The Drowning Man
“Enjoy Hell,” the Man in Silver said, planted his boot on Saar’s sternum, and Saar when tumbling into the ocean.
He hit the water back first. The waves swallowed him quickly and the shadow of the ship
Magic hadn’t been something Saar had ever dabbled in. He’d never really been all that interested in it. Not in power or fame, not with the years and years it would take to do anything of true importance. Most spells were just parlor tricks anyway. It felt too...distant. He preferred a craft you could do with your hands, preferred watching metal take shape and life through tools and human effort alone. That was his magic. Metalwork and smithing. That didn’t mean he didn’t hear people talk. He knew that spell components were really expensive and the prices were always rising. He knew that local governments were beginning to crack down on who could use magic and for what purposes. He knew most magic users turned to the sea to escape those regulations. Most of them turned to some sort of crime. Saar also knew of the impossible things. The things alchemists who fled the regulations all craved, all spoke about in hushed whispers on the peer and shut up about when he walked by. Unattainable things. All-powerful things Damning things.
Saar learned moving meant blacking out. If he didn’t move, it was almost like his body forgot it needed oxygen to function. His heart slowed and soon he stopped tasting the remains of his lungs. Blood moved like sand in his veins. It grated over his muscles with every twitch. Escape became a futility. Even if he could force his body to move, he’d never be able to wriggle his wrists free or tear the macerated skin with brute force alone. Consciousness remained too slippery. Time stopped, it seemed. The light wained and crested in varying intervals, its touch barely brushing across his senses. His body withered. Muscles grew tight and lethargic. His joints grew stiff. Even when he tried to move them through the agony he eventually found they just wouldn’t. The skin on his hands felt soft and the pads of his fingers split. Like a sponge, the water bloated him. At the bottom of the ocean, his decaying body became his prison. It left a lot of time for thought. Saar spent a lot of his moments of awareness trying to figure out why he was still alive—if alive was the right word. Conscious, at least. Maybe he’d fixed an enchanted amulet by mistake, or screwed up some warlocks armor on a rare patch job that came from the wealthy. Flimsy ideas, but he thought them through anyway. The truth was he’d never touched a magical item in his life and he’d taken careful pains to make that statement true.
The doorbell tinkled, followed by a distinct click of heels on stone flooring. Saar mopped at his brow, shut the blast furnace, and went to greet the customer. Like he was expecting, it was a woman. A beautiful woman with violet eyes and a maroon cloak. Saar wasn’t a man of status or education himself, but even he could see the richness in the cloak. The shimmer of gold embroidery on the inside, the texture of the fabric, even the way it moved when she folded the hood off of her head and smiled at him. Her hair—dark as a raven’s wing—had been coiled around the crown of her head, entwined in gold ribbon and beading. Saar tipped his hands off on his trousers again just for good measure. “Are you the blacksmith?” “Uh— yes. Yeah, I’m a blacksmith. What can I help you with?” He added “milady” a half second too late, but she just smiled daintily at him. Her delicate hand extended from the cloak, a gaudy, massive iron ring with a massive, blood-red ruby center dangling from her middle finger. “It broke a few streets down. Caught on a bush. Can you fix it?” She batted her long, dark eyelashes and smiled. It didn’t feel genuine. Maybe it was the lipstick she wore, dark red like blood smeared on the lips. Maybe it was that the smile never reached her eyes. Maybe he just didn’t know how to talk to upper-class women. “Maybe? Can I?” He stopped before touching her hand and gestured with the question. She slipped it off and dropped it in his palm. “Of course.” It was a horrid thing, really. One of those old pieces of jewelry that got passed down through the generations and was probably, actually cursed. Saar opened his mouth. “It’s not cursed.” The woman said and smirked at him from across the store. Saar shut his mouth. Mending the piece was easy enough, it just took bending a couple of hooks back into place to fix the armature holding the massive ruby in place. 5 minutes later, he passed the thing back to her and wiped his hands off on his thigh. “Right, there, should be fixed now.” “Should be?” “It is. It’s fixed now.” He fought the urge to apologize. In a second she’d gripped his arm and leaned into his space, staring directly into her eyes. Saar startled back but her grip was vice-like. Her eyes darted between his like they were searching for something. A moment later, she grinned and released him, sliding the ring onto her finger. “It’s been a pleasure, blacksmith.” and she walked out of the shop, leaving 4 gold on the counter, glittering.
Sea life entombed him. Grasses took root in the soft sand where the anchor lay half-buried. It grew thick and healthy, a bright lime green against pale tan sands. Little crabs scuttled about, crawling through the chain links and over his thigh, waving their pinchers until he twitched and they darted to another rock. A fish broke away from its shoal and inched closer. Saar watched it. It hovered in the water, egg-shell mouth gasping in rhythm with its translucent fins. It swam closer till it brushed against his upper arm. He had to gently turn his head with the buffeting of the current to keep it in sight. The flesh on his upper arm was white and taught, shriveled in the water. The skin itself peeled and puckered in the water, split slightly and lined with sores. The remnants of his shirt stuck to it in shreds, bandaging a few. The fish hovered over one sore now, gills flicking and mouth gasping. It considered him for a moment, then nibbled on a white, puckered ridge of dead skin. It nibbled down his shoulder. Another joined it. Saar tried to twitch them away but they came back with more. Tiny pinpricks slowly eat away at his arm. Blood seeped out of him, slowly but gradually. It clouded the water purple and wafted out of sight. It could attract all kinds of things. Bigger things. Saar shook his arm harder and flailed his elbow, scattering the little reef fish thoroughly. They fled with his vision and a ghostly gasp from his lungs.
