Flowers for the Sea

by Zin E. Rocklyn

Genres: Dark Fantasy; General Fiction; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Survivors from a flooded kingdom struggle alone on an ark. Resources are scant, and ravenous beasts circle. Their fangs are sharp. Among the refugees is Iraxi. Ostracized and despised, she’s a commoner who refused a prince and who’s pregnant with a child that might be more than human. Her fate may be darker and more powerful than she can imagine. Zin E. Rocklyn’s extraordinary debut novella is a lush, gothic fantasy about the prices we pay and the vengeance we seek.

Release date: October 19, 2021

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 96

Sample

PART I: BURIED

THE CHILDREN IMITATE RAZORFANGS and I am without yet another night’s rest.

The swell of my belly increases with each new dawn, my joints all filled with useless fluid, hindering movement and completion of daily tasks. I abhor my present state, but termination is not an option.

As I’ve been told to the point of biliousness, this child must be born.

Seventeen hundred forty-three days at sea. Recollections of a life without the current in our legs is the stuff of fables and faery tales. We trade stories. The babes listen in wonder, having taken their first steps on this cursed boat, their disbelief palpable. Teens brood in mildewed corners, hissing at daylight and orders to earn their keep. The girls bleed late and we are eternally thankful to the godless depths below. We rut in anger and loneliness. And every once in a while, an affliction is cast upon we birthingfolk.

I am the only to carry this far.

Forty have perished for the sake of continuing our wretched lineage, their blood stained on our deck. One fetus managed to cry out before it suffocated on its own defects. The men mourned more than we, the bodies afflicted with this failure. We turned away from the sight of the young ones sending their contemporary to its watery grave.

I took Hirat that night. And many after.

I lost myself in the heat of his heartache, the wetness of his sorrow, the pulse of his resolution. He was one of few who hadn’t tried to dive deep. He stood at the bow of our boat greeting the orange of the sky with determination in his eyes and a faith unrivaled. Even as time ate away at the fat of his cheeks, the bulk of his chest, the baritone of his voice, he stood tall, giving the weakest of us something like hope.

I hate him for it.

Hope has no place on this vessel of death and disease, aimless and everlasting in its path. We’d fled the soil once it was clear the waters’ appetite for it was insatiable. Sand dunes and lowlands were not enough. Walls of stone and brick, huts of clay and blood all torn away in the teeth of the rising tides. Hills wore away. Plateaus topped. Mountain peaks mere posts in the shimmering endless road.

PART II: SEEDLING

MY HOME WAS NOT the same as theirs, though we shared the same land.

They called us nims. A word with hardly any meaning other than to spit upon its victim.

It morphed, much like forked tongues who spoke it, an encapsulating slur that reduced one to shreds, to the foam of the sea we feared, to nothing but the scent of a bowel movement. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was the only to spit back. She paid for it dearly, forced to flee with her only living kin as the hate licked at her back, the fire behind her cleansing the town of our name, of our contributions to the Crown who did nothing to stop its rabid townsfolk from murdering the ones they deemed strange, a strangeness they refused to understand because of our bond with the sea. It went beyond the ships, beyond the fishermen. My family communed with the unpredictable tides, providing an insight that made our lands rich. And yet we were the only—and being the only with an unexplainable gift breeds jealousy, breeds an underlying hate fed by distance and ignorance. They deemed us blasphemers of their church, we who did not need their gods to employ our gifts. And so they dare say we had gods within us, the only logical explanation for such power and knowledge, the olid burrokeet they are.

No one was punished. Not one soul imprisoned for the deaths of my uncles and aunt and grandfather. But we are a people who do not forget, we nims.

This story, among others, was my lullaby at night, my warning and my comfort. From first my grandmother with the intensity of the moon’s pull, then by her son, my father as a soothing balm. My mother, an inlander who had no time for gossip, ...

ption.

As I’ve been told to the point of biliousness, this child must be born.

Seventeen hundred forty-three days at sea. Recollections of a life without the current in our legs is the stuff of fables and faery tales. We trade stories. The babes listen in wonder, having taken their first steps on this cursed boat, their disbelief palpable. Teens brood in mildewed corners, hissing at daylight and orders to earn their keep. The girls bleed late and we are eternally thankful to the godless depths below. We rut in anger and loneliness. And every once in a while, an affliction is cast upon we birthingfolk.

I am the only to carry this far.

Forty have perished for the sake of continuing our wretched lineage, their blood stained on our deck. One fetus managed to cry out before it suffocated on its own defects. The men mourned more than we, the bodies afflicted with this failure. We turned away from the sight of the young ones sending their contemporary to its watery grave.

I took Hirat that night. And many after.

I lost myself in the heat of his heartache, the wetness of his sorrow, the pulse of his resolution. He was one of few who hadn’t tried to dive deep. He stood at the bow of our boat greeting the orange of the sky with determination in his eyes and a faith unrivaled. Even as time ate away at the fat of his cheeks, the bulk of his chest, the baritone of his voice, he stood tall, giving the weakest of us something like hope.

I hate him for it.

Hope has no place on this vessel of death and disease, aimless and everlasting in its path. We’d fled the soil once it was clear the waters’ appetite for it was insatiable. Sand dunes and lowlands were not enough. Walls of stone and brick, huts of clay and blood all torn away in the teeth of the rising tides. Hills wore away. Plateaus topped. Mountain peaks mere posts in the shimmering endless road.

I speak of this as if it were instantaneous. Gods-like in its swift retribution for our foul existence. But it wasn’t. It was achingly slow, deliberate. Hubris could not shield us from the sun’s heat, from the boldness of below-surface creatures caressing the innocent flesh of our curious young ones. We were the finest coastal traders of the continent. Sea-battling vessels, fish, fruit, and labour were our currency. We were hardbacked and hardworking. We were proud.

And now we are dying.

The children imitate razorfangs and I grind my teeth, sharpening mine own. Preparing.