A/N: I had abandoned this story to pursue other projects, though I never stopped daydreaming about it. I plan to finish it this time, and have reworked the first chapter due to feedback I've received.
Fiddlesticks is not here yet, but he will be; it's his custom to wait for the right moment.
Your praise is important to me. Thank you for reading and providing feedback.
The starchild had heard nothing but praise for the sea.
The retired mariners who spent their final years amidst the beauties of Ionia described the tides with words that others reserved for only the finest music. Waves, they all said, did not crash; their baptisms were of a certain octave and rhythm which made vigilant harmony with the nightwind. Twilight at sea was a cadence in blue silk; sweeter, they all swore, than the birdsong of the grove.
"Impossible," she'd say, smiling, and the conversation would be done.
Once, though, a gaunt and greying old captain confided to her that he was returning to his ship after spending a year on land. It was on a clear night, when the moon was her whitest and the night-blooming jasmine flowers had released their fragrance like a gypsy's spell across the island. "What is Ionia but perfection?" she'd asked him. "What is there to lament of other places, even the sea?"
"Dreams." Without the lullaby of the tides, the age-old melodies hummed by the sea-breeze, he said, his mind was only silence. "And you know...we need dreams," he told her, struggling to find words for an emotion so foreign to him. In the half-light, his eyes seemed wet. "I think...we need dreams more than we need sleep."
She nodded, quiet.
So at the hour of departure, when the sun was high in the east and its light was gilt and bladed, the starchild found herself a foot of space near the brine-battered railings at the ship's head, craving the gentle harmony and the vastness and the dreams. Against her will, she'd come to believe in a place more beautiful than her heart's home. Her eyes were open blooms, ready to inherit the world.
With Ionia only a faraway shore, stretched like a hieroglyph at her back, she spent hours by those railings, naming the shapes of the clouds, learning to tighten her muscles and keep her balance as the vessel navigated the endless blue, hugging herself against the chill.
And it wasn't long before she realized, perched there like an anomaly, listening to the waves crash against the sides of the ship and searching for her reflection in the origami seafoam, that she'd left music behind.
Birdsong was her favorite music. And there were no birds at sea.
In the dusk, minutes before moonrise, another passenger ambled up beside her. Behind them, the air was littered with dialects and tremors of laughter and the middles of conversations.
"Beautiful night," he said to her, draping himself across the railing as if he'd done it a thousand times.
"I had hoped so," she said, walking away.
But being by nature a creature of faith, she was there with the sun again on the following morning like an anchorite waiting for the breath of God. "Have hope," she reminded herself. Her soul's mantra.
And again, the breath of God was only salty and stale, leaving grit and chill on her skin. She combed a hand through her hair, and it was dry and coarse like a fist full of weeds. She abandoned her post by nightfall.
On the fifth and final day of her voyage, she found herself staring at the knot of her hands, at her wind-cracked knuckles, no longer listening for any sign of music, no longer believing there was any worth hearing. At the first blush of dusk, her signal, she turned to leave and found him staring at her curiously, the man from days before who had loved the night. A cigarette hung from his lip like a prayer in amber.
"Most people find something to love about the sea," he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke so thick that it lingered behind like a restless spirit. "You've been standing here like a monument at the head of my ship since we started off, but you still don't seem impressed." He regarded her the way an ascetic would regard an unbeliever.
"Does this offend you?" she asked. This man was a younger version of the retired captain, and she was a shadow version of herself.
"That you aren't enjoying yourself? No," he told her. "My ship is clean, the accommodations are good, the crew is courteous. I do my part."
She'd hardly noticed those things. "What is it, then?"
"I've been doing this a long time," he said, gesturing to the colorless world around them. She found the metaphor appropriate. "You might say...I collect life stories. And I could be wrong, but you seem like the type who's got a story to tell."
"And you seem to feel entitled to it," she said. The spread of darkness unnerved her. "I'm sure it comes with the territory."
He took a long another drag from the cigarette. "I deal in transitions. People coming, going, leaving things behind to find new things. What are we if not just lists of the things we abandon?"
"Leaving and abandoning are not synonymous," she said. She made sure to deliver her words like punctuation marks.
"What's your business in Freljord? What's there for you?"
She stared at him, her face an iron mask. "To pass through."
"To where?"
And as she was about to tell him to mind his own business, that her life story was never up for barter, a pinprick of light grazed the corner of her eye. She shut her eyes quickly, but it was no use; the diamond residue stayed behind, coated the bruise-black of her eyelids, reminded her that she had only a little left to lose.
"The Institute of War," she said finally, "is where I'm going."
And for the first time in days, she felt their flickers on her skin. The traitorous stars.
"I see..." the captain said, and then was predictably silent because as they both knew, he could not hope to see.
She opened her eyes and looked past him, past the bewildered expression he wore, past the bone white of the sails and the golden lanterns with their dancing moths, past the handful of patrons who milled about the deck fighting their own quiet battles and the shifting shadows of the violet night.
"Gracefully," she said, defeated.