Blade Maidens: Dead in the Water – 12

“A rare event indeed happened this day. An artifact from the above-world made its way to our depths.

We know others trade and barter with the strange creatures who live without our lady’s blessing of water, for whatever reasons, but the handful of merchants and their hoard whales that venture to our caves have most often been picked clean of any such treasures by the time they arrive.

It is a strange thing. A small structure of transparent stone and a sleek, shining rock. Strange tubes, akin to a squid’s tentacles, are connected at four points, with a central peak. The merchant claimed it is a device of leisure, that the land-dwellers use some sort of localized heat and take fumes into their mouths. The vents near our outer borders produce such things, but the stench and film they leave on my gills make me skeptical any would willingly consume anything like it. Perhaps the merchant has been fed a batch of lies and sold an expensive piece of cast-off trash?

Regardless, we have purchased it in exchange for a school of Lanternfish. If nothing else, it will provide proof of these distant lands to our young.

They also enjoy blowing bubbles using the tentacles. The minds of children, I will never understand them.”

– A personal carving in the home of Kil’thiz, a denizen of one of the Deep Kingdoms