Years went by. When storms came, sometimes the sea spat up relics: a rune-stone, a splinter of petrified driftwood, a brass rivet. Each piece held a memory. A child would find a shard and press it to their forehead and, for a breath, see scenes that were not theirs — a glance, a laughter, a wounding. These fragments became our relics: warnings and benisons. Those who had wielded the Top felt an ache in their chests, as if the recoil lived on under their ribs. Some took up other weights: hammers, plows, pens. Others turned inward and learned to measure themselves against the weapon’s memory.
The tale of the Deepwoken Top traveled on whispers and in the mouths of old sailors who still remembered the way the night thundered when the shot unfurled. In harbor taverns you could buy a song about it, stripped of its politics, a ballad that made the Top a lover, a monster, a god. But the children who had grown up with the weapon’s absence learned to watch the sea differently: not as a ledger to be bled, but as a passage that keeps and forgets. heavy weapon deepwoken top
As the tide accepted its offering, the runes dulled and pulsed one last time. The fisherman who had once touched the barrel laid his palm upon it and cried a single word I had never heard him say: "Forgive." The Top did not answer with more thunder; it answered with release. The barrel slipped beneath the spray and the light swallowed it. Years went by
Word spread faster than sails: "The Top rides again." Men came by night, not all for battle. Some sought to bargain, others to curse, and a few — the lost, the lit by hope or hatred — begged to touch the rune-carved barrel. Each who placed a palm upon it left with a sliver of the thing’s song lodged beneath their skin. Some found courage; others nightmares. A fisherwoman wept for a child she had never borne. A soldier felt the weight of a life he had never lived and threw his coin at my feet. The weapon took those moments like it took iron and salt. It fed on stories. A child would find a shard and press
And when the wind takes up a tune that sounds like a long, distant barrel, we stop and listen — not to summon it back, but to remember the night the sea kept a weapon and gave us, in return, the courage to keep each other.
At dawn, the stranger found the Top gone. We had not hidden it in any hollow or cave, but out on the surf, where the waves raked and the horizon opened. We had taken the Top to the deep — not to sink it, but to give it back the sea that had birthed some of its ore. The weapon who remembers would remember too much if it remained in the hands of those who would make it a legion.
The salt winds howled across the shattered deck as the storm-battered sky bled into the sea. I stood at the prow, cloak whipped raw by the gale, and watched the horizon crack open like a wound. Above the roar of the waves, the world thrummed with the low, metallic heartbeat of the heavy weapon — the Deepwoken Top — strapped to my back. It was not merely a tool of war. It was a pilgrimage.