typingoverworld:sadoeuphemist: deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: No one can breathe blue water. But
typingoverworld:sadoeuphemist: deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: No one can breathe blue water. But down deep enough, where no light reaches, black water runs through your lungs like silk. Fedge brushed away a layer of dust and eased out a long, flat box from beneath a pile of moldering tomes. “Now what’s this?” she muttered. Behind her, old Pforfenoff was puttering about the Necromancer’s undercroft, peering at the shelves of curios through a cloudy monocle. Fedge pulled off the lid, and gazed down into into an absolute darkness that seemed to go on forever without end. “Oh.” She turned to see Pforfenoff blanch, the monocle dangling limply from his fingers. “Bathyssian silk,” he muttered. “Ghastly stuff.” Fedge had already let the box clatter on the floor and was backpedaling away from it, clutching her protection charm in one hand, not taking her eyes of the box of void. “Bathyssian? It’s dangerous?” “Oh! No, no no no.” Pforfenoff shook his tonsured head and disappeared the monocle with a flick of his fingertips. “It’s quite safe. Quite. My apologies for alarming you. It’s simply the process for harvesting the silk that’s an abomination. The silk itself is …” He gestured with his staff. “Honestly, you should take the opportunity to examine it, now that you’ve dug it out. A truly exquisite fabric, I’m told. The sale and production of it is forbidden, of course, but otherwise …” He shrugged. “I suppose it’s a luxurious thing to have.” Fedge took a cautious step back towards the box. The blackness was indeed a fabric, she could see that now, the shape of the darkness irregular and draped over the edge of the box from when she had dropped it. She crouched down, trying to make out the edges of the cloth, force it to take on a definitive form, but the darkness refused to resolve into anything but a pool of the purest black. She lowered her fingers to brush along the surface of the silk. It almost rippled. The touch of it was cool beneath her fingers, and then colder as she pressed deeper, almost numbing. Fedge closed her hands upon the Bathyssian silk and drew it out of the box, fine and sleek between her fingers like water, flowing, but with a curious weight to it as she gathered up the fabric in one arm. It was not at all heavy, but seemed to press down on her flesh regardless, suffocating. Fedge shook her head and shuddered and carefully tucked the silk back into the box. “Remarkable the sheer quantity of miscellanea these dark mages manage to accumulate before being ungraciously overthrown,” mused Pforfenoff. “I’m working on a theory of it. How the drive for forbidden knowledge necessarily manifests as hoarding, as the accumulation of all this supposed ‘physical evidence’ of their arcane power serves as defense against charges of delusional fanaticism -” “Yeah, uh-huh, all right.” Fedge stood and unconsciously rubbed her hand on her shirt. “How’s the silk made, then?” “Ah. Yes. Well, as you might expect, Bathyssian silk is harvested from Bathys. It was first discovered in … hmm, was it ‘96? When Horganfeld and Ardur unveiled their bathysphere and marked the first human exploration into Bathys. We’d dredged up artifacts and animal remains and so on, but no one had ever gone down there for themselves.” Pforfenoff paused to plant his staff firmly on the ground, and then rested his considerable mass atop it, taking the load off his feet. “Anyway, it was a hash, of course. No one had ever ventured down there before. Horganfeld had a panic attack three-quarters of the way down, and the waves above shook the boat and the boat shook the tether and they were rattled around in there something terrible. They had been in Bathys for about a minute when both of them were gibbering, begging to be pulled back up. And then, well - the sphere failed.” Pforfenoff fished around in his sleeves for his pipe and ruminatively packed it with baleweed. “The last thing the surface team heard, through Ardur’s familiar, was Ardur talking very calmly, very sedately. She said that there was nothing to worry about at all, that the darkness was breathable, perfectly breathable, and that she and Horganfeld were fine and were just going to have a little walk around down there and see what they could see. And then they heard a sound like her choking on something, and then Ardur’s familiar dropped dead.” Fedge nodded over to the box. “I’m guessing that there was the darkness.” “Hrm. Indeed. Very astute.They hoisted the bathysphere back up, recovered both of the bodies. And in their lungs they found something fascinating. This gorgeous black silk. Their lungs were full of it. Threaded through all the little branches and the, erm - well, I forget what they’re called. The little branches and the nodes. All filled up with that beautiful black silk.” Fedge grimaced, curling her fingers against the rough fabric of her trousers. “So that stuff over there’s from their lungs?” “Oh, no, no. Don’t be absurd.” Pforfenoff shook his head through curling clouds of smoke. “The original Bathyssian silk is in a museum somewhere. Menthias, I believe. Wasn’t more than a fist-size knot of it, altogether. There was naturally some interest in harvesting more of the silk, but the necessary requirements made it prohibitively difficult. First, you needed to get something with lungs down there, still breathing. Then, you needed to expose it to the Bathyssian darkness. It takes a considerable amount of precision artificing to create a bathysphere capable of withstanding the incredible pressure, and then once you open it up to the water at those depths, the sudden change in pressure tends to irreparably crush the entire thing. The logistics of it were absurd.” He tapped the stem of his pipe against his chin. “There was some experimentation with weighting down animated corpses, dropping them down there and reeling them back in. The trouble was, corpses don’t breathe. And they can’t simulate breathing to the degree necessary to draw in the silk through the lungs.” Fedge paced around the box of silk, staring down into it as if trying to peer into the Bathyssian depths. “That’s a lot of silk in there. Maybe twenty yards of it.” “Mm. I’ll defer to your expertise on that matter.” Fedge put her hands on her hips. “So. What’s the secret forbidden harvesting method, then?” Pforfenoff tugged pensively at the long hairs of his beard. “Well, remember the requirements. Something with lungs down there, breathing, so that it can breathe in all that fine Bathyssian silk.” “Wait. Something with lungs breathing down there? Like …” Fedge looked at him in disbelief. “What, like a whale?” “That was the traditional method, yes. Hunt down and Dominate a whale, attach some chains to it, put a single thought into its mind: swim down, down, down, down as far as you can go. And then after a sufficient period of waiting, haul the carcass back in and cut it open and harvest all that silk out of it. Still a terrifically expensive operation, but given the size of a whale’s lungs compared to whatever you would be fitting into a bathysphere …” He exhaled a drifting cloud of smoke. “They managed to balance the books on that.” “Ugh.” Fedge looked over the dismal vaulted cellar cluttered high with unlabelled phials and dusty artifacts and lurking secrets. That one box held a whale within its depths, gutted and split open, and she did not want to imagine the untold histories still waiting to be uncovered. “Guess we’re gonna be finding a lot more of these ‘abominations’ before the day’s done.” “Most likely.” Pforfenoff hopped down from his staff and tucked his pipe away, rematerializing his monocle. “‘Tis gruesome work, grave-robbing, but the dead are dead, and yet still a living must be made!” Fedge was crouched fitting the cover back onto the box, which she laid carefully atop a table. She turned back to glare at him. “We’re not in a grave! Idiot wizard built a tower out in the middle of nowhere and then went and got himself killed. It’s his, uh … it’s a - it’s an estate!” “Hm. Well.” Pforfenoff squinted through his clouded lens, scanning the shelves for further treasures. “That’s certainly one name for it, I suppose.” This was absolutely amazing. You build a whole world in just a few pages of text. -- source link
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