Archive of Our Own

Years on, there are still things which Corzin does not recall about the day the storm came.

All the memories are flashes, momentary fragments like shattered glass. Images, and nothing more; sounds without source, voices without throats. The order in which they came is lost to time and memory, and when Corzin thinks of them he thinks of them like pieces of broken pottery, a strange archaeology of unremembered origin. They are sharp, and if he turns them over in his hands too often and careless, they draw blood.

When he was a child he would hunt for sea-glass on the shore of Barnacle Point, in those new days of winter when the sky hung low and grey with salt. It was a rare find, sea-glass; his brother told him that it was once sand, pressed by tide and tumult into something altogether new. Nowadays he knows that isn’t true: the pressure and heat beneath the waves is nowhere near enough to mold sand to glass, and the fragments he found on the shore were nothing but the remains of shipwrecks, unrecognizable after years upon years at sea.

There was a great deal of sea-glass, afterwards. Not true sea-glass, of course, not smooth and made strange and lovely by the unknown things that roil in the deep, but the broken remnants of windows and bottles and lanterns. All those things by which the light streams in lay shattered like so many eggshells on the shore, and among them were the bodies.

It was a strange thing, and in all his years afterwards as a doctor Corzin has never seen anything quite like it. Dozens and dozens of them lay on the shore, ruined and wrenched, shipwrecks of brain and blood spilling out like black oil onto the sand. Here and there bones protruded from the wrack— more than there should have been, flesh and viscera peeled away from their fragmented lengths as if by the hands of some careful surgeon, whose mandate compelled him to an unknowable end.

Against all reason, each bone was weathered smooth, and perfectly clean.

Image without form, sound without motion. Barefoot on the sand, glass and broken wood slicing into the soles of his feet, sprinting towards the small ruined form on the promontory. There was no possibility, of course, that someone missing that much could be alive. But there is a certain peculiarity of the mortal spirit: it demands the sight of that which destroys us.

Bones, by the time he arrived. Wave-worn and lovely, and white as new snow. But Corzin would recognize that sea-glass necklace anywhere.

Curiously, he does not remember sound. He does know that when he returned home his throat was flayed and ragged, and that when he went to wash the next morning the sink was red-stained and coppery. He recalls the taste of salt: tears, or blood, or sea water, he doesn’t know.

Days, or weeks. Burials without number by those few who remained, and the ceaseless finding of stray bones on the shore, uncollected and forgotten. They were the color of the sand by then, pale and bare and smooth like driftwood. Only their particular porous texture distinguished them from the other pieces of debris on the beach, though that would not last long. It is from the weathering to dust of such things that the shore itself is made.

A friend, dead, whose wrecked house Corzin had found himself wandering through one cold winter morning, when the sky was low and grey with salt. Above the former mantelpiece, untouched by the chaos: an object of a peculiar sort, which he had seen perhaps three times before. Long and improbably shining, polished and oiled with care and caution, and a pouch of black powder that smelled of saltpeter and flame. One barrel, and one bullet.

It was heavy in his hands, that first weight, heavier than he’d imagined it would be. Despite the cold of the winter day outside, it was warm as something living, the first warm thing in this strange new world. The sense of it, real as a wound, was like waking up after weeks of dreaming, and for the first time Corzin blinked, and heard, and saw.

One dead brother, one dead town. One home, sundered and sunk into the sea. One thing behind it: not a storm, not a shipwreck, not a bolt of lightning from the sky. Not a god, or maybe a god, but a god with a body, a body that he’d seen. A god with a great staring eye as yellow as fool’s gold, which had caught him like the beam— yes, he remembered now, remembered the screaming and the howling wind and the fear— like the beam of a lighthouse, sweeping the bone-wrecked shore.

Sight and sound at once. The wind whistling like a gravedigger through the skeleton of the town. The gun in his hands.

Something like fire, but cold, and hard as sea ice. Something like love, but fanged, with teeth as sharp as broken glass. Something like hope, but black, black, black as rising smoke. At the center of his chest, at the bottom of his heart, something else began to beat in time.

Months and years, and long days of toil, and the gun became as familiar to Corzin’s mind as his own body, an extension of himself he hardly needed to think to wield. Ships and the sea, and it was strange to think that once he had been a farmer, a worker of the land. Years ago, in some other life free of bones and blood, the plow had been as natural to his hands as his carbine, a fifth limb. There was a verse in the Scriptures, about beating the swords into ploughshares, wasn’t there?

