The sun rose over the black ocean, pale and smaller than Camlann had ever seen it. It barely broke through the clouds that blurred the horizon, blending the place where sky and ocean met. Along the shoreline, beneath the tide, rocks broke through the dark wet sand like jagged teeth. He saw them by the foam around their sharp tines. The first thought: Unnerving. Rings arced across the sky above him, a shadowy, hard-edged gray. This place, this wasn’t Earth. It never had been.

Babylon promised him Saturn, and here he stood in this monochromatic landscape, watching the sun rise, far off into the distance and fogged away by a color so dark it lacked a name. Black didn’t encompass it. The indigo halo around the white sun blurred into the clouds, and eventually, he had to turn away. At least Babylon had told the truth, then.

Now: I am home. He smiled, and descended the sloping sand. A path was marked out with small black cairns, the candle-lights within their miniature dolmens long burnt out. Some of them had been kicked over, foundational stones churning away with the tides. Others were sealed together by barnacles and sea grass and discolored wax, but all of them were crusted liberally with salt. His feet followed the path automatically, unerringly tracing the center of the road. There were small gullies, dark with sand and shell fragments, from the higher sandy dunes down to the froth the ocean left behind. These he stepped over, watching the water as he walked.

Atop a small rise, he spotted what appeared to be a giant skeleton draped with salt-stained but well-preserved fabrics. Once, they’d probably been a deep purple, blazoned with a symbol that resembled the sun over the waves of the ocean--he could barely make out rusted threads of metal as he passed a torn banner. After the third, he picked up the bulk of it; it disintegrated beneath his fingers, leaving smudges of steel-lavender dust. This place was old, as old as Babylon had said it would be. Older, perhaps. He had no means of knowing.

He stopped beneath the gaping upper jaw of the monster. It was old, but as he passed beneath the stone dolmen that guarded the entrance, Camlann shivered. The sea-chill had passed, and now the wind blowing off the waves was quiet, and he stood in a warm, embryonic darkness. Home. There was stone beneath his feet, damp with perspiration, and the wetness had a pale sheen--the light of the rising sun outside. He took careful steps forward--something muffled the sound. The space loomed large, empty, and patient, but nothing echoed. Not even his voice when he said, “Hello?”

Hello? No one answered him, not even his own voice. He reached out, trying to find a wall to follow, and found nothing. Moving forward was his only option, then, unless he wanted to leave. Camlann dropped his hands to his sides and slid a foot forward, feeling for any sudden drops or stairs. In this manner, he walked the length of the leviathan in darkness, his only companion the sound of his own breathing. Even his thoughts sat silently, the whisper of Metallia’s demands silent in the back of his head now. His thoughts were red and raw, boiled clean in the pain of Castor’s crystal.

He stumbled over a high step, but didn’t fall. Something bouyed him back to his feet, but he knelt and navigated the space with a hand. A stair of gritty stone, probably… granite, raw granite. Camlann stepped onto it and turned towards the way he’d come. How far had he walked into this dolmen, this grave? How much deeper did he have to go? He wouldn’t mind going so far down the tunnel, or hall, or whatever it was that he didn’t come back, but he’d at least like to be able to see the light--and as he strained to see the entrance, the lights rose.

Pale lavender and darker violent streaks of candle-flame flickered to life as Camlann stood there, on the… on the dias, for there was a chair behind him that could only be called a throne. Draped in velvets that had once been sumptuous, but had succumbed poorly to age and sea-salt, the chair beneath seemed to have been carved from one solid piece of stone. He stepped forward, like a man sleepwalking, and pulled the velvets away even as they crumbled in his hands. There, beneath them, lit by violet flame, was a black ring. In the light, it should have reflected white, but even as the throne threw back a cool spectrum of grey-pinks and ashen lavenders, so did the metal of that ring. Embossed upon it was the symbol he’d seen on the draperies outside. The sun over a wave.

He slipped his ring on his finger because it sang to him, not in the way of Metallia that drowned his thoughts. This song was more of a rising tide. His own voice, redoubled and thrown back at him. Beneath the place the ring had sat was a neatly-folded piece of paper, pounded out of white-silver fabric and written in words that transformed before his eyes from something ancient, spindly, curving into the Cyrillic he knew.

The shore is death.

Camlann flipped the page over, but saw only the imprint of the ring, sun-and-wave, in blood. Dried blood, old blood, so old it was ashy, but still blood. He folded the sheet up and tucked it into his waistcoat. Puzzles for another time, he supposed.

As he sat down in the massive, throne-like chair, Camlann felt another sheet of pounded-linen paper. This one was written in Cyrillic as well, but it was instructions. A communication ring, it said. Well, that didn’t look too hard--a simple curve of something with a few rune-notches in it? There was no mention of the exact function that he understood. The sheet was covered in technical terms, mostly, three dimensional constructs and whatnot. Evidently, the sheets weren’t written with beginners in mind.

The directions for the device itself seemed simple enough. Material to shape for the ring-setting, and something sharp enough to cut it--no problem. He’d seen bone enough for a hundred of these.

Time to get started, then.

[1064]