This short is a chunk of a bigger project I’m working on. Sort of an anthology that tells smaller stories around the central events of the longest D&D game I ever ran. Still experimenting, and I cut a lot before posting – it’s too easy to ramble on this topic. Expect to see this revised later, when it fits into the larger story.
___
While I loathe to use the word “primitive” to describe a people or culture, Syfandr is a place where murdering outsiders is common, even sensibly cautious. Much of the continent gives me a sense of casual savagery and fanatic nationalism. Take, for example, the place where I first made landfall – the archipelago nation of Aes.
Excerpt from the Traveler’s journal
Sea-green lightning flashed beyond the clouds of midnight sky and lit Private Sixall’s dulling bronze scales. Once again she tried and failed to suppress the slow-seething doubt and anger associated with the Bad Habit. She heaved a sigh, the deep ocean air filling her lungs with chill moisture and a light kiss of salt.
She tried to distract herself by imagining that the leviathan was nearby, and she may yet catch a glimpse of it.
It didn’t work.
The faint green at the tips of her scales was age-tarnish, and she was a private – the lowest rank in the navy. Unheard of. Two-and-a-half decades of service should have rewarded her with an officer’s commission on a respectable ship. One bad night was all it took to get her stuck in a posting that should be for the young on their first tour, the young who could stay awake and focused on gently lulling night-black seaswell.
Lightning flashed once more, accompanied by reluctant thunder. In the brief half-daylight, Sixall spotted a pattering sheet of advancing rain like frozen jellyfish tentacles, a gentle chaos on the ocean’s calm. Sixall grumbled, snapped out the hood and sleeves of her oilskin coat, fastened its clasps. The rain wouldn’t bother her, but a wet uniform would.
One more flash highlighted the interceptor’s sleek lines and the single ampli-cannon on the bow… and two white lines on the sea, a wake carved through flat waters by a grey sliver. The leviathan?!
No. “Unknown vessel, forty degrees port!” she called out.
Private Sixall straightened from her slouch, focused her mind and spyglass on the vessel. No more half-waking dreams; she needed precision. The vessel was a sailing boat, small – not military or commercial, scarcely space for a cabin. The hull was a smooth material she didn’t recognize. No flags, only one man aboard: a large, muscular human, his skin an unfamiliar tone.
She lowered her spyglass and frowned, the ridged scales of her brow drawing down into her eyeline. What kind of vessel could this be? Some new Yacinthan development? But for what purpose?
Sixall unclipped her harness from the hardpoints in the crow’s nest and attached them to the counterweighted descent line. With no more than a quick check of the ship’s pitch and speed, she leaped from her post and dropped, her claws skimming the mast. Mottled blues and grays of sea-camo approached fast. She touched down on the slick wooden deck and dug her foreclaws into the wood. The planks were worn; the ship would need replacement decking before its next rotation.
First Officer Daids was waiting for her. “Report,” he said with a flat, clipped voice, looking up to her from under the brim of his stupid hat.
Sixall took her time straightening out her harness and coat before replying. She didn’t like Daids. He was old. Nearly seventy, in fact, with plenty more tarnish on his scales than Sixall. A competent and ambitious officer wouldn’t still be an interceptor XO at seventy. Daids’ age and rank proved that he wasn’t fit to be an admiral, or even a captain.
Or he was enduring a punishment, just like her. Sixall would never admit aloud that she hated Daids foreshadowing her own future. Plus, he was short. Sixall looked down on him both figuratively and literally.
Still, she wouldn’t make him ask again. She refused to allow dislike to become open disrespect. Not when she needed a better post. “Sir,” she began, as formally as she could muster. “Single human on a one-man sailing vessel, smaller than our boarding skiffs. No flags, no markings, no visible equipment, too small for cargo. Unusual hull – smooth and grey. Heading east, faster than the wind.”
Daids frowned and scratched the stub-scales on his scarred chin. “Strange. Some kind of Yacinthan trick?”
Sixall tried not to roll her eyes. Speculating to a lower-ranked officer was unbecoming. Sixall didn’t respond – she knew Daids was merely thinking aloud. Another unbecoming habit.
Coming to a decision, Daids folded his hands behind his back, raised his voice, and bellowed. “Full sail east. Rouse gunners.” He lowered his voice, buttoned his coat against unexpected-to-him wind, and turned back to Sixall. “Call out any changes in course or position immediately.”
“Yes sir,” Sixall replied. She kicked the counterweight lever and rocketed back up to the crow’s nest. With practised grace she swung over the guardrail and clipped herself into both hardpoints.
Another muted flash rolled across the horizon, glittering briefly through rain. “Approaching the storm,” she called down. She couldn’t hear the crew very well from her perch, but she could hear the Bad Habit‘s windmaker swearing. Sixall chuckled. Varix hated deflecting lighting, but he’d keep her safe anyway.
