My hands are bound in mail gloves. My mouth stuffed with a coarse muslin. There are four of us prisoners and twelve of our captors split two and six between vessels. The captive seated a foot ahead of me is blanketed in a freckled gray drape over the shoulders. I suspected that similar shields my back from the night chill that eats through my sandals and at my cheeks. The three at the canoe’s head all paddle and are cloaked in pointed hoods colored a dark navy with a violet hue.
The oars move through still waters, opaque like rock. Black as vanta. The great clouds are warm. They stir without moving, for their infighting covers the Earth. Pressed to the firmament, they were all the map this silent company harnessed. The night sky beyond was featureless, devoid of star and moonlight.
Windy silver shimmers, like oil paints, were all that marred the water face. Like the patterns in quartz, they were distant twinkles untouchably far into the water’s depths. There is life beneath us, but it is the sky, sulking kind that hardly enjoys the shallows with touch skin or a hard shell. Deformed and sometimes monstrous best describes the kind of hideous bottom feeders I have seen here. The thickness of the water shields sunken eyes from the sun.
The cliffs are a pale limestone. Smooth chunks ascend in varying heights all down the channel’s sides. Currently, a beach is on our right and we hug the shore, but to the left is a panorama of challenging peaks. The naked stone turned pink then brown in the failing daylight. Now black rising and falling tree lines cut in and out of the muddy horizon. The air smells sweeter as night overtakes us, like the venom of a flytrap.
The foliage is in peak. Conifers mixed with deciduous create walls of green, orange, and yellow lining the stony banks. There are bizarre dead spots that show like a wound into the forest, and something desperate reaches back out, and stops at the water’s edge.
We drift beyond the maw as all features are left behind. Ahead is an endless sky and a near motionless ocean. There is the sound or rushing and the smell of salt. The waters speed onward it as a river, and we are taken with it. My heart pounds in my chest as the beach is left behind us. The person in front of me is also distressed and groans in intense irritation through his gag. The guards lay aside their oars and we ride the uniform current.
My panic did eventually subside, and we well into subservience once more. I fell asleep. When I awoke, I was the only one left. The world’s end approached. The I drifted over glacial edge into a depthless tehom.