Czecza watched from her refuge as the Salt-vessel was borne against the rocks. She had been like this for an hour, perched atop the black cliffs like the wax-birds that nested in each tide-smoothed crack, and her joints were beginning to itch with crystallised salt beneath her slick carapace. In the time of her exile — it must have been an entire Turning by now — she had never found a fresh wreck before. It was smaller than the old, wooden carcasses she had seen further along the coast. Those had been bleached by the sun over many rotations and were set so deeply in the silt that their remnants protruded like vast ribs. This new wreck was almost whole; its own carapace was upturned, blackened and broken like fallen wax-bird eggs, upon the shore. A thick pole, like a stripped pine trunk, had fallen from the body of the thing and was rolling with the tide as it ebbed and flowed. Oddly, it seemed to be wrapped in stained cloth, as if it had uprooted a large tent. Czecza could only make bemused guesses on how it had gotten tangled there.
Foam fell upon her like fine rain, stinging her unblinking eyes; flung by wild breakers that threatened to claim the wreck for themselves. The wind carried great swathes of water towards her which crashed and broke barely an arms-length below her. She would wait, she decided, for the tide to wane and the Salt River to calm. Only then could she descend to the mudflats that stretched in both directions and claim her prize.
Rising from her roost, mandibles clattering in resignation, Czecza began the short trip back to her camp. Climbing on the wet stone was difficult, especially for one raised in the acrid desert as she was, but each of her hooked limbs found purchase in the crevices. Shimmering ribbons of wax-birds flew from their nests, disturbed by her unsteady passage, and undaunted by the rising swells. Odd creatures, Czecza thought, Where are you flying off to? Their plumage was short, almost like fur, dashed with silver, and coated in the shiny wax that gave them their moniker — the same substance that kept their nests glued to the cliffs when the waves swelled.
She scuttled over dry headland, capped by tufts of red thalo; yet untouched by the water, towards the site she had chosen. Her camp was dismal, but Czecza didn’t mind. It was a little way from the edge of the black cliffs, and tucked between two shards of jutting slate to afford her some relief from the worst of the weather, but Czecza had done her best to make it homely. A silken cocoon was suspended between the two spires, supported by lengths of driftwood lashed into a secure lattice. Inside there was enough space for sleep and, more importantly, a pantry. She had made a blanket and cushions, woven herself, and stuffed them with bracken for adequate comfort. A fire wasn’t necessary. Smoke would draw curious, opal eyes and she didn’t much care for cooked meat. When the weather allowed it, she would sleep atop the canopy; although more often than not Czecza was forced to huddle inside the swaying cocoon, listening to the sounds of of whatever storm the Salt River spat at her in the night. She tried not to think of home in those moments.
Czecza was careful not to rock the lopsided silk ball as she heaved her abdomen through the gash in the threads. She was hungry. So very hungry. She ached with a primal starvation that wax-birds and salt-swimmers could not satisfy. A longing for the satisfaction of the true hunt burnt within her; dreams of the trap; of her lovingly spun, gossamer webs. On the odd occasion she was able to snare a lost wanderer from the dunes or a lonely fisherman, she almost always preserved and stored the meat in her usual manner. Chances like that couldn't be missed, and she couldn’t waste them on herself. Her priorities lay with her clutch of eggs, nestled deep within her cocoon, that would need to be fed well when they hatched. Now she took them from their hiding place, cupping four of her hands together as if in reverence, and tip-tapped each of them in turn with a shiny claw. The half-light from the open silk flap fell upon them so that they glowed from within; and their translucent purple shells shone with a spattering of stars. Small, many-legged shapes moved and twitched lazily in the twilight of the eggs — my little ones, Czecza thought warmly.
However blessed she might have felt, she knew well that the mud banks of the vast Salt River were no place to raise hatchlings. However, the Scisi-Kor of her former tribe were severe in their judgement, and efficient in carrying out their justice. Her kin feared the Salt River as they did death. If her hatchlings were to live at all it would be here — where the Kor and their executioner's blades dared not venture.
