The Exorcist Doctor

The Drowned Parish dominated the center of Wraithpier long before any of them actually reached it. No matter where they walked through the ward, that giant building in the middle of the ward remained visible somewhere in the distance. Sometimes it rose beyond the roofs of fish markets and warehouses. Sometimes it emerged through gaps in the blue mist hanging over the waterways. Sometimes it even appeared at the end of a canal like a great stone mirage, but one thing was consistent: the closer they drew, the more impossible it became to ignore, until eventually the surrounding buildings parted and the entire structure revealed itself.

All eight of them stopped at the crowded crossroads before the building, staring up at it in awe.

Much like the Steelborn’s Hall of the Gutter King and the Three-Faces’ Mothlight Theatre, the Drowned Parish was a little ridiculous in scale. The building had clearly begun life as a cathedral—and the oldest portions of the building still retained old arches, stained glass windows, stone buttresses, and bell towers that reached into the mist—but unfortunately, decades of living with Wraithpier locals had stripped it of all its sanctity. Entire warehouses were attached to the sides. Wooden fishing platforms jutted from upper levels while rope bridges connected the towers, shacks, and markets on the neighboring scrap islands. The result was less a cathedral and more a small district masquerading as a single building, and…

Well, Gael wasn’t surprised it looked this shoddy. He’d been here before, so while his gang kept staring at the messy building, he kept chewing on his grilled fish skewer that he’d bought on the way here.

The fish wasn't bad, but it had too many bones and the eyes were too dry. He preferred his fish eyes juicier.

“... Alright then. Since this is basically everyone’s first time seeing it, take a guess,” he said between bites of his skewers. “What do you think the Drowned Parish actually is?”

Maeve studied the building for a moment. "A cathedral seems like the obvious answer.”

“Looks way larger than any cathedral in Vharnveil.” Vivi shook her head. “Maybe… some kind of communal building? Some governmental hall?”

Jin folded his arms. “Fortress.”

Evelyn snorted. “Looks more like a rich bastard built a Church, then another rich bastard built a dock on top of it.”

“Very large fish Church!” Liorin said.

Cara and Fergal already knew, so they didn’t offer any answers. To that end, Gael pointed his skewer at Evelyn and took another bite of it beforehand.

“That’s… almost right.” Then he gestured broadly towards the structure. “See, when all the various fishing families and settlements around early Wraithpier started growing large enough to become one district, they realized they needed some sort of communal center where everyone could gather. Naturally, they decided to build a giant place of worship right in the middle of the ward, because what else did they all have in common?”

Maeve frowned. “So it is a cathedral.”

“It was a cathedral,” he corrected. “See, everybody agreed they wanted a shared place of worship, but the problem was that nobody could agree on what they wanted to worship. Some groups worshipped the Saintess. Others worshipped the sea spirits. Others worshipped their pagan gods, their ancestors, their household spirits, old monsters, new monsters, whatever the fuck else they were seeing in their drug-addled dreams. It just don’t work when you try to cram a hundred different worships into the same building, so after decades of killing, torturing, sacrificing, and fighting over what the place should be, everyone stopped for, like, a year and asked themselves, ‘what’s the one thing we can all actually tolerate as one?’”

Gael grinned then, pulling his skewer back for another big bite.

“In the end, they turned the Drowned Parish into a giant—”

A tremendous roar suddenly erupted from nside the building.

The sound rolled through the stone walls and broken towers alike, making the floating wooden platforms bop beneath their feet. Hundreds of voices shouted together, then came another wave of cheering, and then another, then another. The noise was so loud that several gull-like birds nesting near the upper towers took flight in alarm.

None of the locals walking in or out or past or around the giant building cared, but all of them—save for Gael—turned towards the entrance immediately.

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“The hell’s goin’ on in there?” Evelyn asked.

Another thunderous cheer answered her. Gael sighed. The timing truly was unfortunate. Before he could finish his sentence, though, Evelyn was already marching towards the entrance, joining the flow of the crowd. Liorin followed immediately behind her, while Vivi hurried after both of them, clearly unwilling to let the teenagers wander into a strange building unsupervised. Jin naturally followed Vivi, telling her to wait, while Cara and Fergal exchanged a glance before heading inside as well.

Within seconds, Gael and Maeve were the only ones left standing outside.

For her part, Maeve looked over at him with a faint smile.

“Slowpoke,” she teased.

He’d pick her up and throw her over the ropes of their platform, but instead, he grumbled around the skewer in his mouth and trudged through the giant flaps of cloth hanging from the giant archway as ‘doors’.

