Sorry for the long wait. I'm working more hours than I ever have in my life and focusing on other writing projects as I finish a novel. I haven't forgotten about you, nor do I find this any less important than other things in my life.
May you never find yourself becoming conditional. Write your own stories. Walk through doors that others can't even see. May your eternity sit just below your skin and frighten those who wish that you something that was less.
Peace. Love. Until next time.
***
It takes three doorways to stop a wraith.
Minnie taught me that. In the kitchen as my arms pulled at sparks and hers at dough she taught me how to protect myself with the mundanity of the world. With entranceways. Tunning water. Salt. Things found in kitchens and the cupboards of those of us that knew.
I knew. It takes three doorways to stop a wraith. Five for a ghost. Thirteen for a demon, but you'll need other things for that. Runes. Spells. Physical weapons. Salt can be used on it's own or in concordance, depending on what you're stopping. Salt from the sea for land creatures; salt from the mountains for denizens of the deep. I learned how to make fresh water look like rivers to things that could not stand them; I learned how to lay stones so as to confuse beings that did not understand solidity. But mostly, I learned about the protection that comes from thresholds. It takes fifteen doorways to stop a kelpie in human form. Twenty three when it appears as a steed. Seventeen doorways for a shade. Nineteen for a gyre.
How many doorways does it take to stop a god?
I walked until Ichor stopped dead, his soul unwilling to go further. Then I walked through two doorways more, blessing the way we built ships like mazes, wondering how many builders knew the reasons and how many did it because it simply was the the way ships were built. Because sailors refused to sail on anything else.
It's dangerous to live on open plans on open water; you need a maze. You need turns, and twists, and pathways. You need doorways that even the ocean can close and know they will stay shut.
The room I came to was empty but for barrels and I placed the Captain (was this still the Captain? Or was the Captain somewhere deep within the ocean, far from my arm, was he lost, was he cold and dark and in the gaze of eyes that narrowed to slits and skin that felt like sandpaper and teeth that - but no, no this was the Captain, it
had
to be the Captain) down in the middle of the room and moved barrels until there was symmetry. Balance. It was hard work and I enjoyed not having to think.
By the time it was finished Alan stood in the doorway.
I wordlessly accepted what he had brought me; salt, a small bottle of oil. A bowl and chunks of incense. A coal wrapped in palm leaves that smelled sharp and felt dull. A knife that was the opposite. Tools. Ingredients. To make what? Did we not already have all the power we needed? A cook, the ocean, and the sky, all held in a room deep within the bowels of a ship...
Alan watched me light the incense, then place it close enough to the doorway for him to reach. He would refill it as needed. Then I began pouring the salt, whispering the words that I knew, carrying the ocean close enough that the smoke in the room sank low and heavy.
I breathed it in and wished it could teach me to dissipate, to disperse. To sink. I wanted to give up my body that hurt so badly, that ached, that held a cold shell and would one day be a shell itself, I wanted to remember what it was like to be endless, eternal. I wanted to crash against another ship, than another. Why had I ever stopped my rampage? Why had I ever returned to this state, to this existence? To life? I was the ocean, I was the storms, I poured a line of salt around my body twined with the Captain's and watched it clump with the humidity of my need. I wanted to dissolve it. I wanted to turn it back to solid rock. I wanted to be a god.
I paused, the circle inches away from complete. The Captain's arm draped limply over mine and at the sight of it I felt a sound well up within my stomach that had nowhere to go and so I simply swallowed it back down. It sat in my stomach heavy like brine and I found myself pulling the Captain closer to me as if his presence would give me some measure of comfort, as if the simple fact that he still
was
in some form could calm me. Should calm me.
It did not.
Every place his body touched mine burned with the memory of his warmth. I heard his laughter; I closed my eyes and in the darkness behind my lids I saw his eyes, that dark gaze boring into me with an intensity that sent a shudder down my spine and forced a sob from my throat. It was as if he were there with me for the briefest of moments.
And then it was over and I was alone in the room, sitting in a nearly-completed circle of salt.
No, I thought. I do not want to be a god. Being a god still means I am alone. It still means I don't have him. I don't want to be eternal, or immortal, or endless; I just don't want to hurt anymore.
I sat for a long time in my own darkness, my eyes closed tight, seeking some last moment of him. Wishing he would come back to me for the briefest of seconds. But he was not here. I held him, yes, held his body in my arms, and still I was alone.
This was untenable. This could not be. I felt myself refusing this, touching the impossibility of it and when I tapped that knowledge, I broke apart.
This was a different breaking than the one that had caused the deaths of so many men in the past few hours, the one that had caused Dave to flee before me and storm clouds to live within my soul. Instead it was a slow dissolving, a particle by particle return of such completeness I had never before experienced. I dispersed myself among the seas and should have lost myself, should have forgotten how to be a single being for I was so many faceted, directional things at once except that each of those directional things each had the same singular focus; to find the Captain.
