“The Sea and the Chandelier”
Albin was born second in his family and first in its fall from grace. His father was once a well-to-do manager on the infamous Stormhenge port, Bastion Landing, and Talquin’s touch, at all hours, was distinctly clammy and viscid: the former from operating the largest conglomerate of fishing warehouses on the West Sembren coast, and the latter from the adhesive used to re-label inventory in his warehouses in a process he referred to as “reallocating the resources.” This procedure occurred only at night behind locked doors amongst the dark company of thousands of dead fish. Their corpses had a cleansing effect on Mr. Talquin’s conscience, for sins committed in the presence of many witnesses do seem to be more brave than bad, even if those witnesses are dead and are fish.
Each time Mr. Talquin finished an evening of reallocation, he would cross the cobblestone lane to his house at the edge of the port to tender his records that hid in the upper left drawer of his desk. All the while, he endeavored to wipe the slime of fish and the goo of glue from his hands, failing inevitably. Content to dribble snot-like along his filthy ledgers, his hands would strike a match to the lantern that spat light onto his desk and his sleeping wife. She would mutter some profane demand to douse the flame, but knew that his work would always come first. Thus dismissed, she would roll over as Mr. Talquin muttered to himself and his books. Deep into the night, the quill would scratch new marks into the paper to balance his lies, and all the numbers would resolve wickedly well.
And lest one should become too quickly opposed to Mr. Talquin, it should be noted that his character was no more sinister than the rest of the scum that trafficked Bastion Landing. He simply wielded it most successfully. Somehow the ledger books always were just a bit off, money always changed hands just a little below the table, and the sun always rose and set with a grimace on the slimy port—too disgusted to administer any sort of judicial light on the situation.
In that gloom, the Talquin family prospered on the cusp of the Stormhenge docks—Mr. and Mrs. Talquin with their beloved daughter Cinza. Mrs. Talquin, a superstitious and wide-eyed woman, never lost her devotion to luck and fortune even after she abandoned her act as a sword-swallower with a traveling circus to marry the self-proclaimed “fish king” of Stormhenge—a maestro of reallocation who managed to capture all her assets and affections in one rapturous post-performance night. That is, at least, how Mr. Talquin told the story. While their ensuing marriage was a loud one, the two found a way to get along in a partnership of muted respect, mutual benefit, and punctuations now and then of egregiously raunchy nights too filthy to put down in pen. Such is Stormhenge.
Though husband and wife possessed not a single honest bone between them, they somehow managed to raise their daughter with smatterings of propriety as much as would compliment her other beguiling tricks. Cinza was innocuous as any other toddler, but in the hands of her father, her little antics were put to good use wooing customers to his storehouses. From the minute she could walk and coo, Cinza Talquin—little blonde charmer that she was—kept her father’s docks full of doting fishermen and kept her mother’s superstitious fervor full of inconsolable excitement.
Despite whatever affections she may have felt for her husband, what truly convinced Mrs. Talquin to marry the fish king was not his fortunes (and certainly not his face) but his location. The Talquin estate was a pompous, haphazard building at the end of the docks whose sagging construction seemed to sneer at the collection of Stormhenge’s storefronts it called its neighbors. One in particular was a tall building with large windows that was in the business of peddling light.
Black iron lanterns, breath-spun glass. Glittering candelabras and torches tall as mountain trolls. By day, the sun would break like a wave against the countless edges of glass and polished metal and splash a hundred shards of rainbow across the grey stone streets. By night, a single torch would light the outside to turn the treasures within a warm copper and stoke the envy of any passersby to return in the morning for a new purchase. During the cold winter months, glowing coals nested in golden braziers kept the tallest shop on the street filled with heat and merriment.
How a lighting vender came to be unfortunately stuck next to the fish houses of Stormhenge, was a sad story of rotten luck that only the shopkeeper could tell, but there it stood just the same, glimmering through the haze. And if you happened to live in the haughty house at the edge of the docks, you would be able to see from the balcony, the crown jewel of this grandiose market: the chandelier.