Czecza often thought about the people she had left behind. Her mother and sixteen siblings, although callous in demeanor — as was the way of her people — were family, and she oft wondered how they fared. She didn't remember each of their faces exactly, but remembered the strict kindness in her mother's whispers, the streaks of grey across her bristles, and the all-encompassing blackness of her eyes. "Fear the sand, Cze." she had said on one windswept night. "It stings our eyes and cuts our flesh. Many die in the desert." She remembered how she had chattered impatiently — obviously not in the mood for another of her mother's fables. Those stories of sand-suffocated travellers, of great beasts that hunted in the night — all warnings to adventurous young spiderlings — terrified her then, although she wouldn't have admitted it. Now she thought of them often. "Yet… sand also brings promise," her mother continued, "And just as it is carried by the wind, it carries us to where we need to be. Our destiny is shaped by its flow. To be carried by the sand, you have to survive it. You have to bear the scars. Do you understand, Cze?"
She remembered each of her homes only vaguely — the many places in which her tribe had set up camp over the years. Among the red dunes, and for the Kin especially, survival depended on moving with the great Caravan, the Wheeled Serpent, that resolutely trundled across the barren wastes. Her people had kept their distance, but had always been on good terms with the Track dwellers, with whom they would frequently trade. Czecza recalled swathes of silk, pitched as tents against the scorching sun; the funnels, capped with rocky camouflage, that the Scisi-Kravi dug into the sand to snare food; the networks of tunnels her siblings and her played in as hatchlings. Old Iskilk, the sand-mason, had scolded them for that, and told them the tunnels were unfinished and dangerous. They had chirped and laughed and played there anyway.
The vague memories of her people felt as though they were hidden behind a funnel door she could never again hoist open; and that she had shut herself. Czecza had run as far as she could in her exile, past the white wastes and the acid lakes, all the way to the Salt River that barricaded her to this continent. There was no sand to carry her further, only sodden mud that would clump around her soul until she drowned in it — and only an egg-sac clutched to her abdmomen as she ran. This was as far as her destiny went.
And yet, she would have a new family soon, and she would tell those stories to her long-awaited children all the same.
Perhaps, she now thought, there will be something to trade in that new wreck. If that were the case, she could make the journey across the salt flats and red dunes to where the Wheeled Serpent would surely pass. Exchanging valuables for valuables was a sure way to survive for many of her people — the hoarders that they were, and the people of the Tracks often looked on exiles with sympathy. The chance of her own tribe meeting her there was slim enough. Czecza returned her eggs to their spot and clicked a crooning lullaby as she folded her limbs and laid down. It won’t be long now, she idly thought as she waited for the waves to settle.
Axiom's thoughts were slowed by fugue haze as he floated limply with the current.
Shipwrecked boy.
"I'm sorry… what?" he muttered.
He became aware that he was floating on his back, and peered upwards with salt-stung eyes to the star-speckled, blue sky. Winged shapes darted across Shimreth’s distant stellar rings. She filled the sky, flesh dull green and nebulous like the waves she commanded and wreathed by Taá's aquamarine eclipse. The many rings of her halo seemed to emit their own golden glow in the gloom, like comet trails. Pinprick stars peeked from behind this crown, clustering around their big sister like frightened children.
Wind-borne boy.
The words were a muddy waterfall, a slurry of quicksand information that poured straight into his mind. Neither written nor spoken aloud, they simply meant, and he understood. His throat burned, and his tongue felt like it was stuffed with wet straw.
"Who are you?" he whispered. "How are you speaking to me?"
The flowing current. The wicked storm.
"Where am I? What happened to— oh." Axiom recalled the storm. The waves that reached like colossal foam hands, splintering wood with ease and sending men tumbling into the depths; the rolling thunder that drowned the boatswain's frenzied squawks and rang his ears with a cosmic bell; and the water that was stained deep crimson as it finally calmed. "The Wader," he said. "It sank."
