To Nereus

[TennyoCeres84]

How would you describe Meris' taste when you kiss her? What makes it so perfect?

[IamLEAM1983]

"As a Void Weaver and an Augur, I'm expected to have an answer for this. I'm racially expected to have mastered the Mad Arts to the point where I could coalesce a set of precise molecules and enzymes into being, something that would disperse into your mouth as the exact reproduction of what she tasted like. God knows I've tried, in my leisure hours. It's like trying to assemble a puzzle where the shapes are both familiar and indistinct, and you realize you're missing the one crucial piece...

As a base-line, there's the basic sensory components of your average taste sensation. In this case, I tasted the salt of Meris' skin - in a way that's far more precise than anything surface-dwellers could experience. Void Weavers grow on a sodium-rich diet, and my tastebuds can tell the difference between several different sources of salt, from a mine's deposits to human sweat. I could reproduce that level of Meris' taste without working too hard if I had to - that basic selkie taste-based denomination.

Where things turn complex is when you ask me to consider what her state as a living being adds to that taste, and especially her state as a loving being. I tasted her in consensual circumstances, the first time, and it was obvious we each wanted one another. She was flushed with heat and smelled of her body's efforts to please us both, just as I think I carried some sort of scent, a nose-based tag of Void Weaver tumescence.

That gives you salt and lust. The first component's easy to reproduce, as I've said; and the second one is fleeting. It's rooted in hormones and moment-to-moment surges in mood-altering chemicals released by her body. Trying to capture lust, to describe lust on a sensory level is something some anthros could understand, but that escapes the average human. Most humans only know what they feel, and not how that feeling translates as waves of data sent by their own bodies in strong waves.

The third component is what stumps me. Love. You can chemically induce lust and I've experienced ersatzes of romantic attachment with other women after losing Meris, but something kept spiraling out of my lust for her and her lust for me - something I emotionally understood to be our frighteningly strong bonds, but that somehow manifested physically. If anything, this is what taught me that there's a world of difference between kicking yourself into showing mild fondness for this decade's new conquest and feeling like you're going to die if you don't close the gap between yourself and your loved one right this instant. It's a close cousin to lust and it obviously has chemical roots - but it's so deep and so primal, so new to my species' understanding of mated pairs, that it goes so much further than me simply wanting to lay in bed with her.

On some deeply unconscious level, I suppose I tasted just how Meris was fated to be mine, and me, hers. These three things surged together and created something that overpowered me - that still does overpower me to this day.

I've tasted my lust for others before, but Meris is the first and last person who makes me taste what it feels like to want to kill someone else to protect a loved one, or take a hail of flying daggers in their stead.

Devotion. Yes, I guess that could do well as a descriptor. What I should have tasted when feeding for Amaxi or Harrogath, I tasted in her. My duties towards the Others were baseline democracy wrapped in religious hypocrisy - but I'd fall to my knees and pray to Meris if she asked me to."

[TennyoCeres84]

I know you initially considered Meris as merely an asset, but how was she brought to your attention? In general, how does Dalarath's slave market work?

[IamLEAM1983]

"Meris was what you'd call a special order. I had been in need of a decent healer for some time, and my usual lot of concubines and caretakers weren't entirely skilled in medical matters. After waiting for a few weeks in the hopes that my hunting parties would return with someone of worth, I lost patience and made my needs as clear and as specific as I could. The Chamberlain having managed to wound me, and knowing that my life was on the line, I didn't have the luxury of waiting for one of my people to return with a London apothecary or a traditional herbalist from the Near East. Something drastic was required, so I called for a Cantor.

Considering this, you might wonder why Meris was abused if I'd called for her. As she was an especially remarkable find and seeing how we have no paperwork to speak of, there were no traces of my request. Meris spent a few months in Dalarath being carted left and right like some lowly piece of merchandise, before I was able to summon her.

Special orders aside, the Void Weavers used to conduct surface raids on isolated ships, or other watercraft that happen to have fallen out of the winds' favor. Nowadays, we enthrall small fishing communities in the Pacific or pirate bands from South Africa and East Asia. No screening is imposed; the trip downwards or the privations associated with a slave's demanding tasks tend to weed out the weak ones over time. Weak or strong, healthy or sick, they all are stuffed into the slave pens that run below the harbor's streets. The heads of slave trade groups tend to let them simmer in there for a week or two, long enough so whatever sickness they carry takes the weak away, or until starvation does the same. The dead are consumed as part of our diet, while the survivors are placed in manacles and sent to the slave markets in single file.

Dalarath being a self-sufficient city-state, there isn't any such thing as currency that allows us to measure the value of a surface-dweller. We barter between ourselves, exchanging future services or preferential treatments for new lives we might add to our family unit's corral. On occasion, exchanges can turn heated.

What most people tend to ignore is that we all natively speak the Black Speech. When there's no express willpower being channeled into our words, however, our language is just another idiom. It's still incomprehensible to surface natives, but it usually lacks its sanity-destroying affects. We had to adapt this flexible grammatical system largely because speaking a language with effective arcane properties out in the open could have damaging consequences to the city's infrastructure, or otherwise ask too much of our protecting Arbiters. If bartering for slaves becomes difficult, then parties that want to, shall we say, hash it out tend to move to more secluded spaces.

In any case, once the trade is complete, the slaver hands over the newly acquired property. Past that, what happens is entirely up to the new owners. My story and Meris' tend to mesh well with Azardad's and Eithne's, in that there's no real limit to what a slave can or can't be subjected to. I've seen some Prelates adopt a more distant and aristocratic approach, especially if their social standing placed them close to me. They'd treat their 'help' with the same general aloof politeness and respect I've seen British dignitaries extend towards their paid men and women.

I've also seen others consider their slaves as punching bags of a sort - walking frustration evacuation devices for when their next-seat neighbor happens to have soured their attempt on a perfect Chant of the Ninth House. I'm not telling you anything new when I say shifting the blame is a popular practice on Dalarath - self-responsibility is only ever called into play if you have reason enough to believe to be in the right. Slaves, according to some, are there to take the heat and to suffer through whatever tantrum their masters might be going through.

In practice, the higher in standing your master is, the better you're treated. Except for those who operate under my oh-so-trustworthy advisor, of course... Confidence levels dip dramatically when you find yourself in the Chamberlain's boots, and blaming virtually everyone for your failures except for yourself is par for the course.

Delmar might speak of the fact that a certain dissident outlook survives in the Prelacy. It's true - but it only ever manifests either through the Augur, or through certain Arbiters or Prelates of renown. It's simple causality, to be honest: the more slaves you own, the more likely you are to be exposed to surface-dwelling cultures. The more you're exposed, the less the Others' core beliefs become sustainable.

There's a despicable little axiom down here, in fact: Philosophers have many concubines, but only Amaxi suffices for the Faithful.

I think this would be a sufficient explanation in and of itself."