More things had gnawed on his shoulder while he was out. And on his thigh. And maybe his hands and feet but he couldn’t see those. Bone peeked through the mangled flesh, but it didn’t bleed anymore. He didn’t want to know why it didn’t, it just didn’t. Saar closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see.
Saar was abruptly awoken from his sleep by a sharp yank out of bed. He hit the ground with a dizzying force, but before he could orient himself properly, he was yanked up by the back of his shirt. He gagged and someone shoved a kitchen rag in his mouth while others pulled him up and away. Moonlight cascaded through the broken window and open door, illuminating the kicked-in door to his shop as they dragged him out onto the cobbled street. Forms slinked about, wrapped in darkness with shining mouths and thick hands bound in white. They reached the port quickly and tossed the bundle that was Saar over the largest one's shoulder, hustled up a gangplank, and tossed Saar onto a pile of cord and burlap. His hands were bound and his feet secured to the mast and the dark forms dissipated to their respective places. Black garments dripped from their bodies, skins shed now that the deed was done and they were once again cocooned in the safety of their rigging. The ship groaned and the water lapped at the hollow hull and the whole beast of a boat peeled away from its mooring and they were at sea. For the life of him, Saar didn’t know what the hell was happening. Saar wriggled to look more like a huddle instead of a heap as tears pricked at his eyes. He wasn’t rich, well-connected, or particularly skilled in his field. He was just a simple the blacksmith who fixed people's jewelry and occasionally some armor if the right person came through. The moon lay waxing in the sky, a crescent of pockmarked yellow. It melted behind the clouds and cast uncertain shadows as the night creaked on and the ship remembered how to move. A sea breeze picked up and ate through the light linen of his sleep shirt. Saar was grateful for the excuse to tremble. If he scooted up and strained he could see the flickering candlelight of windows and streets on the shore, but one of the crew came and kicked him low again so Saar stayed down. He waited with the crew working around him till pink stained the sky and the moon ducked under the wispy clouds and went back to sleep. A bell tolled against the blushed sky. Around him, the swarm stilled, hands stopping in their clockwork as if waiting to be wound again. The ship's attention turned to the door to the Captain’s quarters. Even the seagulls on the boom quieted, watching intently. The very air quivered in anticipation. The door opened to a mouth of blackness. From it emerged a rather unimposing man. His skin was the color of the moon, though without the yellow tinge underneath. Silver hair hung in a thin sheen around his face with the rest either clipped back or tucked into his dark jacket collar. A sword of a similar silver hung around his waist and he rested his long, delicate hands on its intricate pommel. The jacket swallowed the rest of him, clipped together with more silver buckles with polishing wax still clinging to the grooves. It was not a man Saar recognized, but it was certainly a man he would not forget. Behind the Silver Man, a woman shrouded in a maroon cloak stepped out. “Blacksmith, how wonderful to see you again.”
Around Saar, seaweed took root and rose. It wrapped its slimy fingers around him and settled in the soft nursery ground of his skin. It wrapped in thick ropes around the blackened, cracking anchor. Saar couldn’t see much of it, head hung low as it was. Just flashes around his feet. It had darkened gradually till it matched the rock in texture and hue. Maybe the sea floor was just discarded silver. Maybe the whole world was. He choked on his thought and blacked out again.
His mind wandered. Silver had been an odd choice. It wasn’t a particularly special metal. Sure, it polished really well and resisted tarnishing, but it was soft. A delicate material. He bent his wrists. His bones ground together but he also found the manacle ridge. It bit into his flesh unevenly and broke off in parts. Full corrosion, after only... He didn’t know. Something about that struck him as odd. He twitched an ankle against its binding and it, too broke. Metals took a long time to get fragile like that. Years. Decades even. Even cheap metals, like tin, or zinc, didn’t just fall apart after a week in the ocean. Saar looked out over the murky horizon again, studying it. Had the rocks always looked like that? Had they been rougher? Had his knees always been so deep in the sand? Had the water always been this warm? Had the seaweed always grown so thickly around him? Through him? With great effort, he slid his ankle to the side and more of the manacle chipped away. The corner of his mouth twitched and the darkness came again.
