Motherfucking Pirates (Part 2)

wirewalking's house has decided to try and rot out from under her.  She writes amazing stories and makes really tasty cookies and caramels, and she is offering books  and baked goods to help defray the costs of, well, her house breaking.  She is offering them here

shadesong is still trying to fund the bionic upgrades to her poor clumsy kitty  who broke her arm recently.  Halfway there, but a new round of auctions is bound to go up here.

Table of Malcontents can be reached here .

“Waiting for your sweetie?” 

he found he had to fight himself to fight the pirates that slithered out of the dark around him and dragged him to the boat, and by the time he had himself mastered, it was too late. 

Gem saw this all from the dunes as she came running, her sword in hand, but the boat was already halfway out to the Strigiform and wisdom told her that any sound she made would only make Quay’s chances worse.  She watched in the moonlight as the Strigiform glittered and rippled in the moonlight and then was gone, as if invisible.  Yes, it could do that, and you do not want to fucking know how or why, so don’t ask.

For a week, no one else knew about lovely Quay’s fate.  His actual sweetie went so far as to check the lair of the monster in Lamp Cave for his remains, but turned back at the last and lived a long, healthy life because of it.  The others searched and combed the beach, and peered with accusation at the rocks where sometimes selkies sang, but the selkies weren’t around to answer back, so no one got any wisdom on the poor boy’s fate.  His brother Qualm was long out on the water, because both of them were fisher boys, and he peered into the water until the sun made him half blind, but the face he saw below the waves was his own.  The resemblance was close, mind you, poor Qualm and Quay were twins, and while they were not identical, they were close.  Not so close that a stranger could not tell one from the other, sun and moon that they were, but close enough.  Except that without Quay around to be the sun, the light of the moon went out, and Qualm searched, hardly ate and rarely slept, not that he was ever that good at eating or sleeping.  Grief and worry gnawed on him the way he imagined the crabs must be gnawing on his brother.

We’ve got to leave poor Qualm, though, for a little and follow
Gem into town.  Gem had been three years at sea from her thirteenth birthday, and no one in town knew, yet, that she’d come back.  Gem had followed in her auntie Nina’s sailing footsteps and come back, well, not quite a woman grown, but definitely something different than how she left.  It’s complicated to explain, so let me show you what I mean.