thyra larssen | district four | fin

You'll be forgiven if you haven't heard of her or her family.

The Larssen's try not to linger in anyone's memory for longer than it serves their purposes. Forgettable is better than infamous. Memory is a death sentence. The ocean remembers and it does not forgive. The Larssens do the same, and Thyra is bound by her father's oath to the water.

His fall from grace was less a fall and more...a drowning. Or rather, a desecration. When the old order fell and the new one was installed, Matias Larssen (The Serpent, as he had been known), watched his prize fleet as it sank to the bottom of the ocean. 

Thyra, a name that tastes of salt and sorrow.

She wears her father's legacy like an heirloom, not in gold or silver, but in salt. Once feared for the empire of ships he held, they all lie underwater. 

She was eight at the time. She had already tasted the freedom of the ocean waves and had yet to inhale the escape that was the salt air and the allure of the bud that grew in the next house over. 

Born of the sea's sighs and the wind's lullabies, as a teenager, Thyra drifts from day to day with the listlessness of a boat caught in a surging tide. The daughter of a fisherman, a man whose hands weave nets as intricate and delicate as the stories whispered by the waves, she's rudderless. He'd always been a fisherman. But now, the Serpent was defanged and his trade was shifted to the nets that had made him a legend in his previous life. 

She fakes it easily enough - her fingers dance over the thread and nights are spent cross-legged on the floor, bangs in her eyes and callouses on her hands as she knots snares for tomorrow's catch. When her father is asleep, she climbs atop the roof, her boots thudding loudly against the shingles and her father pretends he doesn't know that she's sneaking out again. 

The lies they tell themselves makes the lies they tell each other easier to hold. 

She's up before the sunrise, the beat-up plexiglass board beneath her as she tears through the morning waves. Her friends call her Squid because each child of the ocean needs a nickname. She chokes as she inhales, eyes bloodshot from the weed and the lack of sleep. 

"Dude, don't call me that," she protests, but hands the roach back to Piper before she tugs her wetsuit back up her body. 

"We're gonna be late for first period!"  is yelled after her as she paddles out. She raises a defiant middle finger and wanders into school just before lunchtime, salt in her hair and sand between her toes. 

"Sorry, bro," she says to the school's Peacekeeper, even though he is definitely not her bro. 

In the fragile tapestry of her thoughts, echoes of the ocean's expanse mark themselves along her body. Her hair an untamed cascade of chestnut, her eyes as murky as the tumultuous sea, and the steady rhythm of her heart a metronome synchronized with the ebb and flow of the tides.

She's already on the train, the last hours a blur from the adrenaline and other things coursing through her veins when she remembers. Maybe getting high with Piper and Fitch had been a bad idea. Whatever, nothing she could do about it now.

She had been six when she'd seen her father torture a man by pushing fishhooks through his fingernails. The man had screamed and pleaded but her father, the Serpent, didn't relent until the man was covered in his own blood and piss and snot. Before he had passed out, the Serpent had strung the man up with a hook in his cheek, pulling and pulling.

Now she thinks she's the one with the barb in her mouth, being yanked her towards her past, present, and future.