The City by the Sea
Chapter 7
The blood made her fingers sticky and her mind waver. The power, her power, forming and fueling the runes, trembled. She looked up, over, around; she shivered. She swallowed. She turned in the direction of Coast. The coast. The sea.
It shimmered before her, a memory of clearest glass.
She almost screamed, but stopped herself. This was what she wanted. She had to see it to know it, and had to know it to defeat it. She narrowed her eyes, trying to decipher what she saw into something she could understand.
Its frame was difficult to discern, but it was vaguely humanoid. She watched it sway, tilting on nothing, as if uncertain. Or uncomfortable. Levy watched the movement, touching her tongue to her lips. Tasting her blood and...
And what?
The creature snapped, no longer swaying. Levy's head felt heavy, pounded from above. She looked up, but there was nothing there to attack her. Nothing to fear. Fear was forward, fear was slick and nigh transparent.
Why, she forced herself to wonder, to seek for knowledge, to fight fear, women? Why prepubescent boys? Why mages?
Another sway, another snap. Was it closer? Had it broken through her barriers?
"To make a body," it was the only answer, but why?
The creature did not appear to move, but it was closer with each second. Her heart beat hard, forcing her to catch her breath at the pain. The shields, she reminded herself, are strong. I am safe.
Inside the creature's form, thinner than hair, there were lines, dark in color, or so they appeared in contrast to her magically created light. All angles, those lines. No smooth curves.
Unnatural.
She almost laughed at the thought. It wasn't like she expected nature to have a place in the situation.
"Hello," she said, and congratulated herself on the evenness of her tone. There was no response. Not a twitch; not a shimmer. Did it not comprehend? Could it not hear? Did it not care?
Did it matter?
"No," she answered herself, "it does not."
She raised a hand, palm flat and forward facing. "Reveal."
The word appeared, outlined in black and filled with transparent green. Through it she saw the form take glowing shape. She counted six – what she would call – limbs. Four things that might be arms, two legs. There was no neck, and the "head" appeared as a splitting cell. The cleavage point in the middle pinched to the halfway point of division.
Her left hand gestured, and in a louder voice she commanded, "Box."
The "o" grew and grew until it slipped around the figure, forming a cylinder as it dropped from "head" to "feet", resting on the cobbles and holding the monster in place. The "b" and "x" wrapped around the "o" adding to the prison.
Rune commands were not a field she was expert in, unfortunately. She'd read on the subject and made a study of Freed's methods. She did not have her own style, but she was adept enough to make use of Freed's style, altering it slightly to suit her own needs. They wouldn't be as powerful as his, but it worked with the hiding before, and it seemed to work with the beacon, so she thought she could pull off a few harder rune commands.
"Écriture nom," she said as she wrote the rune on the walls of her BOX.
Knowing the name of the creature was not necessarily important. Levy was certain that she could destroy it without the name, but it would be useful if such a case ever came again. And there was her curiosity to be fed.
The power of the BOX trembled. Levy stepped back. "Contain. Hold. Enforce."
Each word was a layer of protection over the BOX. Her view of the captive dimmed, but she could still make out those fine lines. She could still see the glowing shape of her rune command.
Deep within, the BOX continued to tremble, but it held. Levy proceeded to write the command for name on the outermost layer of the containment. A shudder shook the ground. A tone, short, booming entered the soles of her feet, vibrating up through her bones.
Chuku, was the sound, chuku. It was a round sound for all of its spoken spikes.
"Chuku," Levy spoke but could not recreate what she heard echoing within her body. Instead she put her pen to the BOX again.
Écriture nom. Écriture nom.
Chuku.
It meant nothing to her, that sound. It wasn't enough, that containment.
Écriture étant, she wrote. If not the name, she demanded its existence. She demanded it reveal what it was.
Her skin went cold as all of her magic was drawn into that one rune, that one command. And then a flush of heat as it was sent back to her with all the force of that same power. Levy staggered as the booming crashes rang again, inside the BOX, outside, under the soles of her feet.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The whole of The City by the Sea shook. She stumbled, tripped, tilted, fell. Her right hand twisted at an angle, catching her but pitching her sideways. Her shoulder skinned as it slid across the rocks. The sky joined the earth in its rage, and lightening cut across the darkness above.
CRACK.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Her mind was flooded by memories that had nothing to do with her own life. The salt of her own blood on her tongue mutated and spread. Spread to every part of her. Salt, brine, water, sea. It was everything.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The BOX, wrapped as it was in the commands she had made, shook, and memories continued their assault. She felt herself, herself and not herself. There was silk on her skin. Cold and smooth, dancing ice. She could taste every flavor of water on her tongue, sweet and sour and rich, bold, life-giving.
BOOM.
CRACK.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Her ears rang with more than the earth's trembling. The music of whales caused an aching loss to blossom in her gut. A flutter of bubbles. The giggling play of fins dancing around her. Season upon season of moonlight on water. Years of following migratory patterns of her wandering family, of getting to know all corners of the vast ocean. Losing family, gaining family. Meeting friends and leaving friends.
And love, she knew that, tasted that, heard that, there in the deep.
BOOM.
BOOM.
CRACK.
BOOM.
Ages weighed upon her. Heavy, alone.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
She felt an end, a nothingness.
And then she was reborn. Stumbling. Confused. Hungry. Trapped. Scared. Guilty. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry.
