IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME -
the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE she arrived in Denocte, Locust stood just outside of a bloody tidepool, hooves grinding into the wet, grey sand, surrounded by a crescent-moon of variably nauseated pirates.
“Uhh, capt’n,” stammers out one of the younger ones (Four or five, she thinks, but she hadn’t even bothered to memorize his name, because she knew he didn’t have the guts to make it as a pirate. Damned kid was just in it expecting to get rich, or find adventures, or to sleep around at every port – she’d suspected he’d be gone at the next one, and she was right), “Are yah…are yah sure he’s dead?”
When she sighed, the sound almost seemed bored. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about water horses, kid,” she says, grimly, still staring down at the bloodied corpse, “but I’ll teach you a valuable lesson about piracy, right here and now. See, most things tend to die when you gut ‘em like you’d gut a fish, but, if you really ain’t so sure…” The obsidian knife lashes out, and, with surgical precision and enough quickness to be a blur, slashes open the dead kelpie’s throat. Blood begins to drip out of the newly-opened wound, staining the kelpie’s dark coat violent red. “…this’ll usually do the trick. Any questions?” The boy gulps audibly and shakes his head. She smiles too-warmly, a wisp of her white hair, buffeted by the salty breeze, drifting across her sweat-stained brow; it itches something awful, and she makes a mental note to retie her hair when she finished with this bloody business. “Good boy.” The words slide off her tongue, low and silky and distantly threatening. “Now, as payment for this demonstration, you’ll be cleaning the pelt, once I’m done carving it up.” The boy looks horrified, but she just continues to smile. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”
“N-no, capt’n,” he manages, his voice catching pathetically, and looks away. One of the others, another youngster (albeit one in possession of a slightly stronger stomach), nudges him gently. Locust barely notices. Her eyes are on the dead kelpie. Its toothy jaw hangs open, unhinged in preparation to bite; its tongue, already swollen, flapped uselessly with each rolling wave. She’d carved a neat line from the beast’s sternum to about halfway down its belly, when it was fool enough to rear up. (Entrails hang halfway out, bobbing in the shallow water.) Dark blood, already half-crusted from heat and wind, covers her forelegs and her chest, drips down her jaw; and her dagger hangs boredly in the air at her side, dribbling a thin line of red. Her stare is impassive, glazed and dark – in the light, the teal of her eyes gleams like sunshine through the shallows, but here, it is the color of a storm. The sort that drags ships under.
“Good, good,” she says, her voice dipping to a murmur, and adds, expectantly, “now. Where is my carving knife?”
SEA BIRDS cry out, but their voices are nearly lost to the wind, even as they circle in the shallows bordering the shoreline. It’s high tide, and the water has rolled all the way up to the rocky cliffs that rise up from the beach, coating them in a dangerous layer of slick saltwater and foam. The water is choppy and grey, but, if you dip close enough to it, the color might seem closer to a milk-green, crested with the occasional ridge of off-white. Either way, you can’t see much in it, partially because it is so murky and partially because the sky is heavy with a thick layer of dark clouds. On the distant horizon, far out in the open sea, it is raining. You can smell it on the wind – a sweet cleanliness against the sharp tang of salt water and sand.
Denocte’s pier hangs out in the open water, extending several hundreds of feet out into the water. It is a dark strip against the choppy sea, which froths up against the sturdy old wood like it poses any sort of threat; but the pier has long stood the test of time, and the ocean’s efforts to overtake it have led to nothing more than a thin sheen of water on the wood and thick growths of barnacles on the wooden legs that dig deep into the (presently submerged) sand bar below. Few ships are out in this weather, docked at the port; fewer ships still than usual, with the news of trouble in Denocte.
The Dark Strider docks at the pier, imposing itself on the small fishing boats and merchants’ ships that already bob in the water. It isn’t the largest ship there, by any means – that honor belongs to a huge passenger ship, which seems rather low on passengers, followed by an assortment of cargo ships -, but there is something uniquely intimidating about the smaller vessel. The dark wood (from no tree on Novus) creaks and heaves as it bobs in the water, weighted down with sailors darting about the deck. Black waves, ornate and curling, are painted onto the sides of the ship, and, for all the time that it clearly spends at sea, the paint job is neat – from enchantment or meticulous repainting, though which one is unclear. An ink-black flag flies from the mast, billowing in the salty wind; a white horse’s skull, surrounded by a circle of knives, has been stitched onto the fabric. The ship’s figurehead is equally skeletal. The carved figure, some kind of hippocampus (or kelpie) is half-alive, but the skin around its chest splits, revealing the ribs. It thrashes back against the boat, carved hair a sea of wild tangles, eyes rolled back to the whites. The figurehead is unpainted, and the texture of the wood suggests that it has never been painted.
Dockhands stare at it uneasily as they pass, but they don’t dare say what it is, or repeat the name. There is a silent truce in place - if you don’t mention it, you don’t have to deal with it.
The boarding ramp collides with the pier with a sharp clatter, and the first figure off the boat is a woman.
