The Vagabond

Streaming in on longships and dinghies and rafts, blown together from all 5 corners of the Shifting Shores, most adventurers reach Odd from across the seas. But the octopi came up, up, up from the depths. They started small, trading a bright shell that they’d carried up with them for a rotten oar, then haggling the oar for a hat and after that a bannister. One day, a passing loon asked them the price of the cloth bag that they’d made their home, and they sold that too, even though they didn’t want to. 

Soon, that rocky outcropping in the sea where the bag had lay began to rise, grown huge with a thousand strange possessions that the octopi had claimed. That was how they knew it was time to open Whizsme’s: a Shop for Everything. At their hearts, the octopi had always longed most in the world to have things, as many and as different as possible, though they could never say why. They knew that the best way to get things was to give up the ones they had, and they did so without complaint, even when it was their very first rock, or their grandfather’s gnarled sea root pipe that they were trading. Octopi are not nostalgic creatures, for they are never told the melancholy rumblings of their ancient parents.  

In their scrap shop of broken figureheads and shimmering sea glass, the octopi forgot about their bubbling caves at the bottom of the sea, and even the cloth bag that had come after that, but they though they built huge oaken rafters and covered their store in the softest rugs knit by very wise sheep, they could not shake an unnamable want for a home. A good store is a wonderful and warm kind of creature, but it does not hold you like a home.

***

One day a crow arrived at Whizsme’s doors (there were two of them and they were very different and only one of them took you anywhere good). She was huge and dark and sleek, and her feathers shimmered greenly, reflecting the octopis’ round headlight eyes as they wondered what she most wanted. She wore a bandolier of small silver tins, the kind that had once held anchovies, but now they contained little dancing flames, each a different color. In the crook of her beak was set a great big sapphire that winked as knowingly as she did. She was something of a big business trader, this shimmering glimmering crow, and she had flown to the octopi shop with a proposition. She wanted to buy it for a name. 

The octopi had never had a name, not even a hand-knit one that they had stitched together from sea-weed and bad weather. In fairness, they’d never thought they wanted one either, but good traders learn early on to keep an open mind about the value of an unusual item. The crow told them that there are many benefits to a name like fame and fortune and general personability in social settings, but that a good name is like a key that opens up a secret little door in one’s heart. 

The octopi turned to each other, some a bit skeptical, some a bit hopeful, and they all saw that there was something true about the want of a name. Though they had built the shop up over the course of years of careful work, it was after all just one more thing to trade away for a greater treasure, and so they sold it. When they handed the crow the very real and rather large key that opened Whizsme’s, they were forced to watch a bit glumly as she swallowed it down in one cackling gulp. Then, she coughed very deeply, and a small piece of paper drifted innocently from her beak. It said, “Vagaba”, and when they read it the octopi trembled as if their hearts had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. 

As soon as that terrible word had left the crow’s beak, her leering green feathers began to fall away from her, tumbling into a swirling cloud that consumed all of Whizsme’s. The octopi cried out in fear, and scrambled to grab anything that looked like it might be magical enough to stop whatever horror had engulfed the store, but they found nothing that was any good at all in that kind of situation. They waited, breath clutched tightly inside their chests, and very soon a woman stepped out of the darkness. She stooped graciously, and handed the scrap of paper back to one of the octopi, and asked sweetly, “Do you know what that means little octopus?”

The octopus shook its small head, and shuddered because it seemed like the right kind of moment for that. Circe said, “It means wander, and that is exactly what you will do.” And then she laughed, and it was awful.

***

The octopi live at sea now, just as Circe cursed them to do. They still have that bannister that they traded for at the very beginning, and have scrapped together a kind of patchwork boat of all the floating parts that Circe let them keep, but it isn’t much and it certainly isn’t a home. Sometimes, in the dead of night when there is only one of them left awake beneath a field of stars, an octopus will whisper their name softly, hoping that it will open a secret door inside of them. But no doors have ever opened, and until one does they will keep drifting, trying to make a home of the flotsam.