He turns from his listless sea-gazing and peers at Pyna, who perches, still as statuary. 

Her eyes glistening like chips of cracked opal, wandering some unknowable middle-distance.

“Do you ever speak, plainly.”

Plain is not

What

Was

Proffered.

Something mocking. 

Something melancholy mars her singsong, though her mien remains porcelain perfect.

A doll’s painted-bow bending an unchanging smile.

“What was proffered?

You aren’t…”

It was

A shackle

A slave

A grave.

Umin watches for a brief time her changeless, unmoving posture.

He then turns again to the coal-dark void, pushing away with some small malcontent, any further desire to converse.

A number of his fruitless thoughts are soon borne away by the ponderous rhythm of the rolling craft and salt-tang of the sluggish air.

And so in this uncertain manner the pair kept quiet company for another bell. As the broad, swaying craft continued in its purposeful, if leisurely-seeming progress.

Portside and to starboard, here and there out in the onerous tenebrosity, along what might be a horizon, there winks now pale sparks and odd flourishes. 

Tongues and ribbons of licking fire, momentarily illuminating disheveled islands of ominous piles and ghastly contours.

The Shir below is coaxed by the engine-masters into sharpening its keening, sour song, and it isn’t long before their increased pace brings them into the looming midst of a scattering of island-shaped obscenities.

“I’ve heard tales of this place.

“I’d never thought to witness it.”

Umin leans out over the forecastle rail and squints into the dusky, undulating brine.

His nose is soon assaulted by a salty putrescence so thickly vulgar, that he hastily pulls up and affixes his veil. Rueful that he had not thought to pocket some rose-water or pungent perfume.

“Terrible…”

Tasting bile, he swallows.

Pyna, however, appears untroubled by the odious fetor.

The Archipelago of Koom

The Paper God

His

Second

Tomb.

The crew mills gracefully and fleetly about the undergalley.

Orders ring out. 

The great, wide-bellied craft slows to a wary pace, pressing through mounting wreckage of indeterminate and unspeakable quality.

They pass gingerly abreast a great calamitous bulwark of distended hulks. Carcasses hollow to their cracked ribbing and foul, flaccid spires woven from a cloth of roping rot and flotsam. 

Layered fatty and clammy with ancient nitre and brinish concretions.