Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

The Great Lower Sea.

In prose poetical and spare, the Innulians have brooded upon its obsidian-salt gleam, long since before men and women first strode upright, and bartered their souls away to the gods.

Its aspect is treacly and insouciant. A perpetual fount of unceasingly placid fog. 

Which often rises to lick the unseen upper berths of the Gate of Candles, and lay like a longing spirit upon the quays.

The eighth bell had rung its tinny clarion across the mushroom-spread of The Barrows, Meshmin’s sunless city, and the quays were a leafy rustle of mercantile and marshal enterprise. Echoing out dolefully over the black, horizonless wash.

Umin stood abreast the distended belly of a looming, arabesque, undergalley. One of the many that occupied Meshmin’s admiralty. 

Its graceful, liquid-brassy lines and nimble curvature unpleasantly reminiscent of a similar craft that had vexed his dreams.

His hand rested on a grey, salt-encrusted sea-lamp. Its dull illumination spilling meekly down into the leaden, mirroring depths.

Depths that had, by all accounts, never been quantified.

Depths that were the very womb of the world. Their measureless, ancient amniotic pitch, birthing at times wondrous and ghastly things. 

A pace to his right upon the pocky basalt quay, nearer to the undergalley’s jet-burnished boarding plank, perches Pyna. 

A hands-breadth taller than usual on naked alabaster tip-toe.

With characteristically maddening rag-doll stillness, she peers enrapt at a slim, oddly-worked blade of wavy, stratified metal-craft, pinched between forefinger and thumb.

The short-blade flashes with a distempering dullness in the weak lantern-light. 

A slumbering thirst. A predatory edge at unquiet rest.

Her eyes alone, smiling, acknowledge Umin’s gaze.

Father’s gifts.

Great or tiny, small

Are hungry, thirsty

One and All.

What appears to be a seaman swaddled in salt-rags, soon approaches, stamping down the boarding plank in crusty sea-boots. 

His voice is watery, as though his long years upon the gloom tides have worked a slow, brinish, transmutation. 

And his eyes are a bleached umber, thin as over boiled tea, above a loose salt-veil. 

“Lady Pyna.”

A bobbing brow and rustle of stiff, brine-clotted cloth.

“The Shir is leashed, the hour is proper.

“Lord Emberbole kindly bids your company board.”

With indifferent eyes, the seaman briefly regards Umin before taking leave to plod back up the plank, vanishing in a breath into the baroque undergalley’s florid tangle of rope and rail.