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thetomorrowshow · 1 month ago

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febuwhump 13 - "I don't trust anyone else"

title: if i ever said goodbye

fandom: empires smp

trust au baby prequel!!!!

Haer knew what was bound to occur, long before it happened.

The thirty-three lesser gods had become jealous of him. He noticed the tensions in their interactions, the sly undermining of him around his creations, the carefully whispered conversations that always sent him side-eyes.

Haer knew, and decided to do nothing.

It had long been prophesied that his time would come to an end, and Haer knew better than to fight prophecy.

The one missing stipulation, however, is an heir.

The prophecy, when speaking of his fall into the unknown, mentions his descendants—"And even the heirs shall forget their origins".

Yet Haer has not borne children, and therefore, the soon-to-be end is moving too quickly. Does he not get enough time to even raise his children?

Haer ponders this, on a day when the clouds seem to silently weep for him, as he walks along the beach of the very ocean that he had split from the firmaments.

His death has to be close.

So where are his heirs?

His answer comes in an unexpected arrival—a giant sea wyrm emerges from the depths of the ocean, just yonder, flicking its fins and calling mournfully.

I am old, it cries. I wish for children, to raise and learn in the ways of the ocean, that the fish and crabs and sharks and whales and scuttling things may have rulers.

Why have you none? Haer asks her, reaching with his godly power to calm the waves.

There are none who can father the children of a wyrm, comes the creature's yearning reply. I have no children.

Nor I, Haer tells her. Yet I have the power to grant your wish, and give the both of us heirs.

It is one hundred years later that the sea wyrm lays a clutch of two thousand eggs, deep in the bottom of the sea, Haer long dead.

And it is many thousands of years later that the wyrm dies, surrounded by its subjects, none of the two thousand eggs hatched.

For more thousands of years, the peoples of the seas protect the clutch of eggs, waiting for their rightful rulers to be born.

But, as always occurs, war strikes. War destroys the ocean, hurricanic and devastating, and when the sand settles, there is no longer an empire to be ruled.

And one of the two thousand eggs cracks.

She protects her unhatched siblings with a fervor, baring tiny baby teeth at any who dare draw near, a clear descendant of the great wyrm that many now believe to have been legend.

Blue scales (with the occasional purple stripe) cover the entirety of her body, though she has a vaguely humanoid shape, as many of the sea dwellers have developed. Her arms are long and slender, and fins travel down her legs to streamline her body, a razor-sharp tail longer than she is waving behind her. Her hair is short and dark, and her face is thin and pointed, ears larger than her head for her to grow into.

She doesn't know that she was born to rule the ocean. Not really, despite the repeated gifts brought to her. Despite the praises that the surrounding fish give her.

She has some idea of the sort, of course. If she didn’t, her people wouldn’t recognize her. But none of that matters.

She just protects the clutch of one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine eggs for dozens of years, cooing and chirping and trilling to her siblings in all the different languages that she has picked up from the visitors, waiting for the day that one of them hatches.

She is, however, only a fry, and she can't defend her siblings from everything.

It's a storm, a terrible storm, and those with bad intentions will always use bad circumstances to their advantage.

She's darting from place to place in the nest that she's built around the eggs, waves rocking her little cushions of seagrass as she tries to hold the structure together. It’s a bad storm, yes, but she’s dealt with storms. They’ll be fine.

Then, as she's settling a particularly small egg into the sand, something grabs her from behind.

She fights. Of course she fights, kicking and lashing out with her sharp tail and biting the arms holding her with her little pointed teeth. But two strong dolphin hybrids have her held tight in the tumultuous ocean, and they make her watch as their salmon friends destroy the eggs.

She screams and cries and tries to stop them, but there's nothing she can do. And when nothing remains of her brothers and sisters but their destroyed partly-developed bodies and the shards of their shells, they shove her to the ground and smash a rock against her head until she stops moving.

The storm carries her limp body far away, where it settles in the soft, sparkling sand, under clear, calm waters with the sun shining through, before she forces her way back to consciousness.

And then, head blurry and aching, she frantically calls for her siblings, though she knows that they're dead.

It takes her a week to find her way back to the ancient place where the clutch had been laid. She frantically searches through the wreckage, looking for anything that might have survived the deadly attack, each spurt of hope when she sees an egg poking out of the sand extinguished when she discovers it's only the top of a shattered shell.

In the end, she collapses there on the ocean floor as she sobs, on her hands and knees.

She is alone, just as their mother always was, just as their father always was, and she has no hope left in her heart.

In an unconscious, self-soothing action, she pulls sand up around herself in a blanket, as she has so many times with her baby siblings beside her.

And her hand grazes across something hard and smooth.

She freezes.

She digs, quickly, hands trembling—

And she unearths a small, slightly damaged egg, a thin crack spiderwebbing out from its point.

It’s alive.

It may be damaged, but there’s a tiny heartbeat that she can hear when she presses it up to her ear, and she still has a family.

She holds it to her chest, sobs gasping, and kisses it gently, murmuring in their mother tongue a name for her baby seabling.

Small, found, beloved brother.

He hatches a year later, a tiny creature slightly more fish-like than she, but otherwise almost just like a mini version of herself with brown and tan colorings instead of blue and purple. And he really is mini—she can hold him in the palms of her hands, scratch at his little head with the nail of her thumb.

He grows—his first tooth comes in mere days after his hatching, and he gleefully chews on her thumb to show it off.

