The sea was an alien landscape.
This was no simple low tide. The water ran past yards and yards of sand that became yards and yards of rock, more pitted than the moon. Little puddles reflected patches of cloudy sky like slivers of mirror and a thousand things lay dead or dying, exposed for the first time to sunlight.
It was not reassuring.
Acton was not interested in seashells. He could not care less for fish-bones or shiny rocks or shipwrecks or even for treasures. But he would be damned before he missed the end of the world.
And this would be the place to see it. All abnormally, unsettlingly quiet without the rush and run of the waves, a flat and empty line to the horizon. Even the seagulls were too busy feasting to squabble and cry out. It smelled like rot, like decay, like a hundred hundred organisms that had been very recently living but now were very much not. Whatever the opposite of drowning was, that had happened to them.
He walked out onto the beach, his gait careless as a Sunday stroll, but there was something almost mad in the gleam of his kerosene gaze. Almost frenzy, almost range, almost fear – almost invisible. But not quite, not quite any of those things. He did not care for the way his footsteps sounded on such newborn ground, or the way the dried-out seaweed crunched and squelched beneath his hooves. But this was where his queen was, where many other Denoctians were, and where else was there to go, anyway?
Acton watched the storyteller watch her citizens and said nothing; he watched Araxes cry warnings, and he watched Jezanna watch Isra.
“And I used to be able to get a decent drink at a dockside vendor a little ways back,” he said at last, only a few beats after the ethereal mare’s confession. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel much shock at her words; what could be surprising, after all this? “Shame to lose both.” The smile that twisted his lips then was not without mirth.
With a skeptical glance at a salmon-colored starfish that looked to be waving its last, the buckskin stepped abreast of the three of them, and cast his amber gaze out across the horizon. “Hell of a view. Smells like shit though.” It was a comfort, he supposed, to make jokes – but really he was wondering is this it? Is this how it all goes down? Acton was not prepared to die, but he supposed this was better than freezing. Better than burning. Better than being buried beneath rubble and dust.
For a long moment he considered those few, those foolish or mad or careless, who were far out past where the breakers had been, where the seabed dropped off, where there would be no making it back if something were to happen. Then he shivered his skin beneath a bluebottle fly and turned his neck toward Isra. “You want me to bring them in? Frankly I don’t think it matters much.”
you're italic, I'm in bold
it's your friendly neighborhood sarcastic asshole!
