Inspired by Umbrella Beach, Fireflies, On the Wing and If My Heart Was a House. Dreamy and relatively strange. Like the songs mentioned.

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Compass

In sleep I am lost. In waking I forget.

In interim, I feel I...I remember.

Flashes of light, falling glass, rainbows and dying lamp wicks. Where was I then? Where am I now?

Why do I long for more, when I know I have everything in the world?

Something's missing. Something I lost long, long ago. Something I fear I'll never recover...

N: Nowhere

How did I get here? I'm lying half-asleep tangled in my bedcovers, arms flung wide. Sleep sits on my eyelids still, but it begins to melt in the sunset. Sweat dampens my forehead and my back is warm, so I rise carefully.

How long have I been sleeping? Two hours, perhaps?

Two days? Two lifetimes? What happened then?

Lazily I turn to the window through which no breeze blows. Outside, the sky is vast far beyond—and here I am, imprisoned between marble walls and gilded bedposts, thousands of miles from the sea.

I am far; I am nowhere. Sometimes, I feel even the aroma of scones and tea never really did anchor me down.

In the evening air, the silken sheets are almost suffocating—I am swimming in gold. I draw them away to breathe, stretching; a gleam of sunlight catches the seashell on my shelf. The curious item rests content in its place. It is glassy pale, and beautiful—but it bears wounds of the ocean, winds and storms I've barely read about. I don't know how it came to be here, a treasure of the blue ocean in this dry, golden land.

But I remember something else. On the day I found it, I also lost my paper pinwheel. Who took it from me?

The world outside the window is a sea of gold wheat stalks. They sway in brassy waves, broken occasionally by a wild hewn mill and its lazily pirouetting water wheel. The stream wanders past the dormice and their meagre grain harvests—towards a vast unknown place far away where all the other rivers, just like itself, converge.

A place with white wings, and chiming harbour bells, and endless crescents of starlit sand.

Where do you go, little river?

I've never seen the ocean before. I know it better than the light outside.

But what's this familiarity? It's as if, some time in a forgotten past, I once felt her salty breeze against my lips...

.

A delightful surprise! There is a young woman in my dining hall downstairs this morning. She is smiling serenely to herself among our vast arching windows and pillars, quite at home yet not-quite at home. As if my walls weren't made to hold her. Her eyes are captured in the polished tabletop as she sips her tea, gazing through the glass at the gilded fields beyond.

She is unfathomable, I cannot explain it.

I pull the chair and I join her at breakfast; as my gaze crosses her profile, a fleeting remembrance stirs—then is allayed. In the silence of rustling water and stalks, she glances from the gardens outside, a sigh leaving her. "So far from where we're meant to be. Don't you ever dream of escape? Don't you tire of this?"

I glance back at her, oddly. "Have we…met before?" I ask, instead, straightening my waistcoat.

The young woman takes another delicate sip, then raises her face, brushing an auburn lock away. And I feel my heartbeat fall out of rhythm, for her eyes are ocean-blue.

"Somehow," she replies, smiling softly, like the warm sun on bays in summer. The morning light glows in her eyes. "You make me think of something—some time, long ago. You remind me of the sky…"

She drinks her tea without the milk; how strange.

"The sky?"

Her fingers slip to her pocket, and rising, leaning across the tabletop, she places an old ticket in my hand.

"Yes," she answers, giggling as she brushes my fingers. "I don't understand it either."

"Come, Cielo. The ship's about to leave."

Suddenly the bells are all around me, awakening me from my sleep in the cold shallows. They sound like the start of the world. A ship has pulled into the estuary, and the call of her horn is foggy in the dew, the melodic chant of its engine. Where, where is this? Dizzy, my lungs flooded with the ocean wind, and I lift my feet from the rippling river delta and ascend the cantilevering gangplank to board. She's at the deck, calling for me. Is she pretty? I cannot see clear enough, yet I think she is.

"But where—how—?"

The horn sings again as I stumble on board, and my sailor friend calls again. "It's okay!" she cries out, almost passionate, almost astounded, a lovely smile in her face. All around us, the waves are shimmering blue and deep, and the hull lolls in the tide. "It'll be fun. I promise! You'll love it, Cielo!"

