Dark Light Tales: Ocean of Memories by Jan Erik Waider

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OC-Tober Day 7 - Power

(from @/oc-growth-and-development’s OC-tober list)

I was having a hard time deciding what to do for day 6, so I decided just to skip it, haha. Instead, I bring you a tale of early Seven Cities character interaction, wherein Alex shows off her skills, and wherein the twins are decidedly less friendly than they will eventually be. This is another one I wasn’t as sure about, writing-wise, but I had fun with it at least!

~1000 words

—-

“In the interest of good faith,” said Alex, setting a trio of mugs down in front of her, “and in our continuing partnership, I want you two to know what I’m capable of.”

Across the table, the twins - Finn and Davin, though she was still working out which was which - stared back at her, duel sets of eyebrows raised in half-hearted interest. They exchanged a look sidelong, and then the one she thought might have been Finn sank back into his seat and folded his arms across his chest.

“Do you, now?“ he said, very dryly. "And what could that possibly fucking mean?”

The way he said it told Alex that he wasn’t expecting to be impressed. She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. 

"What it means,” she said evenly, “is that we have something of a vested interest in seeing each other through this mad endeavor, which means that you both ought to know what you can rely on. That, aside from my skills at sea and my obvious charms –” They both scoffed at that. “– I also happen to be blessed with a particular penchant for language. Which is to say, I understand them. Any of them. All of them.”

"Bullshit.”

This came from the other twin, still upright in his seat, watching her with a curling scowl that said he had made a long habit of not trusting people at their word. Alex crooked an eyebrow.

“I can demonstrate, if you’d like.“

"And how would you do that?” the second twin, who must have been Davin, sneered. “Will you sit there and teach us the French for, ‘a great blooming asshole’ so we know how you prefer to be addressed? You can’t know every language, you doaty bastard. And an Englishman, like you? You might barely account for one.“

OC-Tober Day 5 - Throne

(from @oc-growth-and-development’s OC-tober list)

I got. Very behind LMAO. Which I sort of expected but I’m still a little upset about it. In any case, I’m going to keep on trucking on these because it’s worth it just to be able to call them done. That’s very much the energy of today’s piece too, I’m afraid. It’s not exactly what I wanted, but hey, we’re finished with it, right? That’s something. 

Featuring @urdnotgrunt’s Iggy, who is the love of my life.

~1200 words

—–

Iggy wasn’t afraid of unknowns.

She wasn’t afraid of untouched borders on the edges of maps, or strange animals calling in the night, or people who spoke languages that she didn’t know. She made friends with strangers, with wild beasts, the odd fish that she could coax over with crusts of bread. She didn’t fear weather, or water, or even the dwindling coins in her pocket.

She was, however, maybe just a little bit afraid of the captain.

Adelina had laughed when she told her. “What’s to be afraid of?” she had asked, grinning. “He is the only one with manners." 

And she was right, of course. Adelina was usually right. But even with his manners, even with his civility, even with the fact that he hadn’t actually spoken more than a few words to her since they put Santo Domingo to their backs – even with all of that, Iggy had seen his thunderous, churning, storm-black moods one too many times to be put entirely at ease. He had to keep them, she knew. He was barking up at most of the men that he was supposed to be commanding, men who snickered quietly about his age and his stature and a number of other faults they found in him when he wasn’t within earshot. But the look still put Iggy in the mind of a hurricane, and she had spent too long on an island not to run for cover.

Most of the time, anyway.

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OC-tober Day 4 - Medicine

(from @oc-growth-and-development’s OC-tober list)

Another short one! A little late and a little less solid than I had hoped for, but this is why we practice! Today’s exercise also includes @vargonautic‘s lovely Cornelius Skelton, who they have donated to the cause of keeping my idiot sailing kids alive as the resident ship’s surgeon. I love him a whole, whole lot.

~600 words

—-

“Where did you study medicine, Master Skelton?”

