In the Sea a Cave

In the Sea a Cave is set on the world of Raigon, first introduced at the end of Mage Errant 7. 

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This is the story of how I died.

Newcomers to Raigon are often surprised to learn how easy the common tongues are to learn. They think that, with the unnaturally powerful memories Raigon gives its inhabitants, there must be incredibly challenging grammars, countless words, and a profoundly complex writing system.

Raigan languages, even the common tongues, are profoundly complex, it’s true, but the complexity is one that must be discovered, built up over time. There’s a self-referential, multivalent set of aspects to every word, complex nuances that can layer in extra signified meanings with subtle intonations, hand gestures, even just by rearranging sentence structures. At the full depth of the common tongues, a single sentence can carry six or seven times as much meaning per sentence as an equivalent-length sentence from most other human languages.

But you could ignore those depths and get by just fine in the common tongue. All sentences in the common tongue must be comprehensible to any speaker, no matter how many extra levels are embedded within. After all, children must be able to learn and speak them, and Raigon’s magic sinks in slowly before puberty. Visitors to Raigon from other worlds— of which there are many— are usually able to pick up the basic forms of the common tongues with ease.

That pales before the high tongues, of course. No one who has lived on Raigon less than twenty-eight years can even try to attempt the high tongues in any meaningful way, and few master them until nearly forty. 

There were no speakers of the high tongue past sixty, for by that point, their memories had grown so powerful so as to drown their personalities and life in new memories, of every possible sensory input their body offered them. Much of the complexity of the high tongues themselves was an effort to stave off that memory drowning for a few months or years longer.

So when my new friends in the village of Calafque used a high tongue word for death instead of a common tongue loanword, I should have paid more attention.

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We’d been living on Raigon for three and a half years before moving to Calafque.

My father had been an agent for one of those vanishingly rare and dangerous independent multiversal merchants out there. He, like his mother before him, and her father before her, spent most of the year buying up rare herbs, minerals, and works of art in preparation for our patron’s visit. Then, sometime around the end of winter, our patron would arrive with a new load of goods to exchange for our offerings.

It seldom took us longer than a month to completely sell our patron’s goods.

No one but us in our walled, icy city knew our goods came from off-world— they all assumed they came from some remote region in the summery north, with its nigh-impassible jungles of predatory plantlife. Most who ventured out of the polar regions were never heard from again, but those who made it back were guaranteed fabulous wealth— even if you didn’t bring back valuable goods, the chroniclers would gladly pen your biography, which would earn you steady royalties for decades.

The multiverse was not common knowledge on our home. Our complex ritual magics took decades to learn, to relatively little impact compared to the magics of other worlds. The trade goods from our jungles were only moderately valuable, and if we weren’t a stop on the way to much wealthier worlds, I doubt our patron would have stopped here.

But he did, and when my father began descending into madness, when paranoia and delusion began to seize him, our patron arrived and recognized his illness.

He could have abandoned our family, have sought out new agents on our world.

But for some sense of mercy, some sense of loyalty, that multiversal merchant who had cultivated our family for generations decided to help us.

Raigon’s magic alone was not enough to cure my father, but with the aid of certain rare herbs and medicines from across the multiverse, he was restored to… not precisely his old self, but a happy, healthy soul. 

We perhaps could have returned to our own world, but it had been a perilous journey the first time, and in truth, we didn’t want to leave. The fate of the elderly on Raigon, to be utterly consumed by endless memory, seems horrifying to many outsiders, but the Raigan accepted their fate with grace. They found a certain beauty in it, considered it a one-ness with nature, a living afterlife. Indeed, they even preferred it to the alternatives, though it would be years until I understood that.

And so we stayed. 

Once my father’s treatments had ended, we decided that the bustling city life wasn’t for our family. My mother, sisters, and I all agreed with my father that we would rather fully embrace life on Raigon rather than dwell in one of the districts full of multiversal travelers.

There wasn’t much point in trying to pretend to be a native of Raigon— the more functional local elders, those in late middle age, always noticed foreigners sooner or later. They could always tell when someone was from another world, through some small tell or other. 

So we left the city, and moved to the quiet little coastal village of Calafque.

The land was fertile, the sea was bountiful, and the weather was gentle year round in Calafque. You could finish your day’s work in just a few hours, and spend the rest of your time telling stories, spending time with friends, and consuming any number of local fruit wines and recreational herbs. It was an easy, care-free life, much like any number of other villages on Raigon. We picked it because of the lovely waterfall visible above the village, and the gentle lagoon that sheltered the beach from strong currents.

The villagers were welcoming and curious, delighting in stories about our home. We settled in easily, and no one minded my father’s occasional lingering night-terror.

It was a few months into our stay when I realized there was something strange about some of the villagers. A small number of folks from each generation seemed… quieter. More aloof. Treated with just a little more respect.

There were no more than a couple of dozen of them, out of a village of nearly eight hundred souls, but I couldn’t help but notice them.

