pickledbanhbo - Tumblr blog

pickledbanhbo · 1 month ago

Text

Writing prompt:

Story must include the following elements:

A protagonist with a scar that’s relevant and important to the story

A quest to find a missing magical item

The phrase: “Who was that guy?"

WAIL SONGS (2k)

It never stopped singing. Day and night, the wretched roar of the beast spread like miasma through the water. No other voice could be heard for how loud it was. Each note of its horrid song thundered like rocks cracking in the trenches of the deep.

Corpses lay on the seafloor. It didn’t matter if they were fish, crustaceans, mollusks, cephalopods, or otherwise. Those who were caught underneath the song’s blast perished. More were permanently deafened or injured. The whales had left, swimming far away to avoid the noise. Other sea creatures could not leave, unable to survive beyond their reefs.

Rae was lost. When the bellowing had first started, she’d been several dozen arias from her family. Their voices had been drowned out, obscuring their location, and searching for them by sight had proved ineffective. The eyes of sirens were not good. That was why they sang and listened.

A long scar had developed along the base of her ribs. It served as a harsh reminder of the initial blast of sound that had rung raucous in her skull, blinding her to the world while she swam away. Her side had caught on an outcropping of dead coral. It’d ripped through her in her haste, and she’d had to keep going until she could hear properly again.

She was only able to get close to the beast by keeping her head above the surface of the water where the air could not disperse sound as easily. Her red curls floated around her shoulders and clung to her scalp, heavier out of the water. Eyes the same red as her scales blinked once and then twice as they adjusted to the lack of liquid around them. Air allowed for more light, which made viewing from a distance easier—albeit blurrier.

She’d never seen anything like this monster before. It was large as a humpback and shaped similarly, but it was not soft like any whale. Its shell was harder than a crab’s, almost like stone. The top had a flat section where creatures wandered about.

They were like sirens in some ways. Their bodies were long and lean. Some had darker brown skin like Rae, but some were pale like the inside of a clam. Their faces were correct, too—with their eyes and mouths and noses where they should be. The hair atop their heads came in simple dark and light shades, unlike the colorful palette of Rae’s people. They also didn’t have scales over the backs of their arms or down their legs. It was all skin.

Humans. She’d heard of them in the history-chants passed from the elders. They lived on the land with their strange magics, riding beasts like these made of hard flesh. Such beings held power enough to pose a threat.

But Rae needed to silence their song. She would not find her family until then.

Fixing herself to the side of the beast was easy. There were indents that seemed made for being handholds, and she could listen to the humans out of the water. They spoke not in song, but with clipped grunts and whispers. Their language seemed abrupt—staccato. It did not flow together, much like their beast’s bellowing.

Rae did not understand them, but she listened to their footsteps and how they moved over and within the beast. They lived in it. The noise of them let her hear the shape of the interior as sound waves bounced along the internal walls. Objects they used jingled, rattled, or rustled depending on material.

One of the little caves in the beast rested on its flat top near the rear. Rae clung to the nearest edge on the exterior to listen better to it. Her fingers found purchase on hard protrusions in the shell, allowing her to hold herself up despite the inability of her legs to support her weight. They were not as rigid as the humans’ seemed to be—better suited to the water.

“We’ve got to do some maintenance,” a deep-voiced human said. “Shouldn’t take longer than ten minutes.”

The stilted rhythm meant nothing to Rae, but a voice light like the air responded. “Sure. Give me a second.”

The clink of two hard objects rang faintly. Rae focused on it, listening as the sound waves spread to reveal the shape of something small and almost flat. It had ridges on one end. The other side was square. Something thin and beaded ran through it—a necklace?

One of the humans put the pendant of the necklace into a wall of the cave. Clicking indicated some internal mechanism latching together, and when the human turned the pendant, something whirred and clicked again like percussive notes in a song’s measure. The hum of some kind of magic pervaded the walls of the beast. It thrummed louder as soon as the human pushed a bump in the wall.

And then silence fell.

The beast had stopped singing. For a moment, the absence of sound was disorienting. There were just the footfalls of the humans, their strange vocalizations, and the lapping of the waves below. Was that the work of the necklace? What sort of magic was it?

“Holy shit!”

Rae’s head snapped up to see a human standing overhead, leaning on the lip surrounding the beast’s top. Their voice matched the lighter pitch of the person who’d silenced the song with the necklace. Rae’s eyes could not make out fine details on the light-voice’s face, but the slender shape of their figure and the paleness of their skin was evident.

Rae released her hold and fell into the safety of the ocean.

“Who was that?” the light-voice said, muffled through the water.

A deeper voice responded. “Someone fall overboard?”

Rae ignored the humans’ chattering. Her voice started in her throat and then expanded out to suffuse her entire being. She let it grow and grow with the song of the lost—a lengthy melody that could extend several arias. It rose and fell in low drones, meant to travel far and wide.

