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pokeprism · 1 year

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Sinker and No Line

This is my first short story! This story’s production cycle started 3/23/2023 and ended 4/7/2023! The word count for this story is 2,466!

Any questions, comments, concerns that you might have are best served to my Tumblr askbox!

The story itself is below the cut~!

The usually sleepy courthouse in Deepmire is full of guests today. The accused, a young twentysomething by the name of Zax Erickson, stands accused of associating with people outside Deepmire, but even worse in the jury’s eyes is that those people included the undead and their necromancing masters. Despite the nature of the accusations, no out-of-towners were brought into the trial due to the trial’s ‘special nature’... A textbook witch hunt.

An anxious jury quietly surveys Zax, the accused party, as he sits directly ahead of the judge, Caleb C Justice. Caleb has been Deepmire’s local judge since the most recent (and rigged in his favor) election, and he has a reputation to uphold…

Caleb clears his throat, and looks at Zax’s face. “Do you, Zax Erickson, admit to conversing with necromancers and their minions on friendly terms?”

Zax wrings his fingers. “Y-Yes…”

“And that our witnesses' testimony about your ventures into the Accursed Boglands were true as well?”

The accused pauses for a moment. Zax’s eyes narrow. “I never went there of my own accord. It was-”

Caleb rises from his seat as he loudly sets his hands on the podium, quickly silencing Zax mid sentence.

The judge raises his voice. “By your admission of speaking to unholy folk, I’m forced to turn you over to Deepmire’s Sage to be dealt your sentence, Zax. You’ve made too much trouble in town already by bringing unholy doctrine back with you.”

A tense silence edges into the courthouse. Much like the way in which Caleb procured his seat of power, a good portion of the jury slotted in upon hearing that the local oddball was in the hot seat, once again flying in the face of the state’s ‘dedication to true justice’.

Zax, already on high alert and worried he might get a harsher sentence if he speaks again, opts to quietly tremble in his seat as Caleb settles back into his seat.

Caleb looks directly into Zax’s eyes with a stoic expression. “Zax Erickson, you are at the mercy of Deepmire’s Sage. You are sentenced to a transformation at sunset two days from now.”

Zax trembles in the brief silence. At least it wasn’t a death sentence…

Caleb stands back up. “This affair is adjourned…”

The guards on duty in the courthouse escort Zax back to his holding space, his chains swaying as he walks in step with the guards. Caleb eyes Zax as the young man keeps pace with his escorts, then cracks a crooked smile in the quiet of his empty courtroom.

Two days have passed. The sun nears the western horizon as a crowd forms at the Deepmire’s Eastern docks around the city’s infamous transformation block. The last person who was sentenced to transformation was the former mayor of Deepmire, an advocate for teaching magic in public schools, before being confined to a monstrous new form for the crime of spouting ‘unholy doctrine’. So regardless of Caleb’s wishes, Zax’s transformation will be the first of many carried out by his phony sense of justice, and he knows this too well. Standing at the foot of the transformation block is Deepmire’s local sage and holy man, simply known as Seer Deepmire. Supposedly having been gifted his incredible magical power by the disguised supernatural he helped in his youth, Seer is a force in Deepmire’s conscience, but in this moment, he’s silently watching the procession carrying the accused.

At the head of the procession is a carriage containing the carriage driver and Judge Caleb C Justice, who came under so-called ‘professional obligation’, and behind the both of them is a wheeled platform with Zax, the accused, chained to it via some metal staples imbedded into the platform itself. Zax, having had two days to mentally prepare, is quietly sitting in the center of the platform swaying with each bump and ditch in the road below. The guards around the platform keep pace with it while walking around armed to deter any funny business from happening at the transformation. Zax, who has been absentmindedly looking at each of the dozen guards around him, shifts his gaze towards the docks. His anxiety begins to ramp up as he sees the size of the crowd gathering on both of the docks surrounding the ritual site…

Caleb’s carriage turns out of the way of the accused’s wheeled platform into a carriage sized slot close to the soon-to-be ritual sentencing. The crooked judge will get a clear view…

Now at the foot of the transformation block, the guards surrounding the wheeled platform stop to watch the contraption roll into position. The platform comes to a stop, and Zax, his back to the ocean, snaps to attention as Seer magically teleports to a place in front of Zax on the platform.

