The midnight sea was dark, and deep, and foreboding.

And yet, no less beautiful for it.

It was still, tonight. Tranquil. Almost stagnant. Its surface was so smooth, and its miniscule ripples so lustrous that they, altogether, appeared as a great and shifting mirror. A looking-glass of continental proportions that the Gods, themselves, might peer down upon from on high, and admire their own splendor.

A smooth sea.

A still night.

A pale moon.

There was no wind this evening, not even the slightest breeze, and so the Pewter Gauntess had her sails retracted, to safeguard them from the biting, salt-ridden air. Thus we drifted forth slowly, sedately, slicing through the natural mirror’s glass without a sound, leaving behind us not even the slightest perturbation in its surface.

Our galleon was a ghost on the water, and naught remained of her passage save the memory that she had once been there.

Since my discussion with both companions, a week had come, and went, like that.

Just like that.

As near as I could figure, we’d not but days left, now.

I placed steady hands upon the Gauntess’s rough, split-open railing, and dragged them leisurely back and forth, in a meditative manner. I feared no splinters. Even hardened timber such as this would bend and break before my Marble-stage dermis did.

I closed my eyes, stared out at the stagnant sea, and sighed.

I breathed in the quiet. The peace. The midnight air. I allowed the sounds, faint as they were, to wash over me. The creaking of wood. The rustling of rope. The subtle scratching of stowed sails.

I breathed in the night, and let it out slow, and it soothed me.

It soothed my mind, which still ached and spun, flush with esoterica regarding the peoples and powers of the land which I was soon to be upon. I could still hear Alyss recite them. Houses, by the thousands, and with all manner of uncouth and unfamiliar names. Blessed and Godkin, heirs and heiresses, possessed of all manner of names and titles complex and confounding to me.

Names, and titles. Houses and Guilds. Lords, and monsters.

A neverending tide.

To the west there lies the Triarchy of United Franco-Anglica, the land of knights-errant and tourney. After the far south was claimed by Balmut, and the northern isles fell to Lotan, the Franks took in what few Spaniards remained, and well over half the Anglican diaspora. As the name suggests, it’s ruled by three; the Frankish Great Houses de Lancerac and Estoc, and the Anglican Great House Price.

Bern sits directly east of it; neutral ground. Above presides the Technocracy of High Lady Faust and below, Pope Metatron I, representing our Inquisitor’s Faith of the Holy Triumvirate.

Travel further eastward, and you’ll come upon what some call No-Man’s-Land, and others the land of the Proselytists. Devoted territory, in all but name. Home not just to Proselytists, in fact, but to Jehenists, and Physiognomists, as well as the scattering of Houses that back them.

They claim no official regent, nor collective representative in the Assembly, but–but, no one really believes that. Everyone with half a brain knows the truth.

Raphael might be exiled, but her influence grows stronger by the day.

Journey further still, and you’ll find yourself in Confederate country. The Slavic people are an old-fashioned and insular type, ruled technically by a collection of powerful Houses, though historically House Morena and House Tepes mostly call the shots. They support neither slavery nor indentured servitude, setting them much at odds with the more progressive political factions.

The Coterie holds all territory north of the Goths and Slavs, and west of the Thirds, who make their home in the great expanse of wasteland they call Haven. They’ve a good relationship with the Confederacy and, unlike the rest of Europe, with the Empire, as well. Good thing, too, because they’re the ones that man the brunt of the Radiation Exclusion Zo–

Taiven?

I can see those cream puffs, Taiven. They’re floating. You think I’m blind? I didn’t bring those so you coul–

No, don–yes, you were. Yes, you were.

Don’t lie to me. Don’t defend him, Caleb. You’re not paying attention, Taiven. This is important. You promis–

Fine.

Alright, fine.

I don’t want to see that again. Understand?

Good.

Now, where was I?

Even the memory of it made me groan.

I’d always taken well to learning, in the past. The various nuances of rudimentary physics, biology, and algebra had always come so easily, so naturally to me, that I’d assumed the same would be true for history, and literature, as well.

Apparently not.

Initially the prospect had excited me, to learn of great Blessed and their sworn legions, but when gleaming fantasy resolved itself into hour after hour of droning lecture, into a ceaseless stream of names and titles, of decrepit wars and old border disputes and geriatric cultures, the lot of it turned into one big ball of mush inside my mind, and after a full week of it I could bear it no more.

Perhaps ADMINISTRATION had a point. Academia was better left to the academics. We were far better suited to the rhythms of war.

I groaned again, frustrated and disappointed with myself, and slammed my thick skull onto the equally thick oak of the ship’s railing. It was, ultimately, a poor contest. The wood was no match for a Marble-stage Brute’s bones and, had I struck any harder, I’d doubtless have pulverized it.

