Short story: Squid Hunting

Lord Norane is elated to have an arranged marriage with Lady Anna Surène and she is not. This only makes it even more delightful for him to annoy her and provoke her. Before they can wed, he still has to go through the last traditional courtship rituals, trying to twist them all out of their meanings to make her react while avoiding all the traps she is throwing into his way...

The world

Setting

This story is set in an archipelago with islands and sea monster:

A large group of hundreds of core islands are inhabited and closely associated together politically and culturally.

The sea monsters mostly reside outside of this core group but will venture inside occasionally, especially during storms.

The Surène island

Anna's home. It is a medium-sized island of medium importance in the archipelago. However, it has some important magical mineral resources that Norane needs for his research into perfecting his magical artefacts/inventing new ones, and this is why he forced an alliance with the Surène family.

Main city: The harbour is located in the main city on the island. Above them are rocky cliffs and the manor of the Surène family.
Manor: It is surrounded by orchards and has a big entrance drive lined up with ancient trees beyond which carefully arranged gardens can be glimpsed. At its back, the manor opens into a large balcony built over the cliffs and giving over an abrupt drop over the ocean. The glassed walls and ceiling do nothing to hide the magnificent view but protect the room's occupant from feeling the harsh wind that blow over the whole archipelago.

The sea monsters

Molluscs
Giant squid, krakens...
Danger: They are extremely clever and vicious hunters that lay traps and ambush their prey.
Group: They are mostly solitary creatures.
Where: They prefer to stay at sea, on the shore and in swampy islands with lots of water available, and they rarely come inside the most inhabited islands.

Sharks
Of all kinds and all sizes.
Danger: Shark can smell the tiniest drops of blood in the water from kilometres away and will rush in to see if there is anything edible left to consume.
Group:Either solitary or in group.
Where: They often come on the scenes of battles with sea monsters to achieve the survivors.

Cetacean
Giant dolphins, orcas, whales...
Danger: They mostly do not hunt humans directly to eat them. However, they like to play with ships by ramming them and destroying them.
Group: They also live in groups.
Where: They mostly stay outside of the archipelago.

Reptiles
Sea snakes, giant crocodilians...
Danger: They are very aggressive and bloodthirsty and are always very fast.
Group: They always attack in group.
Where: They love to come inside big inhabited islands during storm and to gorge themselves on people during the confusion before anyone can realise the wards have been breached and do anything about it. Anna's parents were killed like this.

Ctenophores
Comb jellies.
Danger: They generate electricity to petrify anyone nearby, then grab them with their extremely thin and long tentacles to bring them to their rows of teeth or to swallow them whole.
Group: Solitary creatures.
Where: They drift in the depths of the sea and are not generally dangerous, but during battles with sea monsters, the waves generated can bring them up to the surface.

Parasites
Hagfish, lamprey, moray louse...
Danger: Moray louses are louses with sharp claws at the end of each leg and sharp teeth. They attach to a sea monster's skin with their claws and eat their way through the skin to burrow inside.
Group: They live in swarm and attack anything that comes to close. This kills most monsters quickly, but the bigger ones survive the initial attack and transport them to another location to create a new colony.
Where: Everywhere.

Courtship tradition

The tradition: To court someone, the requesting partner has to show off their devotion and suitability with a series of gifts. The courtship must go on whether people are already betrothed or still trying to convince someone to become their betrothed. Indeed, courtships are very public events and all of society gossip about them and judge on the suitability of the courtship gifts.
Which gifts: Courtship gifts have to illustrate the couple's values and qualities and what the requesting partners bring into the marriage and to show that they understand each other.

What the gifts illustrate	Examples
Strength and the ability to protect (from sea monsters or political enemies) or defend the honour of the courted person.	Winning a duelling tournament and bringing back a trophy, or killing a sea monster and bringing back the corpse, defeating an enemy politically and bringing back something belonging to them...
Cleverness and ingenuity	An artefact crafted by the courter, some resources hard to get, a clever bit of poetry written by the courter...
Wealth	An art piece commissioned for the occasion, jewellery, something rare and expensive...
Political alliances, a large network of contacts, strong friendships	Favours or meeting with important people, a very large ball...
A sacrifice	Showing that you are giving up a hobby or political advantage in favour of your betrothed. This is mostly done by youngsters losing their mind at their first love rather than by mature adults. However, occasionally such a sacrifice is part of the conditions of a marriage, and it will then be played out as a specular spontaneous gift to earn social points. As a result, there are always a lot of speculations surrounding any sacrifices.
The deep understanding of the future partner	Something reflecting their hobbies, tastes or values. This category is often combined with the other ones so that each gift is made especially meaningful to the courted person.

Character

MC - Lord Norane

An extremely smug and arrogant man who thinks he is better than everyone around him and that he is a genius at everything he tries—and fortunately for him and unfortunately for everyone else, he is almost always right about this. He is one of the most powerful and influential lords of the archipelago, but do not always deign to involve himself into what he judges to be insignificant boring politics.
Why Anna: He plotted to put the Surène family in a position of weakness to force them to beg his help so that he could get control over their mineral resources. However, while carrying the negotiation, he met a young Anna and was charmed and immediately decided to change his plot into a marriage alliance—if an unequal one where he would be the one with all the power.
Hobbies: Crafting magical artefacts and humiliating and annoying other people. This makes him particularly enjoy duels with other lords and ladies, although he prefers the wild honour duels he pushes his enemies to demand compared to tame dueling tournaments.
Artefacts he has crafted:

A pair of glasses that makes magic visible and can filter different magics to allow their wearer to focus on specific traces—an ideal tool for hunting.

A chain whose movements can be control by thoughts and that can electrocute anything it is wrapped against. He uses it to hunt down sea monsters while wearing protective clothes to avoid getting electrocuted himself.

Lady Anna Surène

Anna is the young woman leading the island of Surène. The Surène family was not particularly important before Norane made an alliance with them, but his singular focus on Anna has attracted a lot of attention from the entire archipelago, and she has been using this to develop her own network of influence.
Relationship with Norane: She is just as obsessed with him as he is with her, but she loathes him for forcing her into this unequal betrothal agreement and for generally being infuriating and delighting in annoying her. Because she refuses to give him this satisfaction, she tries to mask her reactions and maintain a pleasant façade around him, but he makes it really challenging. Because he is older and more experienced than her, he makes her feel inferior and she always has to play catch up with him.
At the same time, she recognises that he is superior to all the other people around them, and she gets annoy and frustrated with other people because they do not measure up to him, and she loathes her reaction even more.
Since her parents died in a crocodilian attack, she became independent and took her relationship with Norane in her own hands by doing her best to get him to cancel the betrothal—or even better, to get him killed.
Hobbies: Plotting ways to get Norane killed, making alchemical potions and studying sea monsters to find a way to use them in potions. She likes squids and octopi for being clever, and she is trying to train some to cultivate and gather sea weeds for her. On the other hand, she absolutely hates crocodilians and always love scaling them to put them in her potions.

The short story set in this world is currently being written.