Chapter Text
Ocean foam cradles the tips of Vessel’s feet. The waves are a deep blue that would invoke melancholy in the right state of mind, their rhythm calm and constant. It's a familiar sight and one he's spent countless hours staring at while mired in contemplation.
He cranes his head from the waves to the sky. Sleet dark clouds stretch overhead with such uniformity they give the impression of a wall more than a stormfront, as impenetrable as they are vast, laden with impending rain that has yet to fall.
His toes curl as the tide rolls out and sand dissolves around them, forming small eddies that tug on him in their retreat. His tabi are soaked but the cold doesn't pierce through his skin to numb him; a quirk of vesselhood, maybe. He hasn't given it much thought.
He lowers his head again and swivels it to the left. It presents him with a modest strip of beach stretching out maybe a hundred meters before abruptly ending in a massive cliffside jutting out into open water. The stone is rugged, wind sheared and cropped in spotty patches of underbrush wherever life could keep a foothold. There’s a distant telltale misting of saltspray in the air where the waves break against its furthest ridges.
To the right is more waterlogged sand pockmarked with tidepools. Beyond that is the telltale silhouette of a cave set into the looming cliffside, shrouded in muzzy shadow. Uninviting, to say the least, but still promising.
You return to me again. Sleep’s voice bubbles from the depths of his mind softly as if floating up from a dream.
While hearing it sparks something fond within Vessel, he finds that sensation a gentle one rather than all consuming, like meeting an old friend after years apart. He welcomes this but hasn't missed it the way he used to.
“You make it sound like I did this." The words leave his mouth tilting towards a question more than rebuttal, as he's still deeply confused. “Where am I?"
A cove.
“I can see that.”
There’s a vague pressure winding between his ribs – not threatening, merely a reminder. It’s a weight he knows well in its atmospheric intensity but he's able to bear it, to hold it inside without breaking. He’s grown beyond it in ways no god can take from him.
There is something else.
Vessel turns from the cave. Behind him is more sand with narrow depressions carving their way further up the beach, webbed with branching veins of saltwater. Beyond them he can just make out a narrow path set into the cliffs that leads up toward a plateau out of view.
Something tells him this isn't what Sleep meant.
It feels like a lifetime ago since he’d scraped every facet of himself raw trying to interpret its intentions. He’d bled himself dry time and time again for a drop of divine benediction, tossed himself wholly into every offering made, prayer after prayer spent kneeling or prostrating until every part of him ached. Now he plants his feet in the sand, head tilting upward. Searching without pleading.
“Okay,” he says with mindful, compassionate patience. “What is it?”
Part of learning to bear the weight is accepting most answers will come as abstractions if they come at all. The trick is being able to settle with it and not chase after the silence.
He waits with his back to the ocean and takes that opportunity to mull over where and when he was before this; wherever here is, he is alone with his god, and he wasn't before.
There’s a flash of recollection over a trip to the grocer’s. II was joking about something in a way so deadpan it had made III laugh, and IV had ducked his head to stifle a snort. Nothing had made him more anxious than usual aside from the regular parade of loud noises and annoying lights.
He’d been fine – more importantly, he'd been content. What could have possibly brought him back here unplanned, when there was so much keeping him grounded?
I have watched you discover the boundaries of yourself, Sleep finally says, edges expanded with every question answered. I watched and listened yet I did not interrupt.
Its tone is flat as always. Whether this is further contemplation or something else entirely is unclear.
I have considered my own edges, it presses on, slow and even, such pondering I have not done in a long time, or perhaps this is the first.
“Can gods even have edges?" Vessel is of course enticed by this tidbit of philosophical pondering, taking a few steps that skirt along the waves. “I thought you were in everything."
In every living thing. There’s another long pause. Vessel continues walking at an unhurried pace. This you already know.
Were there any discernible emotion to that statement, Vessel would hazard to interpret it as exasperated.
“You’ve had a lot of time to think about all of this," Vessel says in turn, carefully. “I think that's a good thing."
Is it? A stray piece of seaweed catches on the outer edge of Vessel’s tabi. He pries it free with a small kick.