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E: Everywhere

How the music moves me, from bays and cliffs and markets on coasts! I do not know just when I began to call this ship my home; it sort of snuck up on me, into me, twining itself with my breath. The days trickle past, a fortnight at a time, fading and rising like melted snow in the valleys. All the while the music is playing, scored in the edges of coastlines we verge on our voyage—beaches and bluffs, murky swamps where crabs scuttle through living mud.

We are far in the blue, borne by wind, guided only by the compass in my palm. The needle swirls, and I watch as if it were drawing us the entire world with the sweep of its point. But she tells me we have no use of maps: the world is our map, and the waves teach us the routes, and we follow seagulls who show us where their nests are, up the towering cliffs.

Till a few days ago I insisted on cooping myself in the antechamber, so afraid was I to see the churning sea. I ate my fish-and-gruel breakfasts grudgingly in a corner of a cabin floor, scraping my ankles against planks. I slurp up seaweed as if it would cure me. She keeps the gruel in a storeroom downstairs; she caught the fish herself. I complained about the blandness and the bones, and she grinned from the door, and promised spice next time.

But on the twenty-first morning she opened the door and called a blessing—"Happy New Year"—and by the laughter upon her lips, I found myself rising to go outside.

"Where are we going, Marin?" I question.

She laughs in reply. "I don't know! Everywhere!"

.

It's amazing, and I really am an idiot, and I really should have listened to the beautiful sailor earlier. Barnacles crust the sea-washed hull, and I smell the waves; the deckchair wood is so rough and real! The vessel dances with the tides, and in the empty antechamber, the chandelier is swinging. We pass turning white windmills on the coast, blades swooping through sky, grass carpets unrolling beneath them as if they were kings.

It isn't all good; it is all so harrowing, too. Everyday, I trip through the seashell carpet and stumble out the other door, only to heave my lunch into the ocean that gave it to me. "I'm sorry," I apologise into the waves every time, watching as the last of my meal descends from spinning sight. She often laughs because I'm so easily seasick, patting my shoulder and offering me some soft fruit-scented wine.

"Well, it's not my fault! I've never been on a ship before!"

"You'll get used to it, Cielo. Then you'll love it too!"

Sigh.

I love the way the sun always knows where it's supposed to go. I align my compass everyday at dawn, and we're both fascinated to find it always emerges from the horizon at the edge of the E.

The markets bustle grandly in the harbours. On Sundays, we wave to yachts and tugboats as we pull towards the quay, and their passengers wave back bewildered. We become friends for seconds, before we forget we ever met. Friends in passing. Strangers for the rest of time. I never thought I'd enjoy these crowds, this cacophony—but with her there to tell me what to buy and the scent of spices about, it isn't hard at all.

Chores of the day done, we settle on the deck for an end-of-day game. In the late afternoon gold, the sandalwood table between us decorated like a checkerboard. There are cards in my friend's hand; she deals them for us, and we play a round of fishing.

"I've played too many rounds of solitaire," she says.

Come evening, the light glows rose-red on the salty planks of the deck. I can see my friend through the windows of her room: she unrolls something on the floor, before emptying her bag of junk beside her. Slipping inside, I inquire on the carpet-like object's purpose.

"Carpet-like object? It's my tapestry, silly!" she exclaims, laughing. "It tells my story. I weave my days into it, and it'll keep growing longer and longer. One day, it'll end—and by then, my entire life will be woven onto it!"

She lifts it to the lamplight, and I stagger at its pungent odour. At the bottom, the woven seaweed looks the freshest—and on its weft, the stars and dandelion clocks seem to glow. "Your story?" I question, eyebrow up in scepticism. "What story?"

She shakes her head. "Dandelions and stars…they are the sky," she whispers back. "It's about you, Cielo; you're part of my story now…"

"Oh." A pause. "And when will your story end?"

She shrugs. "When I arrive at my destination," is her answer. I don't think I know a thing about this destination of which she speaks, but I nod anyway, as if understanding were permission.

Whenever she docks in a harbour to purchase provisions, she leaves me in charge of her ship. Then I will find myself roaming the vast vessel, discovering new rooms downstairs that I rarely visit—if ever—while she's around. It's as if there's a part of her she still fears to entrust me with, rooms downstairs that are tangled with all her secrets.

But her smiles seem to invite me, and I supposed it shouldn't matter if she doesn't know, so I go by myself. It is my home too, mine as much as it is hers.