There was no water to taste, now, only blood and flesh. So much fear. So much guilt. So much hunger. She wanted to leave, to go back to nothing, but power held her to this non-life, and power commanded that she return to a state of wholeness.
The more she devoured the more she condensed into something resembling her former self. The confusion and fear gained complexity. The guilt gained strength. She needed to leave, needed to be free, and for that she would need to feed from a place different from where she was chained. Lengthen the tether until it could break.
The water. She missed the water. She wanted, wanted, wanted to return to the nothing of her sea-floor death.
But then there was a pulsing beat in her lower abdomen, and the confusion returned a thousand fold. A child...
"The nin." Levy rolled to her knees. Pitched sideways, heaving. "A ghost of the nin." She swallowed back a feeling of nausea.
The creature. The creature that couldn't truly be called a creature, took on some density. The four "arms" became two, flattening into fins. The two "legs" became one. One thick tail. The cleavage point between the two heads became shallow. It wasn't dividing. It was merging.
The nin. The nin.
They were fish, rare fish from the deepest and most mysterious places in the vast ocean. Of all the rare sea creatures a fisher from The City by the Sea could bring home, a nin was the rarest possible. It's face resembled so closely that of a human that it was considered terrible fortune to kill one and bring it ashore. But the fish was also said to bring immortality. Feared and desired in equal measure. Well. No. Not equal. Some people would reach and risk any danger if fortune or immortality were the reward.
But then this, this nin, this nin was dead. A ghost. None could eat its flesh.
The lines. The energy. That life... a child.
"Women for fertility. Boys for the unborn."
She shuddered.
"Idiots," she whispered. So many harsher words, words others she knew would use, but none would be clearer. "Idiots!"
Did they know? she wondered. The City people who had hired her, her and the others... Someone knew, someone had to know. Someone had called it from its sea-floor death.
"Their daughters as sacrifices!"
She tasted water, again.
"Freedom. Outsiders. Magic. They brought magicians, female magicians, because they had to appear to do something. Female so that the nin-ghost could and would fight back and take the mages as sacrifices. It took the non-City-folk sacrifice because those magicians were of non-City blood with non-City memories. The summoner didn't realize it could use them to free itself."
She looked at the lines, thin, but bold, and at the merging. The creature was clearly taking control of itself. Was that intended?
The nin. Levy knew very little about the sea creatures. Considered by some an object of evil, by others one of desire. A ritual murder and consumption of the flesh of a nin could bring – most likely – death or – rarely – near-immortality.
The City … they were creating a nin. "Reviving the nin." Levy had never heard of a single sighting of a true nin. To her knowledge, before today, they were legend.
"The flesh of a nin … a nin child, a single weak nin child could potentially bring in more money than a year's worth of fish. Even the rarest forms of mundane sea life could not match the value of a nin."
The ground trembled.
"You can't kill," Levy told the thing, wiping blood from her chin and tears from her cheeks. She hadn't realized she was crying. She couldn't cry. She wouldn't cry. She had to do this; she had to do this. "I can't let you kill." Breeding nin! "Twenty lives..." a tear broke through her resolve, slipped down her cheek, and splashed on her chest. "You were also hurt, brought back to a not-life. Controlled. Made to kill. Kept from the waters..."
Just the word brought those memories, memories from another life, crashing down on Levy's heart once more. The ache she felt for the water, the ache she felt for the taste of salt and sea, weakened her knees and tore a sob from her throat.
Levy hid her face in her hands. She didn't know what to do. Didn't know how to fix the situation. She couldn't, she could not tell the Council, tell anyone about the nin. Others would do what The City by the Sea had done.
She was near to hyperventilating as she dropped layer after layer of shields. She barely kept herself from weeping while kneeling in front of her BOX. The apparition was one being, now, and through REVEAL she could see that those dark lines had condensed into a throbbing ball at the center of its form.
Écriture nom.
Zentai.
Écriture étant.
Levy focused on each foreign memory that sang through her. She gathered them for justice. Gathered them for her own remembrance. The crime of this, she should never forget. She stood on shaking legs and willed what few tears escaped her to stop.
"I'm sorry," she told the nin, the memory, the essence of the nin, who had long ago been hunted to extinction. "No matter the number of people you ate, of life consumed, you are not alive. So you cannot continue to exist. I'm sorry."
She absorbed the rage, the helplessness, the guilt, the fear, all of what came to her within her own mind; she took the emotion of the nin into her own heart.
"You cannot remain, but I promise you justice," she told the nin as she touched her pen to the air.
Écriture defaire.
She could not kill, but uncreating...
"I'm so sorry."
The sky and earth and night and stars beat her with a multitude of screams. The nin split, shredded. One, two, three, four … over and over until 20 shaking forms surrounded her. One by one those, too, shredded down to the last, which crumbled.
When all else had gone, only she was left. And one raisin-sized eye, dark and shrived from long exposure to salt and sea.
She swayed. "FIRE."
And it burned.
Only she. And no other.
Author's Note: Nin are roughly equal to the Japanese mythical "ningyo", a fish with a human-like face, responsible for the legend that if you eat the flesh of a ningyo you can gain immortality. The wandering nun and all that. Though often translated as "mermaid" I didn't use the term mermaid because the western mermaid legends and, especially, appearance aren't truly equivalent.
Sorry for the wait. I'll try to be quicker next time, but I make no promises. Should be one more chapter and an epilogue.