Come Sail Away (Ulric)

[Sable Baggywrinkle]

6 Spring, 512 AV Flotsam and jetsam, wreckage and goods. Unstoppable destruction and unavoidable sacrifice. The price of living, of fleeing, of squatting like desecrated carcasses on exposed ridges, cowering, too stupid to take cover. Flotsam and jetsam, blood and tears. Dazed souls toiling to set their carcasses straight, incessant and mindless in their determination to remain rotting hunks of splintered bone and snagged intestine. Yet, carcasses fed scavengers, and scavengers fed predators. One little cycle comprising a small portion of the spiral constituting the social and physical ecology of both land and sea. Alvadas, reduced to a state comparable to its contribution to the wider workings of the world, made small and realistic even as it leaked and achieved its greatest effect. Fear, metallic tangs of blood sliced through saliva, adrenaline. Laviku’s heady brine found only twisted ruination at the docks, where Zulrav spewed the city’s fear out; cattle in the chute, beat and herded through dim channels, wood planks finished in the shyke of millions of steaks, turned salt to a tangy garnish. It licked sweat off sailors as they fished through debris for salvage, it herded dock urchins with eyes the size of horse dung into hidey-holes, and it beat conversation down at every lip parting to waggle thick tongue. Grunts and gestures, vocalizations ground out with the finesse of rocks. A man here, a woman there, hard at work one second and then caught fast the next. Bodies bent, fingers convulsive around trash, unrepentant clouds or steel sea the object unfocused pupils didn’t see. Bruised fingers pointed one way, derision’s sneer tainting each answer until there simply were no more questions from the golden haired Lia. These people didn’t know anything, only one man would. Cloaked thickly to protect against spring’s chill, a three dimensional shadow cast in the sun, his bare abused head turned out over the port, toward the sea, unyielding gaze prickly even in private musings. The one called Ulric, rumored to be seeking passage, rumored to believe the storm portended the return of Zyvas. “Zyvas.” “Shyke.” “Was your temple damaged?” came a voice as strikingly displaced as birdsong among deep sea dust. Sable tugged her coat closer around her, standing just behind and to the side of the man purported to be in need of a ship, waiting for acknowledgement to intrude completely upon him. Zulrav’s breeze tugged on the end of one thick braid, cerulean hues on level with his should he look, though they too had been cast out to sea.

[Ulric]

Harshly, the foamy crests of breakers intruded upon subjugated premise. They’d swelled under bleakest vigil, yet presaged only a dredging of discord. There were bones under flumes, quilted in kelp and corpse, and the mislaid, blurrily glazed wobble of buoyant flask over wine-dark currents. The gulf was luxuriant, drowning in drunkards, beggars, and dreamers, yet kept contrary in secluded intimacy.

Ridged sockets, tugged by implacably frying coals over a tawdry, shrieking bedlam of lofty gulls, forced lower. They bluntly jutted from leonine visage, shabby and limned by a lineage of scars. The bluish forest of whiskers, plunging up to spiky hair rearing over broad shoulders encased by layers of dented plate. Heavy scales sluiced over spine and sinew like a fish, roped by thonged leather. The metal sullied by flecks of gore, dried and coated black by cinders. There was a clasp at his neck, pallid bone with tarnish of inlay, dark fur draped over a plain axe, curved edge gently rasping over bedrock.

The priest glared, as if unaffected by the gusts. The ruthless twist of his insides unrelenting, unchastened by divine fury. There forced only a jerk of his jaw. The chiseling of statuary, nearly ready for the crypt, yet brooding over indignity that hadn’t sloughed. The quork of crows bathed him, a sordid figure under their mockery. They regarded from afar, raggedly carousing over broken tiles as they took in ringed links of metal, lofted his piety to their fateful truth, tightly shackled by the most devout of corpse eaters. In his wake, there was a clanking of chains, the rattle of a cart.

Words were invariably feeble. Trundling, finding their way to the abandon of unwary ears. Fluted by discord.

Ulric unfurled a pink tip of tongue, traced it over chapped lips as he mulled over the appendage of query. His face drew back, reforming in glacial harmony. “There’s hardly much to damage,” he grunted, lancing nearer, “When your temple’s already in ruins.” The coals pried over the plaiting of her limbs, invisible streaks of resin yielding over the callous of skin, heavy braids. Though tersely daubed by disregard, they delved into inquisitory stare, making to judge. There was a nearing of fever-quenched flesh, a sucking intake as if he lusted to lap the brine from the ridge of her jaw, to induce a shiver of clarity over flayed nerves.