Blood in the water.
"Am I dead?"
No.
"This is a dream."
No.
"I can hear your voice— no, I know your words. They're in my head— how?"
You came from across the sea. You are chosen.
"Are you a spirit? A God?"
I am salt and stars.
"Tidemother— Shimreth?" The name of his own God felt ill-fitting, yet it was the only name he could think of. The idiom: 'by the wind, salt and stars' was common amongst his people, and had become synonymous with the influence of the Tidemother. For the salt clung to their downy feathers on the open sea, the ocean breeze filled their sails and cushioned their wingbeats, and the glittering stars guided their journey.
Drift to shore.
For a while he let himself float with the lulling tide. The words appeared no more, and he listened to the gasping wind and the bubbling quietude of the placid sea. Its freezing fingers were almost gentle — nothing at all like the storm which uprooted the foremast and sent it spinning into the clouds like an arrow. That instant, Axiom remembered the way the boatswain had looked as his flesh bubbled from the inside with glowing, white heat. The lightning seemed to arc from body to body, caressing them until they burst with a crack like the boatswain's own cat o’ nine tails. He remembered the choking gas that poured with the rain, coagulating on the deck like blood, stripping flesh from bone, holding breath hostage. Pulped sailors laid strewn, innards sliding over the wet planks with the pulsing of the waves. Axiom threw up then — whether it was from the salt or the memory he wasn’t sure — and ignored the spinning nausea to sit up when he felt soft ground beneath him. He was sitting in the low tide, facing a blurry stretch of black that he took to be cliffs.
The surf that surrounded him was indeed stained red; the thin stretch of mud was marked with bloated corpses and splintered debris. Axiom wept for his comrades, and the tears ran down the sides of his face, mixing with the pink foam that swept over his salt-stiffened feathers. Beneath his tattered plumage, his skin was cracked and shot-through with splinters; and when he opened his beak to scream it felt like it would tear at the corners. Nevertheless, Axiom sputtered and sobbed until his mourning song became hoarse a whisper. The veridian planet — Goddess of Tides, the Protector, Big Sister, Eye of the World — gazed back at Axiom impassively. He cursed her then, “This is your fault,” he breathed, throat choked with salt and mud and blood. “Your power did this— why did you do this?” Axiom had never felt hatred before, and especially not towards the Gods and spirits. They commanded Nature, and his people knew well how fickle they were — they spent much of their lives travelling the currents of the sea and sky. Shimreth herself conducted the tides in her symphony of whale-song and crashing waves, and her mood changed as easily the movement of her celestial baton changed its pitch.
Axiom raised his arms, primary feathers ruffling, and felt a needling pain as he stood to fly. He spun around - the tawny feathers on his tail were bent backwards and marked with blood; melted like candle-wax into his grey skin from the heat of the storm. He felt despair then, for he had no escape, and looked out towards the sun-jewelled waves.
Axiom’s words came slurred, and his voice cracked with emotion, “Why— why did you let me live?”
Shimreth had no answer for him.
Taá had risen hours after Axiom had waded from the sea, and blue sunlight beat down on him from its high seat in the heaven. The slow-roasting heat wasn't enough to harden the mud that pooled in the flats at the base of the cliffs, but Axiom ached with thirst and he began to tire as he beat the piece of stern in anguished rage. Axiom yelled as he brought the driftwood down, and down again, on the shreds of weir-wood that had once been his ship. Across the torn planks, in a scratched hand marred by decades of travel, read: Wave Wader. A length of his weapon broke off in his hands, adding to his rapidly growing collection of splinters. He didn’t care. It just felt good to hit something.
