Kuriko was born into the Lumein, a dwindling, star-sailing rogue species descended from the remnants of humanity.
Survivors of the Rapture who endured in the cave systems of a dead moon. Their bodies, while radiant with the star maps that they diligently followed, had become largely infertile, perhaps by science or curse.
Their survival now largely depended on a single reproductive figure: the priestess, a sacred vessel engineered to carry and birth the next generation.
Kuriko was chosen by virtue of her birth.
Her brother, Orryn, never accepted the myth of the Vessel and the Soul. How could his blood be infertile? he raged quietly over his daily serving of gruel.
How could she take away what was rightfully his? All because of an outdated fairytale prattled by senile elders?
Raised with an iron fist, the expectation of power and divine lineage was promised to him as a solace.
All that training, only to be snatched away in favour of parading his silent, fragile sister for her womb? Orryn turned bitter.
What began as resentment curdled into obsession.
He sought to establish complete control over the cult and possess Kuriko as ‘his’, and that's what he worked towards.
Kuriko can be the priestess, but he will command control. She will answer only to him. After all, the myth needn't speak of lovers alone, right?
It can be a captain and his clumsy, idiot sister, valued for her body. The Vessel could just as easily serve a crown as a soulmate, if not better.
That’s what he proposed to the elders and they conceded. They murmured among themselves in disapproval but who are they to question Orryn?
Kuriko, of course, had no real say in the matter. She was merely an asset, a rare gem; wombs don’t think.
Just perform your purpose, what you were born for….for the rest of your life.
This of course fell apart on the day her coming of age ceremony was to be held. Kuriko fled the spaceship, having attacked and grievously injured Orryn.
Maybe she killed him, she didn't look back. She dare not look back. She's dooming her people, but she wasn't thinking.
The consequences would come later. For now, all she knew was that she was free.. This was her escape!
Right?
from frying pan to fire
She spent the next few years drifting. A ghost across the stars. Hitchhiking, taking odd jobs, never staying anywhere long enough to be noticed.
She avoided the authorities…not that they would have cared much. She was never a civilian.
She was cargo whose DNA wasn't registered, potentially wanted for murder, from a race that trades black-market genetics and off-world relics.
These are all the reasons she ended up in Cowboy Wilson, a floating red light district nestled precariously upon a water world , just a light year off the tracks of the Pelago Galactic Expressway,
a stopover for passing ships and long-haul traders. Demand was high, as workers sought to ‘relieve’ themselves in the arms of a woman of the night.
It's less romantic to the workers themselves, a lot of them having been trafficked here or working paycheck to paycheck. Sex, silence, and survival on a sinking raft for however long their lives allowed.
But this time, it was her choice. She had nowhere else to go. So Kuriko stayed.
The brothel wasn’t the gilded haven that Kuriko fantasised about while reading her faded story books.
But it was thrumming with energy, muffled vibrations from overhead sound systems. Dolby. Playboy. Ecstasy. Neon beaming down, and snorted up. Plastic curtains, glass walls. Limbs writhing.
Smiling, crying, moaning, screaming. Waterlogged, rust-bitten, alive with a constant hum of alien insects, of machinery, of want.
The air was heavy with sweat and incense, and the sea breeze heralds the arrival of a new batch of clients, ferried over from the singular space anchor station on the planet.
A complete contrast to the hallways that she used to sneak through as a wide eyed brat — it was that and more, and Kuriko thought she revelled in it. She thought “ah, nothing like that perfect hell!”,
and yet the nightmares didn’t stop, even as she sank down into supposed bliss.
Even as she worked her way past the debts incurred by inviting herself into the snake pit.
Debts were easier to count than dreams, and bodies easier to serve than gods. She was free, but only in the way a fish is free inside its glass tank.
And it was there, on nights when the tide lapped against the docks and the air was thick with perfume and ozone, that another set of eyes began watching her from the water below.
It was during one of those long nights, half-drugged and rehearsing the same smiles and hip twists, that a client broke the pattern. He was rougher than most, a weapons dealer who’s all bark and also bite, but she was used to some extra bruising.
What she isn’t used to is being told, flippantly as if it was just bar gossip, that Orryn was alive and in command of their last ship.
That night, Kuriko didn’t go home, nor did she visit her acquaintances like she usually does, with slightly less fake smiles and a lighter heart. She sat hunched in a side corridor with the other ghosts, passing powders and vials in shaking hands, each fix a way to slow the clock.
But still, the dealer’s words gnawed louder than the music overhead. Alive. Coming. Inevitable.
By the time the three stars rose, the lights dimmed and the last ferries of the night had lurched away, she could barely feel her legs. The sea breeze hit her like a wall of knives, the iron maiden cutting through the haze.
All she could was bark a pitiful laugh as she stumbled towards the pier. What the hell was she running away from all this time? To rot in a brothel until her brother found her? Fish in a tank, waiting to be served as the freshest cut of meat. That’s what all these years turned out to be.
The waters slapped hungrily beneath her sandals, beckoning. She shouldn’t jump.
But in that moment, she was so tired. And so she leaned forward to the cold embrace of the depths.
Dragged down, not into drowning, but into the arms of something that refused to let her go.
Meeting (the fish wife)
Nishiki is strange. Kuriko has seen plenty in the brothel, enough to fill a catalog of the galaxy’s grotesqueries. But Nishiki wasn’t grotesque. She spoke as if she was tiptoeing over a glass floor, stilted. Unsure, but innocent and bold.
Nishiki is so very innocent. She didn’t care to ask for a repayment or even a thanks for having saved Kuriko. Too open, too unguarded. No tricks, no bargains, no hunger. All she seems to want is to be close to Kuriko, like a cold blooded reptilian welcoming the star’s heat.
She looked at her like she hung up the stars in the night sky and Kuriko was terrified of the trust, terrified that she wanted this attention so badly and never knew the intensity of it.
Nishiki is funny. She learnt to shapeshift one night when fending off the rowdy client, and well, a mermaid is supposed to usually want legs right? Like in that tale! But instead she stumbled in with breasts twice their size, looking like a cat drowning in cream.
Once she showed up with a spoon on her head, declaring it her “new small hat.” Kuriko couldn’t help but laugh. It was so… her!
Nishiki is reliable. Nishiki is earnest. Nishiki is caring. Nishiki is cute. Nishiki…is beautiful. For a moment Kuriko forgot about Orryn, about her escape plan that she hastily cobbled up. Forgetting all about the call of the void.
She hadn't even said goodbye to the girls, but now it was all about introducing this new recruit, her friend to them, to this strange and cursed world she found herself fleeing to almost a decade ago.