The coming dawn reefed the horizon ahead in the pale blue that was the color of her eyes. He left the seaway and struck south toward the great chasm that separated humanity and dwarfdom. The thickets that filled the defiles and the hedgerows that capped the ridges all thinned as he drew close to its cliffside. For the last quarter mile there was only the caress of soft grass against his ankles and the distant sigh of sea on rocks. First light crested the world and he could distinguish the features of the dwarven side of the chasm: the sharp line between dawnlit surface and dark basalt face, the silver serpent of the river and the white horsetail of its falls, the mountains rising in a washed-out blue haze with their summits obscured by pink clouds going gray.
He walked along a hollow that terminated at the chasm. He peered over the edge and the sea's whispering became a roar and he saw its rows of advancing white swells and the crash and crack of them against the cliff as if seeking to dislodge some evil that choked the continent. He turned and walked alongside the edge, climbing out of the hollow and onto a gnoll that was the highest point around. He intended to peer again over the side, but upon the edge stood a stack of mortared stones set with a bronze inlay. The stones were dark and had been rough cut from that land and green oxidation collected in the corners of the bronze and wept down the bevel on either side as if the story it told moved even the elements of the earth:
In tribute to the ten thousand who gave their lives in the cause of freedom for two worlds, who volunteered from all provinces to defend ours from tyranny and liberate theirs from the great scourge. For those who left and never returned, this peak was their last sight of home.
He turned and looked out at the dwarven lands with their impenetrable mountains so tall their peaks seemed to graze the crescent moons and with valleys so deep their bottoms were filled with stars. He hung his toes off of the cliff and watched two seas violently thrash and combine into one beneath a span that had sought to do the same for two disparate peoples after that war so long ago. The sea flung spray up the wall to wet the basalt and its smell recalled to him the belly of the ship. The grass under his feet held the thin layer of soil together and in that moment seemed to hold him together. He began to say his goodbyes to a home he never really knew or understood. To the solo [fisherman] piloting a yellow outrigger that bucked from swell to swell and to the skein of white seabirds with their orange legs stretched out behind as they floated up on the morning thermal and to the tiny red and black spotted beetle crawling over his foot and to the memorial and to the memorial makers and to the [bookmaker] and to the [brigadier] and to her poor [valet] whose name he had never learned for she had only ever called him sir.
As he readied his ends he smelled the dead man come up behind him. He turned away from the edge. "I told you what would happen if I saw you again."
The [bosun] crossed the open space between the foliage and the cliff and stopped to read the memorial. He traced his bony fingers over the letters and made some gurgling noise. For a mad moment Orc thought he might raise the ten thousand from their graves to liberate their realm from its current tyranny. This feeling passed.
"I failed," said Orc. "Turns out I'm not who I thought I was and I can't be who I want to be."
The [bosun] nodded and placed a hand flat on his chest as if to say he knew the feeling. He gestured to the journal in Orc's waistband.
Orc hesitated a moment, then drew the journal and unwrapped the black lace that kept it closed and rewrapped it around his arm and he offered the journal to the [bosun]. The [bosun] pulled the small pencil from where she had shoved it between the headband and spine and he set it on the monument and flipped to an unmarked page and wrote in his child's letters: We can only be what we are. For that we can't be ashamed.
"I'm sure you'd like to believe that."
The tusker went where he was called. And you. And me. None without a home live long. Specially not you.
"I'm done arguing about it."
We'll see.
"If you've got something to say then say it."
The [bosun] nodded over the cliffside. Ain't nothing waiting for you that way.
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"Nothing left any other way either. Feels like every direction's the wrong one. Every step's taken me farther from where I aim to be."
You've got things backward. You feel bounced around like some child's toy but that ain't it. No matter how crooked your life might look it's actually a plum line from your first breath til your last. There ain't any forks in it, not a single one. Every choice is made up long before you get to it. You feel your course led you here but really you led your course here. Everywhere and everywhen you been your course is only what's behind you. Look back and it's all one line. No forks. Like a breadcrumb thrown in a current. Only one direction gone. Mind the geese.
The [bosun] made his horrendous chortling laugh.