The Wave Wader had been a smuggler’s ship. A lean, old schooner, battered and bejewelled with barnacles; crewed by brigands, thieves and murderers; and many of them with their wings clipped. All men whom, by popular opinion, did not deserve to be mourned. Axiom however, had grown to be fond of his crew; and in his brief time aboard the schooner, he had found small cadre whom he would have just hesitated to call friends. That’s it, he thought morosely, I joined a smuggling crew, and I’ve been punished for it by the Tidemother.
He had spent a long time trying to bury his crew that morning, but the mud was thick and filled whatever hole he dug in minutes. As a consequence, he was covered from head to toe in black sludge. His woollen jersey — which had cost a month's wages — was most definitely ruined, and every bit of him beneath the stiff fabric itched with encrusted blood and salt crystals. He hadn't the time, nor energy, to preen. He had left the bodies of his crew, the ones he could find, where they were for now. I’m probably gonna die here as well, he thought, I’ve no water, no way to scale the cliffs. He had tried to climb once, in the early hours of the morning, and found the cliffs were uniquely worn by the tide; the rock was smooth and reflected the dawn like black glass. Wet talons struggling to find purchase, he had slipped from the sheer wall and let himself slide down onto his belly. Even the small fish he caught in his beak from the rock-pools were salty and unfulfilling. How he wished he could fly.
It was now that Axiom froze abruptly, letting the broken stick fall from his grasp mid-swing. It disappeared beneath the surface with a wet smack. Something moved on an obsidian crag a little way down the coast, and at a second glance, he saw a shadow twitch in the reflective stone. Over the long morning, he had grown accustomed to the movements of the surrounding fauna: the zigzagging of wax-birds, little cousins, that approached him out of curiosity; the steady, mulching paths of giant scuttlebugs in the shallow mud; the frantic flitting of luminescent fish in the deeper tide-pools.
The shape Axiom saw was not a wax-bird, nor was it large enough to be a particularly adventurous scuttlebug, and was coloured the same oily pitch as the rock on which it lurked. Although his eyes were not yet adjusted to the sun that bounced off of the tide-pools and inky rocks, he swore to the spirits that the thing was there. Cautiously, Axiom turned and bent to retrieve a nasty-looking length of splintered wood from the debris. Turning the plank anxiously, he waded inland, hoping his shaking hands would not betray him. Whatever had been on the cliffs was probably an animal, he reasoned. He would scare it off easily.
Silence as he approached the cliffs; then a sudden clattering as the thing stepped from between two boulders with a shrill whistle. In reflex and terror, he raised his weapon to defend himself, but then saw that the creature held up six hands in a peaceable gesture. It was a giant spider — a female, he guessed from its red-streaked abdomen — jet black and bulbous; covered in bristling, barbed hairs; and about an armspan taller than he was. Her legs extended from beneath an armoured carapace, and were thick as bamboo stalks, terminating in four-fingered claws. Over her uncomfortably humanoid thorax was flung a silk robe, roughly woven and frayed. From under her cowl gazed four eyes, inky black and round as marbles, shallowly set in a face bisected by a set of gaping mandibles. Axiom knew of the Scisi-Kin, if only by description. They were a nomadic people, hoarders and traders, who dwelt in the Red Desert to the South. He had heard many drunken tales from gull sailors who claimed to have slighted the law of the Kin, narrowly avoiding their judgement in some daring escapade. Odd to meet one on the coast, he noted, for salt was deadly poison to their kind.
The spider spoke as Axiom lowered his splinter. She made a strangled hissing sound, followed by a rhythmic clicking, that could have been a language.
"I'm sorry. I don't know what you're saying— I was shipwrecked here." He gestured towards the wreckage. "I come from across the sea."
She looked at him quizically, tilting her misshapen head as if contemplating his words before speaking, "Little bird." She pointed a clawed hand to herself, and then towards the cliffs, "I can take you up."
The words were alien coming from her maw — they rasped and grated on each consonent, pedipalps twitching, and she lacked the whistling precision of a syrinx. Axiom let himself breathe. He was surprised that this creature knew his language, as disconcerting as it was, but he was grateful that he seemingly wouldn't die on this damnable coast. He spoke slowly and carefully, hoping to be understood.