The rain slapped Sixall gently, reminded her of a teasing lover who wouldn’t see her anymore since her demotion. Through the rain, she reacquired the tiny vessel with her spyglass, then frowned. The human was looking at her – no, at the Bad Habit – with some sort of spyglass of his own. He… removed his coat? The human was bare from the waist up, and in the lightning, muscles shimmered wet. Too big for simple fitness; he must have trained specific for power. He shook his arms out, flexed, and adopted a boxer’s stance. He threw a punch –
Sixall gasped. An invisible shock wave parted rain and filled the vessel’s sails. The tiny ship leapt forward as if shot from a cannon, skipping across and over mounting waves. The straining sail relaxed and flapped, then went taut again with the pressure of the next punch.
All the spells Sixall had ever heard of required the combination of at least two of enunciated words, specific gestures, a focus, and materials. The man on the boat appeared to use none of those. She’d never seen anything like it.
“Uh, um,” she stammered, then composed herself. Sixall leaned over and shouted down. “Sir, target accelerating! Wind magic! Speed estimate… Sixty!”
An uncomfortable pause filled with the sound of rain, and the next thing she heard from Daids was: “Varix, get us to sixty-five!”
Sixall kept her eyes on the little boat, zipping and leaping across the sea’s growing chop. The skies had grown darker still, thunder rumbled nearby, waves built higher. The Bad Habit cleaved through with nary a shudder, but too slow: the human was pulling away. Then, with a gust from behind, Sixall felt the wind change.
It wasn’t the storm. She spared a glance at the Bad Habit‘s stern where crew hurriedly secured the windmage into an eight-point standing harness. Varix was a tall, skinny dragonborn, third oldest in the service, his bronze scales having mostly faded to dull green. His arced whalebone staff, rune-carved from a single rib, fitted into a metal slot and served as the ninth anchor point. If the ship went down, Varix would not have the time to free himself.
Varix chanted; raindrops spiraled round his staff and filled the inset runes. The ship stalled. Winds and salt spray spun in the beginnings of a water spout, then collapsed to dead calm. With a final shout, Varix unleashed his magic. A gale howled, ferocious yet contained and steady, from the tip of the staff into the sails.
If Sixall hadn’t braced herself she’d have been snapped back against her restraints. Still, her arms and legs ached as the Bad Habit rocketed forward into the storm, its lines and sails creaking and groaning with the tension Varix’s gale. Despite her disdain for the ship and what it represented to her, Sixall couldn’t help a toothy grin of pride – an ordinary boat would never be able to handle Varix.
The Bad Habit was an interceptor, a patrol ship, roaming up and down the western edge of the shelf. Tales had long been told of the people of the west, the savage brutes who slaughtered dragons for their bones and plunged all of Syfandr into a dark age of uncertainty and war. A thousand years later, Aes still guarded the coast against the western barbarians. And the alleged leviathan.
This man and his tiny vessel had come from the west. First officer Daids intended to destroy it, as was the Bad Habit’s duty. Sixall never put much stock in those old stories or the interceptor’s duty, but her best chance of getting out of this mess was to do her job well enough to be noticed and reassigned. She called out bearings every half-minute.
The swivel-mounted ampli-cannon at the bow fired a metal slug accelerated by the gunners’ magnetism spell. Too early: a wide miss, piercing a hole through a roller. The human’s head swiveled round, and Sixall thought she could see his eyes widen. Now he knew the Bad Habit wasn’t friendly. XO Daids would have the gunner scrubbing the deck for weeks.
The two vessels flew through stormy seas: the little boat as if on wings and barely touching the waves, and the Bad Habit slicing through the chop as if it weren’t there. The whole crew were strapped to their stations to avoid being lost at sea as cleaved waves swept down the deck.
Sixall called out course corrections, the necessity dwindling as both vessels maintained their wind-magic sprints. The little boat could not outrace the Bad Habit, nor could the Aesian ship gain on its prey. Into the storm and the pitching chop they flew, lightning crashing down into blackwater foam.
Rain stung Sixall’s eyes, and at this velocity, even her scaled skin. There was little more she could do. Even with goggles enchanted to repel water, it was impossible to see through sheets of rain and rolling waves, even during greenish lightning flares. Still, his tiny ship, the man wouldn’t be able to safely change course – Sixall should be able to spot him when they emerged from the storm.
Lightning struck with a heat-pressure blast wave. Sixall went blind; the world flared red. She screamed but couldn’t hear herself.
Sixall blinked and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. Varix’s deflection shield held. Her vision recovered quickly, and she witnessed the residual crackle of spidery charge crawling around a faintly-glowing dome. The air smelled sharp, of electricity and burning. She couldn’t hear save for a high-pitched whine, but she motioned her thanks to Varix.
The ship broke abruptly out of the rain. The skies weren’t clear, nor the seas calm, but visibility improved. Sixall rubbed her eyes again and tried to focus through the green lines and spots in her vision. She would be able to spot the foreign vessel against the dark waters any moment now.
Any moment.