And when I finally asked, my new friends all exchanged strange looks, then in quiet voices, told me this:

“Among the rocks protecting our shore, below the waves, lies a cave. And in that cave each of them died.”

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I didn’t know the word they used for death, resai, and had to ask— but perhaps I should have asked someone who could truly speak the high tongues. They might have better explained the connotations and implications of the word.

But I didn’t.

I thought I knew what it meant, thought I understood what was involved. Assumed it was just a coming of age challenge, and that the death was a metaphorical one, the death of childhood. After all, those sorts of things were common on many worlds. 

In the city of my birth, fifteen minutes of running by an eager child through light crowds, there had been a failed ritual that somehow hadn’t collapsed. The dilapidated building it filled had been warped with strange lights, peculiar anti-sounds that washed away particular notes or ranges of noise in almost-predictable intervals, and dangerous twists in the air.

It was guarded, people were kept away, but brave youths often proved themselves by crossing the dangerous ruins at night, leaping from crumbling column to rotting rafter.

Most crossed safely, but every now and then, one would be caught and torn apart by the drifting twists when they changed direction or accelerated. Every now and then, someone would simply get distracted by a light or anti-sound and misstep, falling to injury in the depths below.

I assumed that the cave was a ritual like this, that it served the same purpose. 

I was wrong.

Youths in Calafque did not challenge each other to swim down to the cave, did not brag about how they’d achieve it. The cave swim wasn’t a ritual of bravado, but a much more somber affair.

Would I have made the swim if I understood? If I had known more of the connotations of resai? If I had just asked?

Perhaps, yes. It… is hard to say.

I decided to make the swim out of my flawed assumptions, out of the very bravado filled motives I’d transplanted from my birth world. I dressed them in garments made of the attitudes of my new home, but I didn’t really understand.

And, out of my insecurities and anger, I didn’t tell anyone before I made the swim.

So I died.

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The first connotation of resai, the first form of death it offered, was physical, mortal death.

It was only a possibility, but a strong possibility. The cave was deep, the waters on that side of the rocks could be treacherous. Some who attempted the swim never even made it to the cave.

I died, but not from the water. Though I came to swimming later in life than the villagers, they liked to joke  that I’d been born to it. I’d always found a grace in the water that I lacked on the land.

I died, but not from the treacherous currents. I timed my swim well, going out before dawn, and waiting on a safe ledge until the highest tide. The dive was longer then, but safer otherwise.

I died, but not from getting lost or confused in the dark tunnel.

I died, but my body lived.

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There were so many moments when I could have turned back, but in memory, only a few stand out.

The beach at night, as I prepared to wade out.

The long wait on the ledge, as I waited for the tides.

And, looming greatest in my mind, the moment before I entered the cave itself.

I hung there for what may have been three heartbeats or what may have been a lifetime. The cave was a shockingly round hole into the rock, itself a forbidding creature that rose up out of the edge of the corals protecting the lagoon. 

Around me, hundreds of familiar fish darted and played, with the strange native ribbon-life of Raigon dodging and weaving among them. 

The moment I entered the cave, there was no turning back. 

I’m sure physically I could have turned back, but something in me felt compelled to keep swimming up the unnatural tunnel. Corals and barnacles coated much of the tunnel wall, but the exposed parts were strangely smooth and unweathered.

And then I found myself breaching the surface, found myself in the cave. 

I believe I was already dead by then. It might be more accurate to say that I died in the cave proper, but it feels more right to say I died when I entered the tunnel.

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The second connotation of resai, the second form of death it offered, was… a fragmentation. A breaking that started at the edges, with the unnecessary things, slowly accelerating towards the focus.

I could see clearly in the cave, but I don’t remember where the light came from. There were no glowing crystals or mosses, no arcane light rituals like you might find on my birth world.

I also don’t remember any shadows, but was that because there were no shadows, or because of my resai, my fragmentation? For, certainly, I had already begun to break apart as I rose up out of the water, climbed into the single small cavern.

There were no stalactites or cave mosses, just a simple, dome-shaped room, carved as unnaturally as the tunnel. On one end of the round flat floor lay the tunnel pool entrance, and opposite was a small, ankle-height dais.

I don’t remember whether there was anything on the ceiling. I’m sure it was a perfect hemisphere, but I can’t remember what it looks like.

When I say I can’t remember, you should listen closely, take my worlds seriously. At that point in my life, in my late teens, I had lived on Raigon long enough that my memory was far sharper, swifter, and more reliable than any but the greatest savants of other worlds. If I had ever chosen to return to my birth world, I would have excelled at its ritual magic.

For my memory to fail me in that cave? It terrifies me more than my actual death does, looking back. It should not be so easy to suppress and break my memories.

There was something wrong there, something… not evil. Not vile. No, its wrongness was stranger. 

I rose up, and on the ankle-height dais there lay a skull the size of my torso.

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The third connotation of resai, the third death it offered, was the breaking of continuity, of the line.

There was a popular Raiga tale, of a great queen who had been offered immortality by a monster from another world who had fallen in love with her.

