The next wave heaved harder, shaking the raft and jostling the two bodies on the deck. Arn stirred—he had seen what lie ahead and had decided to close his eyes to it, as long as he could. Shar lay next to him, stuck to a pool of dried blood. If they ever found land out here, respite from the Deep, Arn would give his friend the proper burial rites. Arn was no embalmer, but how hard was it to bury and consecrate a heart?
The next wave shook Arn hard, and sent the smaller of the their two oars skidding. He grabbed it, pinned it firmly under his knee, and looked up at the nightmare on the horizon.
Under a slate grey sky, a black contortion of slanted clouds descended, like a hand reaching down from the heights. From the hand poured water and wind and shadow, blocking out the horizon and driving the depths towards Arn in furious tides of saltwater. The storm reached toward him, a torrent in the sky that rushed to end him.
The raft lurched uphill again, and then drove downward, nearly rolling Arn off. The larger oar was gone, and Shar’s legs twitched, swished by the spray. Arn’s pack was fastened around his arms, resting against his chest. His wiry arms and legs groaned at his poor attempts to stabilize himself. He pulled out his knife and began chipping handholds into the sides of his raft. During his countless days on the Deep, he had never seen a storm this severe.
The dreamworld had continued to haunt him with its very worst uncanniness, but now his raft truly was sailing on angles, threatening to send him down into the Deep. The wind blasted stingy pellets of chilled salt against Arn’s scrawny shoulders. The heaving swells of water threatened to slay Arn’s shrivelled stomach.
And then, in a manner of moments, the ashen sky was blocked from view; like the shrieking mouth of a predator, the storm swallowed the raft.
Arn’s fingers strained and stretched the wood as the wind tore at him. He grunted and moaned as his flabby skin was stretched and his hair was pulled back. He was kneeling on his raft, to pin the oar beneath and remain close to his lifeline, these bending branches of wood he had burrowed his hands beneath. Then Shar’s body wrenched free of its red adhesive. The corpse was gone in an instant, swallowed by ravenous ocean.
A wordless cry was rent from Arn’s tortured frame. Blankets of rainwater felt like they were bruising his shoulders. “You cannot have me!” he shouted. He couldn’t even hear his own words, as the sky bellowed at him a thunderous curse. Let go! it boomed.
The raft turned sideways and plummeted down a cliff in the water. Arn slammed against the deck when their freefall was ended upon a rock-hard surface. The Deep had it with all its might, but Arn would not let his fingers slide out. It would be so easy… he thought. The raft and he climbed the next tidal wave. It would just be a release of his grip, just a touch, and he would be devoured by the typhoon in an instant. At the top of the rise, Arn looked skyward, squinting through the torrential downpour for some sign in the heavens. And he glimpsed it there—a bird with a wingspan of a hundred feet or more. It blocked out the sun, just like in his dream. It was the storm, and the Deep was becoming an angled decline, and the raft slid down the next precipice.
A clash of thunder nearly covered up the rumble that the raft made when it slammed against the surface of the churning saltwater. The wood trembled as hard as Arn’s bones, and three branches ripped free from the edge of the raft.
Another wave began to lift him. Arn rose up five feet, then ten, then fifteen. He panted for breath through his nose holes; mucous and rainwater bubbled over his mouth as he saw the next impact coming. The watercraft slammed down again and a dozen more branches sundered. Each popped, like joints dislocated, and Arn saw it all starting to come undone. He shifted his weight to use his knees to clench a few key beams together—the oar was slashed away, instantly, welting Arn’s toes as it went.
And then the third fall came. The Deep punched a foamy fist through Arn’s ruptured lifeline. He clung to the largest beam he could. He was sucked down into the Deep, fully submerged, entombed. Shar was down here, and the metal sword too, and, in all likelihood, the spirit of Loklar, drowned in a cave, waiting for his turn.
Arn’s buoyant log brought him bobbing up to the surface again. He bubbled out of the Deep’s clench, and back into the word of bellowing thunder and ceaseless rain.
For an hour, or a month, or for ten years, Arn clenched that log, and was traded between the quiet, hollow world under the surface and the tormented, warring world above. A voice in his head was telling him that he just had to hang on a little longer. The voice told him about courage and about madness and about the things that would come. A tranquil sea after the storm. His log a scar drifting on the open. His victory a wound to the Deep.
Then, the log he clung to hit something. It thudded, stopping sickly, before the slamming waves spun it. Arn found himself rolling, buffeted between the storm and—sand? The thunder had let up, but the gale was still trying to drown him with rainwater and dips below the saltwater surface. Arn looked up, when the log rolled the right way. There was a shape, illuminated black and grey by the scattered light, a lump of land, in the Deep. There were trees, too, maybe five of them…
Then a wave yanked him backward at just the right angle that he went through it’s crest and away from the island.
The storm was fading toward the other horizon now, and the waves were weakening. A last rumble of thunder made Arn ground his teeth. As the sickening angles tilted the last few times, he would have emptied his stomach. He had nothing inside him to empty. He uncoiled his legs from the branch that had pulled him through the storm. Exhausted, he slumped his head on top of the drenched wood and just lay there. He floated on the Deep as small waves remembered the carnage wrought upon them moments earlier. Curtains of rain still fell, but this was the aftermath.
He forced his eyes to open, lest he fall asleep and slip down to his death without realizing it, and he saw the island again. It was a dozen miles away, and was no more than a beach of sand and dirt with a tiny copse of straight, nearly branchless trees upon it.
“Is this a damned joke?” Arn gasped, his voice raw and his head trembling. He kicked his legs and began splashing toward the shore. Every move hurt—not a dull ache, but a seizing, bracing pain. He kicked again and grunted. And then again.
The setting sun finally made an appearance beside the storm and near the horizon. It’s brief orange glow lasted no more than five minutes, and then Arn was kicking through the subdued blue of twilight on the edge of unconsciousness.