My Voyage Perhaps There Is Death In
This night finds Solas secreted in a hollow that is lit only by the spectral worm-light of his wards. Cradled on all sides by fragrant wood he dreams many things, images chasing after each other like so many deer stotting in a tangled wreath around his head. It’s a disjointed jumble, but he sifts through them, seeking meaning in entrails.
First a slat-sided, flaxen-haired child grubs clumsily amongst the ashes of ten thousand dead souls, a young boar rooting for tubers. Her sooty hand closes around a fragment of a fractured chamber-pot, and though she asks the ghosts for answers, there is only silence. She wraps the shard in the rags of her tunic and clutches it to her chest regardless, taking it for some vaunted artifact of a halcyon past she can never know. He pushes the scene away as if casting a stone made of thought into a pond.
Things shift in the ripples, and the same child - now grown - paces agitated circuits around her quarters in the very citadel he led her to, only to suddenly pivot on her heel and hurl a jawbone at the wall with such force that it shatters. Curses she only comprehends the rhythm of surge out of her, and he watches as the shemlen perception of her tarnishes and degrades; from deliverer to a wicked mongrel with a bloodied muzzle stood over an upturned cradle. She leaves the bone shards where they fell, even as the shadow of a rough beast slides over her, its hour come at last. It takes great effort, but he banishes this from his mind as well.
Now he finds himself the steersman at the helm of what was once a ship. The sea is the lyrium-water of the Fade, the sky a starless void. The bow, once the proud gilded head of a wolf, is now diseased-green in color, scummed over with foul weeds - glassy-eyed it stares unseeing into the abyss. There is no breeze and no current, but he speeds her on through the sheer force of his will.
There are faces, bodies in the water, as if a battlefield flooded long ago. They have rotting reeds for hair, eyes like dead fish, gray flesh half-sloughed away even as Fade-light enhaloes them. He’s not sure if they’re alive or not, for if they call to him for help, the words only leak out as bubbles. He avoids looking at them most of the time, but sick curiosity sometimes finds him peering over in some desperate effort to punctuate the foggy solitude of his voyage. He sees the upturned face of his bo’sun, thrown overboard and drowned by his own hand. Decay has twisted his old friend’s expression into something accusatory, and he empties his stomach over the side at the sight.
Once he fancied he heard the clear clarion call of another living soul somewhere far off in the gloom, strident and fierce like the haughty bugle of a hart or pipes chiming down a glen. In primal response his bones snap and pop and frenzied he almost flings himself overboard. In the mere he catches sight of it, of her, some kind of siren, a demon, a mistake, an exception. She’s clad in seal-skin, eyes like liquid mercury, hair like beaten gold. She’s somehow more real than all the rest, shifting of her own volition, a sea-hound, a rider of maelstroms, a mover of worlds. Though her one hand holds a sword, she reaches for him across the distance with the absence of the other, but something clatters down from the rigging - the center cannot hold. Her song is wordless and raw but it pours over him like molten metal, threatening to weigh him down and sink him.
He lashes himself to the tiller, lest he be swayed from his course by the storm of her.
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