As it was, my actions did little to assuage the headache plaguing me.

I groaned for a third time, and cast my eyes upwards, peering out into the endless, dusky gloam.

And then, I saw it.

Far off in the distance, very far off in the distance, I saw it.

It rose tall, and high, and foreboding, in anvil clouds rich with a lightning unlike my own, of a deeper, purplish hue. It stretched out impossibly vast, spreading seemingly from the horizon’s one end to its other, a massive maelstrom the likes of which I’d never seen. Within the depths of its stormy grey, I could just barely make out some great things moving, dusky shadows cast by the flickering, half-obscured motions of some titanic, unknown creatures, some monsters that might well put what I’d seen thus far to shame.

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It was nightmarish. Horrifying. It made my blood run cold.

And yet, I recognized it.

Or, at least, I recognized the idea of it. I recognized its description. From those very self-same lessons I’d so freshly bemoaned, those monotonous lectures that so frustrated me. What lay before me now, represented quite magnificently in the flesh, proverbially speaking, was one of the few things I’d actually enjoyed learning about.

It was a Legendary Dungeon, one member of a vanishingly rare species, less than five known examples of its like in all the world. This was the first of them I’d ever seen, and boasted a moniker just as grand and foreboding as it physically appeared.

We called it the Eye of Terror.

“Ach, alainn, ain’t she, laddie?”

A gruff voice, saturated by a gravely Anglican brogue, cut through the stillness of the night and the wonder of the Maw before me.

I heard the harsh, clipped tapping of steel-toed cavaliers on hardwood, the squeaking croak of tanned leather rubbing against itself, and the bristling scratch that old, dry, frayed rope produced as it met with thickly-callused palms.

It was a song of sea and sailing, of ships and salt-spray, a steady staccato undertone that accented its owner’s arrival like the crashing of waves against craggy shore.

I turned to face the Gauntess’s captain.

~~~

Crannog

Attunement: Tactile Fibrokinesis(Mi) 8

Grain: Sympathetic Axons

~~~

“Lord Crannog,” I greeted, inclining my head a measure.

But just a measure, and no more.

Polite, but undeferential. I was a graduate of the Agoge, now. A student of the fabled Institute. This man was below my station, and to treat him too kindly would out me in an instant.

Not that Crannog seemed to care too much for circumstance.

Instead, he treated me to a great and bushy grin, a mouth filled to the brim with yellow and brown, rank canines and rotted incisors, all surrounded by an ocean of tar-black and oily bristles, a beard of veritably prodigious breadth and girth.

“Ain’t she, laddie?” He repeated, paying my salutation little heed.

“…I’m sorry?” I interjected stiltedly, after a brief pause.

“Alainn,” he repeated, unbothered and without delay, still grinning. “S’Anglican. West Anglican. Means, beaut’ful.”

He lowered his head, and voice, momentarily. His loose-worn duster and half-buttoned waistcoat betrayed a barrel-chest lousy with that same manner of coarse, wiry black hair that, in my personal estimation, at least, could’ve greatly benefited from some razor-borne providence.

“Dinnae ye speak Anglican, ‘Crat?”

His query, though not quite offensive, was almost so. Strange, considering he was of the nobility, as well. And, as I was unsure how a genuine Aristocrat might reply in this scenario, and uneager to anger the one charged with the sanctity of the very vessel upon which I currently stood…in the end, I offered nothing to him, at all.

Save for what I hoped might emerge as a rather disgruntled scowl.

Crannog laughed.

He scratched a thick-fingered hand liberally through the wiry blackness on his face, and nodded outwards, in the vague direction of that whirling chaos, that azure madness represented faintly in the distance by the light of an anemic moon.

“Th’ Aye a’ Terra’,” he muttered, wistfully. “Beaut’y ‘yond compare.”

At this, I frowned, glancing dubiously back towards the ever-raging maelstrom.

“Not exactly the word I’d use,” I admitted, after a moment.

“Ach,” Crannog snorted, grin returning, the black bushyness encircling his mouth quivering with mirth as he extended a broad arm ungainly in the Eye’s general direction, and waggled it animatedly about.

“But, do it not entrance ye’?” He exclaimed. “Do it not amaze ye’? Wonders like this, only a handful, in all the Wirruld.”

“It scares me,” I said, honestly. I could smell the Entropy seeping from it, thick as honey, even from miles away. I shuddered to think what it might be like up close.

Crannog let out another course, barking laugh.

“Smart one, be ye’, then, laddie,” he rumbled, patting his barrel-like belly. His grin soured slightly at the edges, curdling on his face as he strode abruptly forth, grasping the ship’s railing at my side, grasping it tight, staring off into the distance with a suddenly intense focus.

