Marigold

At the far edges of the void, far from most living eyes, leviathans—behemothian creatures from the darkest abysses, and made of the clay from broken worlds—swim through seas of lost starlight. In the seamless bowels at the iron roots of broken mountains, serpents studded with thousands of lidless, sightless eyes coil through warrens carved by their insatiable maws, leaving only obsidian, thrumming with power in their wake. In the vaults of a necropolis forgotten by the souls of its makers, an ocean pours out of a jar that flows, eternal, from a plane of endless water, brimming with life and magic of every kind. Endless are the places in which life thrives, and a scant few of them are the simple fields and valleys in which surface civilizations thrive. While the surface-centric mind might stoop to believing that the machines of Reality had been hewn for them, life is unstoppable, varied, and wonderous, and touches every corner of the universe in equal measure.

As such, on the edge of a brine pool lit with flashes of phosphorescent light, chiselled into the bones of a billion years of dead mollusks painted every colour of a sunless sea, the patrons of the Sacerral Abyss, a Freehold as ancient as the sea water it was entrenched within, served an arrangement of patrons the likes of which the land had never seen.

“And they just… harpoon each other. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

This was Qhrrxchsaa speaking; a gilled creature, with skin like velvet if velvet were made of teeth: brushed one way, smooth as silk, but caressed in the other and it would flay flesh to threads. Their society were bottom dwellers on a relatively shallow water world, and while he preferred the sun on his back to the dankness of this lower hovel, he was slumming, and took up where he found convenient.

“Like some sort of parasitic snail, they slime around and writhe and then they laugh or bite each other or any other crazed thing. One of them blows up like a pufferfish, and from what I’m told, they spawn like sharks, with the brood clawing their way out. It’s perverse.”

The Abyss was not a place for surface dwellers, but that didn’t make them unknown: some of the Freehold’s patrons were ambivalent to the environment they occupied, and trafficked with species from different seas, often sharing myths and legends. At just this moment, they were talking about sex.

“I’ve heard,” burbled Dondru, a fat amphibian whose natural habitat was dark limestone caverns by the seaside, “that they spawn small broods, perhaps two at most. Sometimes that’s all for their whole lives.” Around her, the group frothed with mixed disregard and disbelief. By far, the most common means of survival in the dark was to bet on a flourishing bounty, underlined by the hope at least a handful might survive.

In the middle of the round table about which the lewd conversation about surface dweller reproduction was taking place a brazier had been set up, and atop it a crystal bowl of extremely durable material was placed. The bowl was made from the lens of a Cyhhthid’s eye: great beasts who burrowed into the sea floor, mining out vast hives which they used to build nigh-impenetrable shells of translucent glass. In the bowl, a heavy brine, oily with mercurial salts, hosted a fish so beautiful that none who’d ever beheld it could find words to describe it. It called itself Marigold, something it said a surface dweller had compared it to: a kind of coral called a ‘flower’. Its voice was as uncomfortable as its seeming was beautiful, as it rang out in the primitive parts of the swimming mind, on a channel left open by nature to convey threat, anxiety, and fear.

Marigold didn’t talk much, but when they did, it was remarkable. They were learning, with practice, to evoke low grade frustrations, rather than abject horror in their listeners. Their ‘words’ tended to come in threes, a triptych of thoughts which were by themselves ambiguous, but dipped into the listener’s psyche to fill in context and meaning.

-'SENSE OF REVULSION’

--'HOST TO A FOREIGN GHOST’

---'A BODY RIDDLED WITH WORMS’

Qhrrxchsaa and Dondru visibly recoiled at the sensation this raised in them, while the huge, heavily armored coral creature who held the last post at the table veritably bristled at this outburst. The stone that comprised its body was beautiful, magma studded with gems, geodes turned with the most dangerous razor-sharp pieces often mounted defensively. It ‘held’ a claw made out of megalodon teeth and quills from a lionfish, which it could brandish with surprising dexterity when it chose to move. Within the entangled stone, Broqu were, in fact, a colony of sapient worms occupying anemones that responded bodily to the collective impulses of the hive mind which shared their habitat. They were, together, ambulatory and extremely dangerous, with any number of neurotoxins and venoms at their disposal. Broqu were an adventurer, however, something less common for their insular kind, so they travelled the waterways seeking new things to harvest, places to explore, and stories to learn. When they responded, it was as if a chorus of speakers had voiced their response:

“We would NOT know what that is like, you— “ and the array of scathing terms the colony expelled were as venomous as any of their other tools. “We spawn as polyps, like any decent species should.”

This, again, got another round of jeering from the collected, with even others from nearby tables rippling fins, lighting hues, or blowing belches of gas in protest: Broqu were not quiet, and it was impolite to discuss spawning with such disregard for volume.

-'VISCERAL DISEMBOWELMENT’

--'BLIND, SUCKLING MAWS’

---'DREAMS WHERE PREDATORS KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, BUT YOU CANNOT FLEE’

At this, everyone in ‘earshot’ turned and gaped at Marigold.

