"Everyone is in agreement that we will accept the Gorgesh's bid?" Council leader Fadiir set the proposal to the table. Nethmi felt her heart drop to the pit of her stomach as she heard the rest of the High Council of the Isle of Nar raise their voices in agreement.
Fadiir swung his gavel, striking stone with a resounding thud, "Motion has passed. Thank you Nethmi of Toreb. Your contributions to Nar have been invaluable. None had expected to mend our relations with the Gorgesh, but with the dragon bones you discovered... what was once a dream is now possible. I Fithon Fadiir, first of the High Council, bestow upon you the right to wear the Kiriiz."
Nethmi wanted to scream. She wanted to rise from her supplicating bow before the Council and shake the old man until his decrepit bones broke. Instead she whispered the lie she had to tell herself, "You honor me, great one."
"Someone as low born as you does not know how to properly maintain your new status among the Elevated. I will send my own tattooist to you on the morrow. He will mark you and explain your new station. You may leave us now."
With the dismissal, Nethmi stood, holding her face as still as she could, hoping none would see the tears building in the corners of her eyes. They probably wouldn't, the Council never paid any thought to those they viewed as their lessers. Once she was out of their sight she ran, and ran, and ran.
Nethmi was a leggy woman, with smooth sun darkened skin the color of caramelized sugar. Not one symbol of status adorned her body. She was one of the Markless, or at least had been until today.
Willowy and very tall, taller than most men in fact, anyone could see she was an ugly woman. Not at all what the Nar Islemen looked for in a prospective partner.
She preferred to wear worker's overalls, sturdy and in dull colors that could hide dirt stains, rather than the vibrant tie-dyed skirts and blouses young Nar Islewomen usually wore. Her dark hair was cropped short, not that dissimilar to the cut of a boy, and while she couldn't help it, her resting face tended to scowl in a manner that frightened most.
No, she would never be favored by a man. She would never become a hearthmistress, thickened by the years into a stout mother. A gaggle of children about her feet that she was to tend to.
Having that opportunity pass her by suited Nethmi just fine. Even if it did hurt that no one outside her family would love her, it left her more time to herself to spend on her passion.
But with the council's decision, Nethmi had sullied that too. Sullied the one thing in her life that she had had control over. She never should have told anyone of her discovery. What a giant fool she had been.
When she first saw the skeleton of the dragon trapped in the strata, she had been overwhelmed by its majesty. The hulking form had been revealed after a nasty rockslide in the Maadtheb Hills that sheared many faces of the stone open.
It was a massive beast, at least thirty feet long by her conservative estimates. Now it was going to be destroyed. Nobody, save her, would have even known of its existence if she hadn't opened her stupid mouth.
She reached the Toreb District. It was in the eastern outskirts of Port Nar, where the Markless, those with little status, were tolerated as they set down the foundations of their humble lives.
The topography of the land skewed in odd angles. It was at the edges of the Maadtheb Hills, and the ground there was thin, barely six inches at its deepest before the layers of fossil rich sedimentary rock Nar was famous for was reached.
The land was not arable and it was too far from the ocean to support marine enterprise. The only path for those that lived among the rocks was to harvest fossils and sell them to tourists interested in taking a piece of their exotic vacation home with them.
"How did it go?" Gress, Nethmi's great uncle, asked as the beads of the string door rattled when she returned home. He was hunched over his work table with a needle-fine chisel in his hand. He lightly tapped its back, nicking away fine slivers from the sandstone to reveal a truly beautiful spiral shell trapped within it.
"They accepted the Gorgesh's bid." Nethmi said simply as she sat next to Gress, picking a raw fossil of her own to chip away at.
They sat in silence together for a time, working side by side. No customers in their little shop of curios coming to bother them. No sounds save for the gentle taps of their chisels and the clacking of the wind rustled bead door. Familial companionship in Nethmi's quiet sorrow.
When her work was done, Nethmi set her fossil up in the showcase for display. It was a fern frond, curl tipped, pressed flat by countless years of stone pressure.
She wanted to be satisfied. Proud of the beauty her work had revealed, but it was hollow.
"I've been honored by the first Councilor Fadiir. Tomorrow his tattooist will come to wing the Kiriiz on my temples." The words bubbled up from Nethmi, unable to hold them in any longer. They tasted bitter in her mouth.
"An honor, but then the price for a piece of your soul is steep." Gress's words were quiet. Nethmi felt her great uncle's hand on her shoulder, "The sun is still high, but I tire. Close the shop for me when it sets."