…
It was gone.
Still inside the storm? No. The rain had given up; occasional flashes of lightning provided excellent visibility all round. Yet Sixall could not see the little vessel.
“Dragon’s beard,” Sixall muttered to herself. Her mouth went dry and she licked the backs of her teeth. The captain and XO would not be happy she’d lost sight of the vessel. Would not be happy at all.
___
Life in Aes happens exclusively on or between small dots of life and rock scattered across a hostile sea. Somehow I find it even more intimidating than the open ocean.
Excerpt from the Traveler’s journal
Private Sixall “relaxed” on “personal emergency shore leave”.
By “relaxed”, she meant drank heavily on the docks of a nearby port while the Bad Habit patrolled for the vessel it lost.
And by “personal emergency shore leave”, the captain meant off-the-books punishment for egregious failure in the line of duty.
She took a swig of grog and smacked her lips in disgust. She’d gone for the cheap stuff so she could drink a lot of it on her limited budget. And because she didn’t deserve the good stuff.
Sixall sat on a stack of old crates anchored with netting. There was a greenish-grey film of moss on the boxes, which she’d taken to mean they’d been sitting long enough that she wouldn’t be in the way of the port’s bustle and business.
She watched ships pass in and out of the twin gates in the seawall. Most ships were fishing or merchant vessels, a few faster boats ran passengers, and there was another scout ship leaving port to search for the little boat the Bad Habit lost. The seawall was taller than the masts of many of the ships, rimmed with fortifications and ampli-cannons. No enemy force had ever seized an Aesian military base – here, the port was the fort.
As she watched traffic, Sixall couldn’t stop obsessing. It did make sense to be aggressive with ships that didn’t fly the right flags and codes, but she’d never understood the mandate to destroy any ship that came out of the west. She’d questioned it before, in what she thought were friendly debates with crew and officers who respected her. Why waste so many warships and crews and windmakers patrolling for western bogeymen who hadn’t bothered anyone in ages?
As it turned out, the ‘friendly’ debates earned her a quiet reputation. Between that and her previous demotion, Sixall took the blame for losing the little boat. Not first mate Daids for failing to wake the captain. Not the gunners for firing too early. The captain notified command that established troublemaker Sixall had a “personal emergency” and required immediate “leave”.
She’d been benched, and several other scout ships and interceptors pulled from regular duties or leave to scour the seas for the missing boat. Why should a one-man vessel warrant such a response? Maybe she’d have understood if she’d lost a warship that could actually do some damage. But one man? What threat could he pose to the great naval nation of Aes? There was something she didn’t understand here.
A flock of skinwings interrupted Sixall’s brooding. The flying, fish-eating, needle-toothed lizards let out their little chirps and wheezes, and they were all staring at Sixall. She was pretty sure that meant laughter. At her.
Private Sixall, once-proud Aesian navy officer, threw her empty bottle at the stupid flying lizards and stumbled off to find another drink.
She weaved her way through the modest crowd. It was a military port, so she shouldn’t get too drunk, regardless of her status. She passed uniformed sailors, an even mix of dragonborn and human, gossiping about the latest scout reports. Idiots thought Yacintho was developing some kind of kraken mind-control device, to turn the famously belligerent sea monsters into military weapons. Ridiculous.
She ducked under a crane-lifted cannon on its way to a sleek blue-and-bronze interceptor. Someone yelled at her to get out of the way; she made a rude gesture and stumbled off.
Outside the utilitarian military docks and barracks were civilian areas, where the buildings were equally utilitarian and squat, but more varied and decorated with bright paints. All Aesian civilians were either former or future military, so besides the colour, civilian districts didn’t feel too different. But she wouldn’t be bothered here by anyone who had any actual power over her. As long as she didn’t make too big a fool of herself.
Sixall navigated a river of blue, brown, grey, and black oilskin coats under a colourless low sky, maneuvering over slick and puddled stone streets, scouting for a quiet little tavern where she could drink some more. It was late in the afternoon, or perhaps early in the evening. Whale-oil lamps lit up in windows, and soon the sparkpole crews would come by to light the streetlamps.
Damn skinwings were everywhere. She wanted to toss something else at them, but she had nothing else on her that she could afford to throw away. The squealing was endless, and cleaning crews scoured their white shit from walls. The flying monsters didn’t bother her at sea, when only so many would bother following a vessel that didn’t carry fish. But every port had its fishing boats markets.
Sixall hadn’t paid enough attention to where she was going, and nearly shouted in frustration when she turned a corner into one of those markets instead of the pub row. Stalls and storefronts full of fresh fish, carts full of supplies moving in and out, dragonborn and humans buying and selling the remains of the day’s catches of reef mokey and lobster and eggs, children paid to wave sticks and pop powder charges to scare off the incessant whining swarms of skinwings. Today, it all gave her a headache.