Proximity wasn’t a neglected utensil, but in bereft of import, it only forced captivity of jaded conceit. The grist of that purpose churned in him, baking under the fervency of his zeal. That wasn’t quite a blessing for a soul who’d become defiant symbol, sanctity rescinded by cowl of mortality. The empty coffers choked his lungs.

And with every step, he profaned.

“You’re brash, girl,” he grated, gauntlet clanking as he plucked a lazing moth from her shoulder. The leather underpads didn’t squeeze over vaguely dazed, squirming inmate, but yanked away with a retreat of pincers. That hurried the furl of wings, moth departing in dazed flutter. “You’ve crept over the rags of rumors, gleaned what rubble you might from this perfidy. You’ve digested what they speak of me, but you didn’t retch up your gangly guts, defied the specter of demise.” Bleakly, a guffaw erupted from his chest as he dragged splayed fingers over the dystopia of battered ships, the frieze of ruptured, leaning brickwork. “I’d wager you’ve earned an audience, eh?”

[Sable Baggywrinkle]

Ulric, bathed in bitter juices of citrus until he’d been shriveled into a leathery half-pint, physically whole with a battered body eager to enforce the whims of that broken spirit. A ruined temple and imaginary god, splinters waiting for the cold front to snap and lance deeper. Fractured pupils, heavy with an unhealthy heat, she almost stepped away as he centered on her, bringing the full weight of his considerable misery to bear. Discontent cordoned off, propped up in the scaffolding of his horizon. Zyvas, peeking over, thrust forth on the rush of Syna’s crescent, permeating through the maze of Caiyha’s labyrinth, skimming Laviku, riding Zulrav, tempting Priskil to plant a kernel within this one abused man. She had her proof, Laviku’s claim etched into rutilant flesh, the shared adulation of an entire nation, but there was no way to offer up the sense of him. The fold of ocean, surf kissing sweet dreams along her temple after she’d defended the Water Father to the misguided Daske. He had been there, watching and listening, but no one would ever know but her. She’d wager that Ulric’s tenacity had earned an audience with the possibility of passage. One little pearl with the slim chance of being worth something if she could ever manage to brush the muck away long enough to get a look. And avoid the snapping jaws of the oyster. Azure hues lingered over the evidence of his tussles, lanky parts slinging discordantly in alarm as he invaded her personage. Heart caught as surely as that moth, pumping on dazed flutters to the rhythm of his mirthless bray. Soles scraped over gritty stone in restrained shuffle. “I have ships to fix, a family to care for, stuck on an island while I earn coin for supplies.” Her shrug almost took with it the anxiety instilled by his looming presence, leonine features sapping away her usual unflinching sincerity. A wry twist twitched shyly at the corner of her mouth, gangly guts bolstered by defensive sass. “I admit my choice of priests to seek ‘audience’ with was based purely upon subjective interests. Their words were rancid,” she said with a glance toward his dystopia, “but you don’t smell so rotten. Don’t get me wrong, that god of yours certainly spruces you up.” Her eyes dragged over the grist on his armor, firmly as if she’d taken a rag to it. “Where do you seek passage?”

[Ulric]

The speckles of periwinkle weren’t kosher, like scabs of limpets hanging under a clammy furl of brow. They didn’t penetrate, but flapped like a brace of vapid moths. Floppy, impotent in their prying. That was the tusk of it, slanting bluntly in scheme for a tarnish of tawdry coin. Flushed by hedonistic juices, marinating as end banged in fruitless invasion against basket of puckered flesh. Insensately diatribed by ham-fisted infancy, rebelling against riddle.

Ulric suffocated a growl, hardly duped by translucent purpose projecting starkly under deceitful chains. The skirl of pipers reached his ears, madly clashing over his bones and obliging a shiver of consent. She smells of the sea, he grimly inclined his head. And the sea is pure. The tuning fork of fingers flanged away from his chest, vising over a jut of chin. They jerked it roughly crossways, layers of coal disrobing as they conjured over planes of flesh, snarled leather and bleached sail. This wasn’t a simulacrum before him, but a thing that bled. The sack of flesh fused by bone, prone to truculence.  Intemperate spars of inviting leg, fashioned in a monkey’s scramble over stockades of roped timber. The twigs of toes, grubby in baffled confines of leather sandal. Taking voyage to clothed visage, those reservoirs of knives naively curling to a pair of lips, mirroring alabaster with a scrawny friction. The tremor of revelation suffused him, scarecrowed by sordid bluffs.

His finger bent, shaping into a ringlet under the ridges of bone yielding a softer swell of skin, and flipped away. “Syliras,” he grunted. “What’s left of it, if the barrel turrets aren’t drowned by murky jetsam.” And then, with a marginal twitch under his left eye, “There’s also my wife, and her monkey to account for. The surfeit of my steel. That I will not leave behind.” There was a jerk of chiding, scar-delved eyebrow, as if brushing off a gnat’s caress, and the metal plates intruded on thin fabric. The swelter of his intonation, given off adjacent to a projection of ear. “D’you sink,” gnashed molars, dredging in unruly chorus, “Or do you swim?”

