Waterbones
She's there to catch him when the ocean closes overhead.
Three tales to tell has the goddess, she declares, filling the void with the rushing rhythms of her voice. And she holds him in her dark hands away from the sky and the sun and the prevailing winds; but, somehow, they are still sailing, both of them together. Now, forever and always. Do you know yourself truly? The mortal men, they lose their way, they be coming into my heart and bones seeking refuge from the greedy deep. They forget. Even their faces bear no names.
Sleek, scaled shapes flit quicksilver in the back of his mind. He can taste snatches of a familiar song: all together, all together, never shall we die.
Never, she agrees, 'til the time comes when we can't live no more.
Even in his earliest memories, he saw things as a puzzle of their separate parts. Sand and sea made the coast; rope and timbers and a long slope of bleached canvas made the ships that patrolled it. All the pieces slid together cleanly under the right conditions. There were forces that moved and acted out of sight, pushing like wind, drawing taut and slack like the pressures of the tide. He didn't believe in destiny, but sometimes he could nearly sense it, passing particularly close to glance over his shoulder.
He tried to take that feeling to the forge. A sword was steel and sparks and percussion, true, but the pieces needed to be coaxed into the slim, elegant shape that spelled nobility to the human eye. There was a hand and a consciousness invisible in the process, someone to guide the finished product out of the materials. He tried to be the unseen, to make a thing that was perfect.
He succeeded only once.
So when Davy Jones slid Norrington's sword into his heart, he felt two unlike pieces come together and wondered at what they made. The blade and its architect; and if he could have known from the beginning, he might not have forged it so finely. But never mind.
The ocean rose up slowly, began to close overhead.
He did not like to say that he loved her, because love required hands and heat and quick breath and perhaps a little fear; and in the beginning, she had none of those things and would not have chosen them for herself even if he had begged. So many men have loved her, after all. And the ones who loved her best or blindly she swallowed whole, and what need did she have for hands or heat or even a heart to give them? She did not make offerings of herself. She only took and kept and tempted, ageless.
In the end, the choice was not hers. Even a goddess can be tricked, if only once, if only for a while.
Daybreak glitters against her arrogant smile. She sees herself reflected in the sky, she knows.
Her domain is in the minds of mortals, looming against the edges of their inland provinces, vast and solemn. Beneath its great weight, the slopes of the world itself bend like albatross wings turned against the zephyr. Her body houses a web of lives. A soft shape of dolphins in the coral, a knot of weeds, all the sighing and sliding motion that draws vessels across her skin through the salt breezes and the threat of destruction. Storms coil and thrash in her mouth, waiting to be exhaled; thunder for her anger, lightning for her joy.
It amazes her that the fleeting favour she bestows on each ship and coastline is enough to level the thousands of cruelties, the green and gray furies that rise out of a placid blue horizon at the whisper of her whim; but she does not pretend to understand the men and women who come to her. She accepts them without question, pulls them down in time, and guards their stories in the black tides that sleep beneath the reach of all living things.
Long may he live, she says fondly, 'til he can't live no more.
She lets go. Cold currents open around him and the sun reaches in like a jade talon. He remembers the surface, the grinning, gap-toothed waves with leaping hot light for laughter. The image carries him upward, away, to a world he knows but can no longer inhabit. Land is earth and stone and fire, a heavy, creeping mystery. The sea is home.
Calypso slits herself open.
The Flying Dutchman and its captain are cast onto the blank panels of her flesh like a handful of oracle bones.