This is a piece of In-universe folklore written by a friend/contributor to the projects by the name of Jonathan Duckworth. There will be a couple of these over time to help give a look at the sort of stories that inspire the people within the setting.
The Tale of the Two Fisherwomen and the Unlung
(A Lesson for Children)
The tribals tell a story that may be of edification for the
children of the empire. The story goes that on a lesser island that has long
since been swallowed up by the ages and the sea’s foam, there lived two
fisherwomen. Their names were Lumang and Kunang. Kunang was short and
boisterous and let her hair, which should have been quite beautiful, turn to
knots, while Lumang was tall, soft-spoken, and sad eyed. She kept her hair
oiled and tied neatly. From childhood they fished together, they built their
huts next to one another, and even married a pair of brothers so that they
would not be apart when living every third moon with their in-laws, as was the
custom of this island. They lived a simple but happy life. The reefs around the
island were blessed with bountiful fish, and for many generations hunger was
unknown to its people. But all this changed one year when Lumang and Kunang
were young women—an exceptionally long Sa came to pass, ripping the clouds from
the sky as one sweeps away cobwebs. For many moons the reefs were always
plunged in light, and the fish were driven mad by the constant trailing on of
their own shadows, and too frightened in the clear water of predators to even
eat. So the fish deserted the reefs, and the people began to starve.
At this point it should be said that she was lazy and her
chi weak, Kunang was a clever young woman. There was a spring on the island—a
sacred spring from which the islanders derived the greatest share of their
drinking water. The spring was guarded by a spirit called an Unlung, a creature
not quite of Kios but also not quite of The Dark Realm, born instead in one of
the deep wells that exist on the edge of The Dark Realm . The Unlung was a
dangerous but fair creature, allowing the islanders to take water from her
spring provided they paid the proper respects, only taking as much water as
they needed in specially-blessed sea-shells and never touching the water with
anything else, or the Unlung would eat their Chi and leave the husks as warnings
to others. But even knowing this, Kunang suggested that she and Lumang fish
from the spring.
“This is foolishness, sister-mine,” Lumang said. “Everyone
knows that the Unlung guards that spring and will not allow anything but a
shell to enter it. If we were to put our hooks down—”
“I have already thought of that,” Kunang said, “It is said
that the Unlung will only allow us to dip our shells in the water to take that
which we need to sustain us. I see no reason why we cannot take fish as well as
water, for that is what we need to sustain us now.”
“But how will we take fish from the spring with a shell?”
Lumang asked.
Kunang explained her plan, which Lumang accepted, for Lumang
was too hungry to argue with her friend’s cleverness. First they found the
widest, deepest shell they could in one of the reefs and then had it blessed by
the island’s priestesses. Once this was accomplished, Kunang weaved a line from
the reef-spider webs—a strong material, but so thin that is almost invisible,
thus the Unlung would not notice it—and with the shell and the webbing made a
tool something like a bucket-and-rope in a poor farm’s well.
“So we have this contraption—but the fish will not bother
with it without bait, and we cannot put bait into the water without angering
the Unlung,” said Lumang.
But even here Kunang had a plan. She waited by the spring
for the salamanders to come onto the banks to sun themselves and recharge the
fire in their throats, and once they were on the banks she captured several of
them and chopped off their tails, tying the tails to the shell with more spider
line so that they would not drift away when put in the water.
“These salamanders and their chi are native to the
spring—the Unlung will not notice the difference,” she explained.
Now came the last part of the plan: Lumang’s part. Lumang,
tall and strong in body and chi, operated the shell and line, dropping it into
the spring, waiting for the fish to smell the salamander tails and then, once
the fish had started to nibble, pulling it up with such force and speed that
the fish would be dragged out of the water and thrown to the shore. The plan
worked. Thanks to Kunang’s cleverness and Lumang’s strength, the pair caught no
less than ten fish in an hour, each one longer and heavier than the last.
“That’s enough, we have enough fish for a week now,” said
Lumang. “Longer if we crush the bones into flour.”
But Kunang was too excited. “Enough for us, perhaps. But
what of the rest of the island? Think of it, Lumang, we could feed
everyone—they’d all be in our debt; we could be the queens of the island!”
And though Lumang felt great trepidation in her breast, she
also desired to feed her family and her neighbors and so continued. Five more
fish were dredged up by her mighty arms, but then came the sixteenth fish. This
one was so large that it swallowed the shell, and when Lumang pulled it pulled
back, dragging Lumang into the water. Kunang watched from the banks as Lumang
disappeared, horrified that her friend was gone.