Cornelius glanced up from the mug he was crumbling a handful of chamomile and cramp bark into and turned instead towards the captain sitting at the table across from him. Sitting was maybe too generous a word. For all the conversational poise she forced into her voice, Alex looked a mess; red-eyed from lack of sleep, hunched forward onto her elbows, pale as fresh vellum and growing paler. Even the ruddy blush of half a decade’s worth of wind and sunburn couldn’t quite find the courage to show itself through the shower of suddenly-dark freckles across her face. But then, that was blood loss for you. Cornelius turned back to his work.

“London,” he admitted after a moment. “Although I caution you against assuming that this is medicine so much as it is a nursemaid’s trick.” He shook his hands free of the last little clinging bits of herbal detritus and grabbed the much-abused kettle that he had swiped from under their cook’s nose, pouring a measure of boiling water into the mug. The steam that rose stung his nose with an unpleasant, earthy bitterness that he had come to associate with the same sickly pallor afflicting his captain. He grimaced as he slid it across the table towards her. She accepted it with a gracious bow of her head, but her grimace matched.

“Cheers to nursemaid’s tricks, then,” she said grimly, lifting the mug in a weary approximation of a toast. “And cheers to London, if that’s where you learned them. Although that’s a rather impressive scholarship to have for a man stuck in a worm-infested hunk of wood in the middle of the ocean.”

Ah. Another go at this, then. Cornelius hummed as he gathered the bark back into its tidy bundle.

“I assure you, captain, that even this amount of time spent together hasn’t quite granted you access to the intimate details of my history.”

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OC-tober Day 3 - Duel

(from @oc-growth-and-development’s OC-tober list)

Okay, after THIS one the rest will be shorter. In my defense, though, I had some of this already written, and decided to repurpose it. This is another one of the those lovely peeks into Alex’s history, when she was just a little angry wisp of a Navy sailor, and trying to prove herself. What can I say? I like her a little feral. 

(Housekeeping note: Alex uses she/her and he/him pronouns. Given that this is from Tahir’s POV, and he uses the latter exclusively with her blessing, I’ve elected to follow his lead.)

~1000 words

—–

Tahir tried to keep the little brats in his charge from hurting each other, but it happened now and again. Today, it was happening to Alex. 

Sparring between the younger sailors had become a weekly affair now that they could be trusted on deck unsupervised, and most of them took to it with the sort of rakish enthusiasm expected of boys whose very lives depended on how much bragging they could get away with. Bryce, prone to being both a braggart and a functional layabout at the best of times, had sighted Alex as the easiest way to win his bouts without losing any teeth. He had a full head on him after all, and an extra year of hard sailing behind his arm; a wooden sword in Bryce’s hand only needed half of his strength behind it to leave some truly awful bruises. 

Tahir turned just as he was laying a new one into Alex’s side.

“I think we’re done, Sheffield,” the boy said, turning his wooden practice blade lazily in one hand as Alex wheezed up to his knees. “I don’t imagine you’re going to be getting any better today.”

Tahir couldn’t see the look that Alex fielded his opponent, but he saw the way the boy stepped back, and was moving almost before he had his thoughts straight.

“Sheffield,” he called when he was within earshot. Alex’s head whipped around, and through the tinge of surprise coloring his expression, Tahir saw a shadow of the look that had sent Bryce scurrying. He suddenly didn’t blame the kid. 

At his gesture, though, Alex peeled himself painfully off the deck and hobbled over. His usually crisp bow favored one side. 

“Sir,” he said, in a tone that sounded very much like he wanted nothing more than to be deeply, offensively insubordinate. Tahir swallowed a grin and gestured back to where Bryce was standing.

“What’s happening there, lad?”

Alex’s jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. “What is happening,” he said tightly, “is that I’m getting my ass kicked. Obviously.”

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OC-tober Day 2: Glass

(from @oc-growth-and-development’s OC-tober list)

A much shorter response for today’s prompt! I’m expecting most of the rest of them to come in at about this length too. That said, I’m pretty happy with how it came out!

Today’s prompt is about Finn, crime and knives. Which is to say, it’s about Finn.

~250 words 

—-

The sight of glass always made Finn’s hands a little twitchy.

