Pugio's Sandbox: Assorted ramblings.

Bellerverse Idea:

"We are the chosen, always and never. We seek the forgetting, so the many may remember."

Drae's murmurings rose around him. He busied his hands with the re-weaving of sea-rope round his piercing staff, so his thoughts might drift not, and remain on their task of remembrance and forgetting.

"They are the many. They squabble, and fight. They must know not of what lurks in the tide."

Drae's whispering grew more frantic and stuttering as he lost his remembrance within the silky complexity of his weaving.

"They, ah, they know not of the serpent, larking-er-lurking- ah! i've lost it again!"

Drae threw his aging sea-wood piercer in frustration, wincing as it broke upon the tide-hut wall, it's head of carefully sharpened old-metal cutting through it's bindings and falling away from it's long, weathered neck of sea-wood. He winced in advance, awaiting the-

A great crack of wood obliterated his train of thought, drawing blood from his front-head and causing his ears to retort with the screeching tone of the townes warning bells.

"Focus, you half-drowned cuttlefish! How will you ever close yourself against the call if you cannot order your thoughts?"
A salt stained teller stared down at him, scowling down through a thick, white beard and furrowed brows. He drew his walking-aide back into his tattered shroud, and the many shards of old-word color woven into it's fabric drew Drae's eyes, further fragmenting his ability to think clearly, the carefully remembered words within bursting like tide, forming into a churning mire of reef-like colours.

Noticing this, the teller sighed deep with a catch-less fisher's defeat, drawing the eroded rod back into the shadowed, glimmering folds of his robe.

"Ah, why even subject you the clearer's bite? It seems unlikely that your mind will ever be clear enough to resist the deep-tide. Much less the Wyrm itself."

With this, the aging teller threw his walking-aide against the wall in agitation, causing it to be smote in twain. He sank into the teller's-dais, a wooden sitting-place raised, walled, and slanted in the corner of the room, and seemed almost to deflate, his great swate of fabric and his aging weariness contributing to a curious shrinking effect.

"I cannot teach you." The Teller said, with a finality previously unstated. This was met with an utterance of dismay from the child sitting in the floor's sea-grime, who had finally drawn his thoughts into line.

"Never before have I had such a distracted, obstinate-" The teller stopped, sighing once more.
"In all honesty, it tis' more a reflection on my own ability to Tell.
Perhaps it is time I handed this mantle down once more." He waved distractedly at the door, his armlets of strange, colored metal colliding with a sound like sea-stones rolling.
"In this time, there's nothing more I can do for you. Go, and make something of yourself, in some other place." The Teller turned him, then, and fixed him with a look filled with the unwelcome feeling of the incoming tide. "Pray, child, that you never meet the beings that lurk outside the furthest currents. I would not wish for another to become as the forgotten."

With this, the young fisher's-ward wandered off through the salt-stained morning streets, feeling the seaside mud slosh unpleasantly round' his toes and the grimy, ancient sea lap away at his knees. He moved into a small clearing in the buildings, and lay down within the water, willing it to carry him away, so he might forget his shame.

To fail in the Discipline of Remembrance, within the Fisher's Place, seemed to many like a worse fate than even the Forgetting it was made to ward against. Without a Teller's seal, one might fish and trawl, but could never truly be a Fisher.

In Fisher's Place, the Fisher's role was a sacred, all-filling one.
Fisher's put meat on the plates of the people. They warded off attacks, both human and Kraken. They drew old-world baubles from the ocean's grimy skin, and traded them with traders from far-flung Forgetting peoples, gaining fine things, like torch-oil, and clothes, great alchemies for the healing of wounds and sickness, and strange powders that would give new tastes to familiar dishes.

Most importantly of all, they upheld the endless battle gainst the Wyrm, most abyssal lord of all Kraken.

In ages untold, it is said that Wyrm dwelled in depths so deep, that even the Ancient Ones could only reach his vast terror through the use of great ships made for the cursed waters.
The Ancients, under his mighty thrall, brought him flesh in the form of willing sacrifices, who used great armored suits to reach his awaiting mouth.
For endless years Wyrm lay in his cradle of stone, crushing water, and darkness eternal, growing vast in body upon the flesh of his victims, and bloated in mind upon their souls, which he feasted upon as he consumed their flesh.

However, like all old things, it did not last.

The world was torn asunder by the great cataclysm, and titans raged over it's boiling surface, tearing the Ancients and their works asunder in their fury against the god's gall in having dared to attempt to contain them.

In this great fury, the walls of the Wyrm's gilded cradle became great spears of rock, and the demon was smote many a time by the falling pillars. In it's fury against the sea, for having dared harm it, the Wyrm cast a great and terrible spell. It wept tears from it's tattered skin, tears that forever poisoned the seas against man. All the water it touched in it's enraged thrashings was filled with it's terrible art, the power to strip the souls from man. Then, once the world stilled, and the few who remained crept, stilled, from(TBF)