Ship People, What They Know

The ship people came from their old lands to this coast under the castles five generations past. The stories say they came because their gods had died. As soon as the First-ashores landed they quarrelled. Some sought new ways without the gods. Some sought to remake the world that had perished or follow the circle back even farther. They were in the wrong place to make any of these visions come to pass. 

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Lichen, blue pines. Towering mushrooms. Like a creeping damp the ship people spread across the ragged coast through the mist. Each halting when they beheld them: the castles.  

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Here it is darker and wilder than the land they knew before. Thunderworms and mooncats prowl the night, creatures that were almost a memory in the old lands. Giants too. Or perhaps this was the first country of the giants, for the impossible structures the ship people call the castles are sure proof that some great kingdom was here before the ship people made landfall. The Castles are cloud-breaking towers of vertiginous tunnel and vent, bewilderingly wrought of metal and clay, impervious to fire. Castles are the gods' treasure-houses, but who's to say a god's treasure's any use to living man? Moreover they are infested with the trolls and brine-men that hid in the dreams and holds of the First-ashores. 

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Of the many castles the ship people found, only cold, grey Castle Godless was broken to their purposes; that's where King Mabber set his throne and made his hall, he who saw Odin himself fall dead in the snow, he who made prayer and praying a crime in his domain. The last of the First-ashore kings. But even Castle Godless yet contains mysteries. The king rambles. A council of seers rules in his name.  

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The sea-lanes are home to outlaws and reavers as well as fishers and whalemen. The worst reavers make pacts with gods or other things to change themselves with sorcery. They shed their skins, change their flesh. They say the First-ashores were four times the size of the ship people today. Perhaps some of the First-ashores took to the sea again.  

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Madness and illness are the outward sign of a woman or man's guilt for having created a monster by dreaming it, even if the dream is secret from the dreamer. The therapists of the ship people cure the mad and ill by finding and slaying the monsters that they have birthed in their sleep. So say the teachings of Frood whose sign is a threshing flail. 

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All ship people are hospitable: they will rarely kill a stranger in their home. If the sweet flesh of a turnip has been shared among them they will do this never.