One shop gave her pause, and she lingered a moment. A civilian clothing store with this season’s fashion in the window – in particular, a warm coat-dress with a tail cover, all in gorgeous jewel-tone greens, form-fitted with frilly accents around the shoulders and waist. Sixall wrestled with the part of herself that thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be out of the military and finally able to experiment with clothes.
There was a human at the door of the shop Sixall. He wore a brand-new oilskin coat with a droopy hat – the same outfit as hundreds of other men she’d seen today, but with the tags still on. He was tall and well-muscled, requiring a dragonborn fit rather than human, the tail flap buttoned closed. He seemed to be arguing with the dragonborn shopkeeper about money, both of them frustrated.
There was something off about the human’s skin. It was an unusual colour. A familiar colour. Where had she –
It was him! The pilot of that little boat she’d lost track of.
Sixall pushed through the crowd, ignoring grumbles of protest, hoping she wouldn’t bump into anyone who would really take offence. But then, wasn’t she on official military business now? Yes. Leave or no, she’d found the man her ship lost, and if the captain punished her for following the navy’s mandate, then the captain could go drown himself.
She slowed as she approached. He was even bigger than she’d realized. Dragonborn were tall and powerfully built, but this human was just as big as Sixall. He tried to hide it under his coat and hat, with a forward lean and hunched shoulders. But even in disgraced demotion, you didn’t get to be a ship’s lookout with bad eyes.
The man spoke Gibberish that had all the same sounds as the Aesian tongue, but jumbled, in the wrong order. The shopkeeper was frustrated, trying to shoo him away to make room for a customer who could talk properly.
She was nearly within arm’s reach when he saw her. She got a good look at the face under the hood. He was perhaps middle-aged for a human, with a rough unkempt beard from his time at sea. Under the beard he had what humans called a strong jawline, with prominent square bones and a firm set. His eyes were a shape and colour she wasn’t used to, wider and deeper than Aesian humans.
Sixall saw danger. The man was powerful and he knew it. So she was surprised to watch him turn and run away.
She cursed, put three fingers in her mouth, and whistled: three sharp blasts, two descending and one rising, like the call of the great ketzal skinwings. Everyone around her would recognize the call for marines and word would spread.
Sixall ran after the stranger, the claws on her toes gripping between the slick cobblestones. She had better footing and she knew how the crowds behaved, which made it very frustrating to watch the strange man pull ahead of her.
The street curved west. If the stranger continued to duck and weave down the same road, she could cut him off. She pivoted into a slimy alley between a blacksmith and a fishmonger and leaped over bins full of rot. She watched for skinwings from the main road – they were easily frightened by fast-moving creatures, like the man she was chasing. She took a right turn turn, sprinted forward, another right turn. A flock took off just to her north. She was so close; if she judged right –
Sixall leaned out of the other end of the alley and sank her claws into the stranger’s coat. She dug in her claws and hauled backwards, jerked the man to a stop by his shoulders, nearly toppled him to the ground. She pulled the man into the alley.
With more grace than Sixall expected, the stranger spun out of his coat and raised his arms to a boxer’s guard. The motion took him into narrow alley, away from the street, and he bumped into an oily wagon full of putrid fish. Unlike on his little boat, he now wore a tightly stretched shirt of a strange material and style that Sixall didn’t recognize. It had short sleeves and a low neckline, exposing well-toned muscles and unsettling mammalian chest hair.
She held her arms out to her sides, showing him she was unarmed. Or she tried – the narrow alley restricted her armspan. “I only want to talk.” True, to a point. She wanted to talk long enough for the marines to arrive.
The strange man lowered his fists. Not all the way, he didn’t drop his guard, but he relaxed just enough to show her that he wouldn’t throw a punch. He said something: likely a question from the rising tone, sounds correct but scrambled, an odd accent. To her ears, the vowels were clipped and short and distorted, as if spoken too fast through the nose, though the hard phonemes were clear.
“I don’t understand,” Sixall said to him.
The man took a small notebook from a pocket, consulted it, opened his fingers and twisted on empty air. A brief pink-and-scarlet light flashed from his fingertips. He said something else and it almost made sense. He looked at her, she gave a small shrug, and the man looked at his book and twisted nothing again. Another flash.
“How about now? Is this better?” he asked. He still had a strong accent, but the vowels were more drawn out now, much more appropriate. Almost incomprehensible, but only almost.
“Yes, very much,” she replied. “Where are you from, stranger?”
He ignored her question. “Can you tell me why my boat was attacked by a warship?”
Sixall blinked. He didn’t recognize her! She’d been perched in the lookout’s nest, and he would have been more concerned with the sails and ampli-cannon.
She wished more than ever that she understood the mandate to sink all vessels from outside the continent. What could she tell him? She needed to keep his attention until the marines arrived. Well… perhaps the truth?
“The navy repels all vessels from across the ocean, but I don’t know why,” she said, “You’re not from here. Where are you from?” She spoke slowly, with simple words, in case he found her accent as strange as she did his.
