//------------------------------// // Act II: Desperate Measures, part 2 // Story: The World is Filled with Monsters // by Cold in Gardez //------------------------------// The moon blinked. A shadow eclipsed it. For the space of a heartbeat all the light in the world vanished, and darkness swallowed the valley. Only the windigo queen remained, the glow radiating from her a solitary star on a field of black velvet. Where the moon had been nothing but an afterimage remained, a fading writhing bruise on his mind’s eye. Light returned, and the night and the valley and his friends. Cloudy swore under his breath, and Quicklime gasped. Zephyr’s wings froze, and she tumbled into the snow, kicking up a spray with her flailing hooves as she cursed. Rose was silent. She stared up at the sky, her one eye stretched so wide it began to water. Her ears fell flat against the side of her head. Her jaw began to shake, and Vermilion heard the faint chatter of her teeth. He knew he shouldn’t. He looked up anyway. The moon was gone. Where it serenely floated just moments ago, monarch of the night, only a hole remained, an absence somehow darker and emptier than the vast expanse of star-littered space all around. It was a void not just in the sky or in the world but in his eye and mind, a neat circle of reality carved away by some monstrous shears, and out from this wound began to pour, like ashes out from a funeral urn, the shape he remembered so dimly from Cirrane. It swelled. It breathed. High overhead, filling half the vault of heaven, the nightmare was born once more. It roiled and billowed and swallowed itself and blossomed, sprouting twisted wings and claws and beaks and tails; cancers and horns and shells and raw, weeping nerves and teeth that fit in no mouth and misshapen genitals both male and female. But none of these Vermilion noticed for more than a moment, because all he could see were its eyes, eyes that erupted like blisters from every aspect of its body, an eye for every pony in the world, and they all looked down at him. Its gaze crushed him. Heavier than any pack he had ever borne; it weighed down his body and his soul. The blood in his veins turned to sludge. A crawling, cold horror rose up from his heart, through his throat, and seized his brain. He drew in a shaking breath to scream. And then he exhaled. He forced his quaking limbs to still, squeezed shut his eyes, and reached past the gibbering fear clouding his thoughts. He had seen this before. He had fled before. He could not do so again, and for that he focused on the one anchor more powerful than the terror attempting to send him running into the snow-swept wasteland. He remembered his friends. He remembered their scents and the warmth of their touch. The sound of their voices. The love he felt for each of them. And slowly, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat, the terror receded. He opened his eyes, and the world returned in a rush. Quicklime huddled in a ball beside him. The high, keening sound he heard was not the wind but her screams. Her horn sparked and flashed with golden light that melted the snow around her but did nothing more. Blood covered her face, shining and black in the blue light, flowing down from cuts in her scalp. Before he could reach her, she struck herself in the head again with her shoes, opening another wound. Dark dots, like little flowers, dribbled onto the snow. He grabbed around her withers and pulled her up, but she flinched and squirmed away. Her screams, which had been voiceless expressions of terror, took on the form of words. “Stop it!” Her hoof struck a glancing blow to her horn, sending out a shower of sparks from both. “Make it stop!” “It’s me, Quicklime! It’s me!” Vermilion grabbed at her legs, prying them away from her head. She screamed in his ear, drowning out his thoughts. In the spaces of her breath the world seemed to ring. He managed to secure her flailing hooves, and when she couldn’t shake free she twisted in his grip and sank her teeth deep into the flesh of shoulder. He gasped. It hurt like a bitch, but between his cloak and his thick hide and the general earth pony indifference to pain, he could ignore it. And at least it stopped her from screaming – or, rather, her screams were muffled by the part of him she was trying to bite off. In the relative calm he spun around, looking for the rest of his friends. Zephyr lay a few feet away, motionless, her eyes wide and unseeing. Only the rapid, frantic rise and fall of her chest told him she still lived. Cloudy was gone. The snow was churned and scattered where he’d stood. Flying. Vermilion spun in a quick circle, looking for his friend, but the sky was too large and the night too crowded with blowing snow. He was lost. Rose, then. He saw her still standing and stumbled toward her, dragging Quicklime along. The cobbled road was inches deep in snow now, and his shoes skidded on the slick stones. Just