“Yeah." Vessel affirms it with a nod of his head, watching the seaweed drift aimlessly in the shallows. When the silence continues, he realizes Sleep might not respond unprompted, and so adds, “did anything stand out to you while thinking about all of this?"
No. The wind is picking up, breeze catching along his back and gently buffeting his cloak. It is more what does not stand out to me. An absence.
Vessel pauses mid step, tilting his head as if catching a new sound on the wind. “An absence of what?"
I do not know.
The waves shift more forcefully, now, though it’s so slight that Vessel almost misses it.
I had never thought to ask it before. I am unsure of how long this absence has been here or if it always has.
“But you notice now.” A tinge of worry seeps into Vessel’s tone despite himself. It’s only a heartbeat later that his shoulders straighten in sudden epiphany. “Did you…did you bring me here because you needed help?”
Saying it aloud sparks an old fear that this is the wrong question to ask, that he’ll be ejected without warning for reasons he’ll never understand — but then the fear shifts focus. He didn’t ask to be here. He doesn’t need to be here, scrabbling for attention or answers. All the answers he could ever want are waiting for him in the real.
No. What concerns him more is that Sleep seems troubled, and he’s never associated that term with it before. The concept alone is an alien one and it leaves him briefly frozen, lips thinning into a long, thoughtful line.
The silence carries on again. He’s not abruptly ejected by the flash of ancient baleen or tooth nor scrutinized by three sets of disembodied eyes from a foggy veil. The wind continues to blow and the waves continue to roll.
I need nothing. The question is merely here and I ponder it.
“Okay,” Vessel sighs, “allow me to rephrase: do you want my help? Is that why I’m here?”
Yes.
Such a direct answer would’ve sent a thrilling tremor of spiritual elation through him not long ago but any potential awe is muted by a growing, unrelenting bafflement. Whatever’s going on, Sleep sought him out willingly. It wants his help – and for all the heartache it caused, for every trial and tribulation met with unfulfilled silence, he won’t abandon it. That’s simply not who he is.
“Alright." His lips even out again as he turns back to the sea. “What do you need me to do?"
You are finite, a single drop in an endless ocean. Your eyes can turn to corners of me that I have forgotten in the shifting sands of time.
Vessel hums in acknowledgement, looking down at his tabi. Foam fizzles and pops around his toes as he mulls over that statement.
There is something here that eludes me.
“I'm not sure I see anything, either." Vessel raises his head again, giving everything another cursory sweep. The cave is the most obvious place to start so that's where he’ll go.
As he draws near, the cave’s mouth solidifies from a vague shape into a jagged arc. Shale carved by countless millennium of erosion has calcified with stalactites that dangle down like fossilized rope.
Describe to me what you think of as absence.
“A hole.” Vessel’s gaze flicks up to the overhang that vaguely resembles the fangs of some prehistoric, pelagic beast. “Or a void. Like an emptiness where something always used to be.”
(A missing limb.)
You see emptiness as vast and all encompassing. This is not that.
“More like a blip, then?”
A harmony missing notes.
Vessel stands at the cave’s threshold, listening with intent. There’s the low, monotone moan of wind as it passes through the arc, and a steady drip-drip-drip of droplets landing on rocky floors.
“Anything else you can give me to narrow this down?” Vessel asks.
The breeze kicks up for a moment and flicks across his hood as if to chastise him.
No.
Right, then.
Vessel peers further. The stone deeper within is particularly weathered, pitted with barnacles and discolored from countless centuries of salt deposits. Stalactites the height of men loom as silhouettes in the encroaching dark.
If he thought it resembled the broken jaws of a shark before, the comparison is all too apt now.
(Please, god, let there be no soul-reshaping allegories waiting within. He’s had enough for several lifetimes.)
The first few steps of his venture are uneventful save for cold humidity that billows into his face. A few steps more and the light from outside starts to wane, unable to breach the cave’s secluded gullet.
He catches himself before that metaphor can run away from him – the cave is creepy enough, after all, he doesn't need to make this harder on himself than it absolutely has to be.
His steps produce a weak echo that bounces between the muffled roar of the ocean and the constant dripping of water. It’s not long until the way forward pitches into complete blackness.
He doesn't question how he can discern the path through the mesh of his hood. Better to simply add that one to the list of things that no longer bother him and continue on his way.
