What are we but the culmination of the actions we’ve taken and actions taken against us?
The results of pleasures and horrors we’ve witnessed? Wrapped in flesh and given voice?
Our hands can give and take.
Our words can soothe or scar.
In a cycle as reliable as the tides themselves.

Ophelia was humble once, a kind soul. Giving more than she took and asking for nothing in return. They say what one puts into the world returns, and often it proved true. Ophelia survived off the meager thanks she received as thanks for providing a roof for those stranded on the Dagger Islands as they waited out storms, or for sailors to find new crews.

Most are thankful. How often do they get free lodgings and a bowl of soup?
Some are..not. Some took advantage and used her refuge even when they can pay for a room at the inns. She put on a smile though and took care of them all the same.
Perhaps it was not their body that needed resting, but their souls and she would ensure they saw that kindness and might leave with a seed of it in their hearts.

The world is a dark place however and rarely does kindness win.

One fateful evening, she found herself with a full house. An entire crew just looking for a place to stay. Harvest was poor and thus so is her soup that she shared between them forgoing even feeding herself to see that they are accommodated. But it was not enough. They demanded more until there is nothing left. They’d been drinking elsewhere and she can smell it. When she bid them to head to bed and sleep it off, promising she would have a hearty breakfast for them, it was not enough. They claimed she broke her promise, when she had made none. They swore she broke oaths, when she never had any.

 They threw her out of her own. They dragged her to the shores at midnight. In knee high water she stood, shivering with the cold in little more than worn, dark linen dress. They pointed out to sea and claimed if she had any faith in her Goddess, that maybe she’d be spared. She followed no Goddess. Not then. But they would not let her return to shore and so she put her back her island and walked into the ink black waters. She had planned to wait it out, some ways away, watching the shore and perhaps skirt around them and return.

But what is planned, is not always what happens.

She woke instead on the shores elsewhere like flotsam from a wreck; soaking wet and with an anger she had never felt warming her freezing limbs. Coughing up black sea water and dragging herself through the sand onto foreign land, she found herself amidst a revelation.

Ophelia did not believe in any Goddess before. But she did now, having been spared by the sea and the leviathans that roamed them. And that Goddess washed away her humble soul and left bare one that called for revenge.

Now her hands would take and take and take and take. And all she had to give would be to that Goddess that spared her and no one else.
That crew would never know how prophetic they had been.

Worse still, they’d never know they had created their own leviathan in a sense, wrapped in human flesh and given voice to speak in the place the long forgotten Goddess they had spoken into existence that night.

Rags would not do for the speaker of the Drowned Goddess. She found for herself, in unguarded crates, an old uniform belonging to some organization. But no longer. They were hers now. Her first take without giving. She was lucky they fit on her slight frame, short and waif like. But now she simply looked like them and what good was that when she heard the whispers of the Goddess. She’d seen them before, speakers with veiled hoods, necklaces with symbols of their gods. Once a lace curtain, refashioned to sit on her head and held in place with strands of pearls and shells, hides her dark hair, that she finds never seems to dry completely any more.

The shores, though perfect place to speak the words of her Goddess would not afford a stable shrine. (Though how fitting it would be to spend the morning building it as the tide goes out, only to wash it away when it returned. A perfect example of the dependable cycle of things.)  She found instead another place. One where she could give and take. One for pleasure and horror. In the back of her mind, she heard that whisper tell her what it could be like. Deceptive like the sea itself; on the surface it might be calm and relaxed, tempting the people in like the sea in a sheltered cove. Below though, the horrors lurk like the leviathans of the deep. And she would take from those above to give to the Drowned Goddess below.
A bathhouse, long due for repairs and left to rot. With no money, she would need to take her supplies, with no extra hands, she would need to find others so equally devoted.

And she would need to find those sailors again and give them thanks from her Goddess….