T a i s c e
Dear Friend,
You asked about the day Taisce arrived in Novus. Well, I cannot tell you of that day, for he has always been here. What I will tell you though, is of the day he returned to Solterra and to do that, I must begin at the start.
Taisce, you see was born a boy, like any other. He was born in sand that did not know the touch of water. In the midst of the dust and heat of the desert he was pushed into the world and, no sooner there, he was plucked from his mother’s side.
The child, born in the colours of a sea he had never known, was stolen away to become a part of a new project the once-king of Solterra had planned. As part of that masterpiece, the boy was whipped and poisoned, taken near to death and brought back again. They beat him into submission, manipulated his thoughts, his mind, his love, until all he knew of love was the name a soldier told him was his, Taisce. He was called so because that is what his mother cried as he was taken away and she lay dying, a spear in her breast.
So Taisce spent years with the child soldiers, he fought and offered his life for Solterra over and over. He was a snake in the sands of Solterra’s desert and he fought like one. But his skin was the colour of the sea. So they called him the Seasnake. He would hiss and bite, snarl and savage his enemies – he was as wild a soldier as the other children that made up the rest of his faction.
But one day, the day he discovered the ocean, well, that was the day it claimed what was its own. With his skin the colour of water and sand combined, maybe it was fate that decreed he was made to paint beaches red, not deserts. So the sea sent a kelpie to claim this child soldier, and it did, in a battle that raged.
Taisce drowned a boy soldier and emerged from the deep as a kelpie; the body of his maker broken at his hooves. That was the first kill he made as a kelpie, but one of many he had made as a soldier.
So it brings me to this day, the day he reclaimed his name, Taisce. The day the wild sea rolled into Solterra and from its waves he leapt upon the rugged sand. Ah, there was nothing beautiful about Solterra’s beaches, nothing significant about the place he died. His pearlescent eyes swept over it, dismissive. The broken kelpie was gone, eaten by predators and time.
With the waters roaring and hissing at their creation, Taisce washed like the tide along the beach. He leaves no footprints in the sand, for the sea chases him, helps him, swallowing any evidence that he was there.
The kelpie stops at an alcove and there tat beautiful monster of the sea began to sing. It was a song he once sang before the beatings at the hand of his commander stole his love, his fear.
At sea his brethren watch, the hair of the Comhar herd glinting a myriad of unnatural hues upon the breakers. They listened as their brother sang for the child soldiers, to remind them of the nights they sat and sang together, until each lost their voice, their soul, their bodies to Solterra’s war effort.
That haunting song poured rich as wine, and achingly beautiful. It was specter soft and designed to pull, to lure. Taisce waits, adorned in the blue of the sea, the gold of the sand – he is their marbled testament. Was Solis watching his prodigal son that day? For bright sunlight flashed along the beaten, rusting collar of his servitude. Taisce heeded it not as he watched the beach with white sea-spray eyes and his lungs drank the hot Solterran air.
That, my dear friend, was the day Taisce returned to Solterra.