crossing the few feet toward her left him panting. “Rose!” He grabbed her shoulder with his free hoof. Somepony’s blood – his or Quicklime’s – left a long smear on her bright coat. “Rose!” She didn’t budge. She might’ve been a statue. She wasn’t even breathing, as far as he could tell; her whole body was as still as the stones beneath the snow all around them. Only the wild blowing of her mane, escaped from the ties and braids she so often used to contain it, remained to suggest she wasn’t carved from stone. “Rose!” Something broke in his voice. The fear began to creep back into his heart. The hot stench of somepony’s urine stung his nose, and he just hoped it wasn’t his. “Rose! Stop looking at it! Stop!” Nothing. Her eyes began to water. She hadn’t blinked. “Look at me, dammit!” Forgetting the tearing pain in his shoulder, he reached up and grabbed her horn. It was hot beneath his touch, and an electric tingle ran up his nerves. He ignored the sensation and bent all his strength into twisting her head away from the sky. She resisted, every muscle frozen. But she was a unicorn and he was an earth pony, and the outcome was never in doubt. All three of them collapsed into the snow. Rose’s body began to spasm and shake, and he fell atop her to catch her struggling limbs. “Cloudy!” he shouted up at the sky. Half of it now was filled with the nightmare, a roiling mass of chaos and eyes and insanity. “Cloudy, we need you, buddy! Please! I need—” Something flashed across his vision. Bright and blue, like a meteor. It left him blinking away stars. Overhead, the nightmare recoiled. An enormous fan of flesh, a malformed wing dripping with tumors and eyes and teeth that stretched for miles, fell away from the monster’s bleeding heart. It faded as it fell, dissolving back into the shadows that had birthed it. A thousand mouths opened and screamed out their rage and pain. Beneath him, Rose stopped struggling. Quicklime went limp, and the teeth digging into the meat of his shoulder vanished. She coughed and spat out a spray of blood on the snow. “Wha…” She coughed again and retched. A line of pink spittle dangled from her lips. “Get up!” he shouted at them both. He pulled Rose up and shoved his shoulder against her chest until her legs found their footing. “It’s the monster from the mirror! The one from Cirrane! It’s back!” “She’s fighting it,” Rose mumbled. Her head was tilted back toward the sky. “That’s why Graymoor summoned her.” What? Vermilion stared at her, then looked up again. The windigo was there. She soared across the sky in a graceful arc, so high overhead that her massive body was little more than a blue spark. She danced closer to the nightmare, and the sky filled again with sapphire flash. Another piece of its body fell away. The heavens quaked in sympathy as the monstrous being screamed. “Okay, uh…” He gazed up stupidly for another long moment, then shook himself. There was nothing he could do about anything happening up there. He pushed Quicklime toward Rose. “Help her. I need to find Cloudy.” Rose wrapped a foreleg around Quicklime’s shoulder and held the shivering unicorn against her chest. She managed to tear her gaze away from the battle playing out in the sky, and looked around the deserted, windswept ruins of the camps. “Where’d he go?” “Up there somewhere. I think.” The landscape danced with shifting shadows as the windigo soared across the sky. Not even the mountains seemed solid anymore. He tried to walk toward Zephyr and stumbled to his knees in the snow. He closed his eyes and just tried to breathe. A loud clatter sounded next to him. He looked up to see Cloudy there, his face streaked with frost and his mane half frozen in a wild spray. His wings trembled. “Sorry.” Cloudy’s jaw worked, like he wanted to say more, but nothing came. “Sorry, I—” Vermilion silenced him with a hug. The pegasus squeaked, and Vermilion loosened his grip. “It’s fine.” He set Cloudy down and started back toward Zephyr, who was beginning to stir. The blowing snow had half-buried her, but before they could reach her she was already up and shaking it off. “What the…” She looked up at the sky and trailed off, then managed to squeeze her eyes shut and look away. “What the fuck is that?” “It’s what Vermilion saw in Cirrane,” Rose said. She walked slowly to join them, supporting Quicklime with her shoulder. “That thing he ran from. The same thing Graymoor showed us in the mirror.” “What is it, though?” Zephyr asked. “A monster?” “The dreamoras were monsters,” Cloudy said. “The spiders in Hollow Shades were monsters.” He pointed up at the twisted, malformed horror in the sky, and for a moment they all fell silent, staring up at it with involuntary awe. Rose broke free first. She shook her head so hard her hooves slid on the ice-slick stones. “It’s not a monster. It’s a spirit. It’s… It’s like…” “It’s so wonderful,” Quicklime mumbled. Unlike the others, she hadn’t looked away. She stared