She had turned it down, because no immortal could live so long as one of the Raiga.

Most of the people of my adopted world genuinely believed that their inevitable death by drowning in memory was a form of immortality, that the eons of memories of falling leaves, gentle breezes, and lapping waves they would form were life beyond life. And, in a strict sense, they were right— it would take innumerable millennia for an immortal to acquire so many memories as one of the aged of Raigon.

Few would race to it, of course, but it was not a cause for great mourning. The memory drowning was a cause for quiet melancholy and thoughtfulness among the family of the afflicted. Or of the blessed, I suppose.

What was feared more than the memory drowning, more than physical death, was the breaking of the continuity. The breaking of the chain of memory linking your childhood until your memory drowning.

On Raigon, where no one forgets, losing a span of time is far more traumatic and unnatural than elsewhere.

And I lost a span of time, staring at that skull.

I came to myself for the first time with the realization that it wasn’t a skull. Oh, it certainly looked like a skull at first glance, albeit one the size of my chest, made of some pitch black, light-eating stone. But there was no hollow inside it, and the features had clearly been carved into it.

And I know, without a doubt, that no thought, no memory, could possibly exist inside of it.

And then I lost myself again, for the last time.

I died, once and for all. My continuity was severed.

And that lifeless skull is my last memory.

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I could list connotations of resai all day. It is a rich word, even for the high tongues. And, had I asked, I would have learned that it was a word that had been born in Calafque, born of the cave.

But resai did not merely stand for metaphoric death.

When I say that the person who walked out of that cave wasn’t the person who came in, I do not describe a great change, or a great trauma.

The person who once lived in my body died. I still call them ‘I’, part from respect, part from nostalgia, and part simply to not concern and alarm my fellow villagers.

Memory is everything on Raigon, and the memories before the cave that I carry? These are not mine. Oh, I can read them, as one reads a book, or dons a shirt, but they aren’t mine. I am someone new, someone born in that cave.

The fears that affected the old inhabitant of my body seem often laughable to me. Oh, not the fear of storms, but the fears of rejection, of social shame, these hold little weight for me any more. 

The joys that possessed the old inhabitant of my body, on the other hand, grew in a sense stronger, for I got to experience them for the first time, and share in the delight of the youth who had once lived in my body.

I wonder often what that skull had been made of, who had brought it here, who had hidden it away in that cave. I have never gone back, for I, and the others born in the cave, suspect that there would be no third inhabitant of our bodies.

Because, so far as we can tell, our flesh does not hold or contain memory any longer.

The skull forced the memories out of our own skulls, and into our memory magic. 

On those few occasions when the cave-born gather together to speak of what we saw, away from those who have not yet died, we often argue what would happen if someone without Raiga magic entered the cave, saw the skull.

Before me, some argued that only those born on Raigon could be reborn in the cave, that all others would die a death of the body.

A couple of the other cave-born still hold mild grudges against me for disproving that, but no harsher than the grudge you might hold for a family member who ate the last piece of fruit at the table.

Some had argued that, even if I had survived, it was only because I possessed the same memory magic as them. This was the largest and strongest camp.

The third camp of argument, and the one I belonged to? Was that our unnaturally powerful memories, denser than any memory should be, had caused the skull to react more strongly, to wipe away our memories. 

We could not prove it without returning, so the argument was just an amusing distraction for us.

We also argue about what, in truth, the skull is.

I hold to the most popular theory there.

It is anti-memory.

Not amnesia, not forgetting— these are simple absences.

But memory’s opposite. An unlinking of connections, and sanding away of causality. 

What better world to hide such a thing than on a world where memory is king?

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I wish I had known the full meaning of resai, or at least more of it, before I had made the swim. I wish I had taken more time to think of it, to ask questions of those who had swam before me, for we are willing to answer some questions, to guide away those we think are better off not swimming.

For it is not dying that I regret, for without that I would not have been born. 

No, it is dying uninformed, dying without truly understanding what I went about.

My death was not a curse. The life I life now is better than the life I might have lived. I was not… the old inhabitant of my body was not a happy person. They were angry, hurt, confused. They would have suffered the same fate as our father, but so much stronger even the magic of Raigon would have struggled to preserve their sanity. I can feel it tugging at me even now, but with no memory preserved in my flesh, it can do little more than annoy me when I am tired.

But I wish I had entered the cave knowing I was going to my death. None of the cave-born alive then had suspected the strange, intense off-worlder child of planning to enter the cave, or they might have spoken to me first.

So I am glad you spoke to me before this.

You, who like me, was born on another world.

You, who like the old inhabitant of my body, believe that it might make you fit in better in the peaceful little village of Calafque.

You, who like me, carries scars and traumas from another world, but much fiercer than my own.

What do I say? What do I advise?

No. This must be your choice. Your death will not be a blessing, nor a curse. It will simply be. Whatever you choose, choose it carefully, and do not share what I have told you with your loved ones. It will only hurt and frighten them.

I cannot tell you what you do, only support you.

But…

Remember that the waters are gentlest at high tide.