It was a massive construct of ancient design that hovered angelic over the customers of the store. The golden casting seemed to defy gravity as it cradled the strands of glittering crystal dripping off it like rainwater. It was a holy artifact: triply sanctified by the three separate galleries that encircled its central column. All three were dressed with gorgeous inscriptions in some ancient Dûrdnic script. The candlelight flowed through the ruts and flourishes of writing like water, splashing along the metalwork and flashing indecipherable messages at the enraptured people passing below.
The arms of each candle slip stretched like dancers from these three halos before tossing their rays skyward in the symphony of form and function only the greatest of artisan philosophers ever grasps. Meanwhile, the basket below sloped in a hundred strands of bright crystals to the tip where they met at the five-armed filial which (at the correct angle) looked not unlike the outstretched fingers of some heavenly hand, calling one up into the bright embrace of true light.
It was glorious, and it was not for sale. And though this detail infuriated the wealthy elite of Stormhenge, it was for Mrs. Talquin an omen of good luck that would hang forever in that window across the street for as long as she lived in the fish king’s house.
After being refused her dream of ascending from sword-swallower to trapeze acrobat, the young woman had buried her disappointment in a forgettable night with a forgettable man who called himself the “fish king,” but as she leaned apathetically over his balcony in the morning-after fog, clothed only in a blanket and her own discontent, she beheld the sunrise glinting off the curves of the chandelier like an invitation from Fortune itself. Taking this as the highest evidence for supernatural approval, Mrs. Talquin sealed herself to Mr. Talquin and his house between sea and chandelier. Her circus moved on to the next city without their sword-swallower, and she remained in Stormhenge where she adopted with frightening alacrity the murky nuances of Mr. Talquin’s trade.
Mrs. Talquin’s belief in signs and superstitions did not end with lighting fixtures. To the heated disapproval of Mr. Talquin, she also frequently took her daughter to visit the shaman who roamed the docks for alms: the infamous crone, Q’villia. Despite her husbands frustrations, Mrs. Talquin brought Cinza ever and often to the “lady of the docks,” laden with money, food, or gossip to exchange for the woman’s latest predictions. It also helped that these prophecies were nearly always positive. Squinting (perhaps unseeingly) at the little Talquin girl, the ancient woman would smack her dry lips and croak:
“Eyes laced with gold.” and another smack of the lips, “Yes, she will find great wealth in her time.” Or: “Ah, tooth lost on the bottom? She will have many long and happy years.” Eventually, the poor charlatan ran out of physical features to which she might attach prophecy and had to wrack her withered brains to keep her most loyal client entertained.
“That birthmark! It surely means that she will find love at a young age.”
“Ah, but Q’villia!” Mrs. Talquin would cry, “that is a stripe of mud!”
“Oh—ah, yes. But here I see that her thumbnail grows faster than her fingernails and that means the same thing. Big happy marriage!"
There never was a more perfect family to thrive in that bastion of cyclical deception. All was unjustly well for the three Talquin’s. That is until they became four. And four is a very unlucky number indeed.
Those were Q'vilia's irresponsible words when she saw the bump growing at Mrs. Talquin’s stomach. The halfing probably did not anticipate the damage such a sentence would unleash on Mrs. Talquin, for the vague caution was enough to send the poor woman into a spiral of superstitious terror. Mrs. Talquin slept not a wink that entire night and in the morning marched promptly back to Q’villia’s hovel and demanded:
“Surely Cinza’s good fortune can counter another child's curse!”
Intrigued by the new bounty of goods Mrs. Talquin’s panic had ushered in, Q’villia enjoyed the full basket of bread as she worked her new angle.
“Buh beware, muh dear!” she prophesied through a loaf, “Thiffith no regluh baby! He will flawo—ack!”
Q'villia launched a murderous chunk of sourdough from her throat. It landed with a splat in the gravel but did not rest for long. The thrifty creature snatched the morsel from the dirt and popped it immediately back into her mouth. All the while, Mrs. Talquin stiffened with anticipation as the bulge of bread slipped agonizingly down Q’villia’s thin throat. The old woman smacked her lips.