up at the sky, her eyes wide, her face streaked with blood and tears and snot. “It’s like a god.” “It’s a Nightmare.” Vermilion said. It came out unbidden, as though the answer had always lurked in his soul, waiting for him to find the question that would unearth it. “It’s what brought all the monsters to the north. It’s what caused the darkness we’ve been fighting since Hollow Shades. That’s it.” He swallowed again. “That’s our enemy.” “Okay.” Cloudy’s wings danced at his side, fluffing and flattening and rising to hide his shoulders from the wind. “I don’t, uh… I don’t know know how we fight that. We’ll die.” “We’ll fight it like we fought Blightweaver. Or the dreams in Maplebridge.” The chill began to ease as Vermilion spoke. His chest grew hot, burning. They could do this. They’d faced terrible odds before, and though it had cost them greatly, they’d always won. With Quicklime’s knowledge, Rose’s magic, Cloudy’s courage and Zephyr’s skill at arms, they could defeat any monster that dared threaten the world. Why else would Luna have entrusted the defense of the realm to them, if not because she knew they could win? A new emotion swelled up in him – elation, joy. All their suffering had led to this, this moment of victory. “We can do this!” He shouted. His voice rose high above the howling winds. He wanted to laugh. “This will be its doom, not ours! Friends, we can—” The sky flashed again with the windigo’s chill blue light. It lashed out at the nightmare, opening a huge wound that stretched across the stars. Shadows boiled out in lieu of its blood, and the nightmare howled with pain. And then it fought back. Claws like whips, fangs as long as clouds, a mouth wider than the moon, they all struck at the windigo. Against the vastness of the nightmare the spirit was little more than a blue dot in the sky, a star with the temerity to fight against its master the heavens. The windigo dodged weapons the size of cities and struck again and again. Shadows fell like rain onto the world below, staining the snow black. Through it all, the windigo danced. More graceful than any pegasus, it flew like the winds were in its blood. It flowed around the nightmare’s blows, avoiding them as easily as Vermilion could avoid a wriggling worm trapped on a dirt road, drying in the sun. And she sang, her voice inflected with a frozen joy that echoed in each of their minds. For all the deaths she had caused, the misery and destruction of the town, for that one moment Vermilion was able to forgive her; Graymoor’s death, and Stratolathe’s death, and all the others deaths, they had been the necessary sacrifice to bring this beautiful creature back into the world. Through their lives they had given birth to something great, something powerful, something that might manage to defeat the nightmare or drive it back into dark spaces beyond the world. The nightmare flexed, and a malformed wing wider than the fields of Vermilion’s farm swung across the sky. The windigo swept around it, kicking out her hooves for balance, but a single fibrous feather brushed against her side. The windigo stumbled, her flight wobbled, and she began to drop. “No,” Rose whispered. “No. Fly!” “She’s hurt,” Cloudy said. His wings flared, and he jumped into the air. “Come on! Zephyr, come on, we can help her!” “Got it!” Zephyr shouted. She beat her wings, rising into the air beside him, her spear dangling in her legs like a wasp’s stinger. “Rose, Quicklime, any help you can give would—” She never finished. The sky erupted with sound as the nightmare screamed. A massive beak, larger than the city behind them, stretched out toward the windigo. It closed around the blue dot and thrashed wildly. Blue light seeped out between its serrated edges. The beak swung across the sky and spat out its prey. Like a wounded comet, the windigo flew on an arc through the sky, blue light dripping from its body like blood. A terrible, keening wail filled Vermilion’s mind, filling his bones with ice. He stared in shock, unable to move except to track her fall. She struck the mountains above Hazelnight. The mighty peaks trembled at the impact, sending broken rocks the size of houses sliding down their slopes. A geyser erupted where the spirit hit. A white spray of snow and ice exploded upward like a volcanic plume. The voice in their minds ended, and only silence, broken by the subsonic rumbling of the shaking mountains, remained. Great sheets of rock buckled and began to slide down the slopes. Cracks a hundred meters across began to open, forming new ridges and valleys. The very topography of the land was remade. Above, the nightmare turned. It folded inward its wounded surfaces, and in terrible disunity it shrank back into the gaping maw that had birthed it. It pulled with it the fabric of the sky, stretching out the stars, and as it vanished it revealed the moon again. Within seconds nothing remained of it in the sky. Only the howling winds