He nodded and hesitated. “Is it only your country that does this, or do others as well?”
Sixall frowned. “I think everyone does, but Aes does the most because we see the most traffic.”
“Aes?” asked the bearded man. “Your country is called Aes?”
“Yes,” Sixall said. “What is your country called?”
The man hesitated again and shook his head.
Sixall did her best not to bare her teeth at his evasiveness. She told herself it didn’t matter if she could keep him here until the marines arrived. Where were they?
She tried another line of questioning. “Are you a storm mage?” she asked, then swore at herself under her breath as he raised his eyebrows at her. She hadn’t meant to give away that she’d seen him at sea, but… too late now. “I saw you making wind for sails.”
“I’m…” he began, then paused. “A wizard, of sorts.”
“A wizard? With that body?” She couldn’t help herself. Wizardry was primarily academic, and while navy wizards had to keep in shape to sail and fight, Sixall had never seen a wizard so physically strong.
The man smiled through his rough beard. “Of sorts,” he repeated.
Thick-soled boots clapped on paving stones outside the alley, and the strange wizard went still. Sixall turned around to wave the marines over. Four of them responded to her whistled alarm: three humans and a larger copper-scaled dragonborn, each equipped in bronze-piped military oilskins and leathers, hooked swords on their sides.
When she turned back to the alley, the wizard was gone. She cursed. “He was here! The foreigner was right here!”
One of the human marines narrowed her eyes at Sixall. “You’re drunk, soldier.”
She stomped a foot. “That doesn’t matter, he was –”
“Come on, we’re wasting our time,” growled the copper dragonborn. A male, his voice low with annoyance and derision.
Sixall showed her teeth and hissed at him, but the marines turned away. “He’s a wizard, he must have teleported or –”
“Enough, soldier,” said the human woman. Sixall caught her breath – the woman’s uniform had three full bars on the shoulders. “Go back to your bunk and sleep it off. I’ll have to report this false alarm.”
Sixall grated her teeth together and considered objecting further, but all she allowed herself to say was “Yes, sir.”
She stormed away, hands in her coat pockets, muttering about all the things she’d like to happen to those marines on their next sea voyage. Have their hulls bitten through by a giant guillotine eel. Get their sails burned by a lightning elemental. Mire without wind in the Green Sea. Get caught in the Leviathan’s whirlpool. Be selected for a test of the latest military superweapon.
There had been rumours of a lightning beam cannon. Oh, and a giant crab that could catch entire ships in its claws. Some kind of living bomb that had glassed half the Ashlands. Swords that could wipe out armies. Who knew which ones were real anymore? Ever since the rumours had started a few decades ago that Aes was developing superweapons, every disaster became a weapons test gone either right or wrong. Whatever. May those marines be the test subjects for the latest thing.
Sixall stopped and frowned. Well, assuming for a moment that the rumours were true… Maybe the reason the navy was hunting down travelers was to stop spies, here to steal secret military research? Huh. In fact, now that she thought of it, that explanation seemed very likely. She’d never heard it through official military channels, which could be evidence that command kept it under wraps.
She shook her head. That was conspiracy thinking. Aes’s supposed superweapons were one of the worst-kept secrets in the world. There would be craters in enemy territory rather than rumours if any of the rumours were true.
On the other claw… What if Sixall knew too much about this mysterious foreigner? Would the Angr-Shiv come for her? Aes’s military police were the best counter-espionage unit on the continent. Sailors loved to whisper about how they could make people disappear. In any ship’s mess or tavern, you could find someone who’s aunt’s neighbour’s kid’s friend had been disappeared for knowing too much.
Sixall let out a long breath. She was just being paranoid. That kind of thing didn’t really happen. The military police wanted people to fear them, to see them in every dark corner and shaded alley. It was part of how the navy kept people in line. An adult version of the monster in your closet. Only traitors needed fear the Angr-Shiv.
As darkness fell over the port, the din of crowds, bells, and skinwings faded. Sixall picked her way back toward the barracks and kept to the flickering lamplight of the damp cobblestone streets. It occurred to her to pray to the storm god, but since the tribunal, she’d found it hard to place her faith where she was supposed to.
___
In Aes, the navy is life. All citizens must serve a mandatory minimum of ten years. Having joined up young, becoming accustomed to routine, most citizens sign on for extended duty – especially dragonborn who much faster than humans and hellborn, and thus have served most of their lives by the time their ten years are up.
When the military is the foremost part of every Aesian’s life, a dishonorable discharge can be a worse sentence than death.
Excerpt from the Traveler’s journal
Former Private Sixall sat on the crosstrees of the Dirty Bird’s mast. She kicked her clawed feet and waved her tail beneath her carefully-maintained coat-dress as the old boat pulled into port at the edge of the Emerald Sea.
She was still thinking about her last port call. She’d been drinking at the cheapest tavern by the navy docks, watching the sailors and marines and even the logistics crews with a bitterness surpassing that of the drink she used to punish herself.