My anger, it dissolved. My fear, my loss, my grief. It dissolved. My love. It dissolved, and when I slipped under the waves any who tasted the salt in that moment would have tasted all of those things in sharp relief. The water was made dilute with me.
In that form I could not speak, or hear, or see, but I could taste in the way you know things change. And in this way I searched the ocean depths for him, sought the black pits that were Dave's home and at some point I tasted the slightest hint of love and it was my love, I knew that love I would know that love anywhere, and I followed that taste and then found more and felt it shift, tasted him understand I was there all around him in the waters among the darkness and the salt and the small, green things that fed the tiniest of fish and the largest of whales and I felt his laughter resonate within every particle of my being even as I tasted the way a god's fear slipped into the water all around us.
The Captain did not belong here. I knew it more in that moment than I had ever been able to understand, feeling his laughter through my endless, eternal being. He was not a creature of the deep and he never would be and it was wrong, it was ludicrous, it was a crack in the ocean letting in the night breeze and I felt myself begin to laugh with him as I imagined how Dave must feel to have such a being stand beside him and air out his underwater caverns and because I was so relieved to feel him there close enough to me to understand the fibers of his soul and god, all the gods in the universe did it hurt to know he was there and I was not.
I wanted to snatch him back there, to grab him and turn and go but I was too spread through the all of it and so I simply gathered my love around that place and felt the way the love, My Love, increased, tasted how his love was so dark and so strange to be here at the ocean floor and how the fear all around us was tinged with squid ink.
***
I never did finish the salt circle. I could not, with my soul spread around the world and deep within the depths of the sea, my body empty holding the empty body of my love. If Dave came for us, so be it. I would know. I was with him; I tasted him and he watched me.
Alan came and left, came and left. Natch might have come and sat with us one night; I do not know. I wasn't there. I didn't notice. Time ceased to exist. Direction became meaningless. All directions were the same to me; what else was there but North? So I needed to go, and so we went. I spoke it. It was Truth. I sat in the ocean, as the ocean, I held my love and was so close I could taste him, and I waited.
They told me later that it was three days. It felt like eternity. It felt like a blink. It felt like nothing but the ocean and a voice to keep the room filled with the words it required. Alan burned hair and incense and spilled blood. I floated in voices and myself and learned what my soul tasted like when entwined with another. I felt the Captain just on the other side of mine and promised him, again and again and again, that I was going to get him back.
Three days. It takes three days and twenty three doorways to hold a god at bay, and the whole of the ocean.
***
On what they told me was the third day Alan did not refill the incense. Instead he turned it over smartly and allowed gravity to flip its purpose, dumping ash on the floor. He helped it along with taps, tapping louder and louder until he gained my attention.
I felt like I was swimming through water as thin as smoke, or perhaps as thick as it. I felt like I was breathing air and I should be breathing fluid. I felt upside down and and knew that I would not be returned my rightful place until the body in my arms again held breath.
"We're here," Alan said simply. And then he left.
I sat with those words for a long time. They swam around me, schools of brightly colored fish, shimmering and perhaps not as tangible as they looked or perhaps entirely more so. I watched them for what felt like years. Was I not already here? Was I not with my love, deep within the sea, particle for particle and soul for soul?
It was the burn of the volcano that brought me back. How long had it been since this place had threatened to make me nothing but flesh and bone? It tasted acrid, the fumes forever in the air and when they filtered down through three days of spells and twenty-three doorways, when they finally reached me through the thickness and the maze I had created the fish dropped to the floor and flopped in air suddenly far too thin for the suspension of bodies or belief.
My soul rushed back to my body with alarming speed. I tasted the briefest flicker of something as I was torn away - worry not, worry not, I am coming in such a more tangible way, and yet I could not say the words through my own keening loss - and then I was back in my body, disoriented, confined. Alone.
In the North.
We were here. I breathed in the air deep and let the burn pull my lungs inward. Felt how that sat familiar in my chest, how it ran up against memory and warnings.
How long, how long, and how many times since then had I looked North and thought; I will never go back?
The Captain. It was he, even still, crashing impossibilities down on my head like stars from the sky and I could almost hear his laugh as I sat threatened by the weight of it all, could almost hear him make fun of me for my seriousness but there was no laugh, there was no chide as I gathered the Captain close to my chest and stood. There was only silence. Silence, an unfinished circle of salt, and tattered remnants of spells.
They wouldn't last much longer, those protections Cookie had laid during my dissolution. They were things of the sea. Creations of the cool and wet and the lazy, dry air was deflating them, evaporating them.
