“It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail."
For over a year the boat as waited and rotted halfway to the lake and halfway from the sea. The hull of it has tasted winter and the prow of it (on which a kelpie screams for blood) has tasted the sweet of seed and spring. All the barnacles have started to turn to moss as the wood started to peel back from the bones of the hull.
For over a year the boat has waited there-- dying.
Perhaps it was waiting for me to notice it, to realize that there was this thing in me that was waiting and rotting right alongside it. And I'm noticing it now: the way I wake with pearls of sweat across my chest, the way that I feel like I'm suffocating no matter how deeply I breathe the spiced air of my city. There has always been this blackness inside, I know it as well as I know the pattern of scales across my sides, but now I can feel it spreading like moss and pulling away from the bones of me like mealy wood.
Fable's wing is casting strange shadows in the moonlight glow around me as we walk. I can see stories in in, that darkness cut through with silver-glow. I can see the ocean in it too, the way it rises and crests over the copper grass and the smoky flowers my magic has made. And if it cuts through my shadows like it's trying to swallow it whole I try, as I always do, not to notice.
Eik. I call as I touch my nose against the cool rotten hull. It's like I'm etching his name into the marrow of this dead boat with it's ancient brine. Like by naming it with the chambers of my heart I can soften the death of it, make it lovely or anything but black and worn.
Eik. His name, cried out in tomes of devastation and wildness. I know it'll remind him of all the nights I wake up screaming and panting with magic ripping out of my skin in waves, and waves, and waves. Maybe it sounds like chain-mail in my mind, his name. Maybe it sounds like fire blazing in our room after I've turned everything to birch by only a blink of my sleep-hungry eyes.
I'm still pressing my lips against the rot hard enough that I can feel the bits of mold creeping into the cracks between my teeth. If I had forgotten that somewhere past the horizon there is suffering going on endlessly, the feel of all that parasitic wood would have reminded me.
But of course I'm nearly god now and all that rot doesn't stay rot very long. And that horizon hiding suffering--
I'm going to conquer it.
The rot turns to gleaming cypress that when it catches the moonlight makes comets dance across the corner of my eyes. The kelpie sheds her sharp teeth for a a dragon's mouth and a monster's wings. A flag once tattered and worn flies black as pitch and shines as if starlight has been woven in the canvas. Everything about the ship seems to sigh, like a mighty prayer from the belly of dead trees that never remembered what it felt like to root in the spring-damp loam. My own magic sighs in my belly and that sounds not like relief but like more, more, more.
At first, when Eik comes I don't want to turn away from my wicked ship made for war to look at him. I don't want to see the planes of his face outlined in moonlight below the watchful eyes of the mountains. I don't want to see the way his eyes seem older and older each day.
But then I remember that across that horizon there was a rumor of underworld gods walking between the thrones of mortal men. And when I look at Eik with magic blazing sun-hot in my eyes...
I know I will take that kingdom from them too if it means I can keep this man forever.
Let him see it in my eyes, I think, let him see how I will raze the world to keep him.
I am not a gentle god, not anymore.
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