“Your child,” Q’villia continued, “will swallow all the luck around it.”
“All luck?”
“Yes. Yes, yes. Rotten omen. Much trouble! Trouble for you, and your family! But… There may be ways to shield yourself from such disaster. Yes, items of protection. Like this one…”
Mrs. Talquin’s walked back to her home with posture and piety to outdo the most devout cleric, muttering every fervent incantation she knew into a little chain of thick black beads bound to a tuft of griffin hair. Mother and daughter passed the chandelier’s home and its crystals giggled in amusement at the woman who surged by—muttering into a collection of beads. Mrs. Talquin dipped the trinket into the light ricocheting off the windows as she hurried past and prayed it would stick. Little Cinza dutifully batted the tassel, and Mrs. Talquin poured all her fear and reverence into the bauble. Q’villia, meanwhile, counted up her recent egregious earnings and determined to expand her prophetic operations to include the trading of enchanted merchandise. And the black orbs blinked in Mrs. Talquin’s hands, ravenously drinking in all the light as the sun dropped below the SeaWall and darkness swallowed Stormhenge.
When Mrs. Talquin returned home, she could not disguise her terror. In fact, she would have dropped Cinza at the doorstep had Mr. Talquin not intervened. After she explained their apocalyptic situation, her husband responded with a ruinous laugh. He rebuked her foolishness, especially when he found out how much money had been lost to the clairvoyant. But Mrs. Talquin’s fear only festered under her husband’s insults, and she adamantly defended Q’villia’s call to caution. In the face of her rage, he relented, and a plan was formed.
“Fine. If it’s a girl we’ll be rid of her,” Mr. Talquin was a practical man, “but if it’s a boy we take our chances. I won’t let my dock pass to any one but a Talquin.”
Despising the thought of losing funds to another hungry mouth yet fascinated by the idea of passing his portside kingdom to his own flesh, Mr. Talquin saw this compromise as the perfect scheme to either avoid the extra burden of another brat or else have - at last - an heir to the family business. Mrs. Talquin, having been raised with her deep allegiance to the supernatural, was not unfamiliar with the practice of returning the occasional demonic baby to its ungodly origins, and prayed to all deities both familiar and unknown that she would be spared the agony of a son. Above all, Mrs. Talquin was mortified that she should be soiled by carrying the abominable spawn. But Cinza, who often heard more than was meant for her, had entirely different machinations for her soon-to-be sibling should her parents attempt their barbaric compromise.
Albin Talquin was born on a particularly miserable day at high noon. For those who may be unfamiliar, the apex of the sun’s arc at noontime marks the brightest and luckiest hour of daytime. It is the hour the thief slips undetected—pockets full of treasures—from your living room window just as you are returning from an otherwise pleasant breakfast with the family. It is the hour the lieutenant breathes a sigh of relief at his promotion when his captain fixes another star to his collar and does not notice the red marks hiding just beneath the fabric are distinctly shaped like his wife’s lips. Noontime has never been accused of being a fair hour, but it is certainly lucky. It is also the hour Cinza was born.
But it was not the hour that Albin began his entrance. The moonlit fog rolling into Stormhenge was pierced by the mournful wails of Mrs. Talquin as she began labor between the sixth and seventh bells of the clock tower’s call for midnight. Both adults nearly went into conniptions when the missus started childbirth: Mrs Talquin because of the dark fortunes always surrounding early morning births and Mr. Talquin because he was forced to leave his reallocation bookkeeping for a night of sleeplessness. Setting down his quill and snatching the courage distilled in his sacred bottle of whiskey from the high shelf, Mr. Talquin rallied himself for the ensuing operation and sent for the midwives.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Talquin did all she could to resist birthing the child until the unlucky sun’s fortunes changed to goodness at noon. First, she moved herself to Cinza’s bedroom to avoid the bad energy associated with mixing sites of conception with sites of birth. Then—brave, insane woman that she was—Mrs. Talquin confounded all medical expertise by holding the child within her until the midwives feared for her health and the baby’s. But she completed her mission and managed to stave off little Albin until high noon arrived.
