Elemental Breakdown
Chapter 1

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    The trip was going well until the fishmen armed with automatic rifles boarded the cruise ship.

   Four-foot tall sahuagin, with their arched backs topped with bony fins, big heads, large eyes, and a gaping mouth filled with curved, needle-like teeth, were intimidating enough without the guns in their three-pronged clawed hands. Their scales came in coral-shaded colors of greens, blues, yellows, and reds. Their swift appearance, bursting from the ocean and onto the deck, sent the passengers into a catastrophic meltdown of terror and panic, the likes of which the sahuagin were entirely unprepared for.    

   Shots were fired. People were gunned down as they ran. Fear elementals- greasy little wisps of coalesced magic- formed and hovered above the chaos. It would take a lot more people and a lot more terror for them to become anything more than mindless gnats, but the day was still young.

   Tim had taken to hiding behind the bar below deck with his client and a few others, and he covered his head as a storm of bullets shattered the bottles of booze on the shelf behind them. His client panicked and rose from cover to run, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “Stay put,” he told the middle-aged, recently divorced businesswoman. As her tour guide, he technically wasn’t liable for her until they made landfall in Ireland, but Tim supposed himself an overachiever.  

   A lull in gunfire gave two of the others hiding with them the courage to get up and run. Tim told them to stop, but they were dead a few seconds later, ripped apart by gunfire. The sahuagin chirped at each other as if they were arguing. A particularly yellow sahuagin with dark stripes jumped on top or the bar counter with its gun pointed up into the air as it got its balance, which gave Tim time to grab a nearby bottle of tequila and smash the fish man in the face with it.

   Shouting in its fish language, the sahuagin shot its rifle wildly in the air before Tim grabbed for the weapon. He grabbed the closest part of the weapon he could, which happened to be the barrel, and closed his hand around it- a terrible, terrible, idea as apparently the weapon was missing the cooling runes found in more modern guns. There was a hiss as the barrel burned his hand, but he didn’t dare let go. It was a sort of similar situation to the time he’d been bitten by a Kinsale cockatrice. It didn’t matter the pain of the bite, because letting go would have far worse consequences. 

   Being almost double the size of the sahuagin, Tim had no problem yanking the gun away from it. The disarmed yellow sahuagin gave a fishy scream and ran, which gave Tim just enough time to duck back behind the bar before the other fishmen all opened fire the moment their buddy was clear 

  Tim blindly fired over the countertop, as unlikely as he was to hit anything, but all he got was five shots before the clip ran dry. Tim sighed, but didn’t waste any time in tossing the gun aside and shouting “Grahlagarhaguraghagulashga!” which roughly meant ‘I surrender,’ in the sahuagin tongue- a bit of a long-winded language thanks to the fact there just weren’t too many sounds one could make in the depths of the ocean.

   They led Tim and his client- who he supposed was no longer going to be his client- to the deck where roughly two hundred passengers had been gathered and surrounded by a quarter of the number of chittering sahuagin.

  The air reeked of salt, fear, uncertainty, and fishmen, and the fear elementals had started to clump together like dark clouds overhead. The ocean churned violently as the sahuagin’s ship breached the surface and the sahuagin cheered as their mismatched ship of metal, barnacles, seashells, and bones rose beside the cruise ship. Tim assumed they were so excited about seeing the ship because it could actually float and hadn’t sunk to the bottom of the sea. The sahuagin began pushing people toward the ship, where Tim thought they’d be forced to board it, but they started pushing people into the water, and anyone who refused was shot and pushed into the water, anyway. So when it came to Tim’s turn, he jumped into the cold ocean with the others.  

   With the fishmen all lined up on the edge of the cruise ship looking down with their guns pointed down at all the humans who might as well have been figurative fish in a barrel, Tim had all the incentive he needed to dive into the ocean. Muffled gunfire barked above the surface. People screamed as bullets tore through the water.

   Tim swam as fast and as hard as he could deeper into the water, at least until he saw something squirming in front of him. An enormous tentacle shot right past him toward the ship. Tim followed the dark grey appendage with his eyes to where the sahuagins’ ship sat and discovered the entire bottom of the ship was a mass of wriggling tentacles. Hook-teeth suction cups grabbed onto bodies and wrapped around them, sucking the literal life out of them. A shark, drawn to the blood, got too close to a tentacle and found itself a part of the meal as well. Tim screamed, wasting what little air he had left, and made for the surface.     

   By the time his head breached the surface, the gunfire had stopped, not because the fishmen had run out of targets- automatic weapons and tiny arms actually made them horrendous shots, and a good portion of the humans were still alive- but because they were all staring up into the sky.    

   That was the first time Tim saw her in person; Valkyrie.

