Plea at the Sea

In a world that had lost its sense of shape, Flinn held the rail as if it were the very last truthful thing in existence. Under his fingers, the wood was rotted and soft, wet with the icy breath of the deep, and humming low, as if it were an animal that had been injured for too long to be able to cry out. The ship had already ceased its journey. Remembering was what it was; remembering the stormlight and thunder, the iron song and the oarstroke, the pressure of bodies that once believed it was possible to cross the sea. The memory brought tears to its eyes, and it cried.

The waterfall loomed in front of them, not so much falling as it was collapsing in on itself in a slow and dreadful surrender. In complete silence, a wall of water that was as wide as sin and thick enough to crush was pouring out from the edge of the world. The mist that it produced did not rise in awe toward the surface; rather, it crept along the surface. Nothing moved quickly here. The current dragged with the inevitability of graves.

Flinn did not tremble. He was past that. There is a stillness that comes after fear, a hollow that opens once a man knows the end is no longer a matter of if, only when. He stood within it, caught in the hush that hangs before the moment teeth touch bone.

He had not slept. Not since the coast vanished behind storm and smoke. It had been three nights since he had seen the drop, first in his dreams and then in his waking life, and both of his visions had been identical. Endless. Final. Beautiful in the way only terrible things can be. They had spoken of this place in Gallos. The sailors called it the Mouth. The priests would not name it at all.

Around him, the sails hung in tatters, windless and torn, like shrouds half-stitched. He had not cut them down. A part of him believed the ship deserved her burial dress. She had carried them farther than any map dared mark, and now she would die alone, dressed in ruin, beneath a sky that did not care.

The light found him—thin, gold, bleeding through a break in the cliffs above. It touched his shoulder, then the mast, then nothing at all. It was not salvation. It was witness.

Flinn thought of his mother’s voice—not the words, just the sound. How she would hum to herself when she thought no one could hear. Years had passed since he last thought of her, but now, standing on the edge of the unmade, he remembered her hands, calloused and sure, as they taught him the art of knotting.

His breath came shallow. Not from panic. From reverence.

He closed his eyes.

The ship moaned once, long and low, and then she tipped—forward, into the black.

And Flinn, with no prayer on his lips, went down with her.

He fell, not as men fall from cliffs or horses or grace, but as a candle is extinguished in a room where no one will return. Downward, not toward earth or the end, but toward some more ancient dimension of absence. And it was not falling, truly, but sinking—drawn slow and precise through a corridor of dark so perfect it did not seem to lack light, but rather to forbid it.

The sea did not take him with violence. It took him with patience. And the water around him, green, black, and glass-smooth, seemed not a place but a thought too old for words. He drifted through it like breath returning to the mouth that exhaled it.

Above, the column of light narrowed, pulled thin like the memory of sun after a long illness. It no longer touched him. It did not try. It had other work, far above. His eyes, if they still were eyes, saw the last edge of gold vanish behind the weight of fathoms, and with it, the world of names.

Around him floated bodies—still, turned in strange postures, not reaching, not pleading. Their mouths, open, did not seek air but seemed caught mid-word, some final sentence denied conclusion. They did not move as if newly dead. They drifted like they had been waiting. Like they had watched him come.

There was no sound. But in that stillness, he felt the presence of sound denied. The absence pressed into him—into his skin, his thoughts, his marrow. The silence was not quiet. It was watching.

And far below...if "below" still meant anything in such a place, there was something. Not movement. Not shape. But recognition. A hollowing. A mouth as wide as despair and twice as deep, not made of meat or bone, but of something more permanent: hunger without origin, grief without end.

It did not open.

It was always open.

The shape around it was not body. It was a suggestion—a vastness that defied measurement or even metaphor. The slope of titanic fingers that were not formed to grasp but to reach endlessly without ever touching, the broken crown of a head whose eyes were caverns, unlit and unmourned, were the only things that could be seen, but they should have been felt.

It did not stir. It did not strike.

It received.

And Flinn, who had once been a boy, and then a sailor, and then a man undone by light, felt something in him unspool—slowly, exquisitely, without pain. Not just his breath, but the scaffolding of his being. His name, his shape, the weight of his memories—how bread had once felt warm in his hands, how his mother hummed when washing his hair, how laughter had once hurt his ribs—all of it loosened and floated free, as if he had never deserved to hold them.

They were taken gently, as if by hands too large to ever be cruel.

Around him, the things began to move—creatures that had no true form, only the vague recollection of form. They swam not with fins but with the longing for fins. Eyeless, boneless, full of soft regrets. They brushed against him as they passed, not curious, not hostile—just familiar. Like mourners at a wake too long delayed.

He opened his mouth.

Not to cry. Not to plead.

But because it had become the only thing left to do.