"You can? By salt and stars, thank you!" He paused in sudden suspicion, "Why would you help me? I can't pay you."
She searched for the words, "Can help each other. I am alone here. Two hunters better than one."
He was forced to agree. It would pay to have allies out here, even if he intended on travelling inland later on. Besides, the spider didn't seem the type to form attachments.
"Do you— do you have a name? I'm Axiom."
She rasped something that sounded like "Che-Cha", and beckoned with a single limb.
"I'm glad to have met you, Che-Cha." he said.
"Follow, little bird. Can give you water and food after we climb."
Climbing the black cliffs was largely easy with Che-Cha's help. Axiom was directed to sit on the spider's back, legs wrapped around the space between thorax and abdomen, as she methodically climbed the vertical cliff-face. It wasn't comfortable, his legs burned where they made contact with the rough hairs that coated her; and he was forced to hang onto the ridges of her carapace whenever she leapt upwards. Eventually, as Taá disappeared behind Shimreth's vast form once more, the pair reached the crux of the obsidian rock. Axiom toppled from the spider, legs aching from strain. He rolled in the red grass and lay there, exhausted. His injured wing twinged, amaterishly bandaged with a scrap of cloth from Che-Cha's tattered robe. He heard the tapping of her clawed limbs as they scuttled over the headland towards him.
"So," he asked from the ground. "What's a Scisi like you doing all the way out here?"
"Cast out." she simply replied. Her eyes shone in the dying light.
"Oh. I've heard your people have strict rules, did you break them?"
"I did."
"But you chose to come here?"
"It was safest."
Axiom thought for a moment before asking, "What'd you do?" His beak snapped nervously — he didn't want to offend his new guide, but he had an aching feeling of distrust towards this strange creature. The Kin were known for deceit, if only in trading and hunting, but he could not think of a reason for the spider to harm him.
"I was greedy." came the curt reply.
"You ate too much? That doesn't—"
"No talking." Che-Cha said. Her tone was neither sharp nor angry, but there was a flatness in it that told him the matter wouldn't be addressed again.
"I don't mean to be rude— it must be lonely— being here and all." Axiom said, trying to salvage the conversation.
Sadness crept through the harshness of her voice then, "It is lonely."
"What's your home like?"
She paused, as if considering his question, before replying, "We moved our homes like the sands that shift. We hunted and had enough to eat, always. We obeyed the laws and were given places. I am— I was happy there, I think."
"I'm sorry." he said.
"Yes— my camp is still far, must move quickly." And she scuttled away, many legs rippling over strewn pebbles.
Axiom got up, letting the air whistle from his keratin nostrils in a sigh. He followed his guide up and over the crimson headland. Atop the bluffs, the soil was marred with salt, and the only plants that grew were hardy and inedible. Slabs of lichen-ridden slate rose like giant vertebrae from immense clusters of sword-reeds; and they cast long, sharp-edged shadows in the half light. Thorned bracken grew dense on every flat patch of earth, blocking their path more than once and forcing Che-Cha to lead him up the stone pillars that surrounded them. From the slate peaks, Axiom saw that the hill upon which they travelled eventually ceased, giving way to a dry, white stretch of land that looked almost like a distant lake — the salt flats— and rising up beyond that, the dunes of the great Red Desert. He stood at the edge; felt the salty wind ruffle his feathers and imagined he were flying at that moment, buoyant on the friendly gusts and swirling with the spirits of the air.
"Your people," Che-Cha rasped from behind him. "Why do they come here? Why do you come here?"
"We're traders— well, some are. I was a smuggler, and there's… shame… in that." Axiom supposed there was no harm in telling her some of it. His wings were already clipped. "We were carrying cargo, livestock. But it's lost now. We intended to travel the route of the Caravan, after mooring up-river. We were— we were caught in a storm before we made it to the estuary. I suppose I— I came here because, well, I joined up because I wanted the adventure. I didn't care who it was with. I've been stuck on a rocky little shithole my entire life and— well, I wanted to spread my wings."