[Sable Baggywrinkle]

Taut chords, droplets strung together like pearls, within her quivered to have his chunky fingers play a tune. They’d stirred with the foul breathe of him uttered from his neighbors, luring her to start laying the rhythm in preparation for his harmonic rejoinder or dissonant crash. That was normal, though, curiosity flaring at his piecemeal deity story. His hand swept discordantly across the stings once: D’you sink, or do you swim? A single shutter, the infinite moment between inhale and dive, when mind and body pass through one another on their way to the Sea’s bosom. One moment wary hues delved into steel waters where Laviku braced and washed in, the next, imperturbable glass of midnight blue ocean opened on his insulting gaze. Squaring to him, corporeal concerns sloughed off Laviku’s child, the pressure of enigmatic depths reaching in to the brim. D’you sink, or do you swim? Pearls flexed in response. “I sink with the crab and swim with the whale, Ulric.” She paused, head cocking to the side, as though translating the sea’s rumble. Lips parted to share the Water Father’s musings but those unfathomable reflections of blue cut up his gristled figure and shuttered once more. “You’re unyielding. You sink or you swim, but you can’t do both at once. The mere thought compromises your binary limitations, and you feel one must be sacrificed for the other. In my world we exist in three dimensions.” Sable turned away, refreshing and impenetrable stare easing over Patchwork Port’s murk. Natural sincerity now, as before, edged enough to snare his plumb line. Discordance. Each word uttered hitting the proper note but slant. He could take her observation however he wanted, but the water didn’t lie. He yearned for it. Her palms itched, her toes squirmed, res sang to bathe her in Laviku’s essence. “I’ve got room for a wife and a monkey,” she nodded, glancing over and offering to return to the matter at hand should he wish it. “And I can leave immediately.”

[Ulric]

Heavily, splayed fingers dragged through bristly mane, prying as if seeking an oyster of knowledge. Long submerged, it defied his pursuit, as if ripped asunder by successive infestations of locusts. That was beyond his reckoning. The tides were distorted, somehow. The lines of her face, though plain by any measure, conjured up the lovely wraith of another, prancing further into the foamy swell. The mocking look on her visage, and the way she’d dug bony knee into his spine under the swelter of blankets, only ignited a dormant, brooding grief. There was a crinkle of brows, coals smudging over the pale skin before him.

They lodged there, leveling to gimlets.

Ulric didn’t care for any crabs with their blue bellies, spiny husks, and the pinch of pincers, regardless of if they were sinking. That was their realm. Mighty, hulking whales didn’t intrigue him either, though he’d acquired a fancy for picking at their ruddy flesh. Their oily blubber was meant for the lamps, but in the depths of his chest, he’d always lusted to pour a kettle of verdigris down the gullet of some mincing lady in her pithy satins, so that he might punish her for thinking herself better. That’s what you get for vanity, he snorted. 

Morosely, he gave a chuckle. Jerked his wiry chin like a judge who’d devoted himself to incessant scatters of the knuckles from a chalice of thin, dented brass, instead of the veracity he’d devoted his essence to plucking from dirty ashes. There’d be no further scraping. The intoned slither forced over his neck, making him shiver. 

There wasn’t any conceit in this fish, just scales that refused to budge. They might’ve wrapped scabs. They could’ve been daubed by infidelity, or a fickle temper, but he wasn’t going to listen. “I’d sink,” he grated. “I’d drown, and they’d all rejoice for the freedom. If you’d swim, then swim.”

Lankly braided, her cranial ridges scaled like barrens, nearly bleaching to bones before his gaze. This was his curse, maybe. That he’d fettered himself to a legion of souls, defying the murmur of redemption so they could fuse in ill-fated misery, and rise higher than a dirging convoy of wretches. This face join the others, clanking behind the trundle of his charnel wagon.

When you kill a man, you mustn’t forget him, he scowled. [i]When you’ve loved a woman of honey and cinders, that’s all you want to do.”[/b]

Insensate of his deviance, he raked eyes over the churning, pewter swells, the lifting of tapered masts broached by halyards and white, voluminous yards. The girl’s words draped over him. They balmed, sucking at his flesh like limpets, yet stung like the timid flutter of a jellyfish. “Before you’ve tasted my gold,” he grunted, “I’d clap eyes on your craft, and decide if it’s not reduced to jetsam, or just a deceit, like everything else in this trickster harbor.”