The Hunter's Mark - 10/09/24 - Safire

Co-written with Jaezred Vandree

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After returning to Port Ffirst, and spending some time in The Sunken Anchor with Captain Ishmael and the crew of The Waveskimmer, Safire bids her farewells and journeys to Daring Heights.

However, before she sets out on the road she spies the familiar drow lord.

In spite of the storm yesterday and the tidal wave the day before, there is a small gathering of revellers on the beach, paddleboarding in the shallows under a blanket of grey clouds. Posh lads and ladies, judging from their accents and haughty laughter. And standing out from among them is her drow friend, wearing only a pair of red shorts and sitting on a painted wooden board.

Safire smirks at the sight and shakes her head. In her full pirate outfit of a long blue coat, boots, and metal corset, she looks fully out of place amongst the tourists as she makes her way over to Jaezred. “So, I thought of the devil and he appeared. Lucky me! Enjoying the sun?”

“Enjoying the lack of sun,” he calls back, pointing a finger at the cheerless sky above. He paddles towards the beach and abandons the board and oar on the shore as he jogs up to Safire, grains of sand in his damp hair and a sheen of saltwater over his well-built body. “We noticed the water was unusually clean this morn and seized upon the chance. How are you doing, Miss Safire?”

Safire smiles and walks down the beach to greet him halfway. “I’m good! I’m…” There’s a pause as her gaze drifts over his shoulder and she stares out to sea. “I’m fine. I’m…” Another pause and the smile completely drops from her face and her body slumps where she's standing. “Honestly? I’m completely overwhelmed. And I might need your help.”

Jaezred’s own smile fades slightly, looking concerned. “I needed an excuse to get away from those sycophants anyway,” he says, gesturing at the paddleboarders and begins walking further along the beach. Lurid whistling follows them as they go. “Ignore them. What’s troubling you?”

“Well… You know about my old ship right? And how my situation is not unique? So I’ve been trying to find out about the brands the others have and decided if there are no answers on shore, we should probably check out the sea itself.” The pace of her speech quickens as if she’s trying to get the information out quickly without boring him. “So we went to a triton village. Their diviner kept saying ‘godspawn’ which is hugely concerning, sent us to look at a huge dwarven shipwreck, which I have to admit was pretty badass. But it was right beside this…shrine…of…something. We fried a bunch of sharks and fish. And then this shrine showed it was capable of moving fleets across oceans, even the planes. And there are more shrines. And we found a similar symbol on the walls to the brand.”

She takes a deep breath. “You following?”

Jaezred nods. “What does this brand look like?”

“It’s a crab with a skull between its pincers. The others have it on their skin, but I don’t. However, it was the flag of the ship that took out The Seafoam Queen. We think there’s something that can hear through it…or something. And at this shrine there was a similar symbol, a skull with crab pincers and legs coming out of it.”

Safire looks around to make sure they have walked away from the main mass of people, before crouching in the sand and drawing two pictures with her index finger. She seems rather protective, shielding them from strangers’ view.




Jaezred squats down and furrows his brow at the drawings. “And you've never heard of any god associated with these symbols?”

“Never. And neither did anyone else that was there. But if what I’m looking for is a ‘godspawn’ then maybe there’s a connection there. The shrine mentioned it would react to an artefact of a sea god. Like this, the Heart of the Storm.” From a belt loop, Safire produces a crystal that pulses with storm energy. “That’s what caused the tidal wave a few days ago.”


His eyes widen at the sight of the crystal and his fingers hover over it, though careful not to touch. “And this you got from Umberlee and Talos…?”

Safire nods. “Yes. A temple of theirs in Joran. The priests there were also aware of the brand and the fog, said this kept the fog at bay though creatures from the sea were trying to get it. Whilst we were there we were also attacked by these monsters. One of them…” Safire stops and catches her breath, battling to keep her emotions in check. “…One of them was my old crew mate. He walked on the shore, looking like he always did, but when I called out to him, he transformed into…something.”

She feels Jaezred's hands on her shoulders, steadying her as they both rise back to their feet. “Into what, Safire?”

“I think the priests described them as a ‘deep scion’. They also said that the transformation was voluntary. A deal made to save themselves from drowning or dying in some other nasty way at sea.”

