Hello! I have decided how I am going to write my story, and basically what I will attempt to do is create a non-linear, 'hyperlinked' series of short stories, all revolving around similar places, people and events. I am not writing the short stories in order, so understand that while a chapter I post up may not feel like it has a direct connection to the other chapters YET, it will! I hope! This story is Part 1 of at least 3 or 4 parts of the one story. I hope all that made sense. Enjoy

If I had to give this story a name, it would be called "A Spy in Presaria"


I love you

Rain tattoos against the glass with a rapid tempo, individual drops lost against the greater tatter. They streak away, backed by there weight, light from beyond scattered into rivulets of red and blue and violet. The sky is invisible from behind the glass, no stars but no discernable clouds, just black and the glow of the city, throbbing beyond the Flinders Island harbour.

Kelley pushed his face up against the inside of the porthole, set with heavy rivets into the steel hull of the ship. Beyond, outside in the freezing gale, Water streaked in serpentine smears down the faces of buildings skirting the massive dockside, grey soaked black. The asphalt was slicked and white from the street lamps burning bright in the dark night storm. Thunder echoed to the south, deep and unseen, water on the road surface a constant finger-light tattoo multiplied to deafening proportions. Some of the dockside vendors were still open, neon tube lights glowing and flickering, humming softly below the sound of the raindrops. Curbs and alleys were filled with garbage, the detritus of a rotting city. Beyond the harbor, the metropolis had a pulse, itself almost lost to the sound of the storm. The ground was slicked, wet enough to send up little-fountains of water for every drop from above making the ground dance like the storm itself conducted it, massive and chaotically choreographed, thunderous and brilliant, deep and beckoning, tearing at the ears; malevolent, frenzied, unrestrained.

I love you

I love you

I Love you

I'm in love with you

I miss you

I love you

His eyes were still, a mind clouded and absent. Above the rain and the thunder comes the noiseless voice. Haunted by the ghost of the way she was, and the way he used to be.

I love you

And her face crystallised in the darkness, invisible lips form the words, trembling below eyes stained with streaks of long-since-dried tears.

I don't think I love you the way you love me.


In hoping for clear passage, Kelley knew he would not be so lucky.

The storm had worsened, amplifying in both size and vigour as the mainland vanished behind the dense, blanketing seafog that hugged the entire shoreline of South-eastern Australia.

There had been a thunderstorm out to sea. The clear, open skies which had seemed to persist endlessly for the three weeks he had spent in Barrow dissipated with disquieting pace once out through the Heads, dawn replaced by a vague glow merely hinting below a rolling bank of weighted, pitch clouds tumbling in over the expanse of the Strait. The western passage was a wide, grey channel between twin, stony headlands, linking the flat city of Barrow to the Strait; its course was lined with Cardinal buoys, defining safety amongst the razor sharp remains of a dozen Chinese battle cruisers dead and silently listed upon the sea floor.

In the dwindling remains of twilight, Kelley stood on the portside gunwale watching the great rifts of stained land float by about them. To the east, across the sluggish drool of the passage waters, Philip Island was littered with a dozen points of warm orange light, wobbling and bobbing along lines of wooden fences. Sheppards and farm hands moved tirelessly about pens of Wombats, holding Gas lanterns aloft wooden poles. They inspected the fence lines for any intrusion in the night, before herding the giant mammals toward feed yards. The poor soil of the island made crop farming a pointless exercise, but the proximity of the pen walls to the high-tide shore would, on occasion, attract sealurks toward shallow waters, taking the lumbering beasts in the night and feeding upon them in the littoral. In the growing light, Kelley saw men with long, slender Barb-firing rifles, standing at intervals, eyes probing the ink-stained waters.

Temperate Rain was a decent size; it spilled white deck light out onto the shimmering, lapping surface of the water, hugging the silhouettes of long boom-cranes perched upon the foredeck, casting them into hundred-meter long smears across the surface of the quiet sea. The journey to Presaria City would take two days, by the Captains estimates, but the steerage hold Kelley had let with his partner was more than comfortable for the trip.