She’d been shocked when Daids approached her, brought her a halfway decent drink. The verdigrised old man actually apologized to her. Sixall was too drunk to remember what words he’d used, but he’d empathized, said she hadn’t been the only one to get demoted into a gullshit post. Of all people, Daids had actually been the only one to testify on her behalf in her second court martial. ‘Course, who was the tribunal to believe – a fellow disgracee, or the honourable captain of the Bad Habit?
Sixall felt some guilt over exploiting Daids for drinks. Her first court martial devastated her, crushed her, shook her unwavering faith in the navy. Her second court martial killed what remained of her faith and left behind a creeping, resigned numbness that she did her best not to think about. When Daids apologized, all Sixall wanted to do was to drink herself into unconsciousness, to feel nothing.
Now she was a civilian. Not just a civilian – a dishonourable discharge. She’d been lucky to find a captain to take on a DD, even one who exploited her. Still, gullshit pay was better than none.
The Dirty Bird was a far cry from the Bad Habit. Both ships were built as navy interceptors, but the Bad Habit was in active service, maintained ship with a real crew. The Dirty Bird, on the other claw, was retired from service decades ago. It was overdue for dry dock by at least fifteen years. Probably closer to twenty, given the condition of the hull the last time Sixall had gone for a swim. Barnacles everywhere. Evidence of several patched-over oceanic wood louse infestations. Too many plugs and makeshift seals. The small crew area and hold stank perpetual.
The Dirty Bird was the best Sixall could manage.
The port wasn’t much better than the ship. It smelled of skin lizard shit – an acrid, pungent odour that Sixall associated with poor maintenance. Good ports prevented the flying pests from nesting and cleaned up after them. Poorer ports without steady cleaning crews were loud and smelly and necessitated a wide hat and good pair of boots.
Her fishing boat was taking on new crew. They’d had a lucky haul, the captain said. It wasn’t luck – Sixall was a great lookout, and she’d spotted the shimmer of a school of flying silverscales earlier than any other ship on the water. She got the Dirty Bird there first, and they caught most of the school. The scales of the fish were valuable for jewelry, incorporating enough metal that they wouldn’t rot. Could even be woven into fashionable scale shirts.
The profit was enough to hire on more hands. A full complement, even. They’d need it to go fishing during guillotine eel spawning season. The eels got aggressive, and big ones could bite clean through a ship’s hull. Only morons went fishing during eelspawn. Or desperate down-on-their-luck crews who couldn’t afford to take two weeks off.
Was Sixall a moron or just down on her luck? She hadn’t decided yet.
She wasn’t confident about taking on new crew. A dirty port either couldn’t afford to employ caretakers, or worse, the majority didn’t bother to keep clean. Either way, that meant widespread lack of discipline throughout. Not a good trait to be missing on any ship’s crew.
Sixall stayed on her perch on the mast, watching the crew tighten up to dock and make fast the lines. They did well enough, considering that there should have been two more deckhands. Not Sixall – this captain valued her, or at least her eyes, enough to keep her from most physical labour.
A few scrawny older humans rushed to help secure the lines. Likely trying to show their skill, catch the captain’s eye, and get hired. Desperate folk, if they wanted on a fishing boat during eel season. Desperate enough to be good workers? Or so desperate they wouldn’t have the strength? Sixall thought the latter, but it wasn’t her call.
Among the sparse crowds, low and messy stone buildings, and general disarray of the docks, one person did catch her interest. A human, standing a respectful distance from the dock, but close enough to show interest. He was big, clearly strong beneath his cloak and hat. Sixall wouldn’t have paid him much mind with his worn and dirty clothes, his face so caked in grime that she couldn’t see the colour of his skin.
It was the boots that caught Sixall’s eye. The man’s boots were solid and new. Not clean, not in this town, but in perfect shape. The muck was superficial, sitting on top of the leather, not ground in. No cracks in the soles, barely a crease. So when the man approached the Dirty Bird‘s captain and asked for work, Sixall’s interest was piqued.
She leaned forward and angled her tail out for balance as she eavesdropped, ignoring the skinwings hissing nearby. That accent! Faint, improved, but still there. It might fool the others, but to Sixall, the traces of the accent were unmistakeable, as clear as the first and only time she’d heard it.
It was him. Again.
Sixall spun and locked her claws around the quickline, speeding down the mast. She landed hard, knees bent, and her hindclaws thunked into planking that should’ve been replaced years ago. She strode to the captain, involuntarily gripping the deck.
“Sir,” she interrupted before the captain and the man could shake hands. “I know him.”
The one-eyed captain, a misshapen copper dragonborn who’d gone to green before his time, sneered at Sixall. “Assuming I’d trust you at all, are you recommending him or warning me?”
She ignored the captain’s gaze, watched the foreigner whose interference had cost her a second career. Sixall was no good at human facial expressions, but he was doing all right at not wearing any of them. “We’ve had some history,” she said finally. “Mind if I interview him, see if he’s worthy of the Dirty Bird?”