“That…. That ain’t true, is it?”, Dondru croaked sickly. She took a stiff drag from a pipe of cold fresh water, which would normally offer a pleasant buzz, save for the obscene claims their bowled friend had just expressed. “Live birth? Nursing? Like whales? How could one even accomplish that out of the water?”

Broqu ground their rocks together unpleasantly, and a thin cloud of amethyst sand drifted away towards the seafloor. “Never mind that, gully toad,” they chimed in. “We are more distressed at the idea of fostering a helpless parasite. What do you mean they KEEP them?”

-'BARNACLES, FEEDING LIKE TANGLE KELP’

--'AN OCTOPUS, GARDENING FOR YEARS, AND YEARS, AND YEARS, AS HER YOUNG CONSUME HER ARMS’

---'HATCHLINGS, HATCHING HATCHLINGS, HATCHING HATCHLINGS’

Qhrrxchsaa hammered a leathery fin on the table, causing the murkiness beneath Marigold to bubble up in a seltzer cascade: the heated mercury salts glittered like gems around the beautiful fish, who snapped at motes here and there to consume them while they sparked. “NO. I refuse to listen to this obscenity, Marigold. We all know what sick tales you like to tell, and it isn’t right that you can just… issue them into our minds. But this is too far. No creature could survive dry live birth, let alone hosting their brood for years of their life while they flop about helpless and loud. Predators would have harvested them well before they developed any semblance of intelligence, there’s simply no way that this Sex business could work. I won’t believe it.”

Marigold swum in a tight circle in their bowl., silent a long time in rebuke.

-'forbidden knowledge’, they said, in a voice so thin and subtle one unknowing might mistake it for their own doubts.

--'shame, embarrassment, taboo, exposed to all you know’, again the dulcet whisper, scraping the back of the primitive hindbrain of all who’d hear.

---' “Do you want to have sex?”’, and the last murmur of the triptych thought was intoned with a queer sensation, as though someone else had spoken through the listener’s own mouth, into their own mind, a trembling and salacious implication that rustled the reproductive drive of the assembled at the Freehold in an altogether unwholesome way. It was the voice of a surface dweller, spoken with all the coursing madness of their chemistry driven minds.

Qhrrxchsaa lunged at Marigold in raw fury, but reeled away as the beautiful fish thrice blasted their mind with --'PRIMITIVE AWE’. Dondru belched disgust, flinging a glob of unpleasant pus from one of the nodules on her foreleg towards the rim of the bowl: if it dropped in, it would poison Marigold, and though it might not kill them, it would certainly end a friendship. Before the quavering jelly could clear the rim, a tangled mass of translucent, pinkish flesh lanced out from Broqu, enveloping the snot and pulling it in to their body. The colony creature ‘stood’, restacking their mass to a towering, intimidating height, and issuing a crash of challenge by compressing their stones together, dusting the water nearby with dangerous sands.

“Yes.”, they stated when the room around them stilled: many of the patrons had lurched to readiness, preparing for a brawl: at the doorways to private chambers, any number of observers had gathered, and the walls themselves stopped crawling with the miniscule life that foraged there. Everyone was now looking at Broqu in disbelief. “We do want this. You will show us, Marigold. Let us have Sex.”

In their bowl, Marigold stirred uneasily. They had expected the fight: it wasn’t uncommon for them to drum up ill will when they were out drinking. They had not, however, expected any takers to the absolute obscenity they’d thrown out on the table. Most sapients of dark waters wouldn’t sully their reputations, let alone their minds, with the notion of something so vulgar as experiencing another species’ spawning practices, but for it to be a surface dweller? And, then, it begat the question of how Marigold knew themselves, which only made things more complicated…

At length, Broqu sat back down, settling into their pile of shifting stones in disappointment. The others around the table followed suit, although with clear reluctance. Dondru rubbed distractedly on the burst nodule on her foreleg, while Qhrrxchsaa’s gills still ground in offended silence. The colony bubbled their accusation quietly: “You don’t actually know.”

Marigold was so long in responding that they all began to think the beautiful fish may not, but, with a dismissive swish of a finned tail:

-'PRIVACY’

--'SILENCE’

---'INDIGNITY’

And the two of them got a room.

None of the other patrons of the Sacerral Abyss ever talked about the encounter after that. Some wondered, obviously, what the two of them had said, seen, or done together in the back room of the bar: the clams couldn’t tell, and to be honest none at the time had been so audacious as to try and spy. Not one of the many curious souls in attendance would admit to that curiosity, so Marigold and Broqu had their privacy, and when the colony titan finally clambered out of the room, they did so as two smaller beings, Broq and Qrub, starting different colonies and going their own separate ways in a display none had ever heard of in the species before.

Marigold, for their part, had a tiny little anemone attached to a beautiful geode adorning the inside of their bowl, hosting a pair of tiny polyps. No one asked questions, no one got answers. But last anyone heard of them, Broq had made their way up-shelf, seeking adventure closer to the inhabited reefs near the surface, while Qrub had gone down, deeper into the dark, far away from the deviancies of the dry world.

Apparently, Sex was complicated, and not quite right for everyone, but there was always a table at the Sacerral Abyss for anyone bold enough to sink to new depths.