Work Text:
There is no shelter in Varchas.
In the distance, shouts echo. The gates are closed. The docks crunch with mirror-dust, and all the lights are out.
You have never liked this port of call – too many glass angles to slice the light, too many wounds for smoke to bleed through – and now the only word is worse. You pace your cabin, while the Captain concludes spy business ashore. Your schematics are ruined by shaking hands.
When he returns, you spend a frantic evening in his berth, but zee-chill and dream-dark have burrowed too deep into you for kisses to warm.
.
In the Sea of Statues, fuel runs low. There is a hunger in the air – for light, for warmth – and you lose more of both than you had planned. The problem is evident in the Captain’s curse as he checks again the stores. The solution is simple: run without light.
Light is law, and when law is gone, Is and Is Not become two edges of one knife. And outside the welcoming glow of the engine room, beyond your lamp’s radius, shadows slither.
Only shadows, while that lamp glows, and until your engines fall silent. They cannot have you – yet.
.
Somewhere dark, the Captain holds you. His beard scratches the back of your neck as he kisses your shoulder and whispers, “All will be well.”
You’ve lived at zee long enough to know that that means: that you are small in a lightless world; that the hunger of this place has gotten into him, and it frightens him too.
While he is here, the dreams stay distant. You twist in his arms, taste his skin and the rough scars he bears. To the south, huge reaching statues break the surface of the water, falling farther away and never far enough.
.
Near the Chelonate, you zail through a sea of the dead: vast, hollow skulls, cathedral-vault ribs, the carrion stink of flesh falling from bones. The hunters here carve stories from that ivory, but the stories known to the beasts themselves are their own, unspoken.
You keep to the engine room, where the air smells less of rot than coal and hot metal, and silence has no place. You avoid those cavernous eyes, but not because you’re frightened of death or the dead. The Captain doesn’t understand what drives these monsters to lay down their groaning hulks and rest. You do.
.
In Aestival, a glory of sun. Fruit hangs ripe from the boughs; there are neither secrets nor serpents here.
The crew chase each other laughing through gold-dappled greenery, casting off the lightless voyage’s weight. The Captain picks trinkets from the beach, considering each with a scientist’s curiosity: brass coins embossed with honeycomb markings, a scintillack shard, a green glass bottle and the soul he frees. Little treasures to show you later.
You only stand looking up, your face awash in brilliance – until a man burns and delights as the fire takes him, and you know there is no safety here.
.
The Empire of Hands brings trade and danger. A stoker with a weakness for gambling wanders off and returns soulless. Pirates with high society manners proffer meat you shouldn’t taste.
Outside their jungle court, the apes, in defiance of the Admiralty’s embargoes, are building something magnificent. You see the scaffolding as it rises, walk past crates of smuggled fuel, and your hands itch to aid them. Down at the deep and greedy root of it, their dreams are no different than yours. Whatever the threat to London, the engine of your heart insists no creature seeking flight should be earthbound.
.
In Irem, unreal, rose-scattered, you will make landfall. Journeys will launch from these salt-rimed docks, but your road will take another direction, and this will only be a stop along the way.
In Irem, your Captain will take your arm, and lead you to a place he knows. He will feed you coffee and solacefruit from calloused fingers, bitter and sweet, until you feel not so hollow from lack of dreaming.
In Irem, Parabola will be close, but the attendants at the House of Amber Sky will be watchful. And there, on sunset linens, entangled with him, you will sleep.