Albin emerged into the world at the turning of its luck, and immediately, fortunes did shift. To her great yet anticipated horror, Mrs. Talquin beheld—with defeated moan—a boy. Without so much as touching him, she ordered he be taken from her sight, placed in a separate room with the black beads from Q’villia. The beads that—by Q’villia’s word—could stave off the boy’s dark influence. The poor midwives were shocked, but luckily Cinza, a helpful six-year-old, was there to take them to her parents’ room where she knew the beads were kept on her mother’s bedside table by her father’s desk.
Now, were Mr. Talquin there to assist, he could have prevented his family’s downfall. But as luck would have it, Mr. Talquin - who had nursed his bottle of whiskey through the night - was preoccupied with vomiting his toxic breakfast onto the docks outside, unable to retrieve the beads from his bedroom and, therefore, prevent unwanted eyes from noticing the ledgers documenting his previous nights' “reallocation,” which he had vulnerably abandoned on the desk when his wife went into her labor.
Thus, Cinza led the two girls into her parents’ room, snatched the beads, and tucked them immediately into the arms of the half-elf girl holding the swaddled Albin. The trinket soothed his cries as the cursed child sucked the luck from the beads that Mrs. Talquin had stored there with all her murmurings like some supernatural pacifier. Meanwhile, the other midwife—a sharp, young human who knew much about numbers and less about privacy—persued the dock master’s desk. The midwives finished their duties and saw themselves out.
Over the next week, the girl contacted her fiancé in the Oceanic Guard concerning the dock master’s curious books; that eager Guard delivered that news to his superiors; those superiors connected the dots in a string of investigations of such swindling at the docks and contacted the merchants guild; the merchant’s guild corroborated those exact losses in their shipments and sent their apologies to the shipping companies they had blamed for mishandling their properties; and those shipping companies began circulating the news that Talquin was the perfect scoundrel that he was: a bastard of Bastion Landing.
Had this been the only avenue the truth had taken to make its ugly emergence, the Talquin family could have had plenty of notice from their various contacts in each of these organizations to flee Stormhenge, even send a man to snuff out the informants. However, the politico-economic machine was not the only system the midwife had informed. She had also told her friend Liza.
Utilizing that terrifying circulatory system—urban gossip—the news of Talquin’s deceit spread across Stormhenge like some unprecedented epidemic with all the horrifying velocity of lighting. In a matter of hours, every housewife with her ear to the scandalous pulse of the city was aware. And so by suppertime, their husbands were also duly informed. So swift was the rumor’s fury that a mob of angry fishers and seamen had assembled outside the Talquin house before the aforementioned fiancé had time to feel a smug sense of accomplishment tingling in his Oceanic Guard standard sea boots.
Like any mob, their actions were swift, wild, and ended in inferno. The Talquin family barely escaped with their lives. As the little schooner they kept tied up in the shadowed waters beneath their house scooted secretly into the bay of Bastion Landing, Mrs. Talquin wept tiny, curses into the night sky. Mr. Talquin rowed slow and quiet, dipping his own obscenities into the waters. And Cinza watched in silence as her home writhed in a dance of shadowed men, torches, and the rising conflagration—a great blaze glinting off all the promised gold in her eyes. With a fatal shriek of grinding wood, the house slipped off its foundation, dipped into the sea, and drowned in a bubbling hiss. The torches of the mob faded and dispersed across the docks to find the wretched family. Their light spread thinner and thinner across the dark skeletons of ships then disappeared altogether.
“Good riddance to the little brat.” Mr. Talquin spat at the scorched bones of his once-house still poking through the water. Mrs. Talquin kept weeping her curses and counter-enchantments into the night to ward off the spirit of the wicked child. But Cinza kept silent and prayed that the secret brother in her pack—wrapped in sleep and blankets—would do the same.
The night was black and bulbous, and the water of Bastion Landing glinted like beads bobbing in the dark, knocking against the sides of the dinghy—a little raft of uncertainty in a sea of misfortune.