Writing for The Silt Verses roleplaying game

It was once a prosperous town, this community clinging to the floodbanks of the broad, winding river. But with time the meatworks were shut down, and the wool packers, and the canneries, and with them the lifeblood of the community drained away.

Faith and community are interchangeable, one and the same. Those with faith sit at the center of the community, the leaders and matriarchs, guiding the people ever forwards into an uncertain and mercurial future. Those who lack faith sit at the edges of the community, in flickering shadow, without the strength to reach out, to ask for help.

The most interesting facets of the setting emerge when the wonders and the miracles are set aside, and the people are faithful not because they are rewarded for their piety, but because they have little else to call their own. They survive on the belief that things will get better, because there is no hope without faith.

Encounter

Failed by his father, with no food on the table, a young Carson walked down to the mudflats to scavenge for food. While reaching his hands through the thick, black mud in search for shellfish, his wrist was pierced by a hook on an abandoned crabtrap, sunken and unseen.

For hours, with no one to call to, he crouched in silent agony, slowly trying to work the trap from beneath the deep black mud, and was eventually able to muster the strength to tear the hook from his own flesh. Light-headed from pain and blood loss, he found a large crayfish stuck in the remains of the trap, large enough to feed him for a week.

Where his father had failed him, his god provided, for a price.

Experiment

Lost and adrift from family and community, Carson craved strength, confidence, and a place in the world.

As the last rays of sun sank behind the banks of the river, Carson set out to the derelict old jetty, the one half-rotted, concealed behind a wall of weeds, hauling a pack laden down with his past.

As the stars rose over the stinking mud, Carson gave of himself to his god. A water-stained photograph, a wooden spinning top, a wicked boning knife, Carson cast the last remnants of his childhood off the jetty, to be claimed far below, when the waters and the sun next rose, and in the new dawn Carson would find strength.

Sacrifice

On the fourteenth day of the drought, the waters had still not returned to their former depth. The wind was hot, the fish weren’t biting, and the people were hungry. But the people knew what must be done. Before the people can feed, a god must feed.

And so a lottery was held, out on those sun-baked mud flats, amidst the stench and the heat and the flies. Carson had grown into a young man, a provider for the community, and what was the lottery but another means of provision?

The names were gathered, a slip was drawn from the old wooden bucket, and grim faces set to work to bind and lash and pierce, with wood and rope and hook, in the knee-high waters at the mouth of the river. Kind old Mr Geofferies, shop-keeper and father, would provide for the community one last time.

Wield

Carson had been helping Selina to run the old store that winter, when he first noticed that food had been going missing. It wasn’t much, three apples here, half a sack of potatoes there, but the harvest had been meager and the community had been hit hard by the treatment for Nana Buckley’s leg. So Carson volunteered to close up that night, and stood, waiting, in the shadow of the wood shed, as the stars slowly wheeled overhead.

An hour passed, two, before a darting shadow caught his eye. Corey Devins, the tailor’s son, jimmied the rusted lock and slipped inside the storehouse. Carson straightened, walking slowly to the door. He knew what it was like, to go hungry, to feel the shame of having no food on the table, but if he’d only ask, the community would provide.

Before Carson could call out, Corey, alerted by the squelch of boots through mud, reappeared at the darkened entrance, knife in hand, his face a mask of panic and fear. Carson stumbled back in alarm as Corey lunged, swinging wildly. Another lunge, another staggered step backwards, and Carson sprawled, landing on his back, boots held fast in the sucking mud. Corey advanced, his dark silhouette framed by stars, knife glinting in his white-knuckled fist, and Carson let out a gutteral, wordless cry to the heavens, a primal plea for help.

As Corey strode forward, eyes wild, knife ready, his leg plunged suddenly through the surface of that muddy field, followed by his waist, his shoulders, his neck, and in three long seconds sunk completely, devoured by the thick black silt. Lying on his back, eyes to the stars, Carson could hear the long, low call of a heron, down by the banks of the river.

Neglect

They first met eyes that summer, before the blight and the fear and the crackdowns. Those warm, halcyon months between seasons, the muggy haze rising from the river, the cicadas’ song ‘neath that golden sun spinning minutes into hours.

His family was from up in the valley, but they travelled down to the floodplains for two weeks every year to share news, to trade songs, and to pay their respects to the river. They found excuses to go off together, Carson and the boy from the valley, and they whiled away the days in each others arms, in the dappled shade beneath the broad white oaks, dipping toes in the swirling currents off the old forgotten jetty, and lying together in the bottom of a small wooden dinghy as it drifted lazily along the ink-black river, beneath a vast and star-studded firmament.

But even as they lay there together, with their heads against the wooden boards, Carson could not help but hear the whispers of the waters, telling tales of piety, of providence, of devotion to the tides, to the waters, and to the flood. And the next day, and the next, the whispers grew louder. His whole life, on his search for strength, Carson had built a shell around himself, and there was no longer any space within for another.

So as the days grew colder, and the family made their preparations, Carson let himself drift away, tugged by the currents and the ceaseless pull of the tides.

Abandon

The skies were dark, and the people hungry, when the stranger came to town, telling stories of honest work, of prosperous industry, of good fortune. He was recruiting strong bodies for the mines, simple labour for a one-year contract, and Carson could see the hunger in their eyes. So he left, with this silver-tongued stranger, so that he could bring wealth back to his community.

But the work was hard, in the hot, dry darkness of those stygian pits, and once he had signed he could not leave. Every morning, he’d drag his aching body to those smothering shafts, to descend, packed like cattle, into the choking embrace of the hard, dead earth, and every night he’d lie, coarse with grit, on a threadbare cot, pain dancing like fire along the nerves of his bad hand, as sleep eluded him.

Far were the waters of his home, the cool currents of the river, the rushes and flaxes and thick black silt. Far were the faces of his community, the whispers of his god, and with every swing of the pick, his faith, little by little, began to crack.

Yield

It was a week after the passing of Nana Joyce when the lawmen came. She’d been driving the battered old ute up to the valley, and, her eyes bleary with cataracts, her reflexes dull and slow, she carreened into a tree, dying instantly.

The lawmen poked around, asking questions and taking notes, looking down their noses all the while, but try as they might they would not find the body. Nana Joyce had lived a life of exaltant devotion, her flesh bearing tribute to her unwavering commitment to the tides. A burial at sea had been swiftly arranged, before the coroner could lay eyes on her heretical flesh.

But the lawmen, brows furrowed with masked disdain, would not leave without a scapegoat to answer for this obstruction of justice.