You couldn’t call him ‘thief,’ really. Tradesman, sure. Con artist, maybe. A right mad genius, most assuredly. But for all his charm with locks, Finn wasn’t much suited to skulking around dark corners and risking his neck on badly placed furniture. He was just too good-looking for that. 

Still, it was hard to ignore the windows that loomed above him, with their edgings of thin decor glass, and not pity the wealthy fools inside that didn’t know how easily they came free of their settings. Finn himself had a knife sharp and slender enough for the task, tucked neatly away in his belt. Thirty seconds, a lucky break in the crowd, and he could very easily stumble across a bedroom, or an office with some tidy sum squirreled away, or -

The pointy stub of an elbow suddenly jabbed his ribcage, shocking him out of his mental ransacking of the place. When he turned, Davin was glaring at him.

“Stop,” he said, without context.

“I wasn’t,” Finn snapped, also without context, because his brother was stupid, but he was not quite falling-for-Finn’s-innocent-act stupid. “I was just looking.”

“You’re always doing a bit of 'just looking’ before you do something daft,” Davin sneered. He jerked his chin up to the window overhead and said, “That’s a money-changer. Piss him off, and Alex will skin you for a pennant.”

“Alex would have to be tall enough to reach me, first,” Finn grumbled, but begrudgingly followed his brother’s gesture out towards the main boulevard, keeping a mental mark on the building behind him.

He could always come back later.

OC-Tober Day 1 - Journey

Interrupting my crying over fictional lesbians to bring you my first piece of OC-Tober! It’s not a hard and fast rule, but my intention is to do the entire month, and to do it all for the characters of my silly sailing story. Most of them will be much, much shorter, but I decided to let myself go a little harder on day one, as this piece takes place during the events of the story, and I figure I can probably loan pieces of it to the final work later. 

Anyway, please enjoy Alex and Tahir coping with the notion that they might have very well orchestrated their own demise! 

~ 1300 words

—–

The night before the journey that would almost certainly kill them, Tahir courted Alex’s good favor with an offering of lukewarm stew, and the least grainy pour of small beer that he had been able to charm out of a barmaid’s hands.

They tucked away the meager meal in silence, watching as their hirelings fortified themselves against the long sea journey ahead. Lively conversation had turned quickly to calls for real ale, which in turn had become raucous songs, shouted stories, the beginnings of several card games on several tables around them. Alex had already started a mental tally on which of her crew would actually be taking their advances in the morning. It did wonders to keep her from thinking too hard about how ridiculous it sounded to call them “her crew.”

“Terrible, isn’t it?”

Blinking, Alex turned her attention back to her own table, where Tahir was frowning down at the contents of his supper like it had offered him personal offense. A spoon stood upright in the center of his bowl, propped up by the thick, lumpy grey-brown slurry that passed for a hearty meal in this particular house. As Alex watched, it began to sag ever so slightly to one side, with an awful sucking noise like boots churning through heavy mud. She stifled a laugh.

“At least it moves.”

“Oh, now you choose to be charitable.” Scowling, Tahir wrestled his spoon out of the grip of his dinner and dropped it onto the table with a snort of disgust. “I expect this sort of misery in an English boarding house, you know. I expect this or worse. I just thought the French considered food to be something you ate.”

“You expect too much of the French,” Alex said with a thin smile. “And you are perhaps the only man in this room giving any consideration to the food. Everyone else seems more concerned with relieving themselves entirely of the burden of their money. Or with the thought that they likely won’t survive this mad endeavor we’ve arranged for them.”

Commission for Seafrenchy!

[ID: A digital painting of a young person with pale freckled skin and curly brown hair that is windswept and backlit by the sun. She is wearing a wide-sleeved white shirt, a dark blue linen coat and a kerchief. Behind her is a seascape at dawn. /end ID]

Commissioned @blueberrychill for a painted bust of my novel protagonist, and they fully blew me away with the result! This is Alex as I always hope to see her - at her ease, fully in her element, with sun and salt sea in her hair. ❤ Please check out the artist’s other work here!