This is how I came to find the secret cabin, deep in the belly of the ship. The things inside glitter in the soft light of a wicker lamp. There are strange things in that dim little room: rusty anchors, a hundred unused curtains, and ornaments like bells and ribbons that simply don't make sense.

How much more there must be—an endless pile of junk that isn't junk at all. It chases me in my dreams when I am not there, and I wonder what it means to her, to me. I often think of entering it again, venturing a little deeper, winding the corridors—but somehow, I can't seem to find the room anymore.

.

The nights are the best. When we stand at the deck's edge, the dome of the atmosphere is black about me, and the hull is surrounded by starlit waters and the rush of waves. Oh, how romantic, my friend will sigh in the moonlight, laughing as the iron anchor makes a splash in the fathomless ocean. I want to agree, I do, but I'm ashamed to. Would it do for me to say so?

We light candles on the rails and gaze into the dark below, the wind drawing circles in the water. Cities dot the windswept horizon like fireflies in a dinner queue, but even they are too far away to hear our lively, lonely chatter. The pale bioluminescence swirls on the edges of waves; she takes a camera off its stand in her room, and takes photographs of the patterns.

The months grow long, gradually, questions all lost in nightfall, where we sit at the deck table and discuss the world we've seen and the spice and sugar of coasts rests upon her tongue and in the night air. Rivers tend to forget where they began. We pull the ship into the harbour of a port city nearby, every night before we fall asleep. Light—gold and yellow and red like the New Year—is painted in streaks across the black waters.

It looks magical, I want to whisper to her, but the words clog my throat. It seems a sin now, the breaking of a spell, a spell of blithe ignorance. I don't know if I want to know; I don't know if she does. All we have is the sea, and the sky, and the horizon where they will never meet.

Floating in the sparkling sun of a crescent lagoon, we sort the cards into their suits—diamonds, spades, clubs, hearts.

"My favourite," she remarks, picking the Ace of Hearts off the tabletop. I reach out to take it—but with a small grin, she grabs my hand instead, squeezing it gently. "I know it symbolises love, love in all forms, love in its futility; I love it for that!"

"Oh…love?"

My heart pounds.

The wind swells, and she yelps as the ship rocks, sending us falling and scraping our knees on the deck. The gale turns, wailing like a siren—and the ship swerves a second time, careening across the water, tugging at its anchor.

And with a whoosh, our cards flutter from the tabletop. Giving a cry of dismay, she leaps for them; likewise, I scramble under the table as they scatter across the wood, onto the floorboards. But like swifts they are, swooping off the deck and into the sea. The cards swirl like leaves under the hull, and she yells in sorrow.

Then we return to the table, only for a brilliant golden flash to greet us. A curious seagull has taken the opportunity of the distraction to make away with my compass, and though I cry after it, it refuses to take my orders.

No more perfect sunrises, I suppose.

Three cards were lost—one was her deeply-loved Ace of Hearts. But when I begin my long and profuse apology, she only grins affably back, ruffling my hair irreverently and helping me to stand, with a warm grip like sunlight.

Something moves within me, like a shoal spiralling through the coral reef. Warm, somewhat sweet. Self-consciously, I smooth my dark locks down, sure I have never felt this strange stir in my heart before.

I have, haven't I?

S: Somewhere

I am nothing like who I faintly remember I was. Who?

The golden place, faded to some diluted sepia. She says I am the sky.

Early morning on the antechamber floor, I untangle myself from the old grey blankets and drag my feet to the door.

She's on the other side, smiling at me. Glancing away equally often.

"I have something to show you," she says. Her arms are laden with my seafood breakfast—and somewhat bewildered, somewhat embarrassed at the mess I am, I follow her out onto the deck for our first meal of the day.

"So, Marin...where's it?"

"Somewhere! Follow me!"

I chase her down the vast engine room, where the machinery chants dutifully beneath the shadows, the voices of the pistons echoing in their concert hall of iron.

She glances up the staircase where I wait—and oh, the way she twirls, with her gaze raised so high, is breathtaking. She ransacked the lost cabin today, and now the glittering ornaments are piled in her arms.

"Such a dreary place, don't you think?" She giggles.

I do not mention that I have not been this deep in the ship before, this far into a place that has always seemed illegal to enter. I've always thought of it as some sort of secret—like the name of one's greatest demon, or the words that will unravel her. One too dangerous to tell.

