Uncle Snarejaw

[Ulric]

64th of Winter, 511 AV

Briny, wind-dark waters rushed up on the strand, crested by foamy cream, bearing slimy brown kelp, chunks of driftwood. There were a few horks, mostly from the gannets that made their nests among the pale tufts of grasses, in clefts on the cliff face that rose beyond, highly discordant with the scratchy, scrapy harmony of the crickets that’d nearly forced him to slumber.

Ulric perched on a boulder, crusted by years of salt and laden with dark, cobalt mussels and tiny barnacles. The frigid waters swept around its edges, though the coast was near. There were stars in the sky, pricks of silver to stud the ponderous, brooding enormity of jet. Leth’s waning sliver was there, too. That made it easier to see, but even with his deft fingers, untangling the lengths of slender, tarry cord was a bitch. He’d stuck himself twice already, and now he was grumpy. He wanted to be in his shack, under the safety his blankets, with a jug of wine by his shoulder. Naama, you’d best stay away, he frowned, hoping she hadn’t found the skin already. He’d taken to hiding his liquor, or at least some of it, partly because he didn’t want her drinking and being stupid, but mostly because he felt like being a prick to her.

Already, he’d made a huge catch. They were a jumble of slivery scales, floppy gills, and dorsal fins. The blunt heads dented, squashed, staring at him with empty, gimlet eyes. They were mostly smaller, though he’d taken some large ones, including a red snapper that was larger than his leg. Here we go, he thought, drawing up an empty, dangling length of cord.

There was a large, brown leather pouch hanging lankly from his broad belt, badly cracked and grimy, under whose flap he now reached, extracting a slender hook that he recognized, mostly from the contact with his rough fingers, as being rusty. That wasn’t very worrying, though. The barb wasn’t going to budge.

Ulric found the cord’s end, clasping the fraying fibers as he tenuously drove them through a tiny, blunt ring, then deftly lashed the cord around so it wouldn’t come away from the hook. That finished, he gave it a jerk. The tether was sturdy enough, so he reached into a damp, nearly empty sack, taking out a tiny herring. The sharp hook went through its eye, and then, flinging the fishy burden away, there was a splash, the swift, silent dive of the leaden sinker.

The gannets intruded, horking. They were dejected, or just suffering from insomnia. There wasn’t any gaity, it seemed. The closer he leaned to the crashing waves, the less he was able to discern the crickets. That was calming. Their presence was vaguely unnerving, for he was by the sea. There weren’t any grassy plains, just the jumble of rock, broken shell, and kelp. Though he was far from the city, he felt as if the trickster was yanking a scratchy cowl of wool over his eyes.

Your japery isn’t loved, Ulric sighed, furling the rough cord around his hands and tucking it under his bent thumb, where it rubbed and against the softer creasing flesh of his palm. There was a tension in his back, a twinge in his joints that wouldn’t go away. The biting gusts were less numbing than his partly watchful indolence, bitterly coalescing into a leaden burden. The blanket of night was a cruel master.

[Ulric]

Rigidly, he bided under pearly sky. Flimsy plaiting of strings, like the hallucinatory ringmail of weary eyes. They dredged the camber of his spine. The prongs of callus, like juts of calcified tarsals. Profane, he rasped, that sliver of emory abrading from idle scabbard. Profane, at that taunting jaunt of crescent, risking zenith. That surly comrade, emerging to jaded periphery. Though fair of face, it rose with a vapid grief, he thought. Taking the center of inky swaddling, haunting from an immensity of bland, vacant pocks. This lord, in slumber.

Ropes splayed, and swooped like gannets infected by a barmy greed. They broke the gulf’s surface in jet, roiling bubbles. The fibers rough over fingers, grease levering in the fissures of skin. Here, the steadfast irrigation of damp, and then a fold of obscuring curtain, staging wriggling harvest.

