Chapter Text
Sailors often tell stories of monsters far out to sea- of gargantuan squids and their terrible tentacles, or leviathans with teeth comparable to a navy ship’s mast. And of course, there were the tales of the fair maidens of the west currents, whose melodic voices have called many-a-seafarer to the ocean’s inky depths.
Samuel Beechworth has seen a great many things at sea and kept a great many things between himself and the Blue Lady, but when nights are cold and sleep comes in fits and bouts, he remembers.
He was a young man still when the pride of Gristol whaling, ‘The Albatross’ Nest’ was splintered against rocks by a sudden, black, storm. Waterlogged and half-dead, Samuel woke in a cove of some sort, tall and towering cliffs bowling him in with the encroaching waves, chilling him to the bone.
After he’d emptied his belly of sand and any manner of sea-things and wiped the brine from his chin, he surveyed his surroundings to find what was left of his ship (a few planks, a whiskey bottle here and there) and, to his utmost surprise and fear, that he was not alone.
On a flat slab of rock, there was a woman with hair as red as the sun on a foreboding morning, skin as pale as noble’s porcelain, and... gills, slitting her elegant neck (creature, then, was a better description). A sharp-toothed smile and storm-grey eyes trained themselves on Samuel, a silent assessment. Judgement, perhaps?
Either way, Samuel stood up and dusted himself off best he could, wiped over his hair and asked, “You quite alright, miss? Awful cold out.”
At the woman’s silence, Samuel cleared his throat again, “Well, I’d offer you my jacket but I’d doubt that’d be much help at the moment, ‘sides it seems you’ve sorted yourself out just fine.” He continued his nervous babble as he picked through the surf, watching her from the corner of his eye, “You don’t smoke, do ya? Think some of mine mighta survived the storm... if I could only find a light. I mean- do you even breathe air? With your gills and all?” he paused, “Begging my pardon, ma’am, aint none o’ my business, really. But the offer still stands.”
The woman didn’t reply, but her shell-and-seaweed adornments clinked as she made her way over to Samuel and laid a hand on his cheek. Well, if the sailor had any blood to spare he’d surely blush right down to his boots, but as it were he merely stared at her, tongue well and truly swallowed. The woman’s eyes searched over him, and with a tiny shake of her head, the soft upwards curve of her lips landed where her hand was only moments before. At the same time, she pressed something into Samuel’s chest, and then she was gone, all fins and webbed fingers and fish-tail into the waves.
Samuel’s cold-addled mind barely had time to register the feel of her lips on his skin, much less what the woman turned into as she left: he’d only barely had enough sense to move his hand over the offering before it fell in the sand.
There was an unexplainable warmth in his bones again, and in his palm there was, of all things, a lighter. Samuel laughed then, loud into the still-roaring wind. From the corners of his mind there came an echo, a remembered tale of sailors who’d gained a fish-woman’s blessing, but the euphoria of a smoke on his lips and a fire to warm his hands by took precedent at that moment.
He was one of five men who’d survived from a crew of fifty, and when he was asked, inevitably, how, he’d smile and thumb the lighter in his pocket and not say a single word.
The red-dawn woman of the ocean he didn’t see again, not for many years, not until he was an old man out on the Wren, waiting for his end. When his last breath joined that of the wind, and he sank slowly into those merciless waves, stormy eyes and skin like porcelain greeted him, and with gentle hands carried his soul to the unknown planes where those who gave themselves to the sea go to when they pass.