   She wore a white open coat with blue trimmings that extended down her long legs, only ending halfway down her calves where it met her dark blue boots. The skintight blue suit she wore beneath her coat was frosted with white, which gave an appearance similar to a partially frosted-over car window. A strand of blue ribbon had been intertwined in the braids of her long black hair. The features of her face were soft and easy to look at, but the look in her hazel eyes was hard and determined, with a stare as sharp as a sword. And then there were the wings, two of them, each five-feet long. They looked like they were made from hundreds of white crystal feathers. She didn’t need them to fly and so they didn’t flap, but they were extraordinary works of art. Pictures and T.V. just couldn’t articulate just how amazing she looked in person. It was almost enough to make Tim forget he was in proximity to a giant octopus-monster-ship. Almost. He joined the chorus of people shouting to be saved.    

   The shouts for help broke the sahuagin out of their initial surprise and they raised their guns at Valkyrie.

    “No,” she spoke, in her soft, mild-mannered tone, and branches of ice shot out of the ocean and stabbed into their guns, enveloping them in ice. Those sahuagin who still chose to shoot found their rifles exploding in their hands, and all of them, be they screaming, dead, or just missing a few fingers, were lifted helplessly into the air by Valkyrie’s magic. At the same time, the ocean waters rose to the deck of the cruise ship and froze into the shape of a staircase, complete with handrails.   

  With her right hand, Valkyrie held out her palm and a white orb formed, hovering above it. The orb split into two orbs, then four, then eight, and in just a few seconds, there were hundreds. She sent the orbs flying and they honed in on the floating sahuagin and hit them, freezing them into comically square ice blocks. Some of the orbs flew into the halls of the ship, searching for any fishmen still inside. Valkyrie released the floating fish pirates and their ice prisons dropped to the deck of the ship with heavy thuds. 

  No one was having trouble climbing up the steps despite them being made of pure ice. No one except Tim, who had been helping people out of the water at first, but quickly found himself pushed away by the waves kicked up by the frenzied octopus-monster-ship thing as its tentacles shot out from under the ship straight towards Valkyrie.

   Valkyrie calmly turned her attention toward the pirate ship as her wings went from glowing a soft white light to an intense blinding blue until they exploded, sending hundreds of her crystal feathers out like dancing bullets that cut, ripped, and shredded through the incoming tentacles. They bombarded the pirate ship, shattering against its hull, but tore it apart piece by piece. The ship bellowed like an injured kraken and a wingless Valkyrie stared down at the dying ship without pity. She held out her hand and in it formed a javelin made of ice. The air shrieked as she hurled it, and shining blue particles fell in its wake like snow.

   The javelin pierced through the octoship, and it cried out its death scream as an eruption of water shot up fifty feet into the air. It was an amazing sight to see, but since Tim was still in the water, he was more afraid for his life than amazed. “Hey!” Tim shouted between mouthfuls of water as the thrashing, dying ship caused waves that shoved him around like a doll. “Hey! Over here!”

   But the damned octoship was dying so loudly, groaning and moaning in its whale-like cries. The waters grew more violent as the pillar of water came crashing back down. The waves took him, pushed him up, down, under the water, left, right; He was completely at the mercy of the water. Every time he broke the surface, he had to choose between catching his breath or shouting for help.    

   And then suddenly Tim was in the air, above the water. He didn’t want to call it flying, because it was more like he was dangling. He could move, but his movements were sluggish, like the surrounding air was gelatin, minus the stickiness. 

   Valkyrie stared at him. Streams of water snaked their way up from the ocean behind Valkyrie and reformed her crystal wings. And then she smiled. It was an absolutely breathtaking smile that warmed his skin despite the breeze in the air and the chilly Atlantic waters. Warmed by her smile, or more likely magic. Either way, he’d never seen a more beautiful sight.

   Tim was ten feet above the water when a foreboding chill made him look down. He saw a dark shape in the water and before he could even shout, a hand made of water burst out and grabbed him by the leg and pulled him back down into the water. The dark shape swam around Tim, who could do nothing but uselessly struggle against the magical vice wrapped around him. And then, just as suddenly, Tim and the dark shape burst back to the surface.

   The thing holding Tim was a fishman, but nothing like other sahuagin he had seen. It was just as tall as Tim. Its dark blue skin was smooth where it wasn’t scarred. It had the big head and hunched back of the other sahuagin, but it resembled a shark more than it did a fish. Tattoos of white whorls and jagged triangles marred its body. The sharkman stood on the water like it was solid ground and one of its muscular arms gripped Tim firmly while the other hand held a curved knife at Tim’s neck.     

   “It took me months to grow that thing!” The sharkman said. “Its mother is going to be so angry!” He was talking to Valkyrie. Tim was nothing but a shield made of meat and bone to it. 