Taken away, the tangle ensured again, binding ruddy, cracking hands to frigid purpose. Tugged deftly, wraps of rope leaked turgidly. They tamed, and formed as a serpent. That shelf of shoulders gave a jerk, ever fiber tensed. Insistently, bunching tissue with hanks of resolve, spine curling beyond.

The cord swept away. To linger.

Pale flumes trenched briny slurry, recoiling from the plunge of a sinker. There was lead in his bones, as if dredged by a reliquary. The crusts of barnacles, the cling of limpets by milky knobs of boiling oyster. They wouldn’t glean him a fragment of affluent tarnish. The jostle of dull, horrid discs under layers of leather. This was the dogged crush of simple trade, cowled grimly by repetition. The ashes of his joy.

The gadflies were a plague, biting him plaid. Their pupae languid in distant, filmy squalor. The rub of scales slimed his palms, projecting to the furl of a basket. There, interlaced by intransigence, resided his catch. They divulged, in a ghastly leaching. The gray daubing of brain over rock.

Enter, nemesis. Enter, fruit of the deep ones. Enter, horny spikes and ridges, like a mountain’s crags.

Enter, the submerged.

Uncle Snarejaw, for that was the leviathan’s moniker hushed by fisher folk and brine-crazed traders, caught him unwary. That he ventured toward the clasp of metal was but somber defiance, a weary sigh from the murky depths of time. The shrove of every pair of gills, stapled to scaly dorsal region. There he was, this delver of fables, clad by the scars of myriad harpoons. The jut of spiny jaws like a prognathic ram, plunging like a marble column.

There was a gnashing of molars, vast slabs of muscle grating as if he dared budge those lofty pearls. Their opalescent mockery was deafening. The man, in his ignorance, wouldn’t budge. There was a vein of defiance in him, too. Turgidly, he snared broad thumb around the tar-smeared quiver of cable, leaving rigid scrapings of skin. Their ruddy weeping like so many tears.

Uncle Snarejaw’s surge, the snap of protesting fibers, cast him to his knees. The slippery crowd of limpets, flung by rubbery kelp. There, to confess his inadequacy.

Bulldozed, but not prostrated, he lodged toes in this slimy rubble. There was a wrench of ligature, and with every dram of power at his disposal, he dragged at cruelest fate. There was a buckling of bone, but he righted. The cable held, and then receded. Then a primal gushing, and the glint of scales. The glimpse of cunning adversary, before its plunge by the moon lord’s vigil. Though banded by muscle, and his hauling, grunting fervor, he was nearly undone.

Banishing the flicker of subjugation, he pried at that unruly blanket of onyx. The imploring veins were quiet. They were garbled, beyond him. The incarnate of priestly delirium, manifesting. Braced, he twisted back those crude, creaking traces, already wrung of the sop of brine by implausible tensing. There, crumpling over the ledge of knees, he waged the remainder of his battle.

Uncle Snarejaw, as if enraged by insolence, thrashed ever harder, as if laved by a frenzy, ferociously spading chunks of coral. There was only a desire to dominate, that most glacial of impulses reigning over meager scruple.

The man didn’t care.

Biting the scar of lips, he imperiled the beckoning of daybreak. There was a summons, demanding a levy of vertebral potency. The torquing of his joints, cinched by rebellion. They conjured a rigidity of jaw, but spun of weakness. There was only the unceasing tug, the loss of costly juts of gravel. They were the confines of his prison, and he clove to them with bloody lips, skewered by pearly incisors. Those clefts, and crests of muscle just inching to his disavowal.

They were not enough.

Under jet tides, trenchantly creasing through strands of seaweed, the leviathan returned to the graves of so many sailors. The decaying menhirs of masts his lair, to mull over gray bones. The man had lost, though not in spirit.

And the moon lord fell.

[Bedlam]

Thread Completed!

Player Name

Experience:
1 Fishing
2 Bodybuilding

Lores:
A Beshelled Fable

Notes:

I’ve already told you what my views were on those pronouns! Do with them what you will. But know that I wasn’t sure whether Ulric or the turtle was being referred too half the time.