#joras

But the dogs of the island? They loved Ikkaku.

She was never without Neptune if she went into any town, the lighthouse dog dutifully protecting her from any danger. Every dog in town would happily let her pet them if she approached. From the Newfies at the docks to the Borzois that belonged to the high class families to the mayor of Dunwich’s corgi, all of them would wag their tails and never so much as growled at her.

This drove the superstitious sorts crazy, because it implied that Ikkaku wasn’t some omen of ill luck, and they needed to believe that so they could blame their problems on something. So even though it should have been a sign by their standards that she was good, they refused to acknowledge it most of the time.

Ikkaku is very lucky that she wasn’t born during the days of Old Innsmouth, and that Arashi and Tomasu protected her against the superstations surrounding the circumstances of her birth that still lingered. Because she would have been doomed to a terrible fate had Joras still held fully to the Old Ways.

Opposite-sex twins were immediately seen as an ill omen. In fact, they weren’t even seen as twins. It was believed that only the male twin was actually human/merman, while the female was actually the spawn of an Old One who impregnated the mother to carry its child alongside her own. So, upon birth, the male twin was often welcomed into the community, at worst regarded with pity that he’d shared his mother’s womb with a parasite.

The female twin was not raised by the community. She wouldn’t be killed outright, as the people dared not risk the wrath of her Old One father. But she would be raised away from the others. There was a temple on Shutter Island where the Sect of the Kraken resided where the girl would be raised to adulthood (16) basically in seclusion so she could not cause harm to the mainlanders. Very few know exactly what the girl’s upbringing entailed, but there is much unsavory speculation, given the girl’s ultimate fate. When she came of age, this female twin was put in a boat and pushed out to sea, where she was delivered to the Great Dreamer to become one of his brides/concubines. It was believed that the Old Ones deigned to impregnate the mother in the first place for this exact purpose - to appease the Great Dreamer, as he was considered one of the most terrible among them.

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Rubbing sleep out of her eyes, a seven-year-old Ikkaku plodded down the creaking wooden steps from the second floor of the cottage into the kitchen. She’d only woken up once last night, which was a record for her. She’d thought she’d heard shouting and a loud bang, but when she’d gotten up to peer outside her bedroom window, all she’d seen was darkness and fog. Well, it was still better than her usual nightmares about the woods and spiders and rats in the walls. Maybe the cat Gramps had got for the lighthouse was doing his job warding away evil, even if he was a grumpy thing.

There was commotion in the kitchen, and Ikkaku tentatively poked her head around the doorway to find her grandfather whistling a jaunty tune as he fussed over whatever he was cooking on the stove. He must have heard her footsteps because he quickly looked over his shoulder and gave her a smile. “Mornin’ lass! Sleep well?”

“Uh, yeah, good enough,” she said shyly, taking a seat at the old wooden table. Ikkaku still wasn’t used to cheerful greetings in the morning. Wasn’t used to anyone being happy to see her, really. Yes, Gramps had always been the exception to everyone else on the island, but even he hadn’t been kind and welcoming for the past year. He’d been too deep in mourning over Arashi’s death. But he was…happier now, she supposed. Ikkaku wondered what had changed.

Tomasu nodded before scowling at the smoke that had begun rising out of the frying pan. Damn it, third blueberry pancake he’d burned so far. He’d fended for himself for twenty years – surely cooking breakfast for his precious granddaughter shouldn’t be so hard! “Good, good. Nothin’ woke ya during the night, did it?”

“Well…I thought I heard a bang, but I guess it was just my imagination,” she confessed, nose wrinkling a bit at the smell of burnt batter.

Giving up on the pancake, Tomasu set aside the mangled pastry for Neptune to chow down on later. The giant dog was busy patrolling the coastline, making sure the bodies they’d dumped over the cliffs last night didn’t wash in with the tides. The old sailor planned on taking Ikkaku beach combing later and the last thing she needed to see were limbs only half-eaten by the sharks. “Ah, that was just me. There was uh…a bear got close to the lighthouse. Fired a shot to scare it off.”

“Bears come up here?” she asked, surprised. She thought the black bears lived closer to the orchards around Bangor Crater near the opposite side of the island.

Giving up on cooking and instead throwing together a bowl of blueberries and cream for Ikkaku’s breakfast, Tomasu quickly replied, “There’s one bear that still haunts me, lass. A demon polar bear lookin’ for revenge!” A blatant lie – that beast had died decades ago and had been no real demon. Just a bear who’d eaten a fruit that had cursed him with the ability to hate. But it was still better than the truth.

