Crash of Thunder - Kara Prowl

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TheFox
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Crash of Thunder - Kara Prowl

Post by TheFox » Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:14 am

What I remember, when I remember, is the crash of thunder.

It rips apart the sky, even as the sea turns dark and all light is blotted from the horizon. Storm clouds gather, turning a blue sky to an orange one and then, in gradients, to black. Within that black is the white flash of lightning. In my dreams, I always see those pale fingers reaching into the unquiet sea, and I remember the fearful, fearsome sound again.

How many times must I relive this? How many times will I stand upon that swaying deck, holding on to the slick salt-crusted rigging, staring out at Umberlee's cruelty?

Even now, even in calm water on a bright and sunny day, I'm not too fond of the ocean. I could barely come on deck when I sailed here. It's not seemly for a Hospitaller to show fear, but for those moments, I am not Kara Prowl, squire of Sir Barristan; I am Kara the waterlogged, desperately trying to live with all the ocean trying to crush me.

Tamara is known as Her Mercy. I didn't know her name at the time or how closely she watches us smaller, frailer mortals, but I didn't have to. My dreams don't remember the feeling of being sucked beneath the green-dark water, grabbed on to by what I thought was some hellish terror of the deep. They don't remember the spray from a breeching so sudden and absolute that it couldn't have felt less real like a dolphin had grown wings and snapped them out like huge sails or the twist of a stomach not meant for heights. I remember all that awake.

I remember Alaerurrgos.

It all seems so impossible to me, even a decade later, that such a heaping amount of luck should accompany the death of everyone I ever loved.

Sometimes people ask me what it's like to meet a dragon. I don't think anyone would believe me if I said that I spent most of our conversations crying. I can tell you that bronze dragons eat sharks raw, that they breathe lightning, and that they lair in deep caves where pockets of air allow them to sleep comfortably. I can say that it all smells like salt and old seaweed or like a harbor in a heatwave.

I can tell you, also, with perfect certainty, that they delve the sea for sunken ships and take what they find to hoard away. Not just gold and gems but anything that suits their fancy. Old waterlogged paintings. Ruined bolts of silk. Books, their glue bindings so damp they stick together unopened.

And me. She said I looked like a waterlogged cat, which is how I came to be a Prowl. Entirely whimsical and completely made up, she just named me like it was the most casual thing in the world.

But she couldn't find my parents or my brother, or if she did, she spared me the sight of their corpses, so I don't remember much about my time with her. It was only after she had become a faux-noble and bought my place in the Silver Lance that I looked back and wondered about her. About why she rescued me or why she chose to spend her money on an orphan.

It was a shock, I guess. My world hadn't been sane back then. And I didn't see her again for years, so all I really remember about that time is my fear and my losses. I often wonder if she knew what I would be. I don't suppose she could have. She was doing what she felt like doing, giving mercy to a random stranger, having just happened to be there at the time.

None of my dreams about that time are good, however, so even awake, I hardly remember just what she said to me or how she said it. What things did she try to console me, or if she just chose to leave me alone for a while. I don't even remember eating or sleeping. I've got no idea why I didn't freeze to death, shivering and half-naked in some underwater cave. It slips away from me like I'm trying to catch smoke with my fingers.

I just didn't.

It's just the sea, the sky, and the thunder I keep coming back to, sweeping every memory before I was twelve into a vortex to drown alongside the people I made them with.

And then afterward, such impossible things happened that it didn't seem to matter. I went to sleep one night the daughter of some fisher, a face vaguely remembered, then woke up a different girl in a different place entirely. A god had called me. I had been put there, somehow. I don't know even now whether it was fate, circumstances, luck, a cruel joke, or the coaxing talon of a draconic god.

The sky flashed that day. The ship sank, everyone died, and suddenly there were dragons and knights, and magic like a gnome had written a children's book high on spotted mushrooms.

What else could I do but go along with it?
Currently Playing: Aisha al Jaziri yr Mirai

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