our dead drink the sea
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Seawater lapped at Senna’s hooves as he walked along the strip of worn beach clinging like bits of flesh to the Praistigia Cliffs’ jagged skeleton. Silvery half-moons marked the uneven path he left in the sand, hoofprints filled in by briny tide.
A waning moon hung low and drowsy in the haze of Terrastellan twilight.
There’s no one here, came Nestor’s sharp voice, cutting through whatever thought he’d been trying to form. The falcon was little more than a black speck against a swirl of powdery clouds. Always ahead. Always watching.
Few visit the cliffs. Even fewer to the location we are trying to reach, he reminded her, as he tugged his hood further over his eyes to shield from the frigid spray of a crashing wave. Her unease, though customary, was not unfounded. Even now—briny wind in his mane, sea salt in his eyes—doubt clung like cobwebs in the shadowy corners of Senna's mind.
The symbol carved into the granite grave marker had been cryptic, to say the least. The message, even more so. Senna’s candle had burned well into the early hours of dawn as he’d puzzled over his findings, the floor of his lodgings sullied now by a path of gravedirt.
A path marking the route he’d paced through the small room, books with cracked leather spines suspended midair as he’d gone from one to the next, then back to the first. A quill scribbling in a journal upon his desk. Snatches of sleep, the soft rustling of Nestor’s feathers as she’d dozed. The passing of a day, gone in less than a blink.
The wave and the chain and the shackle. It hadn’t come to him until he’d decided to spread a map of Novus out atop his bedsheets. Smoothing out the corners, he’d found his gaze snagging upon a curious land formation between the territories of Dusk and Night. Easy to miss, strange to behold.
A circular chain of islands, seeming to rise straight from the depths of the sea.
The Ager—the Halcyon’s old headquarters—had been situated on an island, and even that fact had proved tricky to confirm. Information about the Halcyon unit ever since the disappearance of Prudence half a century ago was frustratingly difficult to procure. He’d had to resort to tracking down a series of decades-old manuscripts from the collection of a swaybacked, senile librarian who hadn’t been senile enough to forget how to barter. (And barter fiercely. His silk traveling purse had shed half its weight overnight.)
Yet suppose the Halcyon’s preference for locating things on islands held. What, then, was the island chain’s connection to the accompanying riddle?
Juliet and morning. If the first line was indeed referring to the tale he knew of, then it could’ve referred to two scenes: Juliet’s awakening the morning after she drank the poison that mimicked death, only to find Romeo dead besides her (he’d always thought the tale ridiculous)—or the balcony scene, where Juliet insisted the song of a lark as that of a nightingale’s to keep her dear lover from departing.
And… lovers leaping from wards? Wards of a castle, or a watchtower upon treacherous cliffs? Lovers leaping together into death, like the tragic star-crossed lovers of Verona? Black scrawls of ink, crosses and circles and arrows, had turned the pages of his journal into a forest of intangible lines.
The writer of the riddle was vexingly vague. Only the last line had suggested anything concrete. Just as it divides sea and city. What separated the sea from the city of Terrastella were the Praistigia Cliffs.
The strange island chain was located off of the cliffs—and that, such scant support, had been the tenuous connection Senna seized upon. Why he stood here now, upon the sand of a misty shore, fervor burning like an eternal flame in his eyes.
Do you doubt yourself? I am not accustomed to feeling it from you.
“Decades Prudence has slept, Nestor” he whispered to the listening waves, pausing to stare into the red face of the setting sun. “Whoever hid her, hid her well.”
@redandblack | "senna" nestor | notes: open to anyone!
