The Stomach Knows No True Storm (short story)
by Pierrick Simon (1 766 words)
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“All-Divine have mercy! All-Divine have mercy!” frantically the two men prayed, swaying back and forth in their hiding spot.
“You two! Stop praying! It’s bad for morale!” yelled the Captain at the top of her lungs. No easy feat to be heard in the middle of the tempest rocking her ship.
“But… But… It’s a True Storm, Captain!” protested one praying crewmate.
“It’s not!” she snapped back “It’s a regular ass storm and we’re going to beat it.”
The other praying crewmate, a foreigner who did not speak Sableonian very well, turned to his companion with eyes full of fright and screamed in his ear: “Was ist ein ‘Ass Storm’?”
The Captain groaned and plunged under the curtains of rain, leaving the two cowards behind. Looking out, she saw nothing but endless night, though naught but a few hours before the storm caught them in the middle of a sunny day. Suddenly, flashes of lightning within the dark grey clouds afforded her some view of the dire situation.
Flash. Her gorgeous three-masted ship, The Lucky Break; now two-masted due to the hurricane. Flash. Her crew; half of them running around like headless chickens, the other half having enough sense to work to amputate the broken mast that, by some dreadful twist of fate, was dragging everyone into the Abyss with it. But even them, the sane ones, were experiencing Dragon Fear: they had been raised on stories of True Storms catching sailors unaware in the middle of the ocean, to punish them for the hubris of daring to live in or to profit from two continents at once. Her charisma had taken them this far, but they were all drunk on terror now.
She climbed the stairs to the helm, and the Trusted Pilot (trusted to take the helm when the captain wasn’t there) yelled with fear like the rest:
“Captain! With the mast- I can’t-”
“We’ll be rid of that blasted mast soon! Then you can!”
“But Captain! What if-”
“No what if! When you put the wind behind us, the storm itself will take us to calmer seas!” the Captain replied.
The Trusted Pilot gave her a wild-eyed look whose meaning was clear: this logic holds only if the storm is not intentionally targeting the ship. For this is the difference between a True Storm and a regular ass one. A True Storm hunts you down.
The Captain shot back a look in which one could read her cold and steely logic. In Adenslo, in her youth, she had studied philosophy with the famous School of the Stomach, who courageously scoffed in the face of the worshippers of the All-Divine and of the Good Pantheon. Back in the day, she jumped on every opportunity to argue against the people who saw Fate in every gap of sagely lore; yes, those sophists who called themselves “properly superstitious”, thus making a virtue out of a vice.
The School expounded four tenets, four remedies to cure mortals from the fears that assailed their minds day and night.
One, “There are no gods here to be mad at us”. Students of the School are invited to ponder the following salutary dichotomy. Either a Being is Great and Wise, in which case they would not care about the trifles of the lives of mortals – especially not to the point of carrying out personal vendettas – OR a Being is not Great and Wise, in which case they could never rise to the prominence of a God and wield the magic influence of Fate. Thus I ask you, sailors of “little faith”, how could a “divine” storm rain down on us right now?
Two, “The mouth always calls for friends and food”. The goal of speech is to express the needs of the body, which are companionship and food. The School – which took in the Captain before she was a Captain, and when she was most orphaned and destitute – was a living embodiment of that truth. Its teachings drilled into her the conviction that idle speech, cast like a fishing net on dry land, reaching beyond the natural purpose of friendship and food, dooms our minds and tongues to specious reasoning and empty practices, such as prayers, promises, and predictions. “Save your breath and ride out the storm with me!” she yelled to the Trusted Pilot, whom she loved so dearly.
Three, “Small is what you need”: the need for companionship and food is limited to small amounts. Looking around at the catastrophe, the Captain was already doing the maths. We can afford to throw it all overboard: the useless and the insane. In all situations, we are light and we are free. We will sail with two masts remaining and make our fortune elsewise. “Onward! Onward, you cowards!”
Four, “There is no irony of fate”. Again, a salutary dichotomy. Either there is no such thing as Fate, and so we are spared its dramatic irony, or there is such a thing as Fate. In which case, there is, by definition, nothing to do about it (and thus nothing to feel about it): no way to know it in advance, no way to be tricked into it with self-fulling prophecies… No way to feel, in the present moment, the personal flaws that spell your future doom. Grip the helm tight and your hands shall not shake.