   Valkyrie said nothing, but her heartwarming smile had disappeared. Sharkface continued to speak. “Free to kill anything that’s not human, but you can’t even kill a single of your kind. Come on. Try it. But if he dies, even if I die with him, I’ll die with a smile on my face knowing you’ll be suffering a fate much worse than that. Come on!”     

   Valkyrie remained silent and motionless.     

   “Lose the wings,” Sharkface growled. “Do it!” Tim winced as the tip of the knife stabbed into his neck. Valkyrie’s crystal wings changed from white to grey and softly faded out of existence.     

   The Oath wasn’t something often talked about; It was the downside of joining the Magus, a group of insanely powerful mages tasked with protecting humanity from various threats. A Magus could not kill a human for any reason, not even self-defense. Doing so would see every essence of their being torn apart, ripped to shreds, and tortured. It was the Oath that bound them to humanity’s will. It was the Oath that was keeping Valkyrie from acting for fear of retribution. And it was Tim that was causing the Oath to keep Valkyrie in a stalemate with the sharkman.     

   Well, the hell with that. Tim wasn’t a charity case. And screw the sharkman for thinking he was just some shield to hide behind. Tim opened his mouth wide and bit down on sharky’s arm. 

   The shark man cried out in either pain, surprise, or both, and pulled his arm away. Tim started falling back into the water, but he was caught by Valkyrie’s floating trick and before Tim could even blink twice, half a dozen ice spears shot out of the water surrounding the sharkman and impaled him. The spears broke under the shark’s weight and its dead body fell into the water.     

   Tim quickly floated toward Valkyrie. She looked grim. “We need to get you to a healer," she said.

   “I’m fine,” Tim said, still tasting the disgustingly bitter taste of the sharkman’s skin in his mouth. “Really, don’t worry about me.”    

   “Gully sahuagin flesh isn’t poisonous, but he was a trench sahuagin. Highly poisonous. You probably have enough in you to kill you if we don’t get it out of you in the next hour.”     

   “Oh…” the nausea suddenly hit him like a train. Valkyrie grabbed onto him and then they were off, flying through the air over the ocean. Flying- not just laterally levitating- was a skill that was rare even amongst the Magus, but Tim was far too busy throwing up and slipping in and out of delirium to enjoy it.

    Tim woke up on the couch in some guy’s living room. The T.V. was on and the guy who presumably owned the house was reclining on a chair watching it, remote in his hand. It was playing news coverage of the incident Tim had just barely managed to live through- at least he assumed the sparsely decorated, white-walled, wooden-floored living room wasn’t the afterlife. 

   On the television, rescue boats and helicopters worked to move people off the ship and salvage dead bodies, both human and sahuagin, out of the water. The channel changed. It was more news coverage. It changed again to more news coverage of the event. The man sighed, set down the remote and stood up. Tim closed his eyes to pretend he was still sleeping as the man walked past.    

   “-infamous pirate Crawkrak attacked the cruise ship just hours ago with his band of sahuagin and an infant Conch Dragon.” The female news reporter had a British accent. The footage switched to a phone video recording taken from the ship. Valkyrie was in the air, sending her blue feathers at the octoship. “But luckily Valkyrie showed up to dispatch the pirates, though it did end in a stand-off between Valkyrie and Crawkrak himself.” The footage changed to another phone recording at a different angle showing the shark holding Tim with Valkyrie floating above. From the view of the camera, it looked like the sharkman had simply lost his grip on Tim. Then came the ice spikes out of the water. Tim hadn’t realized how close he had been to being impaled on one himself. “We don’t know what-”

   The man stepped in front of Tim and set a cup in front of him. “You should drink some water,” he said with a British accent, which when paired with all the British accents on t.v. meant Tim felt safe betting on him being somewhere in the UK. Tim looked up at the man, who seemed nearly as plain as his living room; slightly bronzed skin, black hair, brown eyes, a simple short-sleeved white shirt and jeans. His most predominant feature was his goatee peppered with grey hairs.   

   “Who are you?” Tim asked, probably sounding more rude than he meant to.     

   “I am Witch Doctor Augustine Florres.”   

  Tim groaned. Witch Doctors were horrendously expensive. Why did Valkyrie take him to one of those? Healers were mostly practical doctors with a pinch of magical know-how, and their prices were a little more reasonable. But even then, Tim would take a normal, non-magic doctor any day. He was only one of a very few tour guides to the more ‘dangerous’ parts of the Ireland Wilds, but he could only charge so much even if his clientele typically included the ridiculously rich; there was only so much a person would pay to maybe see a kelpie or get shrieked at by banshees in their natural habitat.   