Around us, the dials are whirring, tiny clocks that don't follow any known rhythms. Together we soar through the labyrinthine room of steam and pipes, about boilers and under cranks, draping golden silk and ribbons on the pistons and valves. The silver bells and streamers go on the levers and pipes—we're dancing, I see now. This is a joy she never has shown me. We breathe and dance this world to life, chrysanthemum splashes of light blooming on steel and glass.

As evening arrives and the last ribbons slip across the pipes, we sigh in a corner and appraise our work. Almost unnoticed, she draws up close to me—her warmth is hard to ignore. I shift; it's overwhelming me.

The pistons pound. "This...is the heart," she murmurs as we watch. All I can hear is hers.

She turns, and I am lost in the roaring depths of her eyes—blue, blue like the sea, the sea, the sea. The smile fades suddenly from her voice.

"Do you feel it too?" she whispers, touching my wrist without looking. "Cielo, do you feel…the same, this glow of memory?" Her hand has wrapped around my forearm. She draws a breath that leaves as a sigh. "Will you ever leave? But when? Must it end at all? Oh, no, I know it must. But I don't want it to end, Cielo—"

My eyes close, though I never willed them to. It must. I know that without the doubt. I am not for this place; I belong elsewhere. Gold floods the backs of my eyelids—the gold of a picture-perfect wheat field, and a flaming river, dwindling into the sky…the sky…the sky…

These years, I have felt it sprouting, growing within me, like a flower waiting to bloom. This strange feeling that she's more to me than I give her credit for.

"Marin, I…"

Thunder.

The ship is rocks beneath us—I lose foothold on the grainy steel and the motion throws me to my knees. She cries out and steadies herself with a metal rail, feet slipping along the floor.

Then it lurches in the opposite direction and gasping, cursing, we grip each other's arms as the shadows grow longer, the high tinkle of wind-chimes echoing down the air vents as the engine continues to chug in laborious defiance…

Thunder.

"The deck," she gasps.

We struggle up the stairs, against the wind—and freeze. For three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around us, there is nothing. Only churning crests of water, somewhere between blue and grey, horrifyingly endless from where we drift.

No landmarks. No bearings. No—destination—

"The compass!" she cries to me. I extend empty palms and shake my head, mouthing a word—seagull—and she screams. The wind buckles and folds, and the waves toss us against the starboard rails. And she begins to sob, but I know it isn't from pain.

"Lost," she whispers. Her voice is a death knell. "We're lost."

"Marin, don't cry! Let's go below-deck." I take her by the shoulders, and before I know where I'm going, we're halfway to the trapdoor.

The clouds break, and cold needles of rain begin their assault, like bullets of ice.

"Below-deck, Marin. We'll—be safe there."

.

Down the corridor we fall, slipping into the darkness of the doorway at the end—it shuts with a familiar click. As she lights her lamp in the blindness of the night, my breath catches. Around us, objects lie strewn across the benches and the floor, thrown into complete disarray, the same as the last time I saw them.

The secret cabin. Why is it here?

"This is the secret store I keep," she explains, falling into a beach chair and sighing deeply. "I thought I'd give it a name; I called it the Horizon—you know? Its colours keep changing."

"Oh, how's it different from the...normal storerooms?"

"In case of forever," she says. "The journey to my destination is taking forever." Puzzlement furrows her brow. "Why haven't I arrived yet? Did I arrive and not realised? Will I ever?" She turns to me, and I feel the question is supposed to be special. "Will I?"

Because I don't know the answer, I blink and sigh a little. "I don't know either," I say. "And I'm glad we've been here this long, but I don't know how much longer—how much longer till I must return, and I am nowhere again..."

My eyes have wandered again; there is so much here, too many stories and secrets that will never be told, centuries of history that I will never know. I kick things about at my feet, old lamps eaten away by rust, brittle leaves that perhaps remember a trace of green. Seven anchors, all rusty.

"You've been travelling…a long time," the words come in a soft whispered breath.

"Yeah…" She's been watching me. She touches her gown and casts her eyes down. "It's been so long, I'm not sure I know when it began. I was a child once; I remember this ship and this ocean, I remember passing strange lands." Her eyes then take on a dreaminess. "And...I remember meeting someone in one of these lands. Someone distant. Like a dream. I remember losing my dearest treasure, gaining something in exchange—"

Her next word is cut by a scream. The ship has flung us straight against the wall, sending everything crashing against us. Shards and shrapnel. Something tears a gash in my arm, and I clench my teeth—but she is already weeping beside me.