… The Drowned Parish was, of course, a giant fish market.

The moment they all pushed through the giant flaps, they found themselves standing at the entrance of a vast atrium that stretched so far into the distance that the thin blue mist obscured its far end. Calling it an ‘indoor’ fish market would also be stretching it, though. At some point in history, there must’ve been a magnificent arched glass ceiling that went all the way from one end of the market to another, but huge sections had collapsed long ago. While fragments of stained glass and iron supports remained intact in places, most holes in the ceiling were now stretched with tarps, while rotten beams filled in the rest of the blanks, letting sunlight filter through in scattered chunks.

The walls had suffered a similar fate. Great openings punctured them at every level, only covered by more types, wooden beams, and rope bridges leading out towards the neighboring districts. The ground floor itself had been transformed into the rowdiest, messiest fish market as well, while makeshift balconies jutted over the ground from the second and third floors, also serving as stalls and shops where men traded fish by dropping them down in roped buckets while customers tossed bags of coins back up. Rather than feeling enclosed, the Drowned Parish was more like an outdoor district that’d somehow been convinced it was a building.

And, at the heart of the Drowned Parish, a massive canal flowed.

The waterway began near the entrance and continued straight through the center of the structure until it vanished into the distant mist. Market stalls lined both sides, naturally, while stone walkways followed its banks. Small docks protruded into the water, and a few boats drifted lazily through the building itself, allowing passersby to haggle while the fishermen tossed them the fish on board in nets and patchwork bags. At just a glance, there were at least ten thousand people walking around in this one section of the parish, but…

The source of the cheering that’d caught Evelyn’s excitement quickly became obvious.

A huge crowd had gathered around the canal near the entrance, hundreds of people pressing against one another to watch a fisherman at the bank battling something beneath the water. The man stood near the edge, both hands wrapped around a gigantic fishing rod bent so severely it looked moments away from snapping. Every muscle in his body strained against the line while the crowd screamed encouragement.

"Fight!"

"Fight!"

"Fight!"

The chant echoed through the atrium. Judging by the beet-red veins, the copious amounts of sweat—and also the dirty syringes sticking out the back of the man’s neck—Gael immediately recognized the symptoms of adrenaline-induced strength. So the man didn’t give up. He braced his sandals against the bank of the canal, twisted his entire body against the water, and pulled and yanked and struggled with all his might.

Water exploded up in cold splashes. Something enormous was moving right beneath the surface, and the man roared back at it.

With one final heave, he ripped his rod back, and the crowd erupted as a gigantic fish burst from the canal.

Unfortunately, Gael didn’t recognize the species. It looked like a giant silver bream, but it had six more fins than usual, two more eyes than usual, and a crown of teeth growing outside its jaw. It was also the size of five grown men smushed together, so when the man yanked it out of the water and onto the walkway, it began thrashing violently.

Its tail unfolded, and several barbed hooks suddenly shot out. Three nearby spectators were slashed open before anybody could react.

Evelyn flinched. Liorin and Vivi jumped back as well, but nobody else cared. Instead, people sprinted past the injured spectators to help restrain the fish. The crowd cheered louder than before as more and more people joined in with nets, lines, and physical bodies piling on top of the giant bream, buying time for the man who fished it up to pick up his giant fileting knife and stab it through the bream’s head.

Once the fish stilled and blood began pooling beneath it, the man—standing atop its head—raised his knife and hollered to the air.

“RAHHHH!”

Coins started flying through the air. Men tossed silver toward the victorious fisherman while others hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him away in celebration. Others paid their debts for having lost their bets, grumbling and shouting and tossing their coins in paper cups passed around the crowd, but most people were simply taking out their personal fileting knives and going to town on the dead silver bream, cutting as many chunks of meat as they could carry before running away with them.

It didn’t take long until only bones were left of the giant bream, and even they were quickly pulled apart and hauled away to the corners of the market.

Evelyn turned slowly towards Gael, eyes wide.

“... The fuck?”

Gael shrugged. “It's Wraithpier. These people only give a shit about fish. Now let’s keep looking for the Fishermen.”

“Isn’t he a fisherman?” Vivi asked, frowning at the victorious man still being paraded around.

“No, no. That’s a fisherman. We’re looking for the Fishermen.”

“I don’t… understand the difference?”

“That's alright.” He adjusted his cane and began trudging deeper into the Drowned Parish, following the canal. “You’ll know them when you see them.”