"Of course, Uncle." Nethmi put her hand on his, giving his gnarled fingers a squeeze before they left her shoulder, "sleep well."
Nethmi didn't have the heart left in her to continue working. Instead, she paced the length of the shop, circling and circling the show cases.
She brushed non-existent dust off the display of shark teeth. Great emperors of the ancient sea, she dreamed of riding on one as a little girl. She probably still could have dreamed it if her imagination hadn't been hardened bitter with time. Some of the razor sharp teeth were as large as her entire hand.
She buffed some amber. The rough gems that often washed up on the shores of Nar were near as rich in fossilized fragments as the stone of the Isle proper. When polished smooth, many revealed insects from bygone eras trapped within.
She reorganized the baskets of unprocessed stone shells. Gress liked to group them by size, Nethmi preferred to put similar types together. Spirals with spirals, scallop with scallop, needle point with needle point.
The rock of Nar held truly wondrous mysteries. Clues into times long past, to a world of great beasts beyond imagination. They told stories of the time of dragons.
No one on the Isle, save Nethmi herself and her Uncle Gress, cared one bit about them. Sure folk of the Toreb district hawked the fossils, but they didn't love them. They didn't understand their true beauty.
All they saw was raw material for cheap baubles. Bait for those not familiar with the mundanity of it all. But the fossils meant more than that. The intricate patterning wasn't just something to catch the eye on a bit of jewelry.
The Gorgesh, violent non-men from the neighboring islands in the archipelago, were worse. At least the hawkers wanted to preserve some of the fossils' form, they didn't destroy them. Even if it was for such a vapid reason as to earn some extra coin.
Just thinking about what the Council had consented to made Nethmi so angry she had to stop her prowling and sit. She knew that her temper, running hot, might lead to accidents. She also was far too aware what an accident might do to her delicate fossils.
It was as Nethmi was stewing in her frustration that a woman entered the string bead doorway. Nethmi was drawn from her dark thoughts by the stranger's smell.
The perfume she wore was odd. Its scent strong, with heavy notes of spicewood, and it was musky, smelling rather masculine. Perhaps it was the cologne of her partner that rubbed off on her.
"Pardon me," the woman said, smiling and blushing quite prettily. She was holding up one of the street bauble trinkets, a crab carapace that had been near buffed away, "I was told that I could find stones like this here, but unpolished."
"We don't sell jewelry... my lady." Nethmi grumbled looking the woman up and down. She was a foreigner, likely of Vilt stock considering her copper red hair, light skin, and heavily freckled cheeks and chest.
Short and full figured, her curves were well emphasized by her rather low cut bodice. It was a fine grass green silk that paired well with the large emerald necklace hanging on a silver chain between her ample cleavage.
She was very pretty. Pretty to the point Nethmi blushed thinking about it, then scowled to hide her embarrassment.
The dogs on the Nar docks must have been drooling the day her ship had come to port. She fit any red blooded Isleman's fantasy of a foreign born hearthmistress. Clearly, she was a woman of means though. Nethmi doubted they dared approach her.
"That's OK." The woman said. She still had on a large friendly smile, seemingly oblivious to Nethmi's curtness and scowl, "I'm Delia, by the way. What I'm more interested in is what exactly the stone is?"
"It's trash." Nethmi said simply, "Shoddy work on a fossilized crab that wore all the detail away. You should ask for your money back."
"I didn't purchase this necklace... it was a gift my daughter's teacher gave her."
"Mommy look!" A child squealed from behind Delia, "there's a big bug! And it's stuck in some yellow glass. So cool!"
The little girl, Nethmi assumed Delia's daughter, was in a fluffy periwinkle dress. She was maybe four years old, skipping and scampering about the shop, darting excitedly from one display to another. She looked like a miniature version of Delia.
Nethmi couldn't help but smile seeing so much joy bubbling out from the child. She was practically bouncing with excitement as she stood on her tiptoes to look through the glass at the shop's fish fossil display.
"Careful Cléo. Remember what Father said about other people's things. You can look, but no touching unless the nice Mistress... Pardon my forgetfulness but I didn't ask you your name?"
"Nethmi," Nethmi said, not meeting Delia's eye as she watched Cléo. The little girl had taken a second from her wild exploration to stare back at her, "and your lady mother is right. No touching."
Cléo reminded Nethmi a bit of herself when she had been a child. So much exuberance. So much simple joy created by the fossils. Nothing of reality weighing down the possibilities in her mind, "Here, let me bring a stool for you so you don't need to stand on your toes."