“So your crewmates may not be dead as you thought, but rather transformed into creatures of the deep?”

“It’s possible.” Safire responds by shrugging. “For a while I held out hope that maybe someone else might show up with a brand, you know, because I don’t have one. Maybe the attackers didn’t notice me overboard and thought they were leaving someone else as the last survivor? I’ve given up on that. But if they did take the deal, they’ll just attack me like Golden Eyes did so maybe I’d prefer them dead. Gods, that’s an awful thought.”

The silence from Jaezred lets that thought hang in the air for a moment, between the rushing of waves and the spray of salt.

He turns his head to stare down the shore, eyeing something far in the distance that Safire cannot see. “I don’t know if you've heard,” he says, “but three hours’ walk along the coast this way, there is— was a small village. The whole place was drowned yesterday during the storm. A few adventurers answered a call for help and what they found was…strange monsters from the deep. A giant with a lobster’s head, squid-like creatures the size of men, hulking crab warriors, and a tentacled sea witch who’d summoned them from the water. The bodies are probably still there, if they’d not been reclaimed by the sea.”

Safire takes this in and shakes her head silently. “No, no, I hadn’t heard.”

She walks a few paces away before turning around in rage and stomps towards her sand drawings. As she kicks them she screams out, “FUUUCK!” not caring now who turns to look. It is almost drowned out by the roar of the sea.

Jaezred says nothing as he stuffs his hands in his pockets. He stands by her side, looking out towards the roiling horizon.

“Before I saw it with my own eyes, I’d always thought the sea was a single, living entity," he says, quiet and solemn. “A leviathan that covered the whole world, conjured storms whenever it wanted, and swallowed whoever or whatever it wished. You surface dwellers certainly made it sound like that in your writings. But I understand now — my impressions, though made in ignorance, were not quite wrong.”

He pauses as a lukewarm tide flows and ebbs over their feet, washing away the last of the drawings Safire had made in the sand. “I don’t know how to make sense of all this, Safire, but I know somewhere you could start to find answers.”

As the water laps around Safire’s boots, she calms a little. She looks up to Jaezred’s face with a brief glimmer of hope in her eyes. “You do?” She laughs a little to herself. “Of course you do, Mr. Know-It-All Drow. I want to find out what those symbols are. And where the other shrines could be. If some ‘godspawn’ has been released using them, then we need to know.”

He smiles. “There’s a discreet little place on Silk Street called Gossamer Threads. You can find all sorts of people there and they'll talk — if you ply them with enough tea and sweets. If that crab symbol is connected to a god, then odds are, someone’s going to recognise it.”

Safire smiles gratefully. “Thank you Jaezred, truly.” She relaxes a little and turns to face back out to sea. “For a moment, I thought I was going to have to ask you to introduce me to the Daring Academy. But you can probably tell I’m not exactly the academic type.”

“Well, making you speak to those nerds would be cruel indeed,” he says with a chuckle, before his face turns serious again. “Listen, I do not know much about the sea but I do know a little bit about cruel gods. If what you said about the shrine is true, transporting entire fleets through space… That would require a great amount of power. Power that could be channelled either through artefacts like your Heart of the Storm, or through prayer and sacrifice. And turning people into deep sea creatures — that is most certainly an act of worship.”

Safire nods. “Yeah, that’s my worry. What if our ships and crews were the sacrifice? But there’s some else we found. That if all the shrines are activated with god artefacts, then it would lead to…what was it…an isle? So maybe something was released on purpose. And now there’s a creature out there randomly targeting ships. Or building a following. Or perhaps a cult working with it. I suppose that would work with what you just said.”

“Hmm, a secret hidden isle? Cultist pirates and a ship that sails with the fog? A beautiful heroine at the centre of it all? Why, that sounds like quite the swashbuckling adventure.” Jaezred takes her hand and playfully twirls her about. He then steps around her, drawing her gaze away from the hungering sea and towards the Port Ffirst skyline behind him. “Come, let’s go make lunch.”

Safire smiles at Jaezred but can’t help looking back over her shoulder and fixing her eyes on the horizon for a few moments. “Fine, lunch!” she says. turning back to him. “But just lunch. I have work to do.”