Seer, magically projecting his utterances to those within the vicinity of him, clears his throat, then looks into Zax’s eyes. “Son of Erickson, you sit before me guilty of association with unholy folk.”

Zax stares into Seer’s eyes, softly trembling in the silence after his first statement.

“For you, I believe the best new existence for you is one spent at the bottom of the sea!”

Seer raises his staff as it glows with arcane energy. The motion magically grabs Zax by his chest and lifts him up, to a point where the chains binding him to the platform are at their limit. Zax is powerless to stop the sage’s whims…

Seer begins waving the staff in a rhythmic pattern, readying the cocktail of spells Zax’s sentence entails. As the sage finishes preparing the magical sequence, Seer points the tip of the staff directly at Zax’s heart and fires a beam of pure magical energy. The glowing energy passes straight through Zax’s shirt, striking him in the core of his being, and begins to radiate throughout his body, making his whole being glow with a strange sea-green energy. The onlookers near to the transformation block squint at the glowing form of the accused, and at the peak of the transformation’s brightness, Seer raises his staff once again.

With a simple upward flick of Seer’s wrist, Zax’s chains snap as his reforming body is lifted slightly higher than it was a moment ago, and within two swift motions of Seer’s staff later, the mage magically forms a metallic crate around the accused and sends it flying towards the sea. Everyone in the vicinity around the transformation block follows the crate with their eyes, but even the onlookers at the ends of the piers can’t see where the barrel lands…

Out of the view of anyone in Deepmire and miles away from where Zax and his container were launched, the metal crate that the accused is in begins to lose altitude before dropping into the sea, quickly sinking like a stone into the sea as the sun fully disappears behind the horizon.

By the time the sun emerges from the eastern horizon the next morning, Zax, still inside the metal crate that formed around him, begins to slowly awaken. Confused by the near complete darkness around him, he takes his dominant hand and slides it across his forehead, revealing a spot of soreness as his hand gets close to his right temple. Still in almost complete darkness, Zax begins to feel around for the borders of the space he’s in…

Zax quietly speaks to himself as his hand glides over the surface in front of him. “What in the-”

Zax silences himself as he feels a strange indentation in what’s containing him. “... Am I in a coffin?” His eyes narrow as he attempts to see something…

A soft blue glow enters the space that Zax is in. The light reveals the inner indentations of the metal crate to Zax.

Zax begins to quietly read out what’s just in front of him. “ Hmm… ‘Zax Erickson, doomed to a life in the sea’.....”

He looks just below the sentence, and notices an image of a small fish below the statement. Zax’s mind suddenly freezes. He sets both hands on the now illuminated panel ahead of him, but instantly notices the webbing between his digits and jets backwards as a result, colliding with the back side of the crate. As Zax’s mind switches into hyperawareness, he very quickly comes to notice his scaly skin, lack of hair, new ear like protrusions, a tail, and a mess of glowing markings on his body in rapid succession.

The anxious, fearful, and frankly disoriented Zax then screams without too much thought, his bioluminescent markings lighting up even more at the peak of his volume…

His mind begins to wind down as his scream ceases to be, gradually bringing his breath and heart rate back to an average pace over the course of several ins-and-outs.

Zax heaves a sigh of relief. “At least nothing here will wanna eat me…” He softly says.

Zax then feels a knock on the upper corner of his odd container. He flips over and crawls toward where the sound came from and strikes the container in a similar spot. “Hello? I’m kinda trapped in here…” Zax says.

There’s a silence for a moment, then a set of three lighter knocks on the container, accompanied by a simple, slightly muffled message. “We’re gonna getcha out! Just give us a sec!”

Zax sighs in relief. “Thank the gods..!”

Zax makes out a fair bit of what those around him are saying…

“I wonder how this fish face got stuck in there…” one voice calmly says.

Another voice scoffs. “Did you NOT see the markings on this crate?! They’re clearly someone who came off the transformation block!”

Yet another voice chimes in. “Whoever they are, I’m the one with the cutting power, you two! Just lemme line it up…”

Zax heart rate ramps up at the mention of ‘cutting power’. Zax curls up into a fetal position as his anxiety returns with a vengeance, making his whole being twitch at the thought of being cut to ribbons…

Outside the crate, the person who mentioned their cutting power winds up to swing his sharp edged arm, and within an instant, the limb sweeps forward with immense upwards force.

