Twenty-six bells, since the pair had boarded Meshmin’s flagship undergalley.

Umin stood, rubbing fingers into weary, purpled eye-sockets and pressing tired temples. 

He is densely shrouded against the tacky salt-dew and chill, in a sombre sea-robe. 

The Great Lower Sea is, by all measures, a temperate to cool mass of water. 

Its depths are churned by sluggish volcanic vents throughout, but especially the Northern Rankles, which step and fold, marching from relative shallows in the North to the unknowable, terror-laden fathoms of the Southern Shelves. 

Brooding, Umin leans out against the encrusted upper-rails of the forecastle, peering into the vast outer-dark beyond the wide, wavering aureole of the undergalley’s numerous amber-fire sea-lamps.

The distant, perpetual echoes of the sea’s lap and wash against the great grotto’s rocky, unseen walls and hollows, leagues above him, is comforting.

In opposition to the harrowing ozone stink, and pitch and whine of the steam-brewing Shir in the hull below. 

He wonders how the milling seamen, who move adroitly across the florid decks and sails, like doleful-painted butterflies against the baroque petals of a colossal buoyed bloom, should ever grow comfortably familiar with the Shir’s stretched and sour tune.

Umin plucks the smoothly supple frost-light given to him by Pyna, from a hidden, inner pocket. 

Its cold radiance swiftly pouring from out his open palm, to dance and commingle with the warm amber gleam of the ship’s lantern-fire. 

A white-gold effusion spilling across the mercurial and caliginous, soupy sea. Frothing black against the undergalley’s broad bow. 

He has not seen nor heard from Pyna in sixteen bells.

She is still aboard, somewhere, he believes. 

Or perhaps, she has plunged into the devouring dimness of the clammy and viscid sea…

If for no greater reason other than to simply amuse herself.

The notion is briefly comical, even as its cruelty swiftly sours. 

This image of his unlikely companion sinking into the saline blackness, arms akimbo and eyes wide like an unstringed puppet dropped into a pool.

Although, he doubts that even the brinish, clutching void below is sufficient to dissuade her from her odd purposes.

Umin frowns, suddenly uneasy.

Tangled in stormy thoughts, a breath passes before he gives notice to a feather-gentle tug at his sleeve-cloth. 

All

Is

Salt.