"I—I'm sorry this had to happen. Not while you were here. Not now—"

"It's okay," I whisper quickly back, trying to smile.

Crash.

I hear her screams again, somewhere far beyond myself. Metal and glass tear me apart, tear us apart. In the flashes of fire, I watch as the lantern is shattered against the wall and the wick throbs with a desperate light. The blades are here again, shattering on the wall an inch from my face—

No north, no south. The compass is gone.

"MARIN!" I roar through this ocean of shadows, as if she were a thousand miles away. Is she still here? Will I ever see her again? I can feel my fingers searching everywhere for handhold. I cannot feel my own heart.

"Marin, Marin! Where are you?"

"Cielo!" she cries back, so softly I don't know if it's real.

No east, no west. Where is the sun? Where does it go?

The sway of the ship throws me in among the stones and knives, like rocks hidden in bays that pierce the hulls of the entering ships. I think there are cuts through my fingers, and my veins are screaming the colour of the fire that died, after something they cannot replace. I crawl and grovel. The deep brilliance blinds me, and I thirst for water without salt. But all my fingers can find is the shaft of something.

And though I don't know what it is, it begs me to hold on, hold on, hold on.

...Yes, yes...I'll hold on. I'll hold on to you, until we die.

The world sways, axis unhinged, but I hold on, hold on—I shall. I know I shall!

I'll hold on, even after we die.

More shots of pain, pain I have suddenly learnt to ignore, are fired up my limbs. She's stopped sobbing; is she dead? Oh Goddess, she isn't dead, please.

I hold on, hold on.

Grip tightening on wood, I stumble to my knees. To my feet. The floor tips and my stomach heaves the way it always does, but worse; I search for a pail or pot but there isn't one, only her—

—only her.

She's as broken as me, slumped against the chamber wall, lips bleeding all the things she never said but longed so fiercely to. The light is changing. We're at the horizon.

Falling to my knees upon a rusting anchor, I feel it creak beneath my bones, and reach to clean the streak of blood away, to sweep the hair from her face; her eyes haven't lost the shade and swirl of the sea. It roars. She roars with it, everywhere around me, fighting to get closer. I think I know now; I think I love her.

"Are you...okay?" she asks, and I know I don't know I am, but I smile and nod anyway.

"You have quite a ship," I answer. "Will we live more than a week more, though?"

I know from the silence that neither of us knows the answer. Blinking to clear the dust from my eyes, I glance downwards and raise between us the strange flower that saved my life. What's this...?

In the beating lamplight, its shape slowly traces itself for me, swaying a little in a wind that we imagine for ourselves.

Four perfect paper blades. A humble balsam pin.

Everything is glass and liquid around me, as its shape connects with that of a memory somewhere deep. Somewhere beneath those days and rays on dry gold wheat-fields and turning waterwheels, those lustrous lands that brought forgetfulness, that troubled to scour the memory away.

I have...met the sea before.

"This is—my pinwheel?" I think I sound strangled; the tempest is still growling outside. "Is it really?"

But here everything is still, hauntingly still. Except for the flame fighting to live.

She tilts forward, eyes wide. "I think I remember…"

She reaches out to hold the little pinwheel. But slowly her fingers loosen their grip; they slip down to encircle mine. The blades twirl lazily, like one of the windmills on the coast.

Still we sit, the floor rocking beneath us like a cradle. All the world seems to lie in the touch of her hands, the only warmth I can feel any longer.

"Remember…?"

"Remember!"

A girl, pressing a glass seashell into my palm, taking the pinwheel from mine—sweeping the golden curtains aside and gazing with a sigh at the river beneath my window.

A girl making a trade and knowing that she will never undo it. Something by which we'll remember each other by.

A girl with eyes like the sea.

She glances up at me in question, and I smile though I didn't try.

"I've met you before," I say it at last, sure now, drawing towards her like a cold man to a fire. She's still holding the pinwheel. Holding me. "I met you once, long ago. Remember that day? You visited me once! It doesn't feel like it happened at all, like a dream! You gave me a glass shell, and told me not to forget. Remember?"