and a few lost flakes of snow reminded them it had been there at all. They barely noticed. They stared at the broken mountain and the fountain of snow spraying up from out it, like blood from a wound. It grew and it grew. Avalanches began to slide down toward the valley below. “It’s not stopping,” Zephyr said. “It… I’m not sure it will stop.” A new wind began to blow. Down from the mountains now, as the rising cloud of snow chilled the air above the valley. It rolled down the ridges toward the valley like a flood. Grains of ice struck at Vermilion’s face. He squeezed his eyes shut against the assault. Above them, the clouds occluded the moon, plunging the valley back into darkness. “It’s gone, right?” Quicklime’s horn glowed, and a circle of light illuminated the world around them. High above, the sky was black, with only a faint silver patch of the moon’s light showing the racing clouds. “We… it’s safe now? Is the town saved?” “No.” Rose stepped past them. She stepped out beyond the circle of light from Quicklime’s horn and stood in the darkness. She stared at the town and the mountains beyond it, and the eruption of snow flowing down the slopes. “Look,” she continued. “Look. It’s doomed.” Vermilion stepped up beside her. His eyes, blessed by Luna’s touch, adjusted easily to the darkness, and in just moments he was able to see the mountains clearly. The crater where the windigo had fallen was gone now, filled to overflowing with snow that rushed down the slopes. He watched it slide inexorably downward. Toward Hazelnight. * * * The mass of ponies who had fled into the town, the thousands that kicked down its gates and rushed through the snowbound streets, burrowing into any homes they could find to escape the windigo’s terrible cold, they reversed their flow. Out of the homes and buildings they ran, chased by the rumble of snow racing down the mountains above the town. They ran as fast as they could, carrying their foals and what few belongings they could manage on their backs. The townsponies joined them, and the streets became a river of muted colors, the earth pony shades of dirt and stone and moss and bark mingling dimly in the moonlit darkness. They rushed down the avenues toward the gate they had just entered so eagerly. But ponies were not as fast as avalanches. The first wave of snow crashed into the stone buildings set into the mountain’s face, the warehouses and mining bays and cranes that supported the town’s harvest of geodes. The stone walls buckled and folded and fell with a crash that shook the bones in Vermilion’s legs. The avalanche’s thunder echoed in his chest. The snow fell onto the city like a wave onto a rocky shore. White plumes burst into the air and slowly dispersed, while below more snow came, swallowing everything it touched. It piled high and flowed around and covered even the steepled tips of the highest buildings. And still more came. Out from the windigo queen’s grave flowed an ocean of snow, a newborn glacier whose birth destroyed everything before it. Within minutes half the town was buried. More followed. By dawn the valley was full, and nothing remained to remind ponies a town had ever existed there at all. The ponies, the survivors, the lucky ones who escaped through the gates before the pursuing snows swallowed everything, fled south. Back to the villages they had so recently abandoned. What became of them, Vermilion never learned. He saved who he could. Nearly five hundred they managed to lead through the dark paths, using Cloudy and Zephyr to scout the way back to Chalcedony Harbor. At his guidance teams of earth ponies broke through the snow, carving a channel wide enough for the herd to trudge behind. The Pearl Diver was still tied up at the pier, and three other merchant vessels beside it. He stood at the pier for hours, until the last of the survivors had boarded. The road to Hazelnight vanished, obliterated by the snow. Ice began to build upon the cliffs, occasionally breaking off to fall hundreds of feet into the bay with a tremendous crash that sent waves echoing across the water and heaving the ships against their lines. He stayed at the ramp until snow began to bury it as well, and the timbers began to freeze and crack beneath its weight. He stayed until Cloudy dragged him up onto the deck, where dozens of other ponies jammed against each other for space. He watched, numb, as the Pearl Diver cut loose and made for open water. It was slow and fat and low in the water with the weight of so many ponies, and the waves breaking on its hull sprayed him with ice and salt. The dark clouds over Hazelnight were visible for hundreds of miles. He could still seem them, days later, when they reached the first villages far to the south. * * * The ocean was calm. The Pearl Diver’s wake expanded out behind them, adding its froth to the gentle surface. White bubbles rose and burst and only very slowly subsided. Vermilion watched them