Sink or Swim - Sea, Sand And Surf (Free RP)

[Dungeon Delver]

The Red Silt
On a Beach, Somewhere Near Dol Amroth
(Open)

Trawler-Man of Tide and Flesh. Father of the Water...
You are the Mouth Devouring and the Mouth Returning,
You stand tall at the High Tide and crawl on your belly at the Low Tide
- "The Silt Verses, Let Me Speak First of Revelations"

We sold our souls to the divinity of oceans
- "The Divinity of Oceans, AHAB"

I watch the tide as it came in at evening. Endless. Cyclical. Despairing.

Duinenthel coughed. Sea water drippled down her chin and stung. She sat on the beach, covered in seaweed and wrapped in a besoaked dress. She coughed and coughed, her lungs hacking and seizing. The sea had deposited the young(ish) woman back onto the shoreline, rejecting a final embrace and lightless cabin. Duinenthel’s breath caught her and forced her to open her eyes. The sun was low in the west. How many hours? How many days? She felt a weight on her. The sand, the seaweed, the water, even her own soul. Barely, imperceptivity, she moved. Her body screamed in protestation, agonizing as she stood, wobbled, and fell back to the earth. A wind, jittering, blew off the water and blew salt into her face. It laughed at her. What good would tears do? As much as she wished she could, not a single drop could fall from her eyes. Her lips were cracked, else she might give the shore a laugh of despairing madness.

She was alone. Where was he? He said he would never part from her. He promised. He swore. Yet, where was he?

The weight of absence took hold of her and she sank into the sand. Could she stay here? Could she let the beach swallow her whole, devour her and leave this world a little less empty?

She screamed. The scream had nothing to echo from along the empty shore, but echo it did. What sort of ghostly, unseen monoliths harried this unnamed, unimportant shore? She covered her ears as the scream reverberated off nothing and roared back at her. Anguish, betrayal, loneliness, terror, forlornity, absence, presence, pettiness, surreality, oblivion.

A crab scuttled into her presence. It looked at her quizzically. Was she food? Was she a predator? It clambered and pinched her leg. She yelped and kicked it. Shocked, the crab scuttled away a few paces. Then stopped. It considered her again. Inhuman eyes watched her. She watched the crab. What did it want? It took a tentative step closer. She hissed at it. It did not take a step back.

The tide came in, frothy water washed over the two observers, unnoted by either. The world was erased and smoothed out, made new and unreal.

Duinenthel stood up again. Shakily.

He was gone. He left her. He lied to her when he told her they would go together. A cold rage boiled in her stomach. She retched sea water. The crab, having moved closer while she was occupied with her balance, was baptized in the spume. She took no notice of the crab until it pinched her bare foot. Blood mixed with the sand and salty foam across the crab’s claw.

Neither of them moved in that moment. She did not move her foot away and the crab did not advance nor did he pinch her again. How long did the two antagonists stare at each other? Minutes? Hours? The sea raged and whined around them, frustrated into a secondary character in any tale.

“I told you already, I gave myself to the sea and you spat me back out! You rejected me! You promised me music and you gave me nothing but silence! How long did I breath in your salty promises only the be spat out?”

The crab did not move.

[Dungeon Delver]

The Red Silt
On a Beach, Somewhere Near Dol Amroth
(Open)

Smite the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered
- “Vigil, lamb of god”

Forgive my erring ways, Trawler-Man. For I am amongst enemies and their eyes are upon me.
Protect me, Trawler-Man. For there is no trust in me, and I am alone.
Bear me downriver, Trawler-Man. And when the river rises, on that great day when the river rises, I will find my peace in silt and water. I will rise in the currents, made anew.
- “The Silt Verses, And Next Of Dark Deceit”

It felt good, screaming at the crashing waves. It did no good, of course, but it felt good. There was something onanistic about roaring your displeasure to an uncaring sea. The waves came in, the waves came out. You screamed your rage and defiance, made your petition to a god of silt and salt, and hoped in the end that you were not swept away from your impudence. Duinenthel had screamed and petitioned her deity until her mouth was raw and her lips foamed with the madness of anguish and ecstasy. The salt of the waves stung her broken flesh, yet she refused to move as the tide came in, higher and higher each time. Her skin was stretched and split, blood seeped from a dozen small wounds across her limbs and torso. She could barely feel them. Blind, ecstatic rage filled her. The crash of the waves against the sand, booming so loud that she lost all sense of time and place, kept her rooted to the spot. Her blood mixed with the ocean water, pulling out of her a fleshy tithe. She did not mind. In truth, she barely noticed. She was still weak, but rage made a fire in the cold pit of her stomach.

The crab, too, did not leave her side. She considered eating it. Crabs were sacred and their flesh was said as sweet as the nectar of Lothlórien. She had eaten raw crab before though, and it was not good. Sacredness and desperation were not bedfellows just yet, though she would need food at some point. This crab. This crab was strange. Since she had puked on it, baptizing it in seafoam, blood, and bile, it seemed to have grown. There was no way to prove this, of course, and Duinenthel’s senses were not clear. Still, she could not shake the idea that this crab, scuttling, crackling, and clacking, was meant to be here with her. It snipped several tiny fish and other crustaceans that clambered or snuck too close. It fed with a horrific patience, slow, even, and filled with unnerving potential energy. Twice, she thought she’d lost the crab when the tide came in too strong and swept him back into the brine. Yet twice, he clawed his way back to the shore and waded in the silt with her.

“What are you?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. Her voice was shredded, a raspy ghost-like thing so ripped to shreds that even a whisper brought her pain.

The crab, of course, did not speak or indicate at all that it heard her. If it had not fought the tide to stay near her, she would have assumed it was not even aware of her existence.

