#suuli

Under a fisherman's awning

Amidst the gull cries and fisher calls, hoarse laughter rings out from under the protection of a salt-crusted canvas tarp. Suuli smiles sheepishly, happy to have the dying man’s happiness at last.

The ocean smelled worse than she imagined. That’s what she told him. Seashore funk, fish heads, and seaweed sex, it reminded her more of boiled cabbage than anything.

Despite his circumstances, he laughed.

“Wouldn’t recommend gettin’ any closer then, young lady. I smell like death.”

Words to accompany a whiff of warning; ocean musk from the port mix with a smell so pungent, so barbed, it would be enough to make milk curdle; it is the smell of flesh free from life.

She scrunches her nose more in jest than in genuine disgust.

“And what about life?” She prods.

“What’d you mean?”

“I mean, if you smell like death, what does life smell like? What did your life smell like?”

Stronger Legs

On the crest of the hill Suuli pauses to shift the weight of her pack. It has become easier to bear despite its increasing weight. Before, the weight of a sleeping pad and two days worth of food was enough to exhaust her after only a few hours. Now, the horizon of her own limits is far from view.

A Clifftop Manor

The widow was surprisingly lively for someone preparing for their own funeral. Suuli watched her flit back and forth between her writing desk and window, wry after being dragged from the city gates and straight into the estate of the late local real estate mogul.

“I trust you’re familiar with wills in solemn form.”

She was, indeed, not familiar with wills “in solemn form”.

“Uh, well, as a Kehn, I can’t be the executioner of a will. It would be immoral.”

“I’m well aware,” the widow ushers Suuli towards the writing desk with one hand and, wetting an ink stone with the other.

“You are responsible for an execution of a different nature. Sign here,” she taps a lacquered fingernail on a piece of parchment and Suuli, unable to get a word in edgewise, dutifully obeys.

“Excellent. The funeral is scheduled four days from now. A room has been prepared for you in the meantime. I expect you in my personal chambers tomorrow evening groomed and… washed.”

Mu’hana, The City of Pearls

Plumes of smoke rises from the city in great belows of iridescent purple, not from any individual chimney or flare, but from the city as a whole.

No one had believed her when she first spotted the smoke, only a trickling stream of haze at the time. Even the elder Kehn of the Artel couldn’t see it at the time. How could a child without her horns be privy to the fate of a city leagues away?