Time doesn’t exist here but he knows he’s been walking for a while. The walls remain firmly in his periphery, neither narrowing nor widening out, the way forward linear if occasionally winding. Sleep has gone quiet.
Something tells him that even if he turned around now, he’d never reach the cove again, and he has zero interest in testing that theory out.
So onward he marches. The wind hushed a way back and has now died down completely, leaving only the dripping and rubbery creak of soles and his own soft, nervous breathing. Striated pillars rise to the ceiling, tiered like cakes. Even the algae has disappeared.
Please, he thinks, give me something. Help me help you.
It’s not a prayer. Sleep couldn’t answer it even if it was.
Something else does, however. At first he mistakes it for water droplets but the cadence shifts after a minute, giving way to an underlying current that’s too continual to be the sound of condensation. A rise and fall reminiscent of tides, or…
Vessel freezes, breath catching in his throat.
Or voices.
The sound diverges. Multiple pitches twine around each other but follow the same rhythm, synced yet distinct.
Vessel forces himself to keep moving, following the sound as his mind races with countless questions.
The voices are woven together in the impression of some sort of hymnal. It’s harmonic but pings a deep unease within him for reasons he can't describe – and can't waste time ruminating on if he’s ever going to get out of this bloody cave.
But no matter how far he walks, the hymn is always the same, distant and ever so faintly distorted by its own echo. It’s beginning to stir genuine panic in him more than the prospect of danger.
The further he goes the stronger the sound gets in clarity but not volume. His own breathing has stilled; there’s a tenuous quality to it, and he’s worried any extra noise will somehow dispel the song, making it evaporate into the aether before he can discover its source. His fear is realized when the tunnel abruptly ends and the song does along with it, leaving his head spinning as he peers past the threshold.
The adjoining chamber is sizable. Humidity slickens every surface, glistening off pebbled stone and weathered ridges and bizarre, bulbous formations. Alien planets could only hope to look so bizarre.
His gaze is drawn to the lake occupying most of it. There are a few oblong stalagmites near its edge but the surface itself is placid, serving as a perfect mirror.
Wait.
Vessel’s attention locks on a portion where that mirror is interrupted. There’s a triangular section dug out near its center, as if someone cleaved the water in two and wedged it apart. Not a drop of water spills over the sides.
“Missing notes," he mutters aloud. Even a murmur carries in this chamber and for a second he tenses, hearing his own voice echo weakly around him.
The song is gone. Sleep is still silent. Whatever or whoever walked here before him fled a long time ago.
He slowly approaches the hole. Closer inspection reveals a staircase carved directly out of the underlying lakebed, the stone rough and unpolished but still flat enough to descend without issue.
Did Sleep do this, or something else?
Only one way to find out, he thinks, and begins his journey down.
Mere seconds pass and already the air has shifted, muffling the constant drip of cavewater above. A hint of brackish mustiness creeps into the back of his throat.
One long, uneasy breath is forced out through his nose. A few more steps. The darkness waiting below is a murky veil, its edges shifting the way mist does just before sunlight pierces it.
With another quiet, bracing breath, he descends further and submerges himself in it.
I remember.
Sleep’s voice rumbles through his head like distant thunder.
I remember this place.
“—es?"
Do you hear it?
The rumbling morphs into something sweeter yet more mournful. A dirge.
They sang it for me under starlit skies and moonless nights.
Whalesong surrounds him. It seizes his chest with profound grief and awe in equal measure.
They were joined by those who took refuge in cloistered halls of bone and nacre.
“—es!?"
He wants so badly to ask what is this but he can't seem to open his mouth and form the words.
I do not give back what I take and yet their harmony has gone silent. This is not possible.
The whalesong is a duet with no partner. All that's left of its missing half is an echo in a cave, hollow and fading the more you try to reach for it.
“–please, Ves—"
Where have they gone, that I cannot feel them?
The grief is too much for him to bear it pierces to the core of him and steals away any sense of up or down he is lost in the emptiness and aching for a reason but the pain won’t stop the wound won’t close where are you where are you where are you please you must let go of this before it consumes you return to daylight and solidity I did not know it would do this to you you must let go
Vessel's consciousness snaps like a rubber band. He lets go.