The captain grunted, failing to notice the barb in her question. “Fine. One hour. If not him, I’ll take the two next biggest humans I see.”
Sixall shoved the foreigner’s shoulder, both to get him moving and to get a sense of his strength. He resisted her, his build and frame powerful, just like she remembered. “Ahead and left.” She nodded toward a low building, a combo fish processing plant and tavern that made their drinks out of sweetfish scraps. Somewhat to Sixall’s surprise, the man nodded and led the way.
She’d never had a chance to come to terms with her first court martial, but at least now she could confront the catalyst of her second.
I wonder if I am as strange to the Aesian people as they are to me.
Excerpt from the Traveler’s journal
Sixall eyed the foreigner over her tankard of seaswill. No one thought the stuff tasted good; she wanted to see what he thought of the drink. He raised the mug, hesitated, sniffed, and took a tiny sip. Terrible with human expressions as she may be, Sixall recognized his attempt to cover a grimace. She waited a moment, let him savour the taste and texture of the alcohol made from sweetfish oil and seaweed.
The tavern-slash-processing plant was just as grimy as the rest of the port. Sixall had shoved the foreigner into the darkest booth in the furthest corner, which happened to be the dirtiest and stank of piss.
“Why are you here?” she blurted, unable to wait any longer.
The man paused and rubbed his beard and moustache. Disgusting to have all that hair where only clean scale should be, Sixall thought. After some consideration, the foreigner asked: “Do you mean here in Aes, or here speaking to you?”
“Either. Both,” she hissed.
“I’m in Aes for research, and I’m speaking to you because I want to leave Aes,” he said with a shrug, and pushed his tankard away.
“Elaborate,” Sixall said, and tapped her bronze nails on the weathered tabletop, chipping a few more small holes in its surface.
The foreigner looked side to side, leaned forward. “How do you feel about the Aesian navy?” he asked.
Sixall frowned, lowering her brow ridge. Some answers to that question could be considered treason. “Relevance?”
He held her gaze, ignored his drink. “I don’t know who I can trust, but I’ve gathered that I can’t trust the navy.”
She nodded slowly. “You’re right about that.”
“I’m right for me, or I’m right in general?”
Sixall hesitated. A year ago, she wouldn’t have. Hesitation felt treasonous, but at the same time, right. “Twice I’ve been court martialed for things that weren’t my fault. Demoted to the lowest rank, then kicked out. Everyone hears about court martials, and everyone hates dishonourable discharges. I’m lucky to have a gullshit job on a gullshit ship, and I didn’t do a thing to deserve it.”
The foreigner nodded, his hand twitched. Had he considered reaching out to her? “Are you willing to tell me more?”
HE’s supposed to be answering MY questions, Sixall thought, but she found herself explaining. She hadn’t told her family or her friends how she felt. Even if she wanted to, they’d distanced themselves from the disgrace. Telling them how she felt couldn’t help her, and yet, she realized she’d wanted to.
“I was assigned to a ship on a special transport job. A secure crate, monitored, with two Angr-Shiv aboard as special protection. No other cargo.” She took a long, slimy drink. “One of the crew – a shiny named Kalgar Drakeswynd – somehow knocked out the Angr-Shiv and bailed with the cargo.”
The foreigner frowned, and Sixall anticipated his question. “I was on lookout, so it was my fault he escaped. Never mind that the lookout watches the sea, not the ship. Or that the Angr-Shiv guards couldn’t handle one unexceptional sailor. No, apparently I should have seen Drakeswynd sneaking off the ship and stopped him.”
She clenched her fists. “My grandsire had some pull, so they convinced the tribunal to bust me down to private instead of discharge. I went from lieutenant on Angr-Shiv black ops down to private on a deep sea interceptor.” She motioned to the foreigner. “That’s where you came in. Gunners fired too early and warned you, windmage couldn’t catch you, XO didn’t get the captain up in time and set a course that lost you in the storm. But I had history, I was easier to blame.”
Sixall shrugged. “Family disowned me over the DD. Friends don’t want to be associated with me. All I could get was lookout on a fishing crew so desperate we’re going to hunt guillotine eels that’ll eat the ship if we piss them off. Maybe even if we don’t, just for fun.”
The man gave a slow nod and a steady gaze. Sixall let out a breath and a shudder. It was the first time she’d said any of that. It felt dangerous and exhilirating to even imply aloud that she’d been wronged by the tribunals.
The foreigner stared at her, his human expressions gratingly mysterious. After a moment, he asked: “After all that… are you through with the navy, or will you turn me in to regain your honour?”
Sixall’s breath caught in her throat and she gave a coughing little choke. She hadn’t thought of that. Why not? If there was a chance to get back everything she’d lost… But… twice the navy tribunal had shown her that they’d prefer to lay blame than to solve problems. Why should she trust them a third time? She took a long, deep breath, filled with the taste of fish. “I… no, I don’t want that.”