Parallel with the heads, Kelley felt the growling wind of the open sea grow with immediacy, a bitter chill clutching in. He raised the collar of his cloak, pulling his arms in close around his body. In the shadow of the great pinnacle of rock that pronounced the headland, a small lean-to cabin was erected, a dim, cozy yellow glow seeping under the eave and cracks around a single doorway, a dim thread of woodsmoke winding up and away over the island. A sign was painted on wood, projecting from the roof - it read: Point o' no return. A boy sat on some rocks perched just above the water, a fishing pole dangling loosely before him; he cautiously gave a wave to the ship as it passed.

On passing the final set of buoys, Kelley could feel the motion of the sea below the tonnage of the steel-hulled vessel change from a flat, effortless table to something different – something deep and churning, and wholly malevolent. Temperate Rain rumbled from deep within, the twin bronze screws spinning up from a slow crawl to a blurring mass below the black, choppy cap of the water, the prow of the ship powering into the storm without hesitation cutting an impressive wake across the surge and roll of the ocean swell.

The crew of the tramp steamer hurried about the deck with an uncommon haste; in the month it had taken to cross the Pacific, he had never seen such keen alacrity expressed from a ships crew. A healthy plume of pale white steam billowed from the high, tubular stack, unaffected by the surges of rain now almost constant, heavy in their assault.

Inside his cabin, Kelley tried sleep for most of the morning, but was woken constantly by the roar and the sensation of falling, as if the ship had encountered a sinkhole or perhaps the edge of the world, before suddenly finding the trough between the waves and pitching sharply upward with overwhelming inertia, leaving Kelley's stomach in a bucket by his cot. He lay in the dark, eyes wide open, feeling the roll of the vessel below him; the unrelenting, unforgiving surge pounding upon it like a small tin toy tossed about by the whim of some petulant god.

Finally he dismissed the notion of sleep and rose tenderly, always gripping down hard on some fixture to avoid loosing his footing. He donned his longcoat and stepped out into the quiet companionway of the steerage quarter, finding his way up ladders and stairs to the conning tower. All the time he fought the tremendous shifts in inertia that felt as if it would pick him off his feet and plant his head through the ceiling.

He reached the helm with a few tender bruises. It was relatively quiet, which Kelley found surprising; quite opposed to the vigour of the storm that raged beyond the waist-up glass that stared forward, down the ship and out into the swarming sea. Kelley eased his way forward to a rail that ran below the window, gripping it firmly before staring out toward the stunning panorama of the storm around them, and the long foredeck of the ship extending outward, like a heavy plough pushing its way through the slamming assault of the strait. The Captain was at the helm; he drew from a long corn-cobb pipe gripped between his teeth, hands delicate but firm upon the oak wheel that stood within the centre of the space, making tiny but vital adjustments to course.

Howling rain and surf impacted with the blunt face of the gunwales sending a towering fountain of foam and spray surging out over the darkly lacquered deck, slapping down hard on the weather worn timber. The ship pitched and shook with every impact, yet still maintained its curious confidence as the steel wedge of its bow knifed into the rising walls of foam-laced swell, the face of the wavefront exploding across the steel into soaring fans of briny spray. The sea roared as it seethed against the freezing hull, raking down its length. Overhead, and into the distance, licks of lightning burned brightly, arching out in great rivulets, like the arteries of clouds illuminated for a fraction of a second against the pulpy black mass beyond.

"It'll be three days, if this keeps up" The Captain announced, without acknowledging Kelley directly. His accent was salt-tanged and rough, but rolled with the emphasis of an educated man.

"We're will we anchor?" Kelley returned, finally.

"Flinders Island. Mid-channel spit of rock. The harbour is decent, and the city has a sea-wall that will keep out the worst of it."

"City?" Kelley enquired, turning toward the Captain.

"That's one word for it, it's a fucking hovel, if you ask me, which you are". He paused for a moment and made an adjustment to the helm so minute Kelley doubted its importance. "City's a Trol haven. Was a whaling port til about ten years back, then those Trologs started flooding in. Apparently they were having some kind of fish-war with giant squid, and loosing"

"It's a refugee camp?"