in a trance. “Hey.” A soft, warm presence joined him at the ship’s stern rail. The scent of cotton and pepper and a mare who hadn’t had a real bath in over a week teased his nose. He didn’t answer. He hadn’t been asked a question, and in any event there wasn’t much to say. Nothing worth saying, anyway. “We should reach Huracan tomorrow evening,” Rose continued. She set her forehooves on the rail and leaned over it. “It’s just a few days back to Everfree after that.” Behind them, a seagull dove into the Pearl Diver’s wake. A moment later it emerged with something bright and silver thrashing in its beak. The gull beat its wings and banked wide of the ship’s sails with its prize. He watched it soar toward the coastline on their left. “We’ll rest there a while. We need it. We all do. Talk to Luna. Find out… decide what we’ll do next.” Except for the slight hitch in her voice, Rose managed to sound calm. Like she was discussing her plans for a night after work. He waited for her to leave. When the sun set an hour later, and air began to grow cold, and the sailors set out their lanterns, and she was still at his side, he sighed. “Was this a mistake?” he asked. “What part?” She pawed at the rail. Her hooves, normally pristine and polished like any other unicorn’s, were chipped and cracked. An earth pony’s hooves. Her fetlocks were ragged and matted with salt, more gray than white. He wondered if they would ever come clean, or if she’d just trim them away. “Helping Graymoor? I’m… I’m not sure anymore. When I first saw him using blood magic, I thought he was a wicked pony with wicked plans. But he had to have known he would die after summoning the windigo. I don’t… He was wrong, yes. But he was not evil. I was wrong about that. Maybe we were all wrong.” “Not just Graymoor. That too, I mean. But all of it.” He motioned with his hoof to encompass the horizon. “Everything. Leaving the company. Agreeing to help Luna. Going out to try and save the world. What… why did we think we could do that? What made us so special?” “Well…” She trailed off into a long silence. The twilight glow to the west faded, and soon only the light of the waning half-moon overhead lit the ocean. Small clouds dotted the sky, blowing out from the shore, and they cast dark shadows on the waters below, as though some giant leviathans swam just beneath the surface. “Well?” “Well… we did,” she said. “Nopony else. Nopony else stayed to fight Blightweaver in Hollow Shades.” “Canopy did.” The major’s dark green coat was almost black in the moonlight. What an odd little detail to remember. He frowned and shook his head to banish the memory. “Yes. But she’s dead. We’re not.” She edged her leg a bit closer his hoof, then laid her fetlock over his. Against the cool rail of the ship and the brisk ocean air of night, her touch was like an ember. He glanced down at her hoof, waiting for her to realize her error and pull away. When she didn’t, he looked away, so at least she would be spared the embarrassment of knowing that he’d noticed. “She wouldn’t have failed like this,” he said. “She’d have… she’d have figured something out. Saved the town—” “Nopony could have saved Hazenlight.” Her grip tightened for a moment. “Once Graymoor summoned that thing, the die was cast. And it was…” She sighed. “He thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe it was. Maybe if he hadn’t, the nightmare would’ve devoured the town.” “Then it didn’t matter. We might as well have stayed home.” Silence, again. The deck creaked beneath them as the wood boards released the day’s heat. The rigging grumbled in the breeze. Somewhere, overhead, a pegasus beat the air with her wings. The deep sound echoed in his chest, more felt than heard. A shadow of thunder. “That is true,” Rose finally said. “Or, it’s what came to pass. It’s the truth we’ll have to live with. But let me ask you a question, Vermilion.” She lifted her hoof to his chin, and gently turned his head away from the ocean to face her. “What if Canopy had believed it wouldn’t matter, back in Hollow Shades? What if you had believed that?” The blindfold was gone. Her face was unobscured, as naked as the rest of her. He forgot everything else – the ship, the ocean, his failure in Hazelnight – and stared. The scar began just below her mane, an inch to the right of her horn. It was ragged, bubbled and shining even in the faint light of the moon. It ran down her face like a canyon, crossing the empty, sunken pit where her eye had been, where now only a puckered mass of pink tissue remained. It narrowed as it cut across her cheek, more like a sword’s slash, and came to a point just above her jaw. It was worse than he remembered. Worse even than the dream back in Maplebridge. He forgot her question – forgot even that they’d been talking. The scar was his whole world; all his thoughts bent toward the terrible wound that must have caused it. More hellish, certainly, than anything he’d ever