Character Sketch #1: The Trawler-Man

As we count down to the launch of the Silt Verses, we're excited to begin teasing the characters (and gods) you can expect to meet within the show. 

Today, we kick off with the Trawler-Man - tidal river-deity of the White Gull River.

TEXT:

"Drive up past the Saint’s Northern Dam, into the territories where the land begins to seep away into mud and the long, winding concrete roads begin to seem like the last defences of a war against the devouring waters. The houses are shacks of wood upon stilted boardwalks. They build them high, and they build them impermanent. The river takes everything else.

Out here is where the Trawler-Man’s people lived, and worshipped, and made their sacrifices to their god who walks beneath the river.

The waters of the White Gull are impetuous, mercurial, tidal. One morning you might wake to find that your fields have flooded; the next you might discover that the river has retreated far back over the gullies and ditches of your property, leaving behind strange offerings and reshaped detritus.

‘The river changes, and the river changes us.’ This was the mantra of the Trawler-Man’s strange and unhappy disciples.”

-High Adjudicator Devlin, Reflections Upon A Most Uncivil Year, Vol II

“The Trawler-Man, when he slicks back his oilskin hat to show you his own true self, has two faces, and two mouths.

A mouth that devours. And a mouth that returns. In our faith, nothing is ever wasted.”

-Carpenter

“Our god is simple, after his own unknowable and, it must be said, quite merciless fashion. He rejoices in devolved shapes and mindless, many-legged things that drag their heavy shells onwards through the delta silt. He despises all things of brick and concrete that mankind erects upon the land, in defiance of his formless majesty, and he sends his sacred currents and tides to disrupt them.

I will not claim that he is perfect. Certainly not that he is kind. But he is, in many ways, the most efficient tool for our own purposes.”

- Katabasian Mason, of the Parish of Tide and Flesh