Calavel's Plotnotes
Character History (Story Mode)
It was dusk, and by any standard a beautiful evening on the Suvan Sea. The last rays of the setting sun shimmered on the water, its pristine surface broken only by the occasional dolphin breaching in the distance.
The Svefra pod had, for the most part, retired below deck to decompress from the day’s work and prepare the evening fare. Their palivar, moored just off the coast of Alvadas, nodded to the horizon with each languid swell of the ocean.
Safira clung, half-submerged and white-knuckled, to the stern of the ship, shivering despite the temperate waters that enveloped her. Her companion, Avalor, swam but a short distance away - his normally fluid strokes disjointed, as he attempted to expel nervous energy - occasionally glancing in her direction with a smile that did not reach his eyes.
Safira pressed her cheek against the palivar’s cool, salt-cured planks, listening to the muffled laughter and voices below deck. Their vibrations comforted her and provided a much-needed diversion. She herself, however, wasn’t laughing.
Another pain wracked her body, and she reflexively reached down to cradle her taught abdomen, which was ripe with child. She drew her chin below the water-line to stifle a moan, a plethora of small bubbles carrying her anguish silently to the surface.
Her contractions mirrored the rhythmic swells of the sea.
At the peak of a particularly painful contraction, she sensed a welcomed pressure-release as her “waters” broke, the blood-tinged amniotic fluid mingling with the briny waters of the Suvan Sea. As it should be…
She took advantage of this brief hiatus to chew another mouthful of the rare, fluorescent yellow sea kelp that she had been consuming in large quantities since her second trimester. The weathered merchant from whom it was purchased had touted its muscle-relaxant properties, and indeed it had been effective, if not somewhat addicting. But nothing quelled her discomfort now - and for lack of any better way to vent her frustration, she spat it out and cast what remained in her hand adrift, even as she readied herself for the next contraction.
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Calavel was born with yellow eyes, which mirrored everything and missed nothing – certainly not the disappointment and tears that contorted his mother’s face as she first beheld him in the dying light of that fated summer evening.
Convinced that his yellow eyes were the hoax of a wayward reflection - or the delusions of a woman on the brink of exhaustion - she turned him every which way, determined that the proper angle would ‘fix’ everything.
It didn’t.
In the end, with flat emotion born out of despondent resignation, she tended to his umbilical cord while Avalor swam to shore to collect the reeds that would be required for the casting off. She held him at arm’s-length, fearful to get too close. But she watched him, unable to pry her eyes away.
And it confounded her - this child - that he bobbed and ebbed with the Sea’s own rhythms, as if he belonged.
But he did not, for he had not Laviku in his eyes.
They would dispose of him. They would forget. Life would go on…
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The sun had set, and they welcomed the darkness. It obscured what they no longer wished to see as they mechanically toiled in the dark, completing the necessary preparations.
The tide was ebbing now and tugged at the woven basket, crafted all too quickly, by a detached father. Calavel wriggled and squirmed and babbled, seemingly oblivious to his impending exile.
And then - with the simple release of a mother’s hand - he was cast off…drifting effortlessly out to sea, as if he had never existed.
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The days passed, and still he drifted. Still he survived. The currents drew him and threw him, but an impassive calm pervaded.
Each day his yellow eyes tracked the sun to its zenith and then watched it fall again until it dipped below the verge of his reed-woven cradle, only to greet it anew with an innocent smile when it rose again the following day.
But time and sun and salt slowly leeched his reserves - and he grew unwell - his furious howls culminating in the copious passage of fluorescent yellow meconium, which soiled him from head to toe.
He was at peace then, for a time.
On the morning that followed, Syna must have been surprised, indeed. For He was greeted not by eyes that mirrored His color…but by cerulean eyes, unfathomable and wise. Eyes Touched by Laviku...
Time had expelled the effects of the yellow sea kelp, inasmuch as he had been expelled by his own people…and in that moment, hope eclipsed certain death.
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