She's been talking to his egg for a year straight—she had strapped it to her chest in a sling made of sea leaves—so he has a good idea of who she is, with instinct to back it up.

More fish come to visit, bringing gifts and adoration for their newborn king, but she holds him close to her chest and doesn't let them see him. He's just a baby, after all. His scales are still soft.

And now she knows that there are those in this world who have it out for them. There are those who would rather not have royalty, who would govern themselves.

So she hides him, and they never stay in one cove for long, and she teaches him to bury himself in the sand if he ever sees anyone come near. He blends in with the sand perfectly, after all.

He fits in the crook of her arm, and he presses himself up against her stomach in a hug as she cradles him, and he's so small and fragile and she knows she has to keep him safe.

And years pass, and he grows (still smaller than she, but certainly too large for her to hold any longer), but he keeps his name.

Smallbelovedfoundbrother.

It sounds something like Yimecht, in their ancient tongue.

And he names her Protectorbluesafesister, which sounds something like Szise.

They live together, only trusting each other, moving from place to place, for a century. They hide on the outskirts of towns, and slip away if anyone sees them, and they swim and play and take care of one another.

And after many years, Yimecht feels like they ought to be strong enough to try and pull together the Ocean Kingdom, factionized after thousands of years with no rightful ruler.

Szise doesn't like it. Her brother is still so vulnerable, despite his very very sharp teeth and his nicely hardening scales.

But he's right. They are the only heirs of the being that was created to rule the ocean, and the one who created it.

So Smallbelovedfoundbrother and Protectorbluesafesister claim their people.

She is maybe seven centuries old when the salmon split from the uneasy peace that two united rulers brings. They branch off for their own place and begin to grow their armies, making attacks on the united Ocean Kingdom.

Yimecht, of not-yet six centuries, grows angry with them. He comes to hate the salmon, and frequently swims out to check on and reassure their main target—the community of cod, dwindling in size.

He cannot help them in the way that they need. Their land-dwellers are hit the worst, yet neither he nor his sister can breathe land air. He swims along the swampy shore for years, defending his people the best he can, leaving Szise to govern.

The war becomes bloody, and many lives are lost as the years become decades and the decades become centuries. And finally, Yimecht's anger gets the better of him.

He's fifty years from one thousand when he kisses his sister on the cheek and departs, the green in the patterns on his face (some of his scales have grown to be a rich green, just as the purple among her own have developed a dark pink hue to create stripes and patterns across her body) sparkling, his brown eyes determined.

And Smallbelovedfoundbrother leaves to go on land.

Szise waits for him to return (though she knows, in her heart of hearts, that he won't) for many solitary years. She secludes herself from the people, delegating the ruling to a council of fish (who have already been practically running the kingdom for two centuries now, busy as she has been with the Salmon War), and quickly falls into legend.

And one night, when the loneliness is too much to bear, and she dreams of finding that small damaged egg in the sand and it being too damaged to survive, its heartbeat stuttering and fading as she holds it close and begs it to live—

One night, she decides to go find him herself.

And Protectorbluesafesister leaves to go on land.

She comes to an island, takes a deep breath, and crawls on land.

She immediately blacks out.

When she blinks awake, the blue sky above is blurry.

And then a reddish face comes into view, frowning at her.

"Are you here to lead us?" it asks, in a clicking and clacking tongue that she can somehow understand. "The prophecies always said a woman with pink scales would lead us."

Does she have pink scales?

"Okay," she responds, sitting up.

"What is your name, our queen?"

"Szise," she says.

It frowns. "Lizzie?"

And that's close enough.

Especially since she can't remember what she said in the first place.

Yimecht, however, isn't on the land.

He swims out toward it, and a scouting group of salmon catch him and bring him into custody, lock him up in the darkest dungeons in their part of the ocean.

There he stays for decades, taunted by the salmon guards, his trials extended and extended. He swims back and forth in his five-foot cell, waiting for his sister to save him, like she always has.

But when he is sentenced to death, his sister doesn't burst through the doors.

And Smallbelovedfoundbrother is dragged by four salmon to the surface, where the heavy land air will suffocate him slowly.

They push him onto the land, and he immediately blacks out.

He wakes.

He can't breathe.

There's a building, he can see, his vision blurring in and out. Maybe someone can help him.

He crawls to the building, heart pounding in his ears, movements stuttering.

Inside is a . . . a headdress, of some sort.

Something.

It draws him in, and he puts it on his head, and he can breathe.

When the two Cod soldiers find him, they bow instantly.

"Codfather," one says reverently, head down. "What is your name?"

"Yimecht," he says.

The Cod frowns. "Jimmy?"

And that's close enough.

Especially since he can't remember what he said in the first place.

A book washes ashore at the Crystal Cliffs, two months after Smallbelovedfoundbrother leaves his Protectorbluesafesister.

A very old, worn book, with unfamiliar letters.

And the old, wizened headmaster of the Crystal Cliffs Academy finds it, and ponders it, and places it in his secret library for further study.

And there it sits, forgotten, as he becomes too old to make the trip up the mountains.

The library, known only to him, is also forgotten when he suddenly passes two years later without appointing an heir.

There lies the only recorded history of the sea wyrm and the god Haer, and the offspring they created.

And within it lies the diary of Szise, picking up where the history book ends, with entries about the eggs, and losing all but one small and damaged, and raising her brother, and finally, her brother leaving to join the fight on land.

And many, many years later, the young ruler of Crystal Cliffs finds a door.

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