#getting started off with one of kaede's top 5 most hated fights lmao

[dawnslight-aegis]

1. steer

If someone had told Kaede even a few moons earlier that she would be standing on the deck of two ships, lashed together, with the express intent of drawing dread Leviathan up from the briny deep, she would have laughed in their face. No Llymlaen-fearing daughter of La Noscea would be so foolish as to court the attention of the master of the depths, and Kaede may not have had the cautionary tales against him as her cradle songs, but she had grown up among former pirates all the same. The first Spoken blood to ever coat her blade was sahagin. The first man she’d ever killed was a roegadyn with coral growing from his eye sockets, crying out to the Lord of the Whorl with his final, garbled breath.

And yet, here she stood, pelted by wind and rain, staring down Leviathan himself. Navigator preserve me, she thought with a sigh, and fair winds guide me back to shore. Not that the ship had sails to catch them, more a floating platform than something you could properly steer, now that the ship towing them had cut the lines. It ran counter to everything that Kaede had ever been taught about surviving Leviathan’s waves – speed and manuverability were the only things that kept you safe when the seas rose up against you, at least according to the Captain of the Sea Shriek, whose crew had become the mercenaries that raised her when piracy was outlawed. She hadn’t dared go visit before setting out, fearing the lecture from half a dozen salt-crusted old men almost as much as Leviathan himself.

A loose collection of adventurers that the Scions had cobbled together from the Echo-blessed of the realm clustered behind her, some well known to her, some not, while somewhere off to her right, far closer to the roiling waves than any person in their right mind should be, stood Marzanna Kimbatuul, spear in hand.

“Tell me again why we’re going to all this trouble? I’ve killed plenty of sea serpents, without resorting to all this nonsense. So what if this one’s really big? A spear in the right place and it dies like all the rest.” The xaela shifted her weight from foot to foot in anticipation, as if debating whether to fling herself directly into the water’s embrace.

Leave it to Marz to have only paid half-attention to her explanation of the plan, ready always to leap spear first into the fray without considering the wisdom of caution or discretion. Kaede rolled her eyes, but before she could respond with the admonishment that gathered on her tongue, a soft laugh drew her attention, and a woman stepped out of the nervous crowd of glory-seekers – a viera, and the only other proper Scion among them, recently come from Sharlayan to assist with the construction of the Rising Stones. “I do not doubt your familiarity with the seas, Mistress Kimbatuul, but it is one thing to slay a sea monster – even an enormous one – within its own domain, and another entirely to have the waters themselves as an enemy. Be at peace. The battle will be joined soon enough.”

The woman’s voice, tinged with a far more foreign accent that yet lingered under the Sharlayan lilt, calmed Marz’s anxious fidgeting much more quickly and completely than any sharp words that Kaede could have brought to bear. Hard indeed to argue with the woman whose conjury would be that which decided whether or not you lived to fight another day.

A momentary calm descended on the Whorleater, and Kaede drew in a sharp breath. It was always when the water grew still that heralded the greatest danger. And indeed, before she could exhale, the deck shook and the sea erupted, and then all thought was given over to the act of survival, as the Lord of the Whorl battered them with head and tail, sea and sahagin. Kaede’s role was the same it always was – draw the beast’s ire, so that spear and spell and arrow could find their mark, and to pray that she survived longer than their foe. Several times she was thrown against the railing of the ship by waves that towered above her head, the wood splintering on impact, but just barely keeping her from being swept away.

In the end, Eynzahr’s mad plan was a sound one, and once again corrupted crystals were the weapon that allowed them to turn the tides against Leviathan, as they had granted them access to Garuda moons before. When the monster at last crumpled, its body bleeding from hundreds of wounds, and dissolved into aether and sea foam, Kaede dropped heavily onto the deck, shivering in the cold and the wet. The wood under her hands was slick with blood and salt water, fishback viscera mingling with red blood that it took her too long to realize was her own. A dull ache in her side slowly made itself known through the fever and fear of battle, and it was all Kaede could do not to retch as she realized that several shards of the railing, longer than her own hand, had embedded themselves in her flesh even as they’d saved her from the depths.

There is no fortune without misfortune, no blessing without a curse, whispered the voice of her mother in the back of her mind, and Kaede almost laughed. Wasn’t that the truth – she’d gained fame and glory, regard and renown, hailed as a hero the realm over, but that same status came at the cost of bleeding out on the deck of a ship in the rain, felled not by the god she’d dared raise a blade to, but by some pieces of bloody wood.

It was frankly embarrassing, and she almost welcomed the encroaching darkness as she dimly registered panicked voices calling for a healer, and hands on her shoulders, holding her upright against the weakness in her body, her whole world narrowing down to the pain in her side and the taste of salt and iron on her tongue, a woman’s hand on her cheek bidding her rest. Whether it was a healer, or her mother, or Hydaelyn Herself, Kaede knew not, but she obeyed all the same, falling fully into unconsciousness as gentle warmth overtook the pain, and the smell of seawater was replaced with that of wildflowers. She was left with only one, singular thought, shining starlike through the haze of unconsciousness:

“‘Til sea swallows all” my arse, you great bloody piece of shite snake.