The boat had been dragged on land, a beach of mostly small gravel and some sand. Lirran sat on his blanket before the bucket-shaped stove. He had spent hours by now copying holes in shells onto new shells. Navigator Kaza had decided it was time for him to learn the script of the language she called Hatsui with her corporeal mouth, the very same script in which her limpet-shell maps had been written.

It was all preparation for the night, when the two of them would leave the beach of the bay of dreams behind and instead walk into the forest, across the threshold and into the true borderlands. What these two had to do with each other was not apparent to Lirran, but he had accepted Kaza’s guidance, now he had to follow it. With the bone tool’s black glass tip he drilled holes into clam shells left over from previous meals to copy what Kaza had already written. Most of the writings had no meaning to him, but he copied them as accurately as possible. He quickly realized that most of the symbols were encoding the limited sounds of the Hatsui language in a simple pattern, but some were complicated and long, which seemed to be names of cities, people, winds and currents.

He had quickly learned that while shell seemed even and smooth, it had many internal irregularities that could make writing a symbol difficult, as it would cause the tool to slip or break through the shell where it was harder or softer than he had expected. He needed to pay attention to tiny inconsistencies and found it harder than expected to work with the material. The writing process was not just difficult but also arduous; drilling a hole all the way through took some time, scratching lines into the shell deep enough to be apparent without breaking the shell took time and care. Writing these symbols must be a pain, but some of the shells Kaza had looked positively ancient. Many writings were short and simple, some were mantras to lead to deeper teachings, just like Kaza had given him simple statements or questions to meditate on by himself.

While Lirran was almost going crazy staring at tiny holes in clamshells, Kaza herself was catching food, including more writing material for him to practice, and prepared a camp for the evening. Even when eating, Lirran’s mind traced the fine lines which ran beneath the surface of the shells he held. When breaking a ship’s biscuit, he tried to recognize where it would exactly crumble apart. Kaza noticed his concentration.

“You are very focussed.”

Lirran nodded. “I am excited.

The day had gone by with little events. He set up camp, stretching the waterproof tarp from the railing of the boat to the ground with rope and rolling himself into his blanket underneath. He did not know what awaited him beyond the treeline, he only knew it would be long overdue.

When he finally did fall asleep, he noticed his thoughts turning to nonsense, dissolving in the flow of inner consciousness and grasped it, turned it back to coherence.

He arose in the bay of dreams and Kaza was waiting for him. He looked to the treeline, but Kaza caught his attention back.

You are very eager to go there. Let us remain here for a moment longer. I want to make sure your preparation was enough.

I am not entirely sure how writing was to prepare me to walk beyond the realm of reality.

I suspected it would not be obvious without at least some help. She held her hand level up to his face and on it lay shell and tool.

Please don’t tell me I have to drill holes in shell here too.

Kaza made a sound like a giggle. Oh, don’t worry, it will only take a while to grasp. I have observed you fail to anticipate the material you are working with several times. Shells, while even and smooth to most eyes, are not perfect. You are yet to learn to sense the material properly. But this is something you must learn in the borderlands too. Out there, only the rules you carry with you can apply. That is why you need an idol, it is so to say a corporeal rule of what it takes to be you. Equally, you cannot enact a change or behaviour on the world there if you don’t know how it should feel like. Otherwise, something else might impose that change.

Lirran tried to see the connection.

When you wrote, you imposed meaning on the blankness of the shell, chased away the formless dark to cast a shape. The borderlands are without permanent rules, concrete design or material anchors and therefore, can be in constant flux. They cling to our minds to impose order on them, or, try to impose order on our minds instead. Each of them is formed from a simple impression made by thought and emotion. They seek to deepen that impression, like you deepen that carved line, by retracing it. Fear wishes to become more powerful through fear, seduction wishes to become more powerful through seduction.

I think I am beginning to understand. Lirran nodded.

Then let us walk. Kaza got up and walked towards the treeline.

Lirran followed and when they came close, he noticed the trees, revealed in the light to be hungering maws and blind emotions, swayed further from them than they had before. Then he realized he carried his own tiny light with him, barely more than a twinkle and less than a star compared to the full moon’s shine that Navigator Kaza brought forth from within herself, but it was light and it was his nonetheless. Then they reached the point where the thicket of the threshold cleared up and gave way to the mire beyond.

Does this place seem less all of a sudden? I remember it being denser and longer.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

You are becoming better to avoid even having these emotions. For me, it would be merely a step to traverse all of it, but I am moving slow so you can keep up. Kaza again moved out ahead of Lirran above the swampy waters. Now, impose your meaning unto this realm, tell it how to behave.

Before Lirran, the flooded forest with no hope of traversal spanned, but he noticed something he hadn’t seen the last time he had been at that place: The water seems shallower over there, almost as if I could walk there. I'm sure the water wont even reach to my ankles. And so, he took a step forward.

Beneath the dark water, solid ground greeted his footstep. I can walk here now.

You are imposing a meaning because you have understood that even things that seem to be reason to despair can be moved through, come, follow the path.

