First there came a caressing vanguard: a wavy lap unceasing. 

Pressing and swishing bitumen-swells against the flotilla’s restive, salt-discoloured hulls. 

These waves grew measurably choppier, as the false-dawn born of bright Sufa and its obscene host, achingly waxed.

Each burgeoning silver-frosted, sinuous wave cresting and breaking with the sound of a sea trying to swallow itself.

Captain Koom’s undergalley bobbed in the threatening swell, like a florid cork unquietly, at the heart of his makeshift fleet.

Orders were adroitly dispatched by flag, and the armada of ships soon stretched itself into a loose line along the islets. 

Captain Koom had an eye towards using their low, stony ridges and folded, chalky bulwarks to break and scatter the appalling enemy’s hulls.

The lightless sea’s febrile distemper soon painted these islets with angry spume and spray, darkening their otherwise pale protrusions, and making the once deliberate discord of Koom’s fleet nearly fruitless to maintain.  

Madly onward, frothed Sufa’s flotilla. 

Nor far nor deep now, a few mere leagues only soon stretched between the adversaries. Such that one could from the rolling decks, discern singular forms. 

Asymmetrical figures like howling twigs knit and gnashing, crepuscular and ribboned, writhing and roaming about the lewdly unshapen, papery-fleshed craft.

And so bleakly luminescent above the host of raucous nightmares was the faceless storm of Sufa itself, that Koom’s coppery sea-lamps were dimmed into near glooming by compare.

At the last, many Hearts wavered, and men and women wept in terror.

Some pitched themselves into the char-coloured deep and were swallowed, like sere leaves in a maelstrom. 

Others, maddened, plucked out their own tongues or their own eyes with wracked, fear-bent fingers.

Sufa’s legion landed with a monstrous, sucking wave. Struck with the heedless violence of a great, gleaming maul the islets and scattered craft of Koom’s armada.

Bursting like a lustrous, shimmering fruit.