"Farzaneh..." I pull her to me, flinching when my sleeve rolls back, her eyes drawn to the markings. On my bare skin's a map revealing a different tattoo, one for every person I killed.
I hate looking at the running tally of tattoos on my body. It r...
BOOK TRAILER for A Pirate for the Dead Goddess: The Ballad of Lucky Dice (Video Above, produced and sung by yours truly and a whole lot of editing)
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***
The child kneels in the blood. "Akua is dead." Whispers the child. "They're all dead."
Akua, an island off the far coast on the reaches of the Rahasian Empire, on the end that's closer to Jiwa and Okami. Small but precious in trade since nobles had a taste for seafood delicacies and rare shells.
A perfect target.
Black market traders wished to exploit the land, all under the guise of imperial policy that the Empire in no way actually supported, but their illegal ravager parties always ended up... well, "mysteriously" lost at sea.
I made sure it stayed that way.
I left their bodies floating in the water.
If those crooked, black-market-trading scum wanted to kill innocent people by starving them of their honest life's work, well, they'd face my wrath.
My husband Kane disagrees with my methods. Being the god of life gives him qualms over my governance of death. Technically, the gods are not supposed to meddle this much into the affairs of mortals.
I say who cares? Let the mortals know I'm the new goddess of death.
...and death doesn't discriminate.
It is good, then, that I found this starving child of war first before the nobles did. A long shirt for sleep covered the dirty child's knees, the hem soaked in blood. Tears rolling down a shocked face, but no sobs. Bloodstains covering skin that was darkened by the sun and the salt waves of the sea. Hands worn through by labors of love over handmade netting. Hair in coils, dark curls in a maze down skeletal shoulders. Eyes like the sand, a child born of Akua's golden beaches. A young body that knows labor, that has the ocean and knowledge of the constellations the fishers use to guide them in their blood.
Both the child's hands were mangled, almost every finger broken from trying to lift the collapsed wooden beams off their parents' bodies. Their parents, nothing much more than stains in the dirt. A shadow of a hearth. Burnt fish. Webbed netting. Thatch and sandals torn off the child's feet from running, hiding from the invaders I couldn't turn back.
A fishing family. A child who would've gone out to sea in that ramshackle boat that was currently on fire. Their parents in the sand, as still as their ocean acquisitions. They'll rot soon. I can see their souls. They watch me, bleakly, pleading in silence for their child.