She’d barely gotten through a fifth of it before the hum of the beast’s magic rumbled to life. Panic shot through her, and she clambered up its shell again, breaching the water. Seconds later, its bellow burst from it. She flinched at its volume, even from the air.

A pause wasn’t enough. The beast’s song spread too far for too long. Her family could have been multiple arias away, which meant her sound would need to travel for several minutes to reach them. There was no other option to find them than to silence the beast permanently.

The magic necklace had quieted it.

She waited, listening to the humans. Sometimes they got too close to her, and she had to move her position on the beast’s shell. There was no telling what they would do to her if they caught her. One of them had already seen her.

Most of the humans settled inside the beast at nightfall. Rae could see even less in the dark, relying entirely on her hearing to navigate around. She had lost track of the necklace. It was so small, and she couldn’t hear the clink of it wherever it was stashed.

But then, as midnight neared, a familiar sound reached her. It was the light-voice.

“Freezing,” they grumbled. “I’m not being paid enough for this.”

Did they still have the necklace? Rae had to find out.

She hummed. Her voice was not meant for the air, making her sound feel less full, but it still spread through the night. The song of hope left her lips. It rose in pitch and lulled into valleys, melding into the waves lapping at the shell of the beast.

The human’s footfalls came closer as Rae climbed higher. She was at the raised lip encompassing the beast’s top when the human poked their head over it. Even with Rae’s poor vision, she could make out the shape of blue eyes staring at her from this close. Her voice quieted as she watched the human.

“You’re the woman I saw earlier,” they said. “I knew you were real.”

Rae hesitantly climbed higher. Her legs were near useless, but she got herself up over the lip and perched on it. The human took a step back.

“How could you survive the seismic waves?” Their voice seemed strained, as if they were distressed. “God, you had to have come from the water.”

A soft clink brought Rae’s eyes down. Around the human’s neck was a faint glimmer, difficult to make out in the dark, but the hushed ring of that beaded necklace and ridged pendant was unmistakable. The cave with the strange, magic wall was just a few paces away from their position here.

Rae lunged. She grabbed the necklace and yanked hard. The chain snapped as the human lurched back. That strange, clipped language tumbled from their lips. Rae staggered forward with unsteady steps.

There was an opening in the cave large enough for a human to pass that she stumbled through. Clicks left her from her vocal cords snapping together. The sound bounced on the walls, letting her map the surfaces. That strange port for the pendant was small, but she could still detect it in the faint elongation of a sound wave through the empty air in the wall.

The human rushed toward her as she pushed the pendant in and turned it. A hum ran through the beast, but before she could press the bump beside the port, the human grabbed her wrist.

Rae screeched a call meant to travel a dozen arias. Even in the air, it was piercing. The human clamped their hands over their ears, releasing her.

She pressed the bump.

Silence.

The beast’s wail blessedly stopped, leaving just the water’s churning below and the howl of the night wind. But this wasn’t victory yet. The necklace and the magic wall couldn’t be left intact.

Rae shoved the pendant into the port until the wall groaned and cracked. Something bright burst from it with a hiss. More light jumped up when she wrenched the necklace back out. Hopefully, this was damage enough.

Her legs were weak and tired, unused to keeping her upright like this. She collapsed and crawled on her arms. The distance she gained was minimal before she felt hands at her waist. A frustrated hiss escaped her, but instead of dragging her back, the hands lifted her up.

She found herself propped against the lip enclosing the beast’s top while the human crouched in front of her. They looked down. Their fingertips passed over the jagged scar in Rae’s side, still pink with its novelty.

“Was that us?” they mumbled.

Rae stared uncomprehendingly, unsure if she was going to be attacked. But then the human curled her fingers over the pendant still in her hand. They hoisted her up by her hips and over the edge of the beast.

Dark water rose up to meet her. Its touch was welcome on her skin, like returning home after a long journey. She sank into it for a moment before looking up. The human wasn’t visible through the surface.

Her hand uncurled to look at the necklace tangled between her fingers—a reminder of an unexpected kindness. She couldn’t waste it.

She opened her mouth and sang.

****

I originally wrote this piece as part of writing challenge hosted by Forest & Fawn. It wasn’t a finalist, but I genuinely enjoyed making this world and talking about the damaging effects of seismic blasting.

“Offshore oil and gas exploration uses deafening seismic surveys that generate the loudest human sounds in the ocean, short of those made by explosives. Seismic testing involves blasting the seafloor with high-powered airguns (a kind of powerful horn) every 10 seconds and measuring the echoes with long tubes to map offshore oil and gas reserves. These blasts disturb, injure and kill marine wildlife around the clock for years on end.” – Seismic Surveys for Oil, Center for Biological Diversity

If you’d like to learn more about seismic blasting and what you can do to help marine life, I recommend going to the Center for Biological Diversity site.

#short story #ww writing #fantasy writing #original fiction #sirens #seismic blasting

0 notes