Memory kindled by the words, her eyes brighten suddenly. "Yes—yes, I do," she answers earnest and soft, suddenly clasping my hands. "I remember! It was the place where we once met. The horizon at the other end of the world. And you gave me the pinwheel…I've almost forgotten!" She pauses, and the light is golden in her eyes. Golden like wheat. Golden like the compass. "We promised that we'd travel together, and go where the sun goes. That's why it kept returning, Cielo! That's why the river called me, even though you lived so far away. You're my destination. I have arrived!"

She grins, a sail unfurling to catch the wind. And I know it too, why the memory and the river kept calling me.

This is destiny. Destiny, which doesn't know the rules of time. A journey that can be made without a compass, because it doesn't matter where one begins. Destiny, it is the terminal at the end of every route.

"Destination?" My smile is slightly disbelieving, admittedly. "Then your journey's over."

"And I suppose I must start a new one now," she answers with a small laugh. "Perhaps the same one. Perhaps I've started a thousand journeys before, all so I can meet you!" She softens a bit. "Perhaps I'll forget once you've gone."

She leans forward, and then she's on her knees, so near I can feel her breathing. "You're just like—the sea," I murmur, following her lead—because I know I can, because here and now without a speck of coast in sight, we're closer to the horizon we ever could be. Nowhere near, but close enough. "The sea, with all her whims and hues, that changes as and when she wishes…"

She brushes my hand and laughs again. "And you're the sky over the sea!" she answers, dreamily. "Always beside her, though she doesn't know it. Though they're always a thousand miles apart. You—you're my sky…"

"…you're my sea."

I'm deaf to the screams of the storm that pounds the hull; I'm blind in the glow of the dying lamp, and somehow I am speechless even though I have a million things to say. Just as the engine is her heart, into which she finally let me, this place—the lost storeroom—the Horizon—is her soul and her hope. For a journey she doesn't know will end. A destination, a destiny she's not sure she will find.

"I think you're beautiful, Marin. But you're—more than that. I feel as if I'd lose you any minute—though you never were mine, or I yours—I mean, I can't explain—"

She giggles in reply. "What do you mean?"

Turning, I kiss her. Her grip tightens around my wrists as our lips meet—and she returns it as if she has been waiting for it all her life. Breathlessly I slip away, and she sobs again, tears streaming down her cheeks in rivers of shadow. But before I can hold her and comfort her, she kisses me once more.

The wick tells the last of its scented tale, and dies. The ocean accompanies the rain above in a concerto that serves as our soundtrack as the ship loses itself further in the blue. Here, now, in this shivering second we always knew would come, the shadows beneath the deck are the most wondrous in the world.

.

"Is this love? Is this the card I lost?"

"You never lost it, Marin. It was in my pocket all along."

.

I awaken the next few mornings to a grey horizon as nondescript as the days before. The rain and wind have ceased, leaving a fresh mist on deck. Our sandalwood checkerboard-table was blown overboard.

The ship rocks soullessly on the grey-blue waters, without an engine beat to drive it on. We pray that as long as we don't wind up in the doldrums, the invisible streams of the sea will take us somewhere.

Or everywhere. Or maybe nowhere at all.

Three weeks. We have been surviving by rain and prayers alone. She keeps me alive with her stories, and I keep her awake with my laughter.

In the wee hours of the twenty-third day, I dream of a distant voice calling me to the deck. But as I drag my eyes open, I only realise that the voice in the mist is hers,laughing and pure. And so I do as told, following her out of the antechamber and onto the deck.

And to my horrified surprise, I see what she points out to me.

A pinprick of golden light, a firefly asleep on the horizon.

Now I am in the engine room, flicking every last switch in the room and cranking the levers. She reads the dials swiftly, turning wheels and adjusting knobs everywhere.

And all at once, the ocean is churning against our bow, and the sky is breezing past like silver banners. The ship cuts the night, a blade of song. The light swells as we approach, dividing into two, ten, an entire congregation—each singing its own harmony to our song. Closer, closer, like heaven at the end of the sky.

W: Wherever you are

These days were such a party, oh yes they were—a whirl of dancing days, of celebrations and chandeliers, of wine and velvet tablecloth! But the party has ended, and the stains have been cleaned from the tabletop. We're still drunk, but it is barely a shadow of the joy we once knew.

The ship bobs gently in the water by the jetty, jutting near the foggy estuary where I began. As I emerge from the old antechamber with all my things packed, she calls me up to the deck. "Cielo…you can go home now," she says.

Racing to her, I take her shoulders. "But why?"

