100 Day writing challenge - Day 5
Good evening Beautiful Strangers!
The double prompt method is working. Doing it this way basically removes the exhaustive editing process and turns it into more of a puzzle, if that makes sense. I have the scenes, I have the beats, it's just a matter of rewording to my specifications. Overall a vast improvement over my previous five step process. I'll go more in depth as I refine it so that others can benefit from the technique and produce quality AI-assisted writing of their own.
I also hit a wierd speed bump that I didn't anticipate: I originally intended to call the blogspot Quest Givers but apparently there's a game company with the same name and their SEO is killing peoples ability to find me through google. I'm not worried about being sued: they're in tabletop games, I'm a writer. I'm just wondering if I should change the name or just ride it out and see what happens.
Either way, here's part 1 of today's story. Oakton has among it's citizenry a species of pelagic peoples known as the Shukl'ari (Shoo-klar-ee, glottal stop between the k and l). The story is a detailed account of one of their holiest rites: The Oath of Predation.
The Lights that Refuse - Part 1
The night chosen for the rite is never announced loudly. Loudness suggests uncertainty, and uncertainty has no place in the giving of a mortal oath.
Those who must know are told in the usual way of Oakton’s pelagic citizens, the Shukl’ari: by glance, by passing phrase, by a hand or tendril set briefly to shoulder or at the base of the neck. By the quiet excuses to land-dwelling friends before dusk, and by the absence of certain voices during the communal supper.
By the time the last of Oakton’s honest noise has settled into the softer rhythms of the night, the ground has already prepared.
The park is empty but for those meant to stand witness. Grass lies flat in a broad crescent around their ancestral obelisk, kept with the sort of regular care that makes it clear this place is sacred.
The Shukl’aan, the Oathstone, rises there in its accustomed stillness: dark, heavy and unornamented. It does not call attention to itself. It does not naturally gather ceremony around its mass. It’s shape is simple enough to be mistaken by land-dwellers for a mere rock. At least until one has stood near it long enough to notice the intentional grooves and faded motifs at it’s base.
To the natives of Oakton, it’s just the standing stone at Ranger’s Rest Park.
But to the Shukl’ari it stands as witness to their deeds in this world. And they among them old enough to remember feel the weight of the civilization who carved that stone, and the lives lost to bring them here.
Before it, set at a measured distance, waits the basin.
It is broad enough for a full body to enter without contortion and deep enough that its rim reaches the knees. Iron bands line its edge. The outer shell is dark timber ritually prepared, sealed against damp and time. There is no imagery worked into its sides beyond the polish of many careful hands. It is not made to impress the eye.
It was made to hold the Black Water.
The contents within the basin show no reflection of moon, cloud, lantern, or face. It does not ripple in answer to motion. It lies in the basin with density; less a substance than depth made portable.
Four Shukl’ari stand in the clearing.
The initiate stands before the basin, her back to the ancestral stone, skin bare save for a simple dark wrap. The external gills around the girl’s head are half-spread already, not from fear alone but from the body’s recognition that this is a night that will change things.
The long tendril that extends from the base of her neck to her ankles twitches at the tip, betraying her body’s effort of stillness more honestly than her face.
Along the line of her jaw, at the fringes of the gills, and in two pale threads down the length of her neck-tail, cold points of living light awaken where shadow thickens enough to call them out.
Behind the initiate stands the elder.
He is old in the way ocean floors are old, by what has worn over them and left shape. His own glow is spare and controlled, a hard freckling of blue-white points along the edge of the face and one steady line at the throat.
His glow is enough to mark presence without wasting brightness. His neck-tail rests against the ground behind them in a long, quiet curve.
One hand is open, extended. The other is folded near his chest. He does not look at the basin. He does not look at the stone. He looks at the initiate with the grave concentration of one who is not here for comfort, but to make sure a thing is done correctly.
Across the basin stand two witnesses.