"Ghetto, but I didn't say it". The captain looked sidewards, concerned as if they wrong ears may hear his prejudice. Kelley had never met a Trolog before, but had seen a few odd looking men scuttling about the ship in the evening before departing Barrow – Short, muscular and all entirely bald, they apparently possessed Gills upon there chests, and a webbed fin running the length of there spines.

Kelley turned back to the window. Throbs of lightning preceded yawning, echoing rumbles cascading across the dark ocean. The sunless day was illuminated almost solely by those images, flashes of light gone quicker than they come, captures in time of the towering cloud forms reaching piteously from the black heavens to the chaotic spray of the brooding ocean, the storm like a synapse, the thinnest cleft of apparent calm between the churning bulk of the clouds and the seething pulse of the ocean, arches of white hot light leaping the gulf between sky and sea in an instant, thousands a second, a constant cackle of thunder rising and waning with the rolling energy of the surf against the battered and tired ship.

And through the darkness, contrasted by the pulse of lightning, the black shape of an island rose from the waves, wetly inked into a turbulent canvas.


They had not seen a blade of sunlight for the entire day, but Kelley was told that they made Harbour at dusk, sliding between two enormous gates that retracted into the enormity of the harbour seawall as the ship approached, and snapping closed behind. The wall reminded Kelley of some medieval embattlement; Trolog militia spread along the Fortification like Archers readied to defend the keep from Goths and Mongols.

Before they could make anchor, the Captain told Kelley, they would have to present papers and surety to the Harbourmaster. The Trolog were hesitant around outsiders, the Captain explained, although he used a stronger word: Paranoid. Two Vessels were waiting sure enough; small runabouts loaded with Militia; they had boarding ladders but the Captain had already ordered a cargo net to be thrown over the side. The Trolog Guardsmen were surprisingly nimble climbers for aqua-folk; Kelley supposed it was because they were not fearful of falling into the water. The Captain met with their commander on the foredeck, below the arching cranes. He was short, like the other Trolog, but wore a stiff green cunt hat, and a pistol on his waist while the others all held thin-barrelled machine pistols strapped against there chests. Every Trol also carried some sort of spear launcher in a long leather holster fastened to the lower leg, fastened by cord to a loop held tight around the ankle. Unlike the Machine pistol, which looked virtually unused, Kelley supposed this would be the weapon a Trolog soldier would reach for, if anyone tried them. They were each loaded with a single pronged dart that would snare in flesh, impossible to remove without surgery, plus four more tucked into a bandolier around the thigh. A viscous weapon that could be used despite – or even during - extended submersion, unlike the Machine Pistols, Kelley supposed.

The Captain passed over his papers, and a cloth bag heavy with some bizarre local currency. There were quiet words exchanged, before the Trol commander made some invisible gesture and the Militia withdrew down the cargo net and into their boat. Watching them descend, Kelley spotted more soldiers – maybe a dozen or more - sitting just below the waterline, watching up at the boat. Paranoid indeed

Kelley stayed in the Cabin that night, while is partner Maecort explored the ship. She was not to leave without him, she promised, as her protection was Kelley's charge and indeed his purpose in coming here. If there was time in the morning, they would explore the city, Kelley said firmly. He still out ranked her, he figured, although on the far side of the world the idea of a 'Paladin' or 'Scribe' was hardly of importance.

Kelley watched the storm lash the city through his Cabin porthole, sitting in the calm, still silence. Lighting forked, the weight of the storm piling against the crusty scab of gothic civilization, resolutely clinging to the shallow island like a limpet to rock.

His mind wandered – across time and the vast ocean that now separated him from his life. Kelley would fight to control it, but in these times of solitude, when the weight of the world seemed so distant; those were the moments he found his mind would travel to places he did not wish to be, and he would clench his fists white, or drive his fingernails into the soft underside of his forearm, or simply bite the inside of his lip until the pain forced him to forget.

But it never worked for long.

And so, in the dark, above the faint sound of the wind and the lapping water against the hull, he heard her voice speak to him again.

I love you