The metal crate, previously embedded into the seabed, is ripped out of the ocean floor and cleaved clean in half, all while leaving Zax completely unharmed. A textbook embodiment of a skilled cleave. In the same moment of the masterful cleave, the air pocket inside the metal crate ruptures and rapidly escapes from the depths, exposing Zax’s new form to the lukewarm sea.

Zax snaps out of his fetal position near-instantaneously once in contact with the water just before the two halves of the metal crate settle back onto the ocean floor. He then faints from the shock…

The person who just freed Zax and his two cohorts, confused at the stranger’s sudden lack of motion, all drift close to Zax as he floats in place. The trio all get a good three hundred sixty degree look at this stranger as they slowly circle around them.

A serpentine sea dragon, the one who freed Zax in one stroke, senses something magical in one of the stranger’s pockets, and starts drifting closer to investigate…

The tentacled member of the surveyors, seeing their comrade’s motion and deciding to throw some caution into the current, jets to a place in front of his draconic cohort.

“Levi! We literally have no idea what this guy can do, so maybe let’s NOT get too close, alright?”

Levi rolls his eyes. “Well, you didn’t stop Brook…”

The cephalopod quickly looks over his shoulder to see Brook looming above the still motionless fishfolk at a place even closer to the stranger.

The merperson’s tail twitches before turning to face their two teammates. “Guys, chill out. They’re unconscious. They just got their senses overloaded…”

The tentacled person crosses their arms and puts on a pouty expression…

Brook swims to a place between this cephalopod friend and the out-cold stranger, with the stranger at Brook’s back, before speaking again. “Let’s just wait for this fellow to wake up, Doc. Moving them in this state would be rude, and we’ll learn more from talking to them.”

Doc’s anger subsides, but his arms remain crossed. “Fair enough…”

Levi’s attention drifts beyond Brook’s shoulder as the stranger begins to stir. Brook and Doc see the sudden motion of Levi’s eyes and turn to face the stranger as they re-enter consciousness…

Zax adjusts his position to have his feet face the ocean floor before catching sight of the trio watching him. He stammers as he addresses them. “Erm, h-hello?”

Levi is the first to respond. “Howdy, stranger! My name is Levi, and I’m the dragon that gotcha out of that crate. What’s your story?”

Brook greets Zax with a silent hand wave.

Doc simply looks on at Zax with a cautious expression…

Zax is taken aback, both by his onlookers’ appearances and their largely kind reactions to his presence. “Well… I just came off the transformation block in Deepmire, and I don’t know where to go…”

Brook and Levi look towards Doc.

Doc’s eyes narrow. “... Fine, I’ll fact check that.”

Doc sets his upper two tentacles on his temples and looks deep into Zax’s eyes. Zax merely matches the stare as Doc magically reads the stranger’s memory feed.

After a moment, Doc closes his eyes, then laughs. “I was SO right!!!”

Levi, annoyed, loudly sighs.

Brook drifts forward toward Levi before putting a hand on his shoulder. “Well, at least we know that this fishfolk isn’t any trouble, right?”

Doc nods to Brook, then shifts to a place just in front of Zax. “Anyways, you’re Zax, yes?”

A chill goes through Zax’s system. His name WAS mentioned before his transformation… “... Yes. I go by Zax.”

Brook finds a chance to speak. “Well, what’s stopping us from taking Zax to our humble abode for now? We do have a fourth sleeping chamber that’s not in use…”

Doc, Levi, and Zax all exchange looks.

Levi is the first to regain his bearing. “That’s not a bad idea, Brook! I mean hey, I took you two to live with me, so how much would it hurt to get another weirdo in there?”

Levi turns to face Zax. “So hey, follow us to our place, new friend.”

“We’ll get you acquainted with life down here!” Doc interjects.

Zax pauses for a moment to think. His eyes sparkle with hope as he smiles in acceptance of the trio’s offer.

Levi, Doc, and Brook all smile in turn. Levi gestures for the others to follow, then snakes through the water in the direction of their home. The rest of the party obeys Levi’s gesture as they begin to wonder what this new living situation will be like going forward…

#Jamie W. (Pokeprism)#short story #original fiction #writing #my writing #sinker and no line #4/19/2023

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wabashmfginc · 2 years

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