The thing at the center of his chest fed on the quickness of his hands, the sharpness of his aim. It coiled like smoke, rising occasionally to choke his throat and sting his eyes, a welcome reminder of its presence. It smelled of saltpeter and flame, gunsmoke and ruin, and it grew strong and fierce across the stretch of years.

The first time Corzin found himself at the front of a battle-line, it was with his gun. It was such a strange thing, to load and aim at something living, with the same hands which had once sowed seeds in the wet earth, and even now staunched the bleeding and bandaged the wounded. He was, at first, afraid that it would be difficult: that he would find his finger frozen on the trigger, that his hands would take less easily to the grim work of death as they had to the labors of life.

It was not difficult.

Afterwards, Corzin found himself wandering among the dead on the deck, without memory of how he had gotten there. They lay like shipwrecks, scattered and spilling, nameless and in many cases faceless— and Corzin was no stranger to violence, but there was something sickening about it, though the few bones which protruded were wet with gristle and blood. There was a stinging in his eyes and a choking in his throat, and the scent of gunsmoke in his nose. The barrel of his carbine was smoking. He did not remember firing it.

The thing at the center of his chest coiled, and burned cold.

He thinks, sometimes, of the name for it. Perhaps it is something like the ghostly, flitting creatures of the ether that follow him about, something which had taken up residence inside him. Something that guides his aim, something that knows his cause, that follows him like a smoke-trail from a torch. A blessing from the Regent, or one of Her Saints.

(It is none of those things.)

It doesn’t help him in the surgery, though the others do. Its steely determination, the singleminded roar that blocks out everything but the chase, is no help when a man’s life lies beneath his smoke-stained hands. The only blood that feeds it is the blood drawn by violence, the crimson rush of power and fury from those who had set themselves against him.

(In dreams, often, he finds himself alone on the deck. All around him, across the endless battlefield, are those nameless men who have fallen to his blade or his bullet. His gun is in his hands, smoking and warm and alive, and he does not falter, and the beast which smokes burns like a frozen bonfire in his heart. It is not enough, and it never will be, but twigs for kindling will keep the fire going til timber.)

(In dreams, too, there is the creature: the thing which those who have never seen it have named the kraken, for they do not know that there can be no name for a thing such as it. In dreams he is standing on the promontory at Barnacle Point, caught in the sweeping beam of its great staring yellow eye, tall as a tower-keep.

Its bulk blocks out the stars, and inside him, the beast which smokes roars.)

There are words for this sort of thing, and stories. There is the word revenge, though that is not quite right. There is the word protection, and that is part of it, but it is not the whole. Why does the beast which smokes return and return, kindled ever and burning? Because every ten years, every turning of the tide, the nameless thing with its great yellow eye emerges from the roiling deep and murders a thousand brothers, sunders a hundred homes. To feed nameless bodies to the fire, to turn the hands of a healer to the work of violence, is a small price to pay. It is a small price to pay, so long as there is one barrel, and one bullet.

Perhaps it cannot be killed. Perhaps it is closer to god than creature, this leviathan of the unfathomable sea, and perhaps in the attempt he will perish, like a moth to a flame. It could have crushed him then, that strange fragmented day, memories sharp in his hands. It could have rendered him to dust, sand into false sea-glass, taken back into the shore as his brother’s bones have surely been. It could still have him, drag him under, down and down to the roiling deep where all the things without names die dreaming, and dream dying.

Better that. Better that, than to live on kindling alone, choked by the black smoke in his throat and the scent of gunpowder in his nose.

In moments of quiet, Corzin has developed the habit of sitting cross-legged on his bunk, turning his gun over in his hands. It had been years and years since that day in the ruined and skeletal house of a man whose name he has forgotten, but still he imagines he can smell the scent of salt and blood on it, metallic and keen. Every scuff-mark, every stain, he can trace and know, as well as he knows the scars that mark his own body.

Outside the wind howls, and the waves beat against the sides of the ship. (Which ship does not matter; there have been many.) The storm is not yet at its height, and idly Corzin wonders what lies beneath the hull, dead and dreaming still. Do all the forgotten have yellow eyes, and weather-white bones? Like titanic lighthouses they search the deep, always looking, never finding.

The beast which smokes is strong. It seems to like the storms, seems to adore the fury of the wind and the waves, the roiling sea and the unfathomable things beneath it. The smell of saltpeter and flame, gunsmoke and ruin, is heavy on the air. The sky hangs low with salt. The cabin is full of something like hope, but black, and coiling upon the howling wind.

There has not been a battle in some time. The sea is open and clear, and there is no fuel for the fire.

Still and always, Corzin keeps one bullet in the barrel.