The foreigner relaxed. Inscrutable as human body language may be, she recognized that release of tension. She’d done the same when she accepted that her life in the navy was finished. Not relaxation, no release of anger, but the meager comfort of understanding.
“In that case, I’ll trust you more than anyone else since I arrived in Aes,” the foreigner said, and Sixall knew how much he’d left unsaid. His trust was cautious, to some degree desperate, a gamble of risk and reward.
“You know I’m from… across the sea,” the foreigner began, dropping his voice to a near-whisper, difficult for even Sixall to hear across the table with the din of the tavern and fish plant in the background. “I’m a wizard on a research expedition. I knew our continents had been out of touch for a thousand years, but I didn’t expect such a… ah… this.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. “Meaning?” she prompted.
“The, ah, cultural monolith,” he said, and from his tone Sixall understood he was trying to put things delicately. “As far as I can tell, every citizen of Aes will be, is, or has been in the navy. The military structure dominates civilian life as well – everyone is obse- ah, very concerned with duty and obedience to superiors. You’re geographically and socially isolated from the rest of your continent, barely tolerate outsiders, and have no official international trade, diplomacy, or cultural exchange.”
Sixall frowned, scratched the base of her ear-fin. “Why would we want any contact with other countries? They’re all hostile. We’re at war with some of them. The desert glassing a few years back was the best thing that’s happened in a long time – it cut off the only safe land routes for other countries to get to us.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” The foreigner leaned even further forward, his elbows at the center of the sticky table. “Aes is set up to be so structured and independent that you don’t even think about communicating with the outside. The grand admiral -”
“Why would we want to? We’re safe and happy,” Sixall insisted. The foreigner’s eyebrows crept up his face and his eyes went wide. That was one expression Sixall did know. “Fine, not all of us are safe and happy.”
“Anyway, that, ah, that wasn’t the point. I don’t think I can make any more progress with my research here. The superweapon rumours are interesting, but military secrets are out of my reach.” The foreigner’s eyes glinted in the lamplight, and he nearly reached out to her. “To continue my work, I need to leave Aes, and I need help.”
“You would,” Sixall replied. “Besides the navy, not many ships or caravans leave Aes. There’ll be inspections you can’t deal with on your own. And security has been even tighter since that traitor Kalgar Drakeswynd stole… whatever he stole.”
The foreigner nodded, slowly, as if waiting for some –
“No,” Sixall said with a full-body twitch. “I can’t, I’d be -”
“Court-martialed?” the foreigner prodded, with half a smile.
Sixall growled and slammed her fists to the table, pulled herself out of the booth. This time the foreigner did reach out and grab her: a light touch around her wrist, her off hand where the rope guard didn’t cover her scales.
“Please,” he said. “If you’re worried about what will happen to you, come with me.”
That gave her pause. Go with him? Leave Aes? Most of what she’d heard of the west and the mainland to the east was of warlike savages who would tear down everything she knew, if only they could reach. Yacinth’s navy was evidence enough, powered by heretical priests of the ‘lightning god’, always trying to push up from the south. How could she survive in those uncivilized lands?
And yet… the foreigner blended into Aes for nearly six months (five months, twenty-three days to be precise, not that Sixall was counting). If he were nothing but a bloodthirsty foreign barbarian, how could he have stayed hidden for so long in Aes? How could this conversation have happened?
“Where would I go?” Sixall wondered aloud. “What would I do? I’ll stand out. Dragonborn are of different colours and lineages in other countries and regions.”
“Well, ah, to be honest with you, I know as much of mainland life as you do,” the foreigner told her. “We could stay together, but I don’t know where my research will take me. I can’t promise that you’ll be safe. Only that things will be, ah… different.”
Different. The way the past year had gone, how terrible could different be?
Sixall sat down hard, shaking the rickety booth, and she thought. The foreigner waited without impatience, watched without expectation. She took his untouched drink and swallowed the oily fishbrew in a few colossal gulps. She allowed the seaswill to work its magic.
Sixall sighed and let her shoulders drop. “I can’t leave Aes,” she said, unable to meet the foreigner’s eyes. She chose and spoke her words carefully. “It’s all I know. I’ve spent five times as long with navy as outside it. I already felt unmoored and adrift, I can’t start over again.”
The foreigner withdrew, placed his hands below the table inside his cloak. “I understand.”
She set her teeth. “But I will take you to Portam Myvillion and get you out of Aes through the north gate. You’ll have to travel through the wilds of Canitia, maybe even Hiems. But it’s safer than going through Yacinth or the Dragon’s Waste.”
“I, ah… thank you,” said the foreigner. “Thank you.”
Sixall nodded and pulled herself up in silence, motioned for the foreigner to follow. What she’d agreed to was treason – but she’d already been punished for treason twice when she hadn’t done any, so what was the harm of starting now?
Despite the sweetfish seaswill, Sixall stood taller than she had in months.
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