The way the Captain stood proud… The look of her, as the ship was spinning out of control under her feet, hit obliquely by waves as high as hills, struck by white-hot burning lightning, and corrupted by the foul anchor of a broken mast dragging its sails in the water… It all made it obvious to the Trusted Pilot: the four remedies of the School of the Stomach were branded on her brains and determined her beliefs and behaviour completely. She was cured. Marvellously cured. No Dragon Fear would ever make its way into her invincible constitution.
The Trusted Pilot could never be like her. Branded on his soul were the words of the Eladnys Rivad, the story of the creation of the world, which he learned to sing as a child:
“Before words and before obedience
There was nothing but one endless primordial ocean
It was slow, silent, dark, and warm.
Made of water, stone, wind, and fire,
But each element was distant and seldom meeting.
Until one fortuitous moment, the first moment to ever be,
When by chance a wave formed across the chaotic sea.
The shape of the wave spelled the name: Numalis, the Dragon Flood
From thence sprung forth a great serpent, from head to tail as long as one infinity.
The Dragon took upon itself all of the elements:
A tail made of a killer wave,
A body made of formless clay,
Wings made of brutal wind,
And a throat made of pure fire.”
And on and on the song continued, teaching children how the dry world was born of the flanks of Numalis, as if on loan. How the great Dragon killed most of the mortal peoples in a Great Flood because of all their sins. How, even now that Numalis mostly sleeps, it sends True Storms, Elves, Angels, Lesser Dragons to punish mortals who dare to lead an existence of revelry. Such lessons are not easily forgotten, since those who do, fall overboard and are forgotten in turn.
The Trusted Pilot made a defeated gesture towards the broken mast. Whatever she might say, it wasn’t coming off anytime soon. With the twisted foulness of it all, they couldn’t put the wind at their backs in time to survive the hits of the waves. It was hopeless.
But, the Captain thought: they could turn in the other direction.
“Very well! Face the waves!!” cried the Captain.
“What?!”
The Captain took the helm forcefully. With a gesture she checked that indeed it could not turn in one direction but was free to go the other. With one fell swoop, she committed to the course of action predetermined by the half-stuck wheel and abandoned the meagre progress that the Trusted Pilot had made to beat the surges of the sea. On the way out of a storm, half progress is no progress at all. She turned to face the waves head on, waves that were now as big as mountains.
Several crew mates went up to grab her arms in protest. “She’s spiting the True Storm!” She shrugged them off vigorously, with the help of the Trusted Pilot who threatened them with a fist.
“I am not! You are sailors! Not children! You know I am killing sideways strikes! Have some guts!”
Perhaps she indulged in a bit of sophistry there. For she knew that they knew the types of waves she was facing were exactly the kind to capsize a ship regardless of the cleverness of this move. But how could she let these fools get away with their superstitions? They saw the danger of the waves with some amount of clarity, yes, but deep down they thought: “This Storm hides a Dragon!” “This Storm hides a Wrathful Elf riding lightning and thunder to punish us!” “This Storm hides the toothy maw of the twin maelstroms Seness and Meness!” Ridiculous.
“Dragon! Dragon!” cried the crewmates, grabbing her arms once more in a panic.
“Shut up the lot of you! Shut up- I-”
But then… The Captain looked up and saw.
In a wave so high that it looked as boundless as the all-encompassing night – beginning from nowhere, in the unfathomable depths, and continuing upward forever into nowhere as well – something dark and gargantuan was stirring. It was visible only when lightning flashed silently beyond this unnatural horizon. Under the violent and rageful light, the wave became dark blue and revealed the contours of the black shape inside. The beast was twice the size of the Lucky Break. A long body, a long tail, a long neck, a head shaped like a battering ram, with two eyes far apart, only one eye visible in profile at all time.
Its enormous eye opened and the beast charged fast. Inside the eye, a pale blue iris dotted with white spots. It looked like the Radiant Road, the milky white galaxy in the black sky, named so because it resembled a path one could walk to meet the Gods themselves.
The Captain’s stomach dropped. Not because she was afraid of “The Dragon”. Not because she was afraid the beast would crash into her ship – though it certainly would. But only because, in the giant whale’s superstition-less eye, she saw True Terror matching her own.
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