She is small and silver-sleek, her coat streaked with sweat and stray saltwater, and her white hair has been pulled back, to keep it out of her eyes. She moves with such a cheerful sway that you could almost say that she is prancing – each measured stride long and graceful, in spite of the bobbing of the ship in the water and the quivering unsteadiness of the ramp. She surveys the pier with a rudimentary glance in either direction, locking eyes with a couple of dockhands in the process.
Locust smiles, all pretty and nonthreatening. They turn away as quickly as possible, swallowing their tongues.
Her hooves clatter down onto the pier, and she grimaces as a thin wash of salt water dips around their dark curves; strange, for a pirate captain. She seems to shake it, though, turning her blue-eyed stare towards the kingdom that sprawls out on the other end of the pier, and takes a step forward, when-
“W-what do we do now, Capt’n?”
She throws a look over her shoulder and lets it fall on a boy with a scarred-up face. Scarface. They’d sure been creative when figuring out what to call him. (Not that her father had ever been much better, but she liked to pride herself on being superior to him in almost every regard.) “I don’t care,” she says, succinctly, smirking, “as long as you fuck off and leave me alone. I’ve got business to attend to, and y’ain’t invited, Scarface.” There’s a spring in her step that suggests that she’s being playful, but the snarl in her voice also suggests that it might be better not to question her. And, truth is, she really doesn’t give a damn what they do – she doesn’t care for a single soul on that ship, and, well, if they decide to go disappearing into Denocte’s winding back alleys or tantalizing bars, it’s no concern of hers. She’s sure that she can find some intrepid young soul willing to take their place.
The boy stares at her, slack-jawed. “B-but Capt’n, you don’t have any of the cargo?” It’s not a question, but his tone implies one. She smiles at him icily, pausing, and turns to stare over her shoulder at him.
“It isn’t that kind of business,” she says, her voice dipping low – a threat lingers on the tip of her tongue, begging to come rolling off. “You know, kid, I don’t keep you around to ask questions. I’d hate for us to have to repeat what happened to Jameson, wouldn’t you?” The boy goes stock-still, his eyes bulging, and he might have choked, but she couldn’t hear it over the wind. (She wouldn’t do to him what she did to Jameson, not really. A curious youth and some old man who thought he could pull off a mutiny on her ship were two entirely different threats – but she had a reputation to uphold, and if the thought of getting thrown to a circling mass of ravenous sharks was enough to convince the boy to hold his tongue, all the better.) He nods limply, and she allows her smile to warm a fraction, her gaze to soften. “Good. Do try and enjoy yourself…Denocte is full of interesting sights, and I’d say we’ll be at sea for a few months after we leave.”
She turns on her heel and departs for the shore before she can let anymore kindness slip.
If the boy happens to be around the age her daughter would have been, if she were alive, then so be it.
By the time she reaches the markets, night has fallen.
It’s a dark one – particularly murky. The storm hasn’t broken over land yet, but, if the clouds that block out the moon and the stars above are any kind of indication, it will start raining sometime tomorrow morning. At the moment, that’s no concern of Locust’s.
The streets are so luminous that they might as well have been engulfed in daylight, if daylight were a kaleidoscope of otherworldly hues. Ornate, cast-iron lanterns hang from balconies and awnings, from lampposts; a magician juggles little orbs of light between his antlers; light pours from the interiors of small shops, casting their patrons as odd shadows; occasionally something glowing darts down the streets, moving too quickly to be discernable. She smells candied apples and roasted nuts, sticky-sweet pastries and fine wine…and something with berries. Red ones.
They feel different from when she last visited, more otherworldly. She’s not sure that she likes the change, but Locust has always been superstitious.
Something lights between her shoulders, and she whirls, turning to stare into deep blue, reptilian eyes. “Well, you’re…new.” Locust blinks at the jewel-tone dragon, which gives a soft whirr in response. It crosses her mind that dragonskin would probably fetch a pretty penny, in that nice of a shade of pearlescent white, but the thought is gone as quickly as it came – the creature is too small to be worth the trouble, and, besides, it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. “Where did you come from?” She’s heard stories of Denocte’s new queen, and her dragon. Perhaps they have something to do with that.
The dragon, of course, does not answer, but it does give a knowing chirp before it flies off again, landing somewhere in the exposed rafters of a nearby building; she thinks that she sees a few others with it, flashes of bloodred and emerald green scales shifting in the spotty darkness, but she doesn’t linger to pick them out.
The Scarab is just a few streets down, she thinks, so she could easily go and conduct some actual business, for productivity’s sake, but, for tonight, she just wants to walk. Go find the person who’s selling those candied apples and grab one, perhaps – gods know that they can’t keep sugared treats on the ship. They never last and attract flies in droves.
She doesn’t, though. She just leans back against one of the stone walls of one building or another, pulls her knife from its holster, and flips it in the air in front of her, all the while watching passerby on the street.
It’s been too long, she thinks, since she’s seen some faces she doesn’t recognize.
@open || well, this is....long. anyways. the girl is here. chronologically, this is pre-island, since I intend to throw her in that direction. || "sea of ice," callie siskel
"Speech!" ||