How could this be? There was something arcane about this crab, something unnatural yet comforting. “What are you?” she repeated.

Her partner, liar and cheat, was dead. She knew that now. His sacrifice had been accepted and his life was drained and battered from him. They leapt from the prow of the ship together. Their eyes not on each other but on the storm raging in front of them, a purple and black wound on the surface of reality. She remembered the way the lightning wreathed the sky in a scattered crown. The waters roiled and raged, howling prayers to the sky that no living being could interpret. She remembered the air around them as they leapt. It was cold and jagged, cutting slices in her dress as she descended toward the ocean’s surface. She remembered the way it howled and jittered. Never before had she felt something so divine. She knew that what she and her partner were doing was right, just, sanctified.

Yet.

Here she was. Her body, broken and half-a-corpse, was tossed back onto the shore of some nameless uninhabited beach. Where was her partner? An alien thought entered her mind. What if he survived as well? What if he’d swam away? If he were dead, his body would have been devoured by the sea, taken by him and brought below. If he had lived, shouldn’t he have ended up on the same beach as she? Broken and battered?

She hated him. Hated him for being dead or alive. He had taken what she had earned, supplanted her, stolen the blessing of her watery patron for himself and left her with nothing.

The crab pinched at her leg, tearing a bloody gash.

“You bastard!” she yelped the broken into a fit of painful coughing.

The crab clacked its claws, pulling a piece of seaweed from Duinenthel’s leg.

They stared at each other for what could have been hours or minutes. Time stretched, twisted, and doubled back on itself more than a few times. The waves were the only constant as they crashed and roared.

The woman and the crab.

They watched one another, each consider into their own strange way of thinking, each unable to comprehend the other. Aliens through and through.

She looked away, the first to break eye contact (if eye contact that could be called). There were two fishhooks on the ground, each with an encrusted barnacle on the blunt end. The priests would pierce themselves with fishhooks to show their devotion to the Brined One. She picked one up, examined it, and, without pausing to consider a wiser course of action, sliced her cheek open and pushed the hook through, then back out again. The pain was— not nearly as bad as she could have imagined it. In fact, in the seconds after she pierced herself, she realized she felt no pain whatsoever. Retrieving the second hook, she pierced the shell of the crab and left the hook dangling. The crab made no move to escape or attack her as she did. It remained placid.

“There we are then,” she whispered, “two new priests of a new sect of believers. Come on you, we have work to do.”

[Dungeon Delver]

The Red Silt
On a Beach, Somewhere Near Dol Amroth
(Open)

Will your mind be at ease
When the shadows grow taller?
- “Shovel Beats Sceptre, Marduk”

She’d grown up amongst the lobster-catchers and the ferrymen - great bearded men, the picture of virility and hearty male arrogance - and she’d watched the river swallow them up one by one. Fathers and sons.
- “The Silt Verses, Let Me Speak First Of Revelations”

In her dreams, she danced. She pirouette against the waves and balloned against them, bounding higher into the sky. She flew across the wine-dark sea, her heart aching with longing. The depths of the thalassic world were open to her, she cried to them, and they answered to her, but the words were garbled and mixed, she could not translate them and she cried all the more. The voice of the sea called to her, but she could not understand it. There was anger in the voice, longing, rage, despondency, perplexation, indignation. Oh, how she longed to go to that voice. She recognized it, despite her inability to understand it. She reached down, her long, slender hand parting the waters. The grey sea opened up to her and she surged down, the water wrapping and warping about her. She could almost understand the exaltations of the voice, just a little closer…

She awoke as a wave crashed noisomely against the lean-to. She yelped and, as her mind receded from the shores of her dreams and back into the waking world, she cried. The world around her was cold and grey, unwelcoming and hostile. She shivered and vomited. Her stomach plumbed the depths of her being and found nothing inside her, however. She had not eaten in days now. Could not bring herself to. Instead, she coughed hard enough to mix blood with the dry heaves. She spat. The crab was there and, as soon as she’d spat, scuttled to the bloody phlegm. He poked at it with his claw, swirled the sand around, and danced. He was a sangromancer, reading signs and portents in blood, but revealed nothing to his companion. She watched him, her eyesight grey along the edges. His claws were red with blood, not just hers. He, of the two priests, was eating well. The crab had no compunction against eating, no emotions weighed upon his chitinous shell.

“Would that I could be like you…” she muttered, resting her chin on her knee. “Would that I could be cajoled by the waves as you, that I could return to the primordial tide and be one with the silt…”

The crab stopped his sangromancy and looked at her with inscrutable eyes. What sort of madness lay behind them, she wondered. What idiot god and pressed a measure of intelligence into a creature wholly unprepared to accept it. She laughed bitterly, was she thinking of the crab or herself?

In the days since her resurrection, her mood had shifted drastically, back and forth. The resolve was still there, a stone in her gut, but the determination to act upon that resolve fizzled like ocean foam. So, she sat here, cowering in a lean-to, wondering about the nature of intelligence. If the scene were not so absurd, she would have laughed. What was she doing?

Her fingers were encrusted with salt, her cheek throbbed.

Wobbily, the priestess of the shore came to her feet. The wind blew back her hair, a ghastly smell was on the air, the smell of death and putrefaction. The old, dead version of her might have balked, might have run. But today, Duinenthel did not. She moved toward the smell. It filled her nostrils with a putrescence brought up from the very depths of the abyss. Decay was like a film against her skin. There was a carcass floating ashore, a sign that her god had not abandoned her, that he accepted her.

The crab was at her feet, scuttling along with her and clacking his claws.

The body came closer, pulled to her by the will of the tides.

“Praise the Lord of the Waves. Praise the Prince of the Muck and Silt. Praise the King of Squamous Invertebrates.”

That morning, she feasted.