Work Text:
Goliath’s mother told him once that he was created of different stock than other men were, and for that he was designed to become great. When he asked what she meant, she simply winked and said that his father was as powerful as the sea itself. For Goliath, he simply took this as stock, though he also never had a father live with him (though that of itself wasn’t particularly unusual. Both polygamy and polyandry weren’t very remarkable; he assumed his father was either dead or some other woman’s primary husband). He took little and less after any of the men he knew, though. Goliath grew up too quickly, had a bit too slitted pupils to match any other child with known paternage.
A kid tried to steal one of his belongings, a dull spear made for training, once. He thought that with a weapon (dull or otherwise), even Goliath who had a good few inches and pounds on him would be turned back after a few stabs.
Goliath wrenched the rod from his hands and broke his nose in almost the same movement, and didn’t stop there. The other kid fought back, of course, but it meant little when Goliath never flinched away from him and treated bloodying his knuckles like an obligation. Like skin splitting beneath him was blood in the water to a shark, pulling a grin out of his otherwise stern expressions. Goliath beat the would-be thief nearly to death. He was only stopped because an adult pulled him back thinking that a teenager was trying to kill a child, rather than simply a dispute between peers.
(Violence is accepted, but unfair advantages must have cause, or so the adage goes.)
Afterward his mother cooed and pet his hair, telling him that because he was stronger than others, he would sometimes have to simply beat them into shape. A king gains power through might and respect alike, and from the throne it is then his obligation to reward obedience with provision. She brushed knots and dried blood alike out of his hair as Goliath sat beneath her and took heed.
As a future king, it was his duty to take an errant child and create of him a subject. The idea that he was not a future king, not selected specially for killing and rule, never seemed to cross his mother's mind. His strength may come from his father, but from her alone he inherited conviction. Goliath traded a beating and a second practice weapon, worse than his own but suitable for a lackey, for the kid's loyalty. Under threat of more broken bones, but loyalty nonetheless.
Because he was blessed, special, stronger and different, he was able to create a kingdom for himself. Goliath's adult teeth grew in with a slight sharpness. He joined the army years before his age should let him; on the cusp of puberty he was the size of an adult with the strength to back it. To become an adult, one gets their first tattoos and expresses no sign of pain. That, too, was easy for Goliath. Curls of waves and the dots of fish beneath them, a sign of the Philistines’ loyalty only to the sea. It really didn’t hurt at all, but that was enough for him to join the ranks of fighters at thirteen.
It was enough, too, when he challenged his commander for rule and won the second he got bored of receiving instruction. Sheer physical might was always enough. He was bigger than them, he was stronger than them, and his mother reminded him that so long as fealty was repaid he would never have to worry for his power.
She said with all their shared conviction that the deal she made to create him would protect him always. The sea could claim him, perhaps, but nothing else. (As the sea claims every corpse, the bodies of those lost in battle to be dropped into the waves if they were retrieved.) He could not die save to a god, as gods were the only things in the world stronger than him. His mother reminds him of his obligations and surety to rule every time he braids shark teeth charms into her hair. (This is the only expression of subservience anyone will ever see from Goliath.)
The only time he ever wondered what, actually, his mother did to arrange his birth was upon Miryam's ship. Miryam blamed Goliath's full unaltered cognizance after his seafarer transformation on a force of will. She told him that his ability to look decidedly still humanoid, comprised mostly of human skin and with the face of a man, reflected solely his determination to remain the person he was.
It tracks to him because he’s different. He is a Philistine, unlike the toddering Lemurians who are transformed and reduced to semi-intelligable fish with forms that seem to melt on land and lack the ability to command themselves in any operation more complicated than a frontal charge. Miryam curses him and because he is a Philistine, he comes out better.
He gathered around him, through the centuries trapped with the witch, plenty of vetted guards that he determined to create Philistines out of. A second army, given the transformation that he was but with loyalty to Goliath over Miryam. Every time, no matter how well vetted they were for conviction and pain tolerance, they became indistinguishable from Miryam's seafarers. Every time they transform, all signs of humanity shrivel to barely recognizable. No matter the strength.
Goliath burned through lieutenants until he lost faith in the transformation. Something was different about him– until he remembered centuries back to his childhood and his mother saying he was born of something different. Something which the sea alone can claim.
There are different religions than the one Miryam claims, after all. There are gods different witches can call up, ones with sharp teeth and a hunger for blood in the waves matched only by their obligation to protect their worshippers.
Goliath stopped trying to make seafarers into Philistines. After all, the worship of tose gods died with his people, wiped out on a lonely rock in the middle of the sea and by the Egyptians forcing them inland. There were no more gods of the sea to proposition for their kingmakers and Goliath tired of watching soldiers fail to retain themselves. There was no point in killing them like that. So he ruled nothing in his centuries of waiting.
It was, he thought to himself, strangely lonely to be the last remaining thing of a god.