suffered. How much blood must there have been— She turned her head back to the ocean, and his thoughts fell apart. He coughed and looked away, his face burning with shame. “Sorry,” he managed to say. “I, uh... “ “It’s fine,” she answered in a soft voice. “It’s been months. I need to get used to it. It’s how I’ll look until the day I die, after all.” So, apparently they were talking about it now. He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I, uh, ever asked. What… you know.” “Right, you were out cold, weren’t you? Didn’t wake until we got to Gloom’s Edge.” The corner of her lips edged up, but her tone remained even. Detached. “It was a spider, of course. The first… no, the second night of the retreat. I was with Quicklime, walking up the wagon line to find Electrum for… for something. I don’t even remember what. Not very important, I guess. We were between the wagons when one of them jumped out and grabbed Quicklime. It was so fast I couldn’t even think, I just tried to kick it away, and… Well.” She made a vague motion with her hoof toward her face. Oh. He swallowed. “Quicklime never mentioned that.” Rose shrugged. “She didn’t know me back then. I was just some mare she was walking with. And we were all so tired, Vermilion, you can’t imagine it. We were practically dead on our hooves. And it scared her pretty badly. I doubt she remembers that I was even there.” “Have you told her? She should know you tried to save her.” “Why dredge up old memories? She knows I care about her, that I care about all of you. I don’t bear her any ill will for it. That’s what matters.” “But she ought to know—” “No.” She turned to face him again and put her hoof on his chest. “You think that would do anypony any good? For her to think this is her fault? That she’s the reason I’m disfigured?” Disfigured. It cut his heart to hear her say it. In that moment, he’d have given both his eyes if it meant she would never have to say it again. “You’re not…” His tongue refused to finish. His throat closed. “I know what I am, Vermilion.” She turned back to the rail and set her chin on her crossed forelegs. Her mane had come out of its braid days ago, and she’d never bothered to put it back. The loose strands spilled across her neck like coral fronds. A few blew across her face, and she shook them away. “Wasn’t that one of Canopy’s sayings? Accept your nature?” “But… you’re beautiful.” It took her a while to respond. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth as if to launch into a speech, then paused and slowly let it out. They sat in silence again, and he began to wonder if he’d gone too far. “I have a confession,” she finally said. “And an apology. I thought… I hoped I would never have to say it, but every time I talk to you, I realize I can’t consider myself a good pony unless I do the same thing you’re doing. Trying to do my best, no matter how much it hurts. So I have no choice, and that is your fault, a little bit, and I guess I do resent you for it. Another thing to be sorry for.” He blinked. Somewhere along there her train of thought had gotten too complex or too disordered for him to follow. “What?” She plowed on as though he hadn’t spoken. “Back in Cirrane, after the shrine, when you ran from us, I thought you were a coward. I thought we’d finally come to the real you, the real Vermilion. That all the heroics we’d seen in Hollow Shades and Maplebridge were just an act, and at last the true Vermilion was unveiled. A craven imposter, fleeing for his life, leaving us behind with the monsters. It’s stupid, I know, but when I saw you run past us into the forest, and in the hours we spent chasing you… I hated you a little bit. Even after you told us about the nightmare, I still doubted. It was fantastic, unimaginable. But cowardice… that’s easy to imagine.” His heart sank as she spoke. Memories of the night in Cirrane returned. Shame washed over him in a burning wave. She continued without stopping. “Then came the night in Hazelnight, and we all saw it. And I…” He waited, but nothing followed. Rose gazed out at the ocean, her mouth still half open. Slowly, she closed it, and she squeezed her eye shut. “I’m sorry,” she finished. “I thought you were a coward. I was wrong. I was so wrong.” He tried to swallow, but his throat felt swollen and sore. His voice came out as a whisper. “It’s okay. I thought I was a coward too.” That got a smile. It was weak, and small, but it was a smile nevertheless. “I guess we’re both fools, then.” “Maybe we are. But you’re still beautiful.” “And you’re very kind.” She stepped away from the rail, leaned toward him, and placed a soft kiss on his cheek. While he sat there, stunned, she turned and walked back to the ladder belowdecks. “I’m going to check on the others,” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t stay out here too late.” As if he could sleep after that. He stayed at the rail until the dawn began its slow conquest of the east.