Chapter 260: Naval Ship

That stall was weird not gonna lie…

Something grabbed my hand from behind.

?

I turned.

The merchant from the Bonewright stall— except they stepped out from behind their counter, and without it between us I could see them properly.

Their hand around mine was darkened from the fingers up, not like a stain but like something that had gone into the skin from the inside, deep and even, fading somewhere up their forearm before their sleeve covered the rest.

How far up it went, I couldn't tell.

They then pulled their mask up over their face, revealing a pale features, blue eyes, long lashes, and an expression that was somewhere between sheepish and preoccupied.

She scratched her head. "You're new, right." Not a question. "Sorry, I forgot to give you something earlier.

She reached into her coat pocket— deep pockets —and came out with three items.

Placed them on her palm and sorted them without looking at them, the way you handled things you'd touched enough times to not need to see.

She opened my hand and put the ring in it.

Then she turned to Jisoo and held out the earrings. Then to Alex with the necklace.

"Thank you," I said.

She smiled. It was a small smile, specific, like she was pleased about something she wasn't going to explain.

Then she turned and walked back to her stall, folding herself behind the counter again, and went back to whatever she'd been working on before.

"I forgot to ask her name," I said.

"That's Rhia," Cal said, from slightly to my left, with the tone of someone who had expected this exact situation. "I was actually wondering when she'd show up— she always gives new people something but she must have gotten caught in her work. She does that."

I looked at the ring. It sat in my palm, small and bone-white, made from something that had clearly once been part of something alive… duh.

The surface wasn't smooth— there was texture to it, the suggestion of the original material still present —and across it, visible if you looked directly, a faint moss was growing.

Or had been growing.

Or was in the process of both: it appeared at one edge, crept maybe a little, and then receded, the whole cycle taking about five seconds before it started again.

A tiny living thing in a loop it didn't seem to mind.

It was warm.

"That's from a six-legged crawler," Cal said, looking at it with recognition. "Rhia's been sitting on that piece for a while— the bone holds heat for some reason. Nobody's quite figured out why… you're lucky, that's valuable."

"Why is it warm?" I asked.

She just smiled, which was the same answer Rhia had given without words.

I put it on, beside Mimi.

It fit like it had been made for the finger I chose, which it probably hadn't been, but the warmth of it settled immediately and stayed.

Jisoo had the earrings in her palm, looking at them closely.

They were small drops of the same bone material, except the surface of these had been finished differently— smooth, but when the lantern light caught them at a certain angle, the interior seemed to move.

It's ntk a moss.

Something else. Like there were tiny ripples frozen inside the material, caught mid-motion, like kind of surface that looked different every time you moved it slightly.

She held one up to the light, tilted it, tilted it back.

"Cool to the touch," she said, mostly to herself.

She put them in.

Alex had the necklace on already, the pendant resting against her collarbone, examining it with both hands.

Bone again… of course. Shaped into something between an eye and a mirror, the face of it polished to a high smooth finsih. "It shows the wrong thing," she said.

"What?"

"The reflection." She tilted it toward me. In the surface of the pendant, where my reflection should have been, there was something else— not nothing, but not quite me.

An angle slightly off. A moment slightly displaced. "It's not reflecting right now."

"Is that bad?" I asked.

She thought about it. "I don't think so." She tucked it under her shirt. "Looks cool though."

We kept moving.

***

The scale workshop took up a wide section of the mid-ship with the comfortable sprawl of something that needed room to operate properly.

Massive scales— pulled from what I could only assume were very large aquatic creatures —were stacked against one wall on ordered rows, sorted by size and condition.

Two people were actively working, one cutting a scale into a specific shape with a tool I didn't recognize, the other pressing another scale into a curved form and securing it with a clamp while the material was still workable.

Finished pieces were on display or in crates: armor plates with scales overlapping, shield-sized pieces, curved sections designed for boat hull reinforcement(probably?) containers sealed with scale material that I understood immediately would be waterproof in a way nothing else on a ship like this could match.

"The ship's hull," I said.

"Same source," Cal confirmed. "Took years to collect enough. The captain started before I was born, apparently. Heh…"

She looked at the workshop with that comfortable pride of someone who had been told this story enough times to feel ownership of it. "The scales grow back on the creatures, so it's not— I mean, they don't appreciate the harvesting, but they survive it."

"Big creatures," Jisoo said, looking at the size of the workshop pieces.

"Very," Cal agreed cheerfully.

"OKAY!!!!! LETS GO TO THE 3RD STAGE!!!" Cal announced.

***

The food section announced itself before we reached it— the smell arriving first, layered and complex, the sharp-clean of smoked fish underneath something warm and spiced, something sweet further back, the distinctive green smell of seaweed in several processed forms.

The stalls here were closer together, the lanterns more numerous, and the whole section had a place where people gather into a crowd.

Smoked fish in neat rows.

Preserved meat in sealed containers, labeled in a shorthand I couldn't read.

Seaweed crackers stacked in towers.

Fruits I didn't recognize from a floating settlement somewhere, pale and dense and smelling faintly of something floral.

Ingredients I had no name for, displayed in jars, some of them moving slightly which I chose not to think about.

And at the far end, Vinehaven vegetables— familiar greens, things I'd seen growing on the vine gardens, looking exactly like themselves, which was a comfort.

Alex stopped walking.