   “And where am I?”    

   “My home. Liverpool. Drink that,” he pointed at the glass in front of him. “Your body needs hydration. And do not worry about paying me. Valkyrie, as you may or may not know her by, has seen to your bill.”

   Tim grabbed the cup. “Why would she do that?” Did she feel guilty?     

   “She is my friend. Transmuting the poison from your blood cost her nothing as well. And she said your conversations made her laugh. She seemed quite fond of you.”     

   Tim did not remember saying anything to Valkyrie. How delirious had he been? What had he told her? God, what did he tell her! All the horrible and embarrassing things he could think of, no doubt. He took a drink of water- and abruptly spit it back into the cup. It tasted like moldy lobster boiled in sour milk. “I thought you said this was water!”     

   “It is water. Your tongue is the problem. For the next seventy-two hours, give or take a normative average of seven hours, everything will taste that exact same way.”   

   “What? I won’t be able to eat anything!”     

   “You must eat and drink constantly. If you do not build up your strength, the sahuagin poison will become a problem for you again, and you will likely die as a result.”

   “Great. Just fantastic.” Tim pouted as he sat back against the couch. He felt around in his pockets for his phone and wallet. Both were gone.     

   “Your phone is drying in a bowl of rice in the kitchen,” Augustine said. “But I do not think your phone will function anymore. Your wallet is there, too. The bills are soggy, but your credit cards should still work, if you need to use them for new clothes, travel, and a place to stay.”   

  Tim sighed, grabbed the cup of water, and took a drink. God damn it! He forgot about the taste. He tried hard to swallow and wiped off what had dribbled out of the corner of his lips. Well, at least he wasn’t dead.

   A week later, back in his travel agency business office, surrounded by posters of scenic views and majestic places, Tim sat in his chair, scrolling mindlessly on the internet. The sahuagin pirate incident had left vacations by sea unwanted. Several of his clients had canceled their oversea trips entirely. It left Tim with a huge open calendar. The fifteen minutes of fame he’d gotten once reporters linked him to the incident was already over, shifting quickly back over to Valkyrie and the Magus.     

   The door chimed as someone entered. Tim looked up to see a woman in a black dress and black heels. Her straight black hair was past her shoulders and her sunglasses were pulled up on top of her head, so Tim could see her hazel eyes. “Hi!” He greeted her, feeling like he recognized her. “What can I do for…” Suddenly, he realized who she was and his jaw dropped. “Valkyrie?” She smiled. She was barely recognizable without her famous outfit, but those eyes… that smile... “I, uh, um, thank you for saving my life.” He felt his face getting warm with embarrassment. Damn it, why was he making a fool of himself? Dealing with attractive women wasn’t an abnormal thing for him.   

   “It was the least I could do after letting you get taken hostage. And please, call me Shannon.”   

   He immediately wanted to play up how it wasn’t her fault, but if the greatest Magus of his generation was giving a sort-of apology, he’d take it. “What can I do for you?” He doubted she needed a travel agent and guide.

   “I’m here for our date.”     

   “Our… what?”     

   “Date. You asked me out to dinner when we were flying to England.”     

   “I did what?”   

   “You were quite insistent. You said you knew all the best places to “get lit as a firebird” in Ireland.” She even used air quotes.     

   “I said… God, I didn’t actually say that, did I?”     

   Valkyrie- Shannon- laughed. It was a nice, warm laugh to match her brilliant smile. “You did. But don’t worry, I know you were a little delirious.”   

   “More than a little, I think. But are you being serious about the date thing? I mean, I don’t remember much of it.”    

   “I know. Augustine told me you were likely to forget everything. But you managed to sell me on a dinner date. So I figured I’d let you take me to dinner, and I could fly us over somewhere since you missed out on it the first time.”     

   Tim blinked. A lot. This was real, right? He won over someone like Valkyrie? He’d have to find out exactly what he said.    

   “So what do you say? A little flying, dinner, and a few drinks? Oh, and you promised you’d show me the merrow ritual courtship dance as well. Can’t forget that. You said as far as fish people go, the merrow were way hotter than a sahuagin.”

   Tim felt his face burn off his skull in embarrassment. “I did not say that, did I? You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”

    Shannon- laughed. “Almost got you.”

   Yeah, almost got him. Because he did know the merrow ritual courtship dance. It involved a lot of underwater upside-down leg spreading. “All right, it’s a date, then.” A date. No big deal. Just a date. With one of the most powerful magic users in the world and definitely the most famous. And she had taken a liking to him based on his near-death delirium. If nearly dying made him that charming, maybe he should do it more often. “Just no seafood or aquariums. If I see another fish of any kind ever again, it’ll be too soon.”