I go to lose myself in it, Kindred thought, her grandmother’s words become her own.
“The Lost,” she said finally. “Its name is The Lost.”
“Aye, Captain,” Sarah said, grinning, and from below, Kindred could see Seraph nodding in appreciation. “And what is our destination?”
Kindred eyed the flames. The Lost approached the point where it had started her burn, nearly completing the circle around Arcadia. It would do.
The Sea was burned away, but Kindred’s eyes snagged on the patches of the Greys left behind, and her mind leapt suddenly back to a day not so long before, standing with Seraph on the docks of the Once-City and looking out across the Forever Sea. Stories of what lay below had been his explanation for the Greys—impossible stories the world had long since discounted as fanciful, imaginative nonsense for children.
She wanted impossible stories. She wanted the imaginative nonsense. Those stories everyone knew but few believed? Kindred wanted those.
She dropped back down, followed quickly by Sarah. Kindred kissed her then, fierce and quick.
“The deeps,” she said, pulling back and looking Sarah in the eye. “We sail for the deeps. Aye?”
Ragged Sarah grinned back, her eyebrows rising.
“Aye.”
And with that, Kindred knelt before the fire, nodding to Seraph, who sat back, face wet with sweat and exhaustion. Kindred plunged her hands into the hearthfire once more, pulling it back and into the vessel. She sang her melody, a lilting hymn of exploration and discovery, of dark spaces hiding wonders, of a world beneath the world, of a life unlived until that very moment.
The Lost dove for the deeps.
The storyteller stops, letting the last words fall from his mouth in slow, heavy drips.
“That’s it!?” comes a shout, the tone caught somewhere between disbelief and anger. Its owner, one of the men sitting beside Praise, stands up. “That can’t be the end of the story!”
“Yeah!” says the man on Praise’s other side, standing, too. “You promised to tell us our history! You haven’t explained any of this!” He gestures around: at the broken bones of the world that was, at the ever-present darkness, at the pillar, grey-green in the firelight, rising from the ground and reaching above.
Others are nodding along, a few beginning to stand, all angry or confused, and then the questions come, shouted at him. What happened to Kindred? Did the pirates make it to Arcadia? Did Kindred ever find the Marchess?
And yet they never ask the one that so weighed in Kindred’s mind: what is below the waves?
And why should they ask it? They know the answer, have been born into it. Their fantasy is not to dive below but to live above. For people born in the darkness below the Forever Sea, their dream, their only dream, is sun on grass, open sky above, the darkness below their feet.
The storyteller ignores them. They will get their answers.
Instead, he watches Praise, who stands, flanked by the two men, and approaches the dais. He puts one foot up and then pauses, and the storyteller wonders with the thinnest flicker of hope whether this time will be different.
But no, of course not. Praise hauls himself up after a moment of indecision, and then the two men join him. There was only one the last time, but Praise was younger then, fitter, less an old man gnawing at the last few bones of his life.
“Storyteller,” he says, turning out so that those assembled might hear him. “We don’t have much in our small community, but what we do have, we have offered to you freely and without payment. You have come here, you say, to tell us our history, our story, but instead you drink our water, eat our food, and mock us with a story half-told. You have taken advantage of our hospitality.”
The storyteller gave up being surprised by this sentiment long ago, the words rehearsed and wooden.
“I have given you enough of your history,” the storyteller says, his eyes locked on Praise’s. “And some of your present, too.”
“It is not enough,” Praise says, again to the crowd. “You owe everyone here more, much more.”
The two men take their cue from Praise and leap forward, each one grabbing one of the storyteller’s arms. He does not fight them, except when one tries to take his pack.
To this man, the storyteller whispers a word in a language not spoken in ages, and the man releases the bag with a start.
“I will go with you,” the storyteller says to Praise. “But you will not take my things.”
“Fine,” Praise says. “Keep the bag.”
“My friends,” comes a voice from the edge of the firelight, and the crowd turns to find the First there, her wounds bandaged, her face pale and pained. The headaches have already begun. She will not last the night.
“The storyteller will extend his stay—and his protection—until he has finished the story to our liking. Let us thank him,” she says, clapping her hands quietly.
The sound of laughter and cheering accompanies the storyteller as he is led away from the light of the fires, back to Praise’s home, to the only room in Twist with a door that locks.
The hammock is still there, but now a set of rusty chains hangs from the wall, and the feel of them against his skin as he is locked in for the night is a comfort to the storyteller. Familiar and honest. This was the truth all along—now it is simply out in the open air for all to see.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” the First says, standing in the doorway with Praise as the men chain him up. “I wanted to do it without all of this, but when you turned down our offer to stay, well . . .”
The First trails off, shaking her head to clear the sudden throb of pain.
“I have my people to think about,” she finishes.
For a time, he sits in the idyllic silence, letting those old words tumble out from his memory: “I’ll see you after.” Five simple syllables, each one a weight on the storyteller’s still, still heart.
They leave him, with one man outside the door. The chains are tight, but not so tight that he can’t get his bag open.
He reaches inside and pulls out a book and a stub of coal, the only items inside. He flips past pages and pages filled with an archaic script—the same language he spoke earlier when the man tried to take his pack.
On and on the book goes, far too long, far too many pages, more than the binding seems to hold from the outside. And yet there they are, a seemingly infinite fan of pages.
Finally, though, the storyteller reaches a page half-filled with the script, and he traces one finger along the last line, whispering the words to himself and the walls of his cell.
“Let them forget us. Only this matters. Only this.”