deercountry | 03 . boat log!

Entry tags:

03 . boat log!

Who:

necrolord and existing CR. If your character has met the Emperor and would respond positively to an invite, jump on in. (If you're not sure, ask me at

ochrona!)
What: A voyage out to sea! This is a mingle log; feel free to toplevel and tag around.
When: Ambiguously around New Year's.
Where: The Pthumerian Ocean.

Content Warnings: Undead sailors, flesh-eating crabs, tentacles, corpses; Deer-standard levels of inherent fleshy horror. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

[ See John's toplevel for prompts, and feel free to tag in brackets or prose! ]

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"What gave it away?"

This is said with a gently wry expression, and no bite. He is reminded, fondly, of the moment he fished a boy up onto his boat of corpses and was told You don't look like a necromancer. Genuinely the first time he's ever heard that one. It's all a bit of a novelty, being profaned.

"I am. There are a few of us here from the same home system."

Paul matches the captain's smile, and then surpasses it, brightening immediately at the revelation of shared origin. That's a different spin on things again, and a welcome one.

"I know. I've met the Sixth, and Gideon of the Ninth." He's pleased, clearly, and put at ease, a distinct difference from the tenterhook wariness he still had when he stepped abroad. "Are they coming with us?"

Given Palamedes, the way the captain spoke about magic makes much more sense in retrospect. Paul is mildly embarrassed not to have made the connection earlier, but he's still reassured by the prospect of going out to sea with a better known quantity.

"Oh, good." He seems to mean it quite genuinely, not least because of the way tension has dropped out of the young man's frame. "They are indeed. Both the Sixth and the Ninth will be aboard, and we will be joined by a few other friends interested in the voyage. But it's largely the necromancers who will be conducting research."

"I should have known." Paul shakes his head, still smiling - of course the necromancers would be doing the bulk of the research, considering the goal. "The way you talked about gods."

He'd lacked context for their first meeting, but now that he's heard how the rest of them talk about their god-emperor, he understands why the captain wasn't giving out his name to strangers, why the obscurity around the plan. But there's no one near them here except the dead, and the wind will whip their voices out of reach of the living.

Paul's smile fades, though a trace of it remains for onlookers to see.

"Tell me about him," he says, quietly, "The King Undying."

For a moment, his eyebrows shoot up.

It lasts only a beat before subsiding to something thoughtful, and he turns to look out to sea. He says, "The Resurrecting King, the Necrolord Prime, the Kindly Prince, et cetera. More titles than any man needs, if you ask me. He is a very powerful man, I'll grant, and a very old one. But I don't believe immortality makes a man infallible, Paul, I really don't."

There is a beat of pause, in which he sets his hands upon the gunwale and regards the distant storm. He looks back at Paul, the creases of a frown between his dark eyes.

"Still. Sometimes even a fallible god is the best we can hope for, if the alternative is something," he gestures, vaguely, to that distant storm, "without humanity's best interests at heart."

Paul had been bold, and he believes he can imagine some of the difficulties in finally being able to speak openly of the flaws in your divinity. So he's respectfully attentive as the captain speaks, dutifully following his gaze to the storm.

Even speaking of the god-emperor as only a man shows more trust in him than Paul would have asked for, and he's humbled by it, as he often has been by the generosity of necromancers.

"'The throne is built, calls for a king.'" Paul is contemplative as he quotes that bit of scripture, his gaze drifting to the first mate before finding its way back to the storm, then the captain. "So he is immortal, or close enough. It's hard to judge by epithets. Kindly, for one."

"Is he?"

"Well, he certainly tries for kindly." He returns his gaze to the ocean, weary now. "But I do wonder how often he has the opportunity, these days. For a shepherd, he goes rather far afield of his flock. It is a very vast empire, Paul, and a very long war."

He drops his hands from the gunwale, and glances just so over his shoulder to Paul.

"This is a topic you picked up from Harrow, I imagine?"

"No. I haven't even spoken to her yet." Which makes the reflexive protectiveness in the way he's so quick to absolve her of involvement a little unusual. Paul doesn't think of it himself, distracted by new revelations.

"It hasn't been something I've asked them about. Only things I've picked up from implication." He shrugs lightly, the casualness of it undercut by his eyes gleaming as flatly as coins. "They didn't mention the empire went beyond the system, or the war."

On the topic of implications, the one suggested by his tone there is that he finds that terribly interesting.

"There have been god-kings, where I'm from, but it's different when god does have power, isn't it?" It's Paul's turn to lean on the gunwale, and he's not doing as much as he usually would to conceal that this topic matters to him for more than reasons of curiosity. Trust for trust.

He notes the hurry to defend Harrow's piety, not that she has ever needed it. He notes the sharp attention, too.

"I like to think so." With Paul settling in beside him, as close to relaxed as he's yet seen the boy, the King Undying sets his elbows back on the edge. "It's the claims of omniscience you have to watch out for, in my opinion. Power over life and death is one thing. Judgment and sin, that's another."

"Is there a difference?"

Paul leans further over the edge, his head dipped to watch the ocean's unsettled waves. His dark hair half-hides his face, and he breathes in salt-wind.

