The ixitxachitl is the only fish known to hold a grudge against a specific doorway. It will leave a feeding bay, cross a reef shelf, and spend an afternoon circling the lintel of a sunken temple it was once driven out of, as though waiting for the door to apologize. A full-grown specimen spans five feet from wingtip to wingtip, flies through water like a flung cloak, and carries a tail with a spade-shaped barb at the end. Its mottled hide runs from oxblood to the black of a wet slate roof.
The oldest account is a fisherman's tally in the margin of a salt-tax roll from Jarrowclint, which records the loss of one net, two oars and a boy's good cap to "a ray that chanted." The chant is the part that holds up. Ixitxachitl produce a low, rhythmic clicking in sets of seven, and listeners agree it has the cadence of a litany. A century later, a diver working the flooded undercroft below Ostrander Scar reported finding them arranged in rows along a stone nave, facing the broken altar, clicking in turn. He left without his lamp. Around the same period the rays began to appear in fresh water, having followed a drowned chapel up a river mouth when the sea breached the dike.
Since then they have become a nuisance with a trade attached. Ostrander Scar supports a guild of listeners, men and women who sit in skiffs at slack tide with an ear pressed to a hollow ash pole lowered into the water. When the clicking comes in sevens, the shoals are bad and the oyster beds stay shut. When it comes in sixes, a colony is quarreling and will not bother the boats. Goran Pell, the senior listener, has worked the Scar for thirty-odd years and says only that a colony in sevens "sounds like it's counting our debts." Nobody has contradicted him.
Locals follow one rule when they must wade a flooded chapel floor: they drop a handful of crushed mussel shell ahead of them, because the rays will not cross it. The rays also leave behind a pale, waxy film on stonework, which shipwrights scrape off and sell as caulking. One petty habit is recorded in every account: a colony will steal exactly one shoe from any wader, never a pair, and will not return it. What the rays do with some four hundred single shoes recovered from the Ostrander nave, stacked by size along the north wall, has not been explained.
- Classification
- Chanting devil ray, semi-intelligent
- Habitat
- Flooded shrines, brackish bays, river mouths
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft wingspan, 8 ft with tail
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Sea and River
- Binomial
- Raja daemonomorpha
- Diet
- Oysters, eels, drowned offerings
- Temperament
- Devout, territorial, petty