Work Text:
There is a well.
You’ve passed it every day. You must have. Every day, on your way to Veilgarden for a drink to forget the Starving Artist, or back home from a fighting ring, dripping with blood and rostygold. Every day, whether you’re off to the University for your research or to Mahogany Hall to prepare slight of hand for the show. Every day, surrounded by Revolutionaries, or Rubbery Men, chattering incomprehensibly all the same. Every day.
There is a well.
Was it always there? It must have been. Wells do not spring up overnight.
Had you not noticed it until now?
How?
No matter. No matter. The well is there now. You sit in the chair at your window. The crumpled, greasy paper bag from the Rubbery Lumps you bought today at Mrs. Plenty’s carnival is crackling in the hearth, along with several reams of discarded notes from your most recent composition. Have to have heat somehow, down here. A small green plant has poked its way up from the floorboards and glows emerald in the firelight. You notice none of it. Out the window, there. There you can see the well. A cat darker than the Unterzee is sitting on the edge and begins to yowl. After what seems like an eternity, or no time at all, it jumps lightly to the ground and saunters away. And the well is still there. You fall asleep sitting at the window.
That night, the dreams begin.
At first it seems to be one of the ones you’ve grown accustomed to. Wrong word. One of the ones you’ve grown to tolerate. Still wrong. One of the ones you expect. Though expecting them doesn’t make them seem any less real. Expecting them doesn’t mean you don’t wake up drenched in sweat when your reflection controls your limbs or your skin burns and burns and you float apart like the charred embers of music notes.
No, this dream starts like many of the others. On a boat. On a boat heading…where? You were never quite sure. Heavy sacks are piled around and take up far too much room on deck. Burlap rises and falls gently, not the way a cork might bob on the Stolen River, but the way blankets do when someone lies beneath them fast asleep. Like breathing. Like bodies. There are no lifeboats. There never are.
A dirigible hovers above, far in the distance, wiping away the stars. You would rather be on board the airship. Rather be rocked by the gentle hum of the engine over the hushing sound all around you. You stomach growls, audible above the water and the whispers, saying NORTH…is that it? Is that what they have been saying? Suddenly you understand them. Yes. NORTH. You are heading NORTH. It is where you’ve been heading all along.
You lean over the edge of the boat, to see what has once been sand, and once a desert flooded with water somehow, and where there once were bright and twinkling stars reflected all around you to the horizon. But now the water is matte, black and oily, and perfectly flat all around. The zailors down at Wolfstack never trusted water like that. It feels wrong. They’re right. It feels wrong.
Something enormous moves deep below, something that you cannot see clearly, and something that on second thought you do not want to see at all. Skulls float just under the surface of the water, green and out-of-focus. They should not be floating. They should sink. Why don’t they sink? Why do you feel like it’s your fault they’re there?
And suddenly NORTH is not only pulling you, but you dread it. You absolutely must not go there. And yet you can never turn around. It is a hook through your stomach pulling you, tearing at your insides, and you must walk forward or there will be nothing left. The invisible something pulls you over the boat’s rails and you tumble into the water below. There is no splash.
All at once you know what awaits those who go NORTH. You want to scream and scramble for the surface but you open your mouth and nothing comes out except a perfect silver bubble suspended in front of you for a half-second, and in that time you can see a snatch of your reflection. Just your eyes. Just your eyes, wide and crazed and staring right back at you and full of hunger, and then the bubble rises up and away towards the surface you cannot reach. You try again but the water is cotton over your parted lips and you cannot breathe and something has grabbed hold of your feet and pulls you down, down, and you know that you cannot count on death to release you.
You wake up screaming. You are still in your chair and your stomach growls louder than your voice and you are still screaming when you look out the window you fell asleep at.
There is a well.
That was the first time. Every night after that one, you lie abed and listen to the churning in your abdomen that accompanies the stabbing pain that never abates, and lick your lips until they chap to bleeding. You cannot remember ever being full. When you finally sleep, it is only to visit terrors of skyglass sacrifices bled dry and a cat that flays the flesh from your bones and rattling chains that chill you straight to the spine. Your mouth tastes of sour beer when you wake up shrieking, until finally one midnight you awaken to a tall man with bright brass buttons at your bedside. He gives a friendly nod and places an elegant key on your nightstand.
“On the house, of course” he says, and touches not enough fingertips to his stovepipe hat as he turns for the door. “You’ll be there soon enough I warrant.”
“Oh, and may I request one thing of you,” he adds over his shoulder as he lingers at the door. “Forget about The Name.” With the soft click of the latch closing he is gone.
Your nights are dreamless when you finally check out of the Royal Bethlehem, but the moment you pass the well on your walk home, your stomach growls strong enough to shatter bones. And it all comes back to you like you never left. You charter a ship to Mutton Island the very next day.
There is a Well.
You will go NORTH.
And you will find the Name.