The Gray Lady
The Gray Lady and The Fog Stalker, a protector and a monster, a lesson in perspective. You see, gods are interesting creatures. Nearly everybody worships one or another, but very few understand how they work. The layman thinks that a god just is how it is. It rules over its domain, and that’s it, as far as most are concerned. But that’s not the end of it.
The island she inhabits, Nalturren Island, is fairly unexceptional, aside from its whaling guild. Its whaling guild, and of course, her. Half the continent gets its whale oil from there. And, being sovereign and yet dependent on the continent for much of its goods, Nalturren leverages that need strongly. This has lead many powers on the mainland to attempt to take the island by force, and bypass their demands altogether. This has historically not ended well for them.
The Gray Lady, as she’s depicted by the islanders, is a seven foot tall, elegant goddess. A fierce protector of the island and its people, she guides the winds such that any invading ships are wrecked before they reach shore, and any survivors will die at sea without ever glimpsing the sandy beaches. And she does all this with a simple wave of her hand from the shallowest part of the water.
The Fog Stalker, as it’s depicted by the various invading armies, is a monstrous leviathan, covered in tentacles and teeth, impervious to even the strongest of war machines, that tears through the strongest ship of the line as if it was nothing more than a twig, leaving no survivors. And you won’t see it coming, the permanent fog cover around Nalturren means it can stay out of sight until it’s too late to turn back.
I suppose there isn’t any point being coy, anymore. I’m sure you’ve already put together that The Gray Lady and The Fog Stalker are the same, and I should now explain how that can be. Gods do not have a set appearance or any set abilities. They are as people expect them to be. A newborn god isn’t god of anything, and has no appearance until given such by its worshippers. And the thing is, how a god is expected to be can differ from one group to another. The Gray Lady is an elegant protector who waylays would-be conquerors with the subtle art of wind, because that is how the islanders expect her to be. The Fog Stalker is a monstrous killing machine because that’s what invaders expect to see from the stories.
The obvious question is, of course, “how do they have any expectation of what The Fog Stalker is like if there have never been any survivors?” The, perhaps less obvious, answer is that The Fog Stalker was not always like this. It started as just ships being wrecked, and then survivors started spreading rumors of things they might have seen. And the monster they told of became what others would see, and as more ships were destroyed by this monster, the monster became deadlier.
The interesting question, though, is who’s right? Are the ships wrecked by wind, or are they destroyed by a monster? The answer is that they both happen. The end result, after all, is the same. A destroyed ship at the bottom of the ocean, and a ship’s worth of never-to-be-recovered corpses. It doesn’t greatly matter, on a personal or cosmic scale, how this came to be. If you tried investigating, you would find evidence to support both conclusions. Both possibilities converge into one.
As we see, however, the early introduction of armor and engines to warships, and more advanced artillery, it will be interesting to see if the trend holds, or if the armor can hold back the Fog Stalker, and the added mass will make the ships too heavy to wreck with the wind. Interesting times are coming to Nalturren Island, and I am glad to say my time here is coming to an end. I do not want to be here should the Lady’s protection fail.