#15. SKULLER III
On the water at the fringes of the town was a funeral procession. The crew stood silently on their skiff, Skuller and Tasha at the fore. She shook with grief, her body trembling like a dropped tin which rang out its dismay. Yet she stood silently, her only signs of feeling that taut vibration running through her flesh. There was not even sadness on her face, but anger. A deep well of it surged within, a cauldron of rancorous vengeance threatening to boil over.
It was Millek that was being put out to sea. Though there was no blood relation, it was Millek who had helped Tasha survive in this roughshod world of skulduggery and theft. It had been Millek who had connected Tasha and Skuller and given her a family. Millek, the storeman, always kept an eye out for those like her.
And it was Millek who had been stabbed twenty times for the food in his pantries.
It was a darkness all of them had to accept. With no Leyline, Djirama was on its own. Food, fuel, specialty goods, weapons, water purifiers. Everything that kept Djirama alive had now been cut off.
Skuller couldn’t help but watch the procession with a macabre amusement. Hundred were gathered on the water’s edge to see Millek off, each one someone that he had helped shape into who they were now. But part of Skuller couldn’t help that this was going to be all their fates. One by one, people would drop, sent out to sea, until the last person in town perished, and they would be the only one who would not find rest in the water.
Skuller gave himself a dark, humorless laugh. He thought, “If it were me, I’d sail out to sea before that time came.”
Now, Skuller found himself looking at all those gathered today. One question filled his mind, and it was so large it eeked its way out into the world through his lips. “Which one of you bastards did this?”
Tasha looked up to him, her shaking abated for the moment. The hatred in her eyes told him that she was wondering the same thing.
A slow drum beat began near the shaedrower that had been built for Millek. It had no urgency, no sense of purpose or destination. Then, the chanting began. It was Millek’s daughter, his only surviving family. Skuller thought that she was lucky to have been away that night otherwise she would have joined her father in the shaeds.
The song that was sung was one of ancient rites. Its words had lost all meaning, and in so had gained a whole new meaning to this land. A Call to the Shaed, to the place of darkness from which all arise. It was a lament to those lost, a sign to the universe that the grief and pain was real and as inextricable from reality as sunlight. The ocean, the ultimate portal to the Shaed, would take those in Djirama to their loved ones.
Skuller couldn’t help the tears that came to him. The song was one of grief alone to him, it contained none of the release that so many others gained from it. It reminded him of things lost he would rather not think about again. Some pains, even at his age, had not been dulled with time.
Silence overtook them all as Mellik’s boat was pushed off into the water. Though the current wasn’t very strong here, it would be enough to take him out to the ocean where the violent storms would deliver him to his wife.
As he and his crew returned to the Grotto, silence still lingered. Tasha’s pain was evident to them all, and even though she was confrontational on the best of days, she may have well have been covered in broken glass and razors for how good comforting did for her then.
So silence, it seemed, was the safest option between them all at this point.
But words were bubbling within Skuller. He was angry, sullen, but mostly he was feeling… betrayal? Ill defined, this feeling did not direct itself at anyone in particular, nor at any specific event. It was a general betrayal towards the universe as a whole, as if his heart was screaming, “How could you do this to me?”
He sighed. Millek had been only two years younger than Skuller.
Their skiff pulled up to the dock and they were home, whatever that meant in times like this. As they walked down the roughshod wood, Skuller felt sick at the way this place existed now. They had consolidated all of their resources in the barracks, knowing that soon scavengers would try and sneak in, take what they could, and leave before being noticed.
This was a temporary measure, for when things became more desperate, and starvation lingered on the horizon, it would be the time for swordplay and gunfighting. That, at least, was something they were good at.
Regardless, the reality of the coming days did not give Skuller hope.
He had never foreseen what would occur, how could he? Yet still he was shaken by the intensity which the world was changing. Djirama was a place of the fringes. Its people were bats hanging in the dark rafters of the cosmos, unseen and unheard from unless you poked around in their domain.
Skuller had been born here, raised here, had never even consider leaving. Now, trapped, a part of him wished he had cut his losses and tried to find a new life somewhere else. His thoughts began to wander as they entered the main Keep.
He imagined a life for himself on Rackaman, tending to nobles and Magi and all other manner of fancy folk. He considered what a ranch-hands life on Botansa would be like, setting posts and herding cattle and tending sheep. He wondered about a great many places he had heard of and how different they were from Djirama. He imagined a thousand different Skullers walking the streets of these many realms, each having a different life, a different mind, a different soul.
Perhaps one of them, hopefully, would be happy. The Skuller in Djirama was most certainly not.
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redmysterium
A DARKER ENERGY 