“Beaut’y Terra’,” he whispered, low and slow. “Legend’ry Maw.”

He turned eyes wrinkled with irritated capillaries, red and world-weary, my way.

“That be th’ gift of th’ Oilliphéist,” he murmured, in a timbre that shook slightly at the seams. “One a’ tae, laddie. A’ter he took aulde England from us. Sunk it down. Down, and down. Anglican culture, drenched and drowned. Now, all ye’ find aught there be death. Death, and monsters.”

He sucked his black-yellow teeth, peering out into the gloom.

“I be seen’ many, many venture intae its depths,” he muttered, nostalgically.

“You’ve seen people try to delve that?” I echoed, incredulously.

He quirked his head, and beard, my way, smirking at me in a manner that seemed at once cruel and melancholy.

“I be seen’ Gods try tae delve that, laddie,” he half-spat, half-snarled. “Amadán déanta. Seen’ it, me’ own tae eyes. Took ‘em tae the edge, me’self, now and agane. Ne’er tae close. Th’ bold. Th’ brave.”

His smirk soured in that same way I’d seen it do before, sagging at the edges, curling into a pained grimace.

“Th’ fool. Th’ desperate. All th’ same, in t’end. Waited for ‘em tae return. Ne’er did.”

Crannog’s weathered, wrinkly skin grew further lines and crevices somehow, crumpling into itself as the old captain turned back to stare somberly at the Maw.

“Ne’er did. Ne’er do. Ach,” he intoned, quietly. “Nay return from th’ Aye.”

Though his tone and malaise were quite clear, Crannog’s accent was so viscous, and saddled his words so completely, that it took me an extra moment to process them. As such, our conversation felt a deal one-sided, with considerable pauses left after the termination of his speech, whilst I rushed to collate it.

“I…honestly, I can’t imagine being mad enough to try to delve something like that,” I muttered, as much to myself as in response to him. I meant it, too.

I’d had more than my fill of Knossos’s tender mercies back in the Frontier, and that Maw had only been Exotic. What possibly possessed someone to plumb a Legendary Maw, I could only imagine.

But something in my tone must have displeased the old seaman.

“So ye’ say,” Crannog spat, restoring his smile in short order. It returned sharp and biting. Ridiculing. He aimed it directly my way, and quirked a dense, crawling, caterpillar-eyebrow up to the sky, jabbing a large, hairy, sausage-finger at me.

“Yet, ye’ be bound for Bern, dinnae ye’?” He accused. “Ye’, th’ blondie, and th’ lil’ lassie.”

I frowned, but saw no reason to hide such things from him. Our itinerary might as well have been public, at this point.

“Indeed, we are,” I admitted. “For the Institute. Your point being?”

“Ach,” he crowed, triumphantly, wagging the protruding digit back and forth, hopping from my face to the whirling maelstrom in the distance.

“Ye’ be quick tae scorn,” he indicted, vindictively. “Yet ye’ tread fast fer death, ye’self.”

His tar-black eyes twinkled in the pale moonlight.

“Death ye’ll find, in Bern’s black heart,” he uttered. “That, aye promise ye’. Th’ Maw has monsters, aye.”

His voice dropped low, sinking down, and down, drowning beneath the waves.

“But in Bern, th’ monsters wear clothes,” he whispered.

My mouth hung open, poised to reply, yet paused for my mind to fully process Crannog’s words. Yet, before I’d time to speak, the captain let a shrill, sharp whistle, and the ship came suddenly alive.

Rope and rigging whipped without warning through the midnight air, a nest of writhing, wriggling serpents wrought of coarse-woven thread and split-frayed fiber, articulated by nothing at all. Sails unspooled and mains were reefed by invisible fingers, just in time to capture the abrupt gust of unexpected wind that set unceremoniously upon us, treating the galleon whole to a great and jerking jolt.

Deckhands tumbled from their hammocks down below, and pulled themselves to station, the ship’s crew moving as a single, stinking, unwashed entity to set us upon our proper course once more.

As I watched it all occur with widened eyes and a mouth still hung slightly open, I heard the captain’s cracked voice croon at me once more.

“How ye’ tell a monster from a man, if t’all wear the same clothes?” He pondered at me, smirking. “This, aye wonder.”

I frowned at him, but did not reply. And though I managed not to shiver, or otherwise surrender my composure, I could not stay a measure of unease from seeping its way into the marrow of my bones.

Crannog’s sharp, biting laugh haunted me as the captain strode away into the gloam, disappearing amidst petty officers and boatswains.

“Aye bid ye’ good evenin’, m’lord,” I heard him cackle.

“Tomorra’, we be comin’ upon ye’r destination.”