Histories in the Dusk

PART II

by M. Keel

Mind that Sabet Holstrom, they said: she washed in from the Void Sea during a storm. She’s not human.

It was a story that followed Holstrom all her life. It is true that she was orphaned at a very young age, and that her adoptive parents found her wandering on the Docks. In this age, it serves as the beginning of a story that ends with Holstrom destroying a powerful noble house from the inside. I first heard it from an old storyteller in the Charhollow market, a Doskvorn yarn told for the little ones. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was a real person, tucked into a single sentence in our history book.

This is what we know from the documentary record: In the year 562, a child named Sabet was adopted by the noble house of Holstrom, aged no more than five. The Holstroms, already an old and powerful family, had built one of the first great leviathian hunting fleets in Duskwall. As Sabet grew up, she proved trustworthy and intelligent enough to become one of her adoptive parents’ chief agents in the city, while her brothers captained vessels in the fleet. She even came to manage the routes, having a particular genius for analyzing the captains’ observations.

And then the fleet started dwindling. Vessel by vessel, ships missed their projected return dates by months, and were given up as lost. Money, put into apparently safe investments, disappeared as well. A deal with a refining plant went sour during negotiations to renew contracts. In a matter of months, the fortunes of the Holstrom family collapsed. By the time Galard, the single remaining Holstrom son, returned to Duskwall, his sister was gone.

No one ever heard from Sabet Holstrom again. The historical record loses her entirely after the bankruptcy proceedings began. She never saw debtors’ prison, though both parents did. Galard and his parents would argue in court that she was not only responsible for the failure of the fleet, but had planned it deliberately and maliciously. The story about her washing in from the sea returned with a vengeance, and they built her up into a kind of unnatural monster.

Modern historians have tended to agree that Sabet engineered her family’s downfall. There is a surprising amount of documentation to support it. All the Holstroms but Sabet herself kept the daily logbooks common among the elite in that time, and many of these writings and their business records are in the archives at Doskvol Academy. In his biography of Galard, Reyner Peet drew convincingly from the logbooks of the family to show tensions present between Sabet and her parents and siblings long before the disasters began. He suggested that Sabet was an outsider in the private sphere of the family, even as they relied on her in business matters. However, the tendency is to discard the monster story as a useful fiction to levy against Sabet.

We’ve all heard that line, haven’t we? Such and such a person washed in from the Void Sea during the worst storm in memory; loving parents found a baby mewling among the waves the next morning and took them in, raising them as their own. What follows is almost always a disaster of some sort, a tale to send shivers down your spine on a rainy day. It’s become a sort of formula in our stories, though it is most conventionally used in tales of witches, to explain what made a particular witch so strange and dangerous.

A new paper about this line in Akorosian folklore sheds quite a different light on Sabet’s story, however. You’ll remember if you’ve read my previous pamphlet that prior to the eighth century, historians often relied upon folk tradition while studying the past. The late fifth and most of the sixth century in particular saw a vogue for collecting and printing folk stories from every class and every region scholars could manage, often with meticulous notes to where and when and from whom the story was collected.

R. M. Kinclaith examined stories of witches collected before and after this time and found something startling: until midway through the sixth century, the “washed in from the sea” origin story was not used at all. The Holstrom court saga came just a few years after the first printed uses of that element Kinclaith found. It was several decades before that story element became common outside of Duskwall.

Kinclaith argues that there is more to the sudden interest in horrors from the sea than the newly formed leviathan fleets. Before leviathan fleets brought many more firsthand accounts, the sea was known to be full of horrors; they just remained at sea, and firmly non-human. The fleets brought home dead monsters, huge and strange. But something, around this time, convinced the people of Duskwall that new monsters had come from the sea to walk among them, as one of them.

Other orphans were accused of acting out against their families around this period. Kinclaith lists over a dozen cases recorded in court records and printed news during the middle of that century. These stories seem to have both existed contemporaneously with the witch tales and fueled new ones. Kinclaith ends the paper on a provocative question: if this was only a case of people’s fears fueling their paranoia, where did that particular fear come from? What kernel of truth lay at the center of those stories?

We know that there are more types of being than the Akorosi model of humans and leviathans. Tycherosi combine Akorosi-human traits with traits from other species; people from the Dagger Isles survive close to the Void with no lightning barriers; and there are stories of people with even more remarkable differences. So much is unknown that it is not impossible, to my mind, that Duskwall’s fleets disturbed something more than leviathans in their first journeys far from shore.

Sabet Holstrom could well have been a human outsider taking family quarrels too far. But I have to wonder how much more there is to her story than the documents can show us. What story would Sabet tell about herself?