A Piece of Folklore

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.