The Sea - Of Despair

Alastor’s remaining eye opened wide as the blade sliced through his windpipe then pinned him across the tiller, separating two vertebrae of his thoracic spine. Lifeblood seeped from his throat into a hovering pewter bowl until it overflowed, dripping to the deck. A sail flapped as a fresh breeze began to stir the plate-glass sea.

 As the moon slid out and up from the mist hovering over the water, Verity became visible, hazy like dust. A halo of light from behind her head lent her the appearance of a robe clad saint. She moved closer to the stern from her vantage point on the forward deck. Raising a long fingered, elegant hand, Verity pointed in the direction of Sword and curled her fingers toward her, beckoning Sword closer.

Sword moved in dancing flight to Verity. A shimmering blade, bloodless, glowing in lunar light, until fragmenting, dissolving to almost nothing, just salt in the air. She turned her attention to the pewter bowl and signalled it to come closer to her. She grasped the bowl and drew it to her head, her chin rose high, and her jaws separated with a loud crack that rang like a single gunshot. As first specks of blood touched her lower lip, scaling began. As she consumed Alastor’s blood, her presence solidified, shifting back and forth from human to fish. Plucking his still open eye out from its socket, she tossed it up toward the moon, tipped back her head and swallowed it whole on its descent, then flipped over the side of the boat into the water, silently returning to the deep. Tail intact and golden hair flowing.

The discarded pewter bowl rolled casually around the deck, clanking against cleats, as a large seabird swooped down from the night sky, its heavily beating winds filling the air with a deeply disconcerting, rolling throb. Sea water caught the beat and began to swirl close to where Verity had flipped overboard, into the deep.

 Bird continued to hover and beat the air. The swirling water created a tunnel within the sea that grew wider and deeper with each microsecond that passed, finally revealing Verity. She attempted to hide, darting amongst rocky outcrops on the seafloor.

‘You know what I want!’ Bird screeched ‘and I will get it, now!’ Throbbing soundwaves boomed as Bird made his move through the tunnel, swooping down he grasped Verity with his huge taloned claws, piercing her scaley skin. As he flew back to the surface, the parted sea closed behind him.

He flung her back toward the deck and screeched.

“No one, but no one makes a dead fool of Alastor, Alastor the -”

‘Alastor the evil one!’ She screamed, ‘Truth stealer! In this sea of discontent! Everywhere he goes, wherever his ship lands, he feeds on the best of people, sucks out their humanity leaving them cold and struggling with disdain running through their veins. Despair casts it shadows in their eyes, dims their light, as they grind each other down to dust. His salty kingdom grows, as humanity drifts away.’

‘Yet now he lives on within you Verity, your brother Alastor, sees through your eyes, beats with your heart, his blood runs through you, he will turn you Verity and what then?

‘I am the truth seeker, Bird. We will see what happens when Evil is willingly fed with truth. I will feed him truth.’

‘Says the shapeshifter’ Bird squawked.

‘As are you. From a distance just a fleck in the sky. close by, an imposing power, to your friends, ‘that quirky bird, always with the story.’ A reflection of perception, which is all anything is.’

‘And that is as true for you, as for anyone else Verity. As those golden scales fall from your tail do they reveal justice or judgement?’

Verity glanced down to her damaged scales now littering the deck, and the black grooves on her tail oozing with drops of blood within blood, the blood of a brother, and paled.

Bird made his move and cast his right wing toward the pewter cup and away from Verity. The blood of Alastor, cleansed by the moonlight, flowed out of his sister and back into the cup, in arching streams.

‘The eye Verity, now….’ Bird commanded.

Verity felt the release of her brother as a burden lifted. As if the light and the wonder of the worlds he had consumed resided now within her, yet their anguish, released. She leaned back and cracked open her jaws, reached in deep with those long, elegant fingers and withdrew the eye, his misted eye, threaded with malevolence and cast it up to the sky.

Bird caught it deftly in his beak, leant over Alastor and dropped it back in to its socket, he nodded toward Verity who sealed the gash in his chest with a generous wave of her hand. The pewter cup poured its contents into the gaping wound on his spine. A fiery heat, Alastor’s returning life force burning, rose and melted the pewter, fusing broken vertebrae and sealing the wound. Verity reached over and marked the seal with her fingertip and the swirling symbol of Truth.

‘May you feel their pain’ she murmured to Alastor, then nodded to Bird and dissolved, the fallen scales rose and drifted away like autumn leaves rustling up a plan.

In her absence a chill settled across the stern of the boat. Bird folded his wings more closely together.

‘Son,’ he croaked, ‘Alastor what did you find, what is your truth, is it truth that will set you free?’

Alastor straightened his spine and stood tall on the deck, a hand resting on the tiller. ‘It is not truth that sets you free Bird, it is what you do with it. I can set myself free, I can choose to avenge individual evil misdeeds, cast as hero. Or sleep in a swell of ignorance and wait out this life like flotsam flowing with the tide. But she is right. I feel powerful watching the mayhem I spread like a malignant contagion wherever I step. Whoever I touch, in that moment as I suck on their nature, I have a taste of their goodness, as it turns to bile, I leave them their shadow and move on, I am their curse, and who is without evil or the potential for it? Humanity is dammed by their very existence; my kindness is in speeding up the journey. May they all sink into this my Sea of Discontent.’

Bird, spoke in sadness.

 ‘You had a chance, a chance to see life lived with love, through love, you experienced its power – yet you live more in despair than the lives you ruin.’

‘But I could not control it!’  roared Alastor, ‘and what I cannot control, is not within my power, and if I have no power over someone or something it is of no use to me. That is the truth, my truth and so I will dispense with humanity.’

‘No’

Birds command ricochet through the sky; lightning forked across it as thunder rolled.

 ‘Verity spoke the truth. You have chosen yourself, a part of yourself to connect with evil and personify it. You have consumed your hero potential to extinction. May humanity dispense with you.’

 Moving to the edge of the boat, Bird opened his wings wide, pushed with force against the rail and rose high toward the stars. Tears fell from his eyes as torrential rains over the Sea of Discontent. The boat rose on a 100-metre-high tidal wave powered by Bird’s thrust and pummelled toward the mountainous coastline. Alastor stood tall, fighting the seas beneath him through his helm, his good eye searching for safe landing. He sighed as the smoking island volcano came into view. His ship lifted to the volcanoes rim lurching over it as the sea receded. The heat burned hotter than his rage. Flames torched the boat and Alastor burned to ash that floated across sea and shore, cleansed, it fell to earth and fed the land.

Verity, felt his passing as love and compassion for the boy she had known, allowing it to pour from her limitless inner well of contentment to his sea of discontent. Transformation took place as the waters lapped against shores. Clean, clear water where children played, their laughter raising soft smiles in communities that had forgotten how. Fish thrived, and fields were worth farming again. As trust grew, people explored contentment, its’ boundaries, values, urges to break away and return to it.

As love and compassion fuelled this transformed land of harmonious living, outsiders looked on with disbelief. Rancour brewed and sabres rattled on distant hills. With trepidation yet elevated expectations, the peoples of the sea prepared to meet jealousy with tolerance, envy with generosity, to meet only the friend in a potential enemy, to embody, a good life.

Verity perched on her rock in the bay, observing Bird’s arrival, ‘Not bad,’ he chirped, ‘not bad at all.’