Interlude DCXLVI: Ferryman's Passage
Ferryman's Passage
-By Diana, the Sea Sprite
The sea surges all around us, its voice reverberating through the timbers of the ship. It has been a cornucopia for the children of man since long before they first learned to sow seeds into the earth, its currents paths to carry their boats to all the world's lands. To the sea flows every river. Perhaps it is the sea's voice that children sleeping beneath their mother's hearts hear, and that is why they cry so loudly at being drawn forth. To those of us blessed by birth or circumstance to swim beneath the sea as easily as we breathe air, the sea reveals a whole new world of life and wonder beneath its waves, filled with creatures mighty and clever, swift and deadly. Is it any wonder then, that in the time of mankind's beginning, they looked to the sea and saw the domain of the dead, both a return to the world and a passage beyond it?
It is to those days of dawn that we must look if we are to understand the Ferryman and his Daughters, for though they draw power from the Endless Ocean where the Halls of Judgement reside, they are not of it, and never have they been. One thousand times and one thousand times again, crude rafts and boats hollowed out by fire were launched into the water bearing the newly dead, with offerings of food and drink, tools, and weapons to use in the Otherworld. So did the tears of men mingle with the brine of the sea, for death in those times was an even more constant companion than it is in this age, when the forests and mountains were untamed and filled with the legacies of elder things.
Not even the God of the Depths himself now remembers the name of the one who first begged him to return in some form those dead too soon taken from the world, but whatever the name of this bold petitioner, the god was so moved by their passion that he took the body newly set onto the waters and breathed into it new life, that of the sea from which all things spring.
When the first of these new-woken came to the water's edge to speak to the kin they had lost, men were sore frightened and they drove them away with sharp bone spears and heavy curses, and the sea was in great turmoil. The Lord of the Depths was wroth, but he did not then rage and send fel tides at the people, for he of all gods knew best their fears of the unknown. So did the Ferryman take a form of brine and sea foam, with a coral crown upon his brow, and so he stepped among the Children of Man for the first time. Much did He teach them then, of the weaving of nets to better catch the bounty of the waters, and the carving of better boats to cut through the waves, and much did He learn in turn, of poetry and passion, of art and love.
It was in those days that the first of Galaetea's sisters were born to mortal women, and the sea folk that were spreading out from the shore and claiming more of the seas for themselves. Some were even born to the Ferryman's Dreams carried by the currents. Alas, that not all was such gentle dreaming in the shallows.
Foul things lurked in the deep waters, twisted and alien beings, their nature far removed from the beasts of the woods or the spirits of the hills, and they claimed dominion over all the waters touched. Think thee gentle reader upon what which I have revealed at the beginning of this account. All life is touched by the sea.
What followed was not a war only of the sea folk, whom many called tritons for the three-headed spears they carry to battle, nor was it even just a war of men who would have dominion over the seas, but a war of all life against those who would twist and pervert it to their own ends. Many battles were fought then that spewed great storms upon sea and land that, if not for the shepherding of Father Sky who is no more, would have scoured the people from the earth.
Some of the tribes of men then choose to move west into the lands of the Forest-Kin, and of those journeys and wars the Ferryman knows little, save that men came to revere the deep woods and not fear them. Of Father Sky and the Earth Mother, they spoke less and less with the passage of years, and man, having long since began burying their dead in cairns of stone, took to calling the Lord of the Sea by a new name, Merling King, for the people who came from the waters and claimed to know no king save Him.
The God saw this and he sorrowed for the loss of His divine kin, but accepted the passage as was the nature of the Ever-Changing Sea. Slept did He during the time of waning, when magic and miracles seemed the dreams of another age, and commanded the tritons to travel beyond the borders of the world rather than perish to this ethereal drought. Now the time is turned, the age of magic come again, and triton and man worship once more at the same shrines, of stone, of wood, and even of the God's own blood shed during the secret battles in the depths.
-An Introduction to Old Allies, New Ways Written in the Year 292 After the Westerosi Reckoning
OOC: Diana has not been given a lot of scholarly tasks so I figured this was a chance to explore that, and a good opportunity to explore that side of her character.
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