A Dream of Ikuras Craft

[Smaw 2368]

A Dream of Ikuras Craft

 

 

 

With the smell of salt did he awaken, his clothes soaked in days old perspiration.

 

Gubbin threw his sheets aside as he rose from his bed, pulling his damp hair back and out of his face. As he stood the same scent as before pervaded him; he could smell and taste salt, and feel it on his skin. By some strange inclination he was drawn to the nearby shore. Perhaps it was a sign, that the coastal air would offer some respite from the illness that had shaken his core of recent days.

 

He pulled off his shoes and sunk his feet into the sand, the swirling hues of red and orange on the horizon lulling him from his discomfort. In those moments his senses dulled as his body guided a mind that could no longer think but could only observe. He saw the sun set upon the waters afar, an attraction that pulled Gubbin forward and into the sea.

 

It was warm and light and Gubbin felt no need to exert any force as he swam toward the horizon. For what felt like hours his body carried him through the waters as he fixated on the eventide. At some point in his journey he stopped, his body floating in the endless expanse around him.

 

Suddenly the star before him sank below the ocean and colour departed. As quickly as the world around him had fallen to darkness, his senses began to return.

 

He could feel the cold waters on his skin and the tension in his muscles as he worked to keep himself afloat. He felt his heart awaken from it's slumber, his eyes darting for anything at all to focus on. Before long the moon rose and in its presence offered not solace but despair. Gubbin recognised in the dull light the endless waters to his left and to his right and far below. The waters themselves did not crash and dance as usual, but were smooth and still.

 

A fright and anticipation rattled his nerves as his mind began to race. He conjured images of what may lurk below in the darkness, a sense that at any moment he could be pulled beneath. Yet little happened outside of his own internal chattering and churning. The ocean was so deathly silent that Gubbin could hear nout but his own beating heart.

 

At last something occurred before him, albeit confusing, and unbeknownst to him some phenomenon not yet recorded. The waters began to rise slowly at first, individual drops reaching for the sky, followed by marine life of all shape and size. It was not long before the sea level itself began to rise, though Gubbin himself did not follow suit. He could move his body, yet could not swim up to match the waters.

 

The cold sea soon enveloped Gubbin as he felt it rush past him, and in those moments he began to drown. He felt the desperate need to breathe tug at him as the waters continued to swathe over him. For many hours did they wash over Gubbin and for many hours did he suffer an endless torture between life and death.

 

All of a sudden he felt his legs swing free, and turned his body in a horrible disorientation. His head broke the surface of the water that was below him as he gasped to breathe. As life swelled once more within him, he saw before him the endless ocean floor without its water, where the sun that had escaped him before was present and blinding white. It was not long before whichever force had held his body in place released him, and he crashed down into the open expanse.

 

A fall that would kill an ordinary man had offered no injury to Gubbin as he sunk into the sands around him. As he rose to his feet he saw abound a graveyard of ships and wrecks, and noted a silence so pervasive that his brain offered a ringing in his ears to abate its terrible overwhelm. The blinding environment offered a stark contrast to the black ocean that hung above him in place of the sky, where fish broke the surface only to fall back in. The sands at his feet seared at his flesh, his tongue and eyes drying as he looked desperately around him for some semblance of normality in this Desert beneath the sea.

 

Yet nestled in the wrecks around him he saw only writhing organisms of flesh and nerve so confusing that he had little response aside from vomiting and shaking in a terrible cycle. Some were purely bundles of nerves that dragged themselves around, where others were horrid, blistering mounds of flesh with arms and legs so numerous they could skitter along the sands at incredible speed. 

 

Before Gubbin could make sense of what was happening, the ocean above descended onto the landscape. He felt only weight and pain and a deep cold before his head broke through the water and he was once again on the oceans surface.

 

The moon revealed once more the endless expanse, which slowly filled with the writhing nerves from below that seemed to float now like nightmarish jellyfish. They soon were so numerous that it was difficult to see the water they were wading in; so numerous that before long the reaching tendrils of nerves enveloped Gubbin as he was torn and made one with them.

Edited July 28, 2021 by Smaw