit from the ge’oca, the gods of the oceans. She’d had no fear of their massive, leviathan-sized presence. In fact, she’d felt honored and cared for.
“Piss on any bargain that looks like that,” she said.
Esoteric shrugged and motioned for her to follow. “Come. The Lady Mockery has arranged for you to aid us, yes? I would put a theory to the test.”
Red Tide sneered at that, but followed anyway. She was stuck in this damned hallucination, might as well ride it to the end. Although they waded our further and further, the water level never changed and the sky remained still. If she hadn’t feel the ground beneath her change—from smooth stone to crunching ice—she would’ve sworn they were simply marching in place.
But then, a woman tied to a stake appeared before them.
Red Tide thought of the way that the Queen of the Coralline Throne executed rebels by tying them to coral masts above the ocean and letting them roast in the sun. Her own father had died that way after Deep Dweller’s last rebellion. However, this woman tied to the stake was no oca’em. She was trolkin—muscular and wide, with one hand caught painfully inside a metal glove, the flesh bulging through the armor as if it had expanded too fast. A dark cape, silver-furred, was draped across her shoulders and flowed down her body.
No. Not a cape. The lurker again. Untamed and hungry, nearly consuming the woman.
Red Tide crept closer. The woman had the Ink of a champion splashed across her chest. A healer of the third renown. So, this was one of Mockery’s champions. But the Ink was faded—beyond what happened when an ability was overworked, as Red Tide had seen on her own chest. With dozens of tiny tongues, the lurker lapped at the woman’s Ink, stripping it away layer by layer, including the snowflake symbol tattooed on her throat.
“The snow melts,” Red Tide said, recalling Salt Wall’s saying about when a trolkin transformed into a troll.
“Yes,” Esoteric replied. “This is Gauntlet, Lady Mockery’s chosen. She loses her struggle with the lurker. I believe you can help her.”
“Me?” Red Tide snorted. “The fuck am I supposed to do?”
“Sing for her,” Esoteric said. “An old song, a—”
“Mage! You overstep!”
Manifesting from nowhere, Mockery kicked through the water toward them. Red Tide stumbled backward at the sight of her. She was bigger here, within the smoke, made massive by the six arms of the lurker that spread out from her back like insect legs, each clutching a knife of vivid blue ice. The huge trolkin shot Esoteric a murderous look, but quickly turned her attention to Red Tide. Mockery cupped Red Tide’s face in her huge hands.
“Battle-sister, you weren’t meant to undertake this alone,” Mockery said softly. She peered deep into Red Tide’s eyes, as if searching for something. Much to her chagrin, Red Tide found the woman’s presence oddly comforting. “You are safe here. Do not be disturbed by these visions, these hideous…” She trailed off, as if noticing the placid ocean for the first time. “Oh, this isn’t so bad.”
“It is as you suspected, my lady,” Esoteric chimed in. “Her mind is well-suited to the frosswiss.”
Mockery let go of Red Tide and rounded on him. “You were meant to wait for me!”
Esoteric bowed deeply, though his beard curled further upward to stay out of the water. “Forgive me, my lady, but the moment felt right and Gauntlet does not have long.”
“I’ll have your ear for this insolence,” Mockery said, and mimed a chopping motion.
“A price willingly paid if it means seeing Gauntlet tame the lurker, my lady.”
“Your conciliatory tone only makes me angrier!”
Mockery’s screaming sent ripples through the water and made Red Tide’s head hurt. She glanced again to the woman on the stake—Gauntlet—and her writhing.
“Enough,” Red Tide said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“There is an old song, a song of the giants—” Esoteric began.
Mockery interposed herself between Red Tide and the trolkin mage. “You need only sing for her,” Mockery said. “The rest of his bullshit matters little. Use your Ink and sing.”
“I don’t know any fucking giant song,” Red Tide said.
“You will know it,” Esoteric said, over Mockery’s broad shoulder. “It will come.”
Red Tide looked down at her hands. “I need my harp.”
“It arrives presently,” Esoteric replied.
Red Tide turned to her left and saw her harp—the beautiful, gleaming instrument—borne across the water. It was carried by a fish, a barracuda, the biggest that Red Tide had ever seen. The fish floated on its back, sliced down its belly, the harp mounted in its guts. For a moment, dread and disgust filled her, and Red Tide quickly snatched the harp away, brushing it off.
“Geez, Red,” said the fish, with Cuda Bite’s voice. “They told me to get it. I was careful not to scuff it.”
Red Tide shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, the gutted fish was gone, leaving her alone with the three trolkin. She sighed.
“Fine,” Red Tide said. “What now?”
“Your [Healing Song] and [Hypnotic Object],” Mockery said, with a note of reverence. “I will begin and you will take it from there.”
“Fuck it,” Red Tide said. “Go on, then.”
The three of them turned to face Gauntlet. Red Tide strummed a tentative note. Mockery opened her mouth to sing but, when she did, nothing but sea water came bubbling out. The water was joined by small chunks of ice, the trolkin puking all this out into the ocean below, the noise like a waterfall cascading over a cliff.
In the pattering impact, Red Tide heard notes.
Red Tide strummed her harp to match, making chords without thinking. As Mockery had instructed, she activated [Hypnotic Object] and [Healing Song]. When she began to sing, it was more than just words moving air, better than some land-walker song could ever be. She found that she could sing like she did under the water—through pulses and vibrations that painted vivid pictures—though the notes of her harp came through clear and sharp.
The words did come to her. They filled Red Tide until she felt huge. She sang of where the ice met the water; she sang of giant hands splitting open the horizon and letting light pour forth; she sang of opening arteries the size of rivers and letting poison spill free; she sang of eons waiting for that muck to freeze and then shaping it with careful hands; she sang of muscles and bone reshaping themselves in the womb of the winter and being born anew.
Her Ink felt hot on her chest. The song demanded much. It was a song that even these gods of man that had given her Ink found taxing. She would fade soon.
But she could see that it was working. Slowly, inch by inch, Gauntlet slipped the binds that tied her to the stake, leaving the lurker stuck to roast in the sun that suddenly burned down from the once rosy sky. Bits of the entity still clung to the trolkin woman’s shoulders, creating a mantle of deep blue shadow and silver fur, but her Ink filled back in and her shaking stopped.
Gauntlet straightened and met Red Tide’s eyes. “By Sulk, I was deep. I was deep and you’ve pulled me out.”
Somewhere, far, far behind Red Tide, her dead father shrieked. He would do more than slap her if he ever caught up with her.
It was Mockery who caught Red Tide when she passed out.
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