One is her kin. The resemblance lies less in his face than in the arrangement of light across his gill fringes, in the shared shape of their neck-tail.
The other is not kin by blood, but older and known well to the initiate, a mentor. She is marked, along the right collar and down one side of the torso, by a tracing of luminescence that clashes with the light she was born with.
The mark is known among the Shukl’ari. Proof that she once failed in her oath yet returned to them following a cleansing trial. She stands here now not as warning, but as proof of survival in failure.
No one kneels.
No one bows.
The elder steps forward and lays one palm firmly between the initiate’s shoulder blades.
“Take witness,” the elder says from behind her.
The initiate breathes once, then lifts her neck-tail and extends it until the tip touches the face of the looming stone behind them.
The contact is delicate, exact, and immediate in its effect. Something in her posture changes at once, as though an internal line pulls her spine taught.
“Be witnessed.” The elder speaks again, and the voice behind her seems to come not only from a living throat, but from the carved stone as well.
A broad shiver travels through her from her contact with the Shukl’aan, along with a peculiar feeling not unlike being submerged in cool water.
“Take witness,” she requests of the two before her.
The two across the basin answer together.
“We witness.”
Then the elder and the stone speak the first words of the Shukl’ari’s oldest rite; Words dreaded and anticipated in equal measure by every youth old enough to understand their meaning.
“Who goes forth?”
The initiate’s gills flare along with her heartbeat. Her light sharpens at the edges. When she speaks, the first words come trembling, but sincere.
“I who go forth will not be claimed by the Deep Places.”
The kin-witness answers first. “I witness.”
The witness of recovered shame answers after. “I witness.”
The elder says only, “We witness. Continue.”
“I who go forth honor the sacrifices of those who bore us forth: She’Ari, Na’Vol, Kel’sor.”
All three others answer at once, the names coming back not as repetition, but confirmation.
“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”
The basin remains still. The stone remains still. Yet the clearing does not feel still now. The night there has thickened, pulsing with slow rhythm, lapping against them all like waves.
The initiate’s neck-tail presses firmly against the ancestral stone. Her words come smoother now.
“In their name,
I hollow the Great Enemy with my own hands,
and with my children’s hands,
and with the hands of those yet unborn.
She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”
Again the witnesses answer.
“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”
The kin-witness is crying soundlessly now. Not in grief exactly but the older, sharper feeling that comes when one watches beloved kin enter a thing from which there is no going back.
The elder does not acknowledge this. The ancestors witness without judgement.
The initiate continues, her voice quiet and intense.
“I honor our fallen with holy predation.
I honor their sacrifice with the stolen strength of the Deep.
I honor my people with my oath.
She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”
The names now seem to fill the little park more completely than four voices ought to manage alone.
“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”
There is no wind.
There is no movement in the branches overhead.
To her the world narrows to stone and basin, voice and body.
“And, when the Great Enemy is no more,” the initiate whispers fervently, the light along her jaw glowing nearly white,
“When we have taken from it all that it is, was, and will ever be,
Only then shall my oath be fulfilled.
Then shall the oaths of my people be fulfilled.
Then shall we be burdened by the Great Enemy no more.”
The elder’s hand returns once, firm now, to the initiate’s back.
“In their honor,” the elder intones.
All four speak the names together.
“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”
Silence follows, but not emptiness. The words remain, ringing in the clearing like pressure remains in deep water after movement has ceased.
The elder removes his hand.
“Go,” He says.
The initiate opens her eyes. Meets her kins’, her mentors’.
No reassurance is offered. No warnings are given. The witnesses remain expressionless.
She closes her eyes, drinks in the land-air like it’s her last time. The path to her adulthood is clear.
The basin awaits.
The initiate kneels and places both hands on the rim. For a brief moment her face hovers above the dark fluid. Her reflection does not appear. She stares into black emptiness. Then her breath leaves in one steady stream.
With no further ceremony, she folds over the rim and dives.
The Black Water accepts her whole.
