The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 9: The Water Court of Black Sand Creek

Flicker, of course, had no intention of letting me brainstorm in his office before he shuffled me off to my new life. He, as he'd informed me so many times, was a busy clerk who had an actual schedule that he had to stick to unless he wanted to pull unpaid overtime, which he didn't. But did all the time anyway. Usually thanks to me.

Since I only saw him every twenty years or so, I considered that a gross exaggeration. Still, he seemed disinclined to help concoct ideas for catfish charity work, meaning that loitering was pointless.

Okay, okay, fine, fine, let's get this over with.

His expression said that we were in complete agreement for once – and he didn't like it nearly as much as he'd thought he would.

As soon as I woke in my egg, I started thinking furiously. How in the world could a regular old catfish perform services for humanity, apart from letting humans eat it? What did humans even do with catfish, besides eat them?

Keep them for pets? That seemed wildly unlikely. Anyone who had the spare change for a private fishpond would prefer koi, while anyone who lacked aforementioned spare change would rather steam me or stir-fry me than lounge on a bench under a willow gazing languidly in my general direction.

Did humans study catfish? Some eccentric scholar might happen to come across, capture, and keep me for research purposes...but that also seemed unlikely in the extreme. Serican rivers were packed with catfish. They weren't some rare, prized species like that butterfly I'd reincarnated as back in White Tier, after I kept pestering Flicker about what kind of caterpillar I was.

After I kept pestering Flicker.... Now I was positive that Glitter spied on her clerks. Knowledge to file away for later. Right now, I needed altruistic activities to pad out my curriculum vitae.

As I glared at the watery world around me, I finally admitted that the obvious place to start was the local Water Court, because dragons controlled the rain that was critical to human agriculture. The most important of them ruled from crystal palaces deep under the Four Seas, lakes, and major rivers, served by mermaids, fish, crabs, shrimp, and other aquatic creatures that had awakened. (Guess those spirits were never advancing past Green Tier, poor things.) Lesser dragons oversaw creeks, inlets, marshes, swamps, ponds, and so on. Although we called all of them "dragon kings," in most cases, the title "king" was about as appropriate for one of these glorified water snakes as it was for a human bandit-turned-warlord on the fringes of the Serican Empire. The dragon king of this particular river dwelled in a humble grotto that I'd seen many times in my many lives.

I'd always swum straight past it.

Whenever I thought of dragons, I saw the hard, unblinking stares of the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas as they watched my trial. Not a single one of them had spoken up for me.

I hated dragons. All dragons.

And now I was going to ask one for help? Go as a supplicant into his court, kneel and kowtow before him, and beseech him for meaningful work?

At the image, I recoiled so hard that I knocked my egg into my siblings'. All around me, their thin, silvery forms twitched and wiggled around their yolk sacs until dozens of pairs of eyes were glaring at me.

Those eyes, those blank, black eyes –

In a flash, I was back in the Hall of Purple Mists, watching as Lady Fate's Three Cadavers handed her the documents she needed to condemn me. They'd stared at me afterwards, knowing what would happen to me, not caring.