He dreams, sometimes. Not often, not anymore, but sometimes when he does, he can feel something tugging on the end of his psyche, a cord that drags him deep beneath the salty brine where he’d spent most of his life. These dreams are dark, suffocating, but they are dreams, he still has enough sense about him to know that much (Fiel says they’re ‘lucid’ dreams, he thinks he’s going mad and might end up some muttering soothsayer before long like other more Nornish folks he knows). It plunges him deeper into the abyss that lies before him, a far cry from the peaks and valleys of the mountains he’s grown to know, the clouds that soar above them. But he knows these depths as well, he knows their secrets, he knows their dangers.
And when he hits the silty bottom, it is on both feet, anchored firmly to the ground below somewhere in the lightless canyons of a seafloor he’d hoped to never see. Or at least, that he’d had the grace of being dead before he could.
But what stretches out before him past his bubble of darkness is a mystery. Curiosity drives him forward but he is tied to this anchor, kept from drifting away too far lest he never come back to this point. He’s never been this far though, has he? The warm safety of this net, the dizzying thought of something beyond it. A dark, warm hole in the ground, in the ocean, where even the sun cannot reach.
A need forms in his gut. It rolls around and gathers until there is nothing but a hunger that means he can no longer stay put, a void he can’t fill with all the seawater in the world. Some angry, hungry thing and a voice that whispers blindly, in a language he cannot understand.
A point of light forms in the distance, he squints, he tries to understand, and when he does he has to look away. Worms on a hook. Anglerfish.
————–
A rush of warm wind.
His stomach growls and rumbles like a mistreated dog and he looks down — down, down he looks, down into a hundred foot drop into the waters surrounding this golden island of theirs, and the Captain, who has never been afraid of heights, has to stagger back from the edge. An audience of tropical jungle birds watch him curiously, squawking and chattering amongst themselves. He shoos them off in a flurry of feathers and stops, takes stock. He is uninjured, well enough, and nothing feels off with his body except for the void. Yes, yes it’s there again. Sitting under his heart, just behind his eyes and the fear of it keeps him upright, afraid to mention it, to think about it, to bring those two halves closer together until it swallows him whole.
His stomach growls. Again. He takes his cue and stumbles back towards the alcove where he’s supposed to have been sleeping, and dresses for lunch, or dinner. The sun’s nearly set already, changing the sky above from a bare, dusky blue to red.
He compulsively cleans his rifle, the taste of blood on his tongue.
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