"It's been awhile since you've talked to anyone."
The [bosun] wiped the back of his fingers down his slack jaw. Not since you tore my face in two.
He looked at the man's face and raised a hand as if to touch it. "They said you deserved it."
I did for other things. What's your plan?
He stood beside the monument and looked a long time over the precipice to the twisting and running seas. When he spoke the [bosun] had to lean in to hear him. "Wish I knew. Wish someone would just tell me what needed doing so I could get it done and get out. I'd walk over those mountains and keep walking right off of her maps past places nobody knows and where nobody knows me til I got so far I didn't know myself neither."
When he looked back he saw the [bosun] had written: I've been that way.
"I shouldn't have come back here."
The [bosun] turned the page. You was always coming here. Just like me. Hurrying along, studdings and tops and gallants and royals and skys all piling on. Even toe draggers like your tusker friend are stepping to. Along we go, no faster or slower than any other. Kids dying too young, invalids living too long. I might've lived fifty days or fifty years. It all feels the same. Our courses only go back as far as our memories, and those ain't worth shit. Foggy horizons and blank charts with a score of dim spots away in the distance like atolls rising out of the tide. We cross through life by moonslight, only what we can remember is real. Everything else behind ain't no more, perhaps never was, and everything ahead ain't any more real than a dream. A reading of guts. Unborn kids who never were.
The [bosun] put a finger in the page and closed the journal and held it up to Orc's face as if it was all the proof he needed.
"You had kids," he said.
The [bosun] opened the journal and wrote: Still do thanks to you. But they ain't nothing to me no more. Leastways no more than this here book is to you and to her who writ it. All its words just knots along the logline of your woman savior.
"I wouldn't call her that," he said.
Memories so thin they vanish like a wake across the ocean. Only remembered until the next ship cuts their path. That's how it is. This is how it is too. You being here after visiting her place and the other places. Places so heavy their weight pulls your course into a great circle drawn ever back to them. Like an anchor thrown over at full sail.
The [bosun] drew a small circle on the page and another larger one intersecting it, and his lines went straight through his words as if none of them mattered.
Yes I had two kids. It's a fateful thing to carry memories as rich as theirs. You have your own like them. Visit them often to keep hold of them, but remember also that every moment you live in your memory is the moment of another memory lost. How much have you lost? Who can say? Not you. Nobody else neither. How much more will we lose by retracing the well worn paths of others? And for what? Comfort?
The [bosun] retraced the large circle.
"You've thought a lot about this."
He crossed out the last line and wrote: I'm dead. Memory is all I have. You're still living, but you and me ain't so different. Both want a past we can't get to no more. Both living it in our heads. But we can't truly revisit the past. Instead we're mired by our memories and the countless ways time has rotted them.
The [bosun] scribbled the pencil all across the page and it left tiny pebbles of lead behind.
Finally he wrote wrote: Heed this thing, Orc. Your course's destination is hidden from you. It will be thus even as you reach it. Home can be in your past or in your present, but in the end the place you'll spend the most time is wherever you happen to be when you die.
The sailor shoved the pencil back into the binding and flipped through the pages as if to make a point, and pages and pages of her script flowed past faster and faster until he let go. The journal lay atop the monument open to a page with a sketch of a faceted and porous stone, hand shaded and with measurements and comments captioned beside it telling of its four fragments and their supposed powers. The [bosun] stared at it as if its sudden appearance was no accident.
Orc knew it immediately for what it was. She had been searching for it. Perhaps she searched still. And there in the margin was written the answer he sought. The black heart of the world.
"So much for dying," he said.
He picked up the journal and wrapped her lace around it and thrust it back in his belt. He looked at the dead man and said, "Come with me and perhaps you'll live again."
The [bosun] made a retching noise and nodded. His unhinged chin bobbed in place.
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> +1 [Awareness]: Well it’s all truth ain't it? (7/10).
> -1 [Rage]: ...for why I did what I did. Why I had to send him away and why I couldn't come for him after. Why I never could. The work was more important than any one person. Him, me, we are nothing against the possibility of what could be, of what should be... (4/10)