Arn glided across an endless water. He peered outward from his raft at the familiar landscape—the water was a pale ichor, covered in hand-spans of black smoke and the eerie hum of the spirits beneath. A bird with monstrous wings glided over his head, never flapping or croaking a single utterance. Despite its uncanny silence, Arn was thankful for its presence; its wings blocked out the enormous blood-red sun.
In a moment of epiphany, disrupting the flow of time, Arn realized this was the dreamworld. He had been gone from it for so long.
Ahead, a hundred miles or five, the sickly Deep began to slope downward. Arn held to the raft, thinking it would slide him off. He didn’t feel the pull though, and remained seated on the raft, ever-perpendicular to the slant of the surface he sailed upon. As he continued on this new angle, downward, he noticed the colossal, white-winged fowl did not follow him. It continued straight on the level it had, and the searing sun went with it.
Arn and his raft sailed downward—and then the Deep slanted again. He must have been going directly down now, if down was a thing at all, in this place. Yet still, Arn’s legs were crossed beneath him and his mass did not sway from its seat on the raft. To him, down was now forward.
“We can’t both do this,” a voice said. It had come from the man seated next to Arn who had not been there a moment earlier. His thick beard was the same as the stern man that had frequently visited Arn’s dreams, to call him onward, ever onward. But now, the thick hair on the man’s distinct jawline hid a wiry neck and gaps behind his collarbone. His arms and legs were wiry, malnourished, and they shook. “Only one of us can go on from here.”
Arn opened his mouth. He wanted to tell the man not to leave him, not now as he was going into the Deep. Of course, to Arn, the stretch of lurid, steaming water, was still a surface he had not breached. The sky was still above him, without a sun, and he had only gone onto a different facet of the ceaseless expanse.
He could speak no words. The other man coughed, and blood spluttered down his chin, matting in his beard.
Arn started awake, on the real raft, surrounded by the real, bright blue water of an unoccupied domain.
A wet gagging wiggled into the salty, humid air and Arn sat up swiftly. Dizziness twisted his vision from the swift movement, but he knew what he saw was real: Shar, clinging to the edge of the raft, with the point of a blade jutting out the back of his neck.
“No,” Arn gasped, his bone-dry throat clinching. They were still alone in the Deep. He slid across the bump deck of the raft and grabbed Shar by the shoulders. The man had put Arn’s sword through his throat, using the hollow cleft in the surface of the raft to hold the weapon steady. Blood had covered the blade as Shar drowned in the stuff. Arn pulled him off the blade. “No, no!”
The weapon went with Shar, as the man rolled onto his back, so Arn grabbed its smeared length to pull it free. The red was sticky, but not enough—the blade slid from his hand and clattered on the wooden floor once, twice, and then plunked into the water. Arn’s hand followed it, but plunged into the warm liquid to grasp only water. The blood smudged on his skin began to trail off, tainting the bright turquoise surface with tendrils of red.
Arn yanked himself back to Shar’s side. The man was looking skyward, his eyes twitching. Arn pressed his hands over the hole in Shar’s throat, feeling the hot blood welling against it. “Why, Shar?” he asked. When Shar tried to croak a wheeze a reply, Arn said, “No,” and kept trying to hold the man’s life in there.
Shar’s eyes began to glaze over, while Arn pressed close against him. The red pool beneath the cripple had filled the dip in the deck. “We should have both made it,” Arn said, trying to hold it together. Shar was gone, now. Just a body lying beside him. That didn’t stop him talking. “I needed you still,” he said. “I didn’t know it before. I needed to not be alone.”
Steam was rising off the water, dark and sinister. That damned sword had been a curse, he realized, and the Deep had reclaimed it. Arn finally let go of the dead man, and sat down where he had before. The surface of the eerie wilderness had indeed slanted, but Arn remained where he had always been, alone.