Beyond the deck, I see the spires and blocks of the harbour, all silent and swaying. Something in those shadows is calling, calling me back to the grey and gold of my old life, a thousand miles away.

"Birds aren't meant to be trapped in cages." She smiles. A tear streams from the corner of her eye, saltwater. "You are theirs—your home's, your world's. And I have nothing here for you."

"But you don't need to have anything, Marin!"

Shaking her head slowly, she unrolls the tapestry for me. There's something new at the end of the sand-crusted weaving: a formless tangle of seaweed. "That's what you've turned me into," she explains, laughing. "There's so much more waiting for you at home. So much that I could never dream of having. Let it be and go, Cielo." Her laughter fades into a mere grin. "I'll remember you—and please remember me too."

I try to smile back.

The world is mist all around me, as I linger on the gangplank between heaven and earth. The ship floats on the crystal estuary; her horn call is gentler now. In these seconds, I find myself turning to take a last glimpse at her.

"Where will you go after this, Marin?"

"I don't know. Westward, maybe. I want to see where the sun goes every night."

But without the compass do you know where "west" is, Marin?

I reach out, and my fingers close around hers. "Will I see you again?" I whisper.

"You won't. Or you will, but it won't be the same and we won't be the same people." She giggles as if it were a joke no one was meant to understand but her. While I'm still trying to puzzle it out, she tiptoes to kiss me for the last time, and slips a hand into my right pocket, leaving something there. "Come on, they're waiting. And my new story is waiting too."

"I won't forget! I will not!"

Nothing more is said. Down the bridge I walk, into mists that speak of the sky. I dream I hear a shimmering sigh behind me, and like Orpheus I turn—hoping, wishing that she's there, still waiting with a smile.

I will not forget.

But there only remains a faint shadow of the ship and the ocean I once loved so, fading into the mist beyond. I will not...

Does your story end?

I crawl from among my crumpled silk sheets, setting my feet upon gleaming marble. I whisper a compliment to the sunset that paints the windows and fields a lustrous gold. A wayward dog's bark echoes from that mill down the river; it skips across rustling currents to where I lie entangled in evening sunlight.

Somehow the air is so still and stifling here, and I walk to pull the curtains apart, even though there is no wind outside.

The ornaments are still gleaming on my shelf, like fairies with high ringing laughs. The shell lies asleep, glassy like the ceiling of a coral reef, the clouds that swirl beyond. I lift it in my fingers and touch it to my cheek—so cold, just like the ocean I've never seen before.

Then there is a squawk on the windowsill. A white bird with black wingtips flutters to land, dropping my gleaming golden compass onto the floor before taking off into the sun. It rolls to my feet. Bewildered I pick it up, wondering why it's tarnished, almost as if it really has seen wind and brine.

All of a sudden, I feel something moving deep within me—something like an archaic memory, of white wings, and bells, and crescents of sand...

Absently I search my pockets. There, I find a playing card—the Ace with its single red heart in the centre, . Flipping it over, I see a message, scrawled with a black marker:

We meet at the horizon, don't forget!
Love, Marin—your sea. :)

I'm smiling, suddenly. Because though I don't really remember how it happened, I think I understand.

Destiny, I remind myself. I'll get there someday.

And nothing can explain this heartache—nothing, except love.

A/N: Yes, plot events don't seem to make much sense, so here I am with something to (hopefully) clear it up! Two years after writing this, I think it has become clearer what exactly my old self was trying to convey and so I edited it to better bring the concepts across.

It is about the feeling of being in a dream, of how sometimes the dream can seem a long voyage, the world within so sprawling and vast. Cielo wakes up and feels all sorts of memories stirring that suggest he's been somewhere, yet these could equally likely be the products of fantasies regarding the items on his shelf and the question of where they came from. The first and last scenes are continuous and everything between is a flashback of the dream he just had. Then again, I suppose it may not have been a dream since the pang of love seems to transcend what any sort of dreaming could accord. Or things may actually be in reverse; the mansion is the dream. I left the doubt on purpose because I love that sense of not-knowing that you have in the brief moment between sleeping and waking (or up to ten minutes after). At the end of it what I'm getting at is probably that hope we sometimes have of having the same dream again. Because if the dream does recur then it is no longer the product of a whim; it is more and we can cling to that and begin to hope it is real.

To those curious, I conceptualised and wrote this before I watched Inception, though I did complete it after, so it's possible I drew something from it, if not the entire story plot.