"Power is like mass," he says, and it's clear from the first word this is not an undeveloped new thought, "It accumulates, and with every addition the more it bends the universe towards itself. What is an emperor to their subjects, if not like a god? He decides their fate with every choice he makes. His actions are watched for signs, those signs read to interpret his wishes, whether he asks for it or not. Justice is what he decides it will be be."

"An emperor-divine, every word scripture." Paul looks up at the captain, his eyes bleak. "Is gravity kind? Would that matter to the asteroid, or to the planet?"

Well, God does not say, because he really is trying for kindly, we don't have time to unpack all of that.

"You've spent some time thinking about this," he says instead. Sometimes it is nice to be acknowledged. When he looks at Paul this time, the thoughtful, assessing pause does not show in his eyes. The gentleness does.

The boy looks tired. That's something they might have in common, which, given Paul's age, is a genuine travesty.

"Power accumulates casualties," he agrees, and his voice is soft and grave. "There's never been progress without pain, Paul, you're not wrong about that. But ten thousand years cannot make a man as distant as gravity— not twenty or a hundred thousand either, I damned well hope— and justice doesn't spring from nothing. We enact justice because we learned it from the people we love."

There is a beat, and then he adds: "There's a saying, you know, about great power and great responsibility."

Paul drinks in the gentleness like sand does rain, and in its wake an awful hope blooms, a dark-petaled flower. He looks back to the storm, and finds salt-spray in his eyes that he brushes away with the back of one hand as he grips the gunwale with the other.

"I hope you're right," he says, and then, "I hope there's still someone who loves god."

There's a difference between love and reverence, and Paul has watched the change in too many pairs of eyes already not to know that. All he wants to tell them is be not afraid, but how can he say that when they should be? The messiah cannot say he is lost. They'd tear him apart.

If power is a kind of gravity, so is love, the steadying moons that balance the pull of the sun. What happens to your orbit without them?

"It must be a wise man who came up with the saying," Paul says, somehow finding the words, his voice as bloodless as his troubled face, "What does it mean?"

I hope there's still someone who loves god.

This breaks it. God looks at the boy as though Paul just walked into his house and shot him. He looks at Paul as though genuinely astonished someone just said that to his face.

Then he tries again to smile. It doesn't quite work.

"Mostly that it's a rough deal, being God," he says. His eyes are dark and inhuman and very, very old. "People will die. It's your job to make sure it's worth it."

And that is firmly enough of that. He claps his hands once on the gunwale, decisively, and turns to fully regard his navigator.

"Still," he says, and tips his head like he's sharing a secret, "I like to think I've been managing well enough."

A trained memory can be a strange thing, at times. Every word that Paul has ever exchanged with the captain (that's not what he is, who he is, Paul was closer the first time and farther away) seems to come to him at once, and yet he comprehends none of them. All he can seem to focus on are black eyes, truly black, and the way they've watched him all this time while he talked.

"No," Paul says, and then, his voice breaking, "No -"

The way he falls to his knees is less like obeisance and more like despair, but it bruises the same way. His palms hit the deck next, his head bowed, his eyes staring blankly down and still seeing nothing but black.

"Your Divine Imperial Majesty," Paul says, and he's never prayed before. He cannot find the words, and even if he did, he wouldn't be able to heave them from his mouth.

It is satisfying, to watch the distance rush back in. It is deeply exhausting. It hurts in a way that ought to be pity, though he must have scraped out the last shards of that millennia ago, like bits of broken teeth. Somehow he keeps digging and digging for remnants.

He is very used to it.

"It's alright, Paul," he says, and his tone is terribly gentle. "Really, let's go with 'Captain' for now. I put on the coat and everything."

"All of it was me. No one else."

Even on his knees, Paul doesn't know how to beg. He's never been in a position where it would have made any difference.

"I never said any of this to them, not any of them, or anyone else, it was me," he says, uselessly repeating, and his voice should tremble, he should shake, but his desperation is a fierce thing, his fear always too close to fury. "Hold me accountable, but not -"

He lifts his head, and Paul's eyes are incandescent with pale moonlight and terror.

"Don't," you dare, "Please."

"Paul," he says, "No one is in trouble. I'm not angry. You make some well-thought points, you know."

His expression twists a shade deeper into pity, at the look in the boy's eyes. God exhales a slow sigh through his nose.

"If I were that readily offended," he says, "I would be an absolute nightmare, can you imagine? After ten thousand years. Give me a bit of credit."

If the future is an ocean, points like this are the hurricanes. Paul can see ten thousand possibilities unfolding from this one, a churning chaos that obscures more than it illuminates. (He's never done this while he was awake here, a fact that would be a horror all its own if it wasn't so overshadowed.)

Some things are clear. Every time he flicks a knife into his hand and lunges, it's a wave crashing against a cliff, dissolving into a violent, terminal salt-spray. Others are not, or clear in ways that make no sense, would never happen: a wordless howl as answer to being called by his name, or falling at the captain's feet and crying help me, please, tell me how to-, from which make it stop and do this branch away from it on their own untraceable paths.

None of it helps him choose. What drives his next action is a thought that might be best translated as Thou shalt not vomit on God's shoes as the taste of bitter, rotten lime and sea-brine flood his mouth. Paul scrambles to the gunwale and up its side, retching, his bag discarded on the deck beside him, and leans over the railing bringing up nothing but sour spit and hot, thin bile.

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03 . boat log!

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