“Prepare him.” The woman snapped and two of them hoisted Saar, quaking, to his feet. They held him there when his knees buckled. Gagged as he was, there was little he could do other than shrink back into himself as the woman approached. Saar groaned and gurgled into the rag, faintly tasting dishwater and trying not to retch from nerves. She gently brushed over his cheek, crooning when he flinched away. “To think, It could have been so easy.” She whispered, her fingers dragging over the rigid of his face and down the soft hollow in his throat. Behind her, the Man in Silver laughed and his crew laughed with him though they looked much less confident in what the joke was. She gripped his jaw and his attention snapped back to her. “Do you even know what you are? What you contain?” Saar shook his head as much as he could with her nails digging into his jaw. Tears pricked at his eyes. He didn’t know anything! He didn’t contain anything! He was just a blacksmith! Her face hardened. “Hand.” His arm was wrenched from behind him and held out on display firmly. The Man in Silver gripped Saar’s wrist in one hand and splayed his fingers with the other. The woman pulled out a knife. No. No, no nonono— Saar bucked and shrieked, full sobbing now. Hardened by fighting the wind and the sea, his captors didn’t budge an inch. Quickly, She raised the knife and— Saar screamed and collapsed in on himself. She held his pinky finger aloft, blood dripping down her hand as she inspected it thoroughly. “That should be enough. For now...” her voice washed over him, ringing in his ears like the waves. Words spilled above him, but he had no awareness of. Just a pulsing wave of heat emanating from his hand. His outstretched, still held hand. Dimly, he realized someone was bandaging it, each careless scrape of the cloth sending another wave of heat twitching through his body. Someone gripped his hair and lifted his rag-doll head. The Man in Silver held him with their faces inches apart, Saar quivering and moaning in the dawn light and The Man impassive. His breath smelled of mint and cooked fish and his eyes gleamed like the white scales on the underbelly of a fish. “We give him to the sea.” Dimly, the woman shrugged in the background and her mouth moved before walking back to the cabin and shutting the door. The Man in Silver grinned like a Payara. The two men holding him yanked him back and dragged Saar to the railing, snapping him back to the present. They deposited him and stalked off to the cargo where a gleaming polished anchor lay on display. Fastened along the shank, just below the stalk and above the anchor arm were 2 sets of manacles connected by a twinkling chain. No. No, they couldn’t— They couldn’t mean too— Saar scooted back, sobbing and pleading into his gag. His bare feet slipped on the slick deck and he lost his balance, falling back onto his shoulders and flopping like a fish escaped from a net. The Man in Silver grinned, drew his sword, and drew a line from Saars naval to the soft underside of his chin, stilling him. Tears leaked down his face as they manhandled him into position. Meaty hands held every part of him; gripping his hair, his arms, his body. They dragged him back and folded him into position, spine against the shank. His arms they folded and secured over the stock and locked his wrists behind him. His hand pulsed terribly, white-hot with every brush. They secured his feet similarly, binding his feet over the anchor arm and around the shank. Only once they stepped back into the masts shadow the Man in Silver sheath his sword. Saar collapsed in on himself, gasping through a half-clogged nose. He shook and his head felt empty of all but the ebbing terror. The Man sucked in a breath through his teeth, placed a boot on Saar’s thigh, and bent into his face. He gripped Saar’s fleshy cheeks and forced eye contact. “I can see it in your eyes,” He hissed. “You’re an abomination” Saar trembled and shook his head as much as he could. That didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t—he wasn’t anything! The Man sneered and shoved himself away, stalking back to the center of the deck. Saar shouted and strained against his bonds. He yanked at his arms, shrieking around the rag. He wasn’t an abomination, he was just a blacksmith! They had the wrong person! Without looking, the Man signaled again and Saar and the anchor were hoisted onto the railing. Saar shouted louder and the Man turned slowly, disdainfully. His lip twitched like he was inspecting the bilge after a long trip, rank and rotting at the bottom of the hull. They stared at each other and there was a moment of silence as the Man in Silver studied a trembling, heavy-breathing Saar. The crew quieted around them. In the rigging, men watched, a parliament of dumb judgment coiling ropes around their arms and frowning their disapproval to the birds. “Enjoy Hell,” The Man said and planted his boot right on Saar’s sternum and Saar went tumbling into the ocean.
Saar blinked the bleary underwater world into focus. Wispy clumps of hair hung in a dark curtain. It shrouded much of his view, but he wasn’t really looking. A little orange fish hovered over his forearm, nibbling away at the flaking flesh. It swayed and he felt light, almost weightless as the current held him up. His fingers twitched as the fish nibbled down to his palm. Didn’t they tie his hands behind him? His gaze sunk low and found the crumbled remnants of the manacles on the seabed below him. He’d chipped them off. The anchor lay next to it, half buried in sand, a forest of kelp surrounding it. The kelp held him now, encaging his arms and suctioning the weeping sores on his stomach. He kicked, a twitch of his ropey thigh muscle around the frail, exposed femur. Saar watched it shift and roll under his translucent skin. The darkness came and receded and he kicked again, harder. A tendril peeled off and he floated higher. Freeing his shoulder came next. Inch by inch, twinge by twinge he fought through the darkness, through the shivering pain that wracked his frame. Another tether unwound. Then another. He twitched himself free and bent his face back towards the sky, eyes closed. The seaweed tore and Saar buoyed to the surface. Pressure unfurled, a blooming flower pushing him higher and higher until he bobbed through the surface and the sun, delighted, held him.
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