Those damn fanatics had tried to sneak in and kidnap Ikkaku again. Third time since she’d come to live with him. Tomasu couldn’t believe the Joras had undergone such an overwhelming industrial revolution with leaps and bounds in technology, but still clung to the backwards belief that killing an innocent child would solve all their problems.

Dark eyes went wide as Ikkaku gasped. “There’s a demon polar bear after you?” she asked, voice fearful.

“Aye, but don’t ya worry, sweetheart,” Tomasu reassured her, placing the bowl in front of her and dropping a kiss to her forehead. “This ol’ sea dog too ‘em down once, and I’ll do it again t’ keep ya safe.”

“Keep…me safe?” she asked tentatively, eyeing her grandfather with disbelief. No one wanted to keep her safe. She was a cursed child. Spawn of the Old Ones. She should have died in the womb, not her brother. Everyone said so. Everyone knew so.

Everyone but Gramps, apparently.

A large, warm, calloused hand ruffled her curls, and Ikkaku looked up to find her grandfather smiling down at her reassuringly. “Yeah. Don’t listen t’ what the crackpots back in town tell ya, lass; I’ve sailed the Grand Line and most of the North Blue and ya know what? Yer the most precious treasure I’ve laid my eyes on.”

“I am?”

For the entire time that Ikkaku lived with him, Tomasu told Ikkaku that the people he killed in the middle of the night were mad cultists. That they were citizens of Joras who still held to the darker aspects of the Old Ways and wished to extinguish the lighthouse’s guiding Light and awaken the Great Dreamer.

This was not entirely true.

Yes, there were some who attempted to do that. Some madmen who believed that the island was better off destroyed by the Old Ones. But there were some who were foolish and curious and simply wanted to see if the legend was real, regardless of the possibility that people could die even if it wasn’t - after all, the waters around Joras are full of jagged rocks hidden beneath the waves, and the lighthouse guides the fishermen and trade ships to safe harbor. And there were even a few who felt any remnant of the Old Ways, Light Keeper included, needed to be erased from Joras’ present for the sake of erasing the history and reputation of Old Innsmouth and being accepted by the World Government.

However, the majority of the people he killed on the job, especially when he first took Ikkaku in, weren’t after the Light; they were after her. There were still too many who held to the superstitions about opposite-sex twins and especially one being stillborn. Ikkaku’s birth was seen as an ill omen and a potential determent to their future Marine hero, Ushi’s, career. The boy himself never dispelled this belief, even subtly encouraging his admirers and sycophants to hate her further and take matters into their own hands. Which many did, resulting in several deaths at Tomasu’s hands as fools attempted to break into the lighthouse to kidnap or murder the little girl. When Dunwich’s mayor, who was a childhood friend of Tomasu’s, discovered the killings, he agreed to keep it quiet; technically, a Light Keeper could kill anyone he felt was a threat to the Light, but outside of that, it would still be considered murder. However, as he was also technically preventing an equally heinous crime, he was willing to look the other way so long as the matter was kept quiet. 

Derry Forest is both home and prison to the Nameless Fear-Eater. It could once roam the island and the world unhindered, but It was shackled there with the Creator Turtle’s last breath when the eldritch spider murdered Him.

Thus It roams the woods, leeching off the fear and devouring the flesh of those foolish enough to wander into it. In the old days people (mostly children) would be led to the forest as sacrifices, but that has dwindled since Innsmouth renounced the Old Ways and rebranded itself as Joras. So the Nameless Fear-Eater has grown hungrier and hungrier, barely sustaining Itself on outsiders stupid enough to ignore the locals’ warnings and the occasional drunken fool.

But one day, a new sacrifice was finally brought. A little girl, led into the woods by her oldest brother and abandoned to the giant spider in hopes of erasing the curse her birth had brought on the family. For two days It watched her, following her lost wanderings and savoring her potent fear. It weaved subtle webs to make her even more afraid, marinating her flesh in terror so Its meal would be a true feast when It finally devoured her.

Except Its sadistic game was in fact Its downfall, as the Light Keeper had heard of his granddaughter’s disappearance and had shaken himself free of the despair-induced drunken stupor he’d been in for the past year. He charged into the forest, and just as the Nameless Fear-Eater had chosen to at last dine on its terrified prey, impaled a silver axe directly into Its clownlike face. The blessed metal caused It excruciating agony and crippled It, leaving It blind and too weak to feed anymore. Its spider legs twitched as black ichor trickled onto the forest floor, unable to even scream in pain as Tomasu carried Ikkaku out of Derry Forest and to the safety of the lighthouse.

Borzois.