After just a few steps, he realized that the water was becoming even shallower and soon, he was traversing a narrow path of dry land flanked on both sides by stagnant pools and waters that seemed not as empty as he hoped. In the trees and beneath the surface, things seemed to lurk, observe them. What are these things?

This place is more abstract than the raw emotions that crowd close by close to the safety of the bay, but it is still full of emotion. Sadness, despair, doubt, hopelessness. As such, it is full of things to draw you into these emotions, memories and states of lives that made people fall and get stuck here, just like you were, which is why I found you so easily. Many people are here when they are in a dire situation after a shipwreck, starving, dying of thirst, adrift at sea with no direction to go.

But I wasn’t here, I was barely off the beach of the bay of the dreams when I met you.

Distance, direction, expanse, all these things are convoluted in the realm of the mind. Kaza pointed to the waters. Imagine a reef beneath the waves of the ocean and you in a boat floating on the waves. Now imagine a seagull flying above. If it looked down, it would see you atop the reef, despite your boat swimming safely away from the rocks. If the water dropped, the seagull would barely notice it, but your boat would hit the rocks and run aground. And if I were to sit in the reef and look up, I would see you right next to the sun, despite you being by no measure really closer to the sun than I. I have travelled despair much in search for lost souls and to me, I can see them here even if their mental image has not yet completely reached it, been swallowed by it. To not know where the darkness ends and you begin is to immediately disappear when you step into a place like this, swallowed by the swamp, entangled by the kelp, skewered by the thorns, whatever your mind perceives it as, it is all painful, fatal and everlasting. Equally, if someone else was attuning to despair, you could meet them here even if they were on the other side of the ocean.

Does that mean we could meet here even if I was in a deep desert?

If we agreed on a specific place here, then yes. We would need to have both the same understanding and align ourselves with each other. In the material realm, people erect tall poles or stones to meet between the cities and settlements, even under water my kin does that. Equally, the two of us will, over time, erect some common meeting place. Kaza smiled at Lirran as if she was looking forward to it. That also means that if I were ever lost, you could find me if you knew to look for the right traces. She stopped and looked up as if to guide Lirran’s gaze.

Up in the trees above them, he now noticed that clumps of brushwood, straw and leaves were arranged as if something was nesting inside. From them rained more material on the ground below, making the path more and more imapssable. What are those?

I try to save souls before they turn to evil, but the imprints of despair and sorrow, especially in the moment of death, can be powerful. These desires in those powerful moments are the only rules they can impose on this place, so they become manifest. We may no longer be able to cleanse those minds and ease their passing over, but we can clear the brush. It is busy work, like a gardener clearing away the weeds.

Lirran heard a voice crying that appeared oddly familiar to him. He looked up and saw a ball of twigs; he knew the voice was coming from there. The tree it was in had a convenient spiral of branches placed so that he could easily grasp and step on them like a staircase. He was up rather quickly and saw an entrance into the ball of brushwood and straw ahead of him. The crying was even more evident to him now, it was her after all.

A rosy ball of naked skin lay curled up in the nest. As he came closer, the interior of the ball seemed to sink away from him, as if drawing him in further and further. He crawled in on all fours and saw the beautiful girl was holding her face, tears draining out from between her fingers.

She shifted her fingers to let her blue eyes peek at him with care and fear. Is it you?

He felt his heart cramp at the memories the sight brought to him, the deeds he had done, the guilt that weighed down on him, he bundled his thoughts, his true feelings, and send them out to her with all the sincerity he could muster. “I am sorry, I truly am. I never intended to put you in this much despair. I wish to help you!

But she just pushed herself away with her legs backwards further against the back wall. The tender skin on her thighs was revealed and Lirran caught himself trying to glean a glimpse. He set another hand ahead into the nest and noticed the straw beneath his hands getting thin and sinking in. He saw her face once again and noticed something else was hidden underneath her hands: a grin. Greedy, voracious, anticipating. Then the straw gave way.

With the last gasp of a thought, he pushed himself backwards just as the apparition of the girl he fancied lunged towards him with outstretched claws and a hungry maw. He rolled backwards and off the branches he had climbed. He landed in shallow but muddy water, above him the nest with teeth of stakes roared up and left its ambush position, a pink tender tongue whipping around for prey.

Lirran tried to get away, the mud hindered his legs, the cold sapped his strength, the murky water blurred his eyes. The nest-like monstrosity landed in the shallow water before him, moving forward on thousands of twig-legs. Lirran looked for something to do, a stone in the mud maybe to throw at his foe, then he saw a figure sail above him, suspended in the air as if on wings and dove down onto the monstrosity holding a white spear. Its black tip sank into the soft mass, the monstrosity cried, then the angelic figure burst forth a flash of light robbing Lirran of his sight but for a moment, he thought to see a diminutive shadowy figure disappear in this light like a spit in the ocean.

A dozen serpentine shadows fled from amid the trees, leaving empty nests built from the despair and regret to crumble away.

Lirran observed Navigator Kaza landing on the water’s surface ahead of him. He had been the dumbest boy in the world, getting sucked into the most obvious trap and needed to be saved like a helpless child.

I failed, didn’t I?