But the bubbles kept coming up. Then blood started to rise,
staining the pristine surface of the spring. Lumang’s beautifully oiled hair
breached the water. She was dragging up the dead fish—a fish almost twice her
body’s length, so large that one would wonder how it could fit in such a small
spring—by its tail, while clenching her bloody stone knife in her teeth.
“They’ll sing songs of you, Lumang!” Kunang cheered,
kissing her friend on her lips, concerned not one bit over the taste of fish
blood that covered every inch of her now.
For a moment, Lumang’s sad eyes became happy, like two
perfectly carved pieces of blue coral in the sunlight.
But Kunang’s cheering turned to screaming, and then the
screaming died too. Rising from the spring water, coming to tower over the
fisherwomen was the Unlung.
She was fearsome and beautiful, pale as a fish’s belly.
Instead of legs she had a long, scaly tail like a serpent’s. She had five
eyes—two on each side of her egg-shaped head and a big, burning one at the
center—, six breasts, and too many arms to count. The arms started were a
person’s arms would be, but more arms grew along her side, becoming
increasingly smaller until by the fifteenth row one could hardly distinguish
the arms from little white hairs. When she spoke, she spoke with the voice of a
woman underwater, and so it was difficult at first for the fisherwomen to
understand her. The fisherwomen put water in their ears, and then they
understood her perfectly.
“You have committed a great sin,” the Unlung said. The
fisherwomen tried to speak, but the Unlung waved her thousand hands and they
fell silent. She picked up Kunang’s device and inspected it. “Very clever,” she
said. And even now, even frightened close to death, Kunang felt pride at this
compliment. “Who crafted this?” she asked.
Kunang had a chance to accept her responsibility, but she
was too frightened to speak. But Lumang, being the braver of the two, spoke up.
“It was my fashioning, Great One.”
The Unlung did not believe her. “You? No, I sense no
cleverness in you. Are you sure it was not your friend?”
Now Kunang had a second chance to do what was right, but
still she was too afraid and Lumang spoke up for her.
“I’m the clever one, Great One, it was my folly that
despoiled your spring. And besides, I touched the water, not her.”
The Unlung knew better, but she was awed by Lumang’s bravery
and loyalty to her friend, however misplaced it may have seemed.
“I will give both of you the chance to beg for your lives,”
she told them. “But only one may keep their life, while the other will be paid
with death.”
Now Lumang was silent. She had no interest in begging for
her life, and she would rather die than live without her friend Kunang. But
Kunang was different. Kunang was quick to jump on the chance of saving her
life, and so supplicated herself before the Unlung. Kunang did not have time to
even cry out a farewell to Lumang before the Unlung descended on her, plunging
her long tongue through Lumang’s navel and sucking out her chi as a woman sucks
the juice from a fruit. She ate Lumang’s flesh and bones and hair, leaving only
a shriveled skin. Kunang wept, horrified that her friend was gone and would not
even pass on to the Sea of Chi. She prepared to run from the spring, but the
Unlung held her there.
“I did not speak idly when I said one of you would be paid
with death,” the creature said, pinning Lumang’s husk to Kunang’s back as if it
were a cape. “Through my belly is direct passage to the Sea of Chi, your friend
will be happy. But you—you must live with what you have done. You will walk
throughout this island with your friend’s skin on your back. Everyone will see
you and know that you have let your friend die, that you are a coward without
honor.”
And so the Unlung sent Kunang off. Kunang’s husband would
not touch her anymore. Her parents would not speak with her. When the fish
eventually returned to the reefs, they would not even nibble Kunang’s hook. So
it passed that a woman who dreamed of being queen of the island became its
lowest outcast. She survived on tree roots and rainwater and the charity of strangers.
As she grew older, the skin on her back seemed to grow longer and heavier.
There came a time when the skin came to outweigh Kunang herself, and she could
no longer move. Pinned, unloved, and broken, Kunang looked up to the sky. It
was Fu now, a very severe Fu indeed, and the rain started to fall. She opened
her mouth to the rain and let it fill her, now longing for death. But when
death came, the weight of the skin held her chi in her body, keeping her far
from the Sea of Chi and her friend, Lumang. Even after the island sank below
the water, it’s said—by the tribals of the lesser islands—that Kunang still
exists somewhere deep in the sea, lost to honor but perhaps not to mercy, for
there may come a day when Lumang, eternal friend, comes to collect her. Or so
the tribals say. Wise children should know that Kunang would not have to wait
if she’d done the right thing in the first place.
