SSCS 02: Installment 25 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 25 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
“By itself, it would have been a terror. It is sure some would have been lost, no matter what. But after fighting the storm, and with so few of the acolytes able to sense the shift in the earth beneath the ocean that had started it, it was a massacre. We lost our acolytes, and we lost our hold on the tides. And so that great wave rushed outward, rushed up to the land, and carried your parents away – along with thousands of others.”
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 25: 21.0305
Gran-Tom fell silent, but when Mina looked over she found it was the silence of a glare rather than anything sentimental. With a start, Mina raised the pot of rice higher up off the fire and covered it, barely catching it before the whole thing boiled over. It was only once this task had been corrected that the old priestess finished. “And that is why you came to me,” she said, her voice age-cracked but firm. “I needed a new acolyte, just as most of the other spires did. And not only that, I needed an acolyte who would be able to hold firm, who wouldn’t be fooled by the rising and falling of the ocean into thinking nothing else was shifting. The priestesses of the spires have to have a foot standing both on land and in sea.”
Mina swallowed and looked down, still facing the cooking hearth with spoon in hand just in case. That did seem like sort of a why. But right now it still felt like mostly just a story. How was –
“Now,” gran-Tom continued, voice turning sharp, “it’s time to learn the First Hum. It is shameful I haven’t taught it to you before now, so you must make up for that by learning it quickly.”
Mina’s head did lift at that. The old priestess admitted to messing something up, and so Mina had to make up for it? Well that certainly fit in with the day, didn’t it? Hedwin may have been made to clean up some shit, but like always it was Mina who had to clean up everything else. While cooking. While trying not to make a wrong move that could bring the Other One back down on their heads.
Mina caught herself on that, took a careful breath, and then turned her lips up in the forced smile gran-Tom already knew was the best she’d get from Mina most days. The old sea woman nodded, then jerked her chin to send Mina back to her cooking. And so, while Mina rooted around in the new-brought provisions for the radishes and salt-fish, gran-Tom began her first lesson. It was just three notes hummed, descending, but not quite in even order, so that the last one twisted a bit. Gran-Tom took each note slowly, and Mina thought it sounded as though she let it fill her whole body before moving on to the next. Three notes down, and twist. Slower than breathing, but then again, and again. Repeated so many times over Mina was sure she’d have a headache by the time it was all done, especially as gran-Tom poked her with a claw half-way through and made Mina join in.
After a while, the repetition made Mina feel like something inside her was going to rattle apart. But thankfully by then the rice was done, and so she broke off with a short glance at the priestess and went to call Hedwin in for…lunch? Thankfully gran-Tom was gone by the time they came back into the kitchen, and Mina would have said that was definitely enough buzzing for one day. Except, she remembered what gran-Tom had said, that she was going to make her sing to the Moon tonight, too. Which might not be so bad – the Moon songs Mina had heard these many years were fairly pretty. But…
Mina shuddered, almost choking on her fish and earning an alarmed look from Hedwin as a thought came to her: What if the humming was all acolytes were allowed to start with? What if she was going to be buzzing all night? If so, that’d be just great; she’d be practically begging for the drudgery of tea and cooking and the Other One’s tyranny – even dodging demon kraken – before the night was done.