He looked outward and he fancied himself soaring away, all the way up to the stars; and to where Shimreth hung like a vast ruby. Her hue was an ill omen, he noted, but didn't believe the Tidemother's mood could impact him here. The spider reached a spindly limb up to rest on his shoulder. He thought the gesture was meant to be comforting, but her claws dug roughly into his skin and bent his feathers.
"You will not make it to the Wheeled Serpent now, little bird." she said with gravel in her tone.
"That's not very comforting." he joked, suddenly unnerved; but the spider released him and turned to descend the slate ridge.
"Perhaps not." she said apologetically. "We will camp under here tonight. It will rain."
Perhaps the Tidemother will reach me here after all, Axiom thought, closing his eyes for a moment. Through his eyelids the blue light of the sun's eclipse appeared as if the surface of water from below, shifting with an unseen tide.
Czecza listened to the slow drum of the little bird's heartbeat as he slept — she could barely hear it from under the torrential downpour that filled the air with splashes of dark mud. Heavy clouds had gathered, sooner than she had thought, obscuring the rings of the World Egg, and her and the avian — he called himself Axiom — were now huddled beneath the slate bluff like wood-lice under a log, avoiding the worst of the weather.
The bird was so very fragile, she had thought when he approached her hiding place on the cliffs. He was a squat creature, and not poorly built, but the Salt River had drained him of his strength, and his yellow-white plumage, from which clumps fell, was hung loosely about his frame. His beak, shiny black and dashed with flecks of salt, opened and closed like the mechanical jaws of a puppet. He had collapsed immediately, exhausted by the journey as she had intended, and lay on a bed of leaves a small distance into the outcropping. Czecza hand't been able to tell if his eyes were closed, for they were black and wet like the hood of pitch feathers that cowled his head. She had feigned sleep, but after his pulse slowed and she was confident he would not wake, she stood over his sleeping form, poised to strike.
The little bird was nosy and chirped endlessly, but she admitted that it was nice to talk to someone. Even if it was in a tongue that felt as alien to her as the poison of the Salt River. All in all, he had been a satisfactory travelling companion, and his anecdotes of pirates and mythical treasure and wave monsters had captivated her as she had been by the aged storyspinner of her tribe. Stood over this strange, stunted creature in the darkness and the rain, Czecza remembered cool desert nights on claw-woven carpet; listening to tales of the Crimson Herald, of the Antlion Hunters; of secret cities buried in the sand and which could be seen, revealed, after dust-storms.
She almost hesitated.
Her tribe had turned on her, her own kin had cast her out with accusatory, obsidian stares. Their sacred laws had been defended with the steel edges of scimitars and thrown stones; and Czecza knew, should she return, the Scisi-Kor would execute her. They hunted her because she dared to indulge her curiosity, and in doing so had broken the oldest of taboos: consuming the flesh of a sapient creature. This time was different, she knew as her mandibles gaped, and she plunged her dagger fangs into the avian's neck. She would not eat him because of some benign curiosity or enjoyment; but her children would need feeding when they hatched, and she would need to eat in order to provide for them. This was a matter of survival.
Czecza's venomous cargo flooded the avian's veins, her fangs throbbing in tandem with his heartbeat. He awoke then, beady eyes widening in surprise, and tried to thrash his way free, but the toxin had already done its work — she once prided herself on the potency of her venom, which was strong enough to cripple a fully grown amaraak. Czecza drew back, and he went limb, shaking in silent agony, eyes enameled and glassy, his talons clutched ahead of him as if to ward off invisible assailants. A single, thin string of foam fell from the corner of his open beak. She knew he was dead when he stopped shuddering, but her work was far from over. Czecza knelt over the corpse, spinnarets and spindling limbs working furiously. She bound his legs first, moving slowly up his body until she cocooned him completely. The wings were a hassle to bind — they extended unnaturally from his arms in death, and she was forced to break a few feathers to get them to fit. Finally, she spun another length of thread to tie around his neck, slipping it over his beak, and then looped the other end around her pedicel. This makeshift rope would allow her to drag the corpse, instead of expending energy she didn't have to carry him further.
She waited until the rain slowed and rumbling peels of thunder calmed before venturing from the overhang. The last feeble drops fell upon her carapace and ran down the chitin in little streams, catching in her hairs. She set off in the direction of her camp. Along the ground, she dragged the cocooned corpse, leaving a long trail in the mud like the foamy wake of a Salt-vessel.
He couldn't tell if he was truly awake, or even alive, but amidst the dream-haze that clouded his consciousness Axiom felt silt shift between his toes. He couldn't move. Invisible forces bound his wings to his sides and sucked the air from his lungs. He half remembered waking in the night, the knife-points of the spider's teeth in his neck, heart seizing in convulsing pain until it stopped completely. There had been darkness — a nothingness so utterly definitive that it made his head spin with vertigo to think about — and then he was here.
He was standing, immobile, in a circular cavern. The ground was covered in a fine carpet of black silt, broken occassionally by jutting rocks. Seaweed clustered at the base of the walls, which were grooved and weathered by centuries of high tides. In the centre of the cavern the silt receded into an undisturbed pool, like a polished mirror, and protuding from the water was a sun-bleached structure that Axiom first took to be another rock. It was the carcass of a whale, dry bones picked clean; ribs strewn haphazardly, following its broken road of a spinal column as it twisted into the depths. Its three-pronged skull, half-submerged, leered at Axiom with empty sockets.
There was a sudden flurry of movement from around the chamber as silt burst around him in short plumes; but he was paralysed by the gaze of the whale. Several crabs emerged from the black sand and began to scuttle towards the pool — then they were joined by another ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifty, one hundred, until a procession of crustaceans marched into the water. They settled themselves in and around the skeleton, darting between its ribs and sheltering beneath its spine, and Axiom could imagine the bulk of the animal when it was alive, made out of writhing, chitinous bodies. The skull now studied him with a pincer protruding from each eye.
It spoke then, and Axiom's blood seemed to leave his body — to be replaced by icy water that froze him in place. It was a torrent, an expulsion of muddy words that drowned all else. Concealed behind it all was a faint, wailing melody that brought him to the deepest oceans, where he was surrounded by colossal baleen shapes that twisted in the murk.
Drift to shore.
And then he was awake. Axiom was hanging upside down, smothered in a sticky material that tore his feathers and held his beak closed when he began to thrash. His fingers curled around coiled thread and he tried his best to scream. — he couldn't breathe, he couldn't see, and blind panic consumed him. It was then he felt a chill that overwrought the stifling humidity of his prison. Water was beginning to pool at the bottom of the cocoon — around his head — and the taste of salt was thick on his tongue. And yet he didn't drown in it. As the water rose, the material that coated him became sodden and lost its adhesion; and Axiom desperately thrust his talons upwards. The thread tore and he tumbled onto a soft floor — which he realised was made out of the same coarse, white web that he had been cocooned in.
Axiom's clothes were soaked through, and water continued to pour from him.
"Shimreth?" he asked to the stale air.
Blood-soaked boy.
"I was dying— dead, I was already dead. Why did you bring me back?" he pleaded, like a sailor praying for the sea to calm.
You are mine.
"Like Taá I am."
Your blood is salt. Your flesh is silt. Your mind is swelling.
"I don't understand. What do you want from me?"
Go to where the bastard sun scorches. Fall like a tidal wave upon the dunes.
"No— no, I can't. I should be dead."
Sweep their settlements away. Drown the dead with sweet salt.
"I can't."
Turn the sand to mud.