Into Limbo //(Char + Dunc-, all others only on invite)

[Enkidu]

Absence started to pity her and spat her up from the whirlpool of unconsciousness onto a sand as thick as sugar icing, pulling back from the viridian sea of a silent delta sleep. She coughed and her lungs poured out absinthe, she hacked and her blood flowed from every pour, the thin, reedy red of raspberry punch. Her limbs were bent like a wire woman. Nishi felt around her mouth for her tongue and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had absconded quite a few hours ago, and breathed freely for the first time in her waking life.

The gravity was low. She didn’t so much haul herself to her feet as rock back on her ankles and there she was, elevated, poised, every vertebrae attentive to the task of keeping her burning frame cemented up as a needle to pierce the sky. She sniffled and smelt only the cascade of fruity, alien salts and the wholesome sweetness of a not-quite-domesticated world. In the sky, a turbulent orange disk hung all by itself, silently judging the earth, not that there was much of it, she noticed, just flat, sucking sea and a wind that would have dried her if it wasn’t spitting spray. It was a warm wind, it befitted a warm sea.

She slogged herself up the subsiding white sand and squinted at the brown earth cliff pushing its crags against the sky above her, its tops teasing of new life with tendrils of green, nondescript flora downing the coast in straggling clumps of marram grass. There was no bay, just a curving line of coast that gave the world a freshly-packed, primeval feel, as though creation had only just ordered the planet out of the box and hadn’t quite had time to wear in the lines of use. A few miles behind her, a solar foil punted its long bows over the slow rolls of aqua that lazily pulled her keel, dragging a line of buoys that bobbed and danced like the children of ages long past enough to have withered by their adulthood. A grey off-cut of rock, thrust away from the cliff by some giant hand decades before, had dredged a long, stagnant tidepool into the beach, scarifying the clean dimples of sand lining up to the land.The asymmetry delighted her, and Nishi clambered down to it, perched against the rock with curling toes, staring moon-eyed into the brackish brine. Inside, a rakish, four eyed alien fish, big enough to have suffocated its pond mates, made a fluid one-eighty and peeled its lips back at her. Nishi waved. The fish had pluck. She pledged not to leave it to die there.

The half-dome of her survival helmet hung flatly against her neck like dead skin peeling off a burn victim, and she ripped it aside as the straps came free under her fingers, tucking it under her arm. She had survived, after all. It had done its part. The Chrysanthemum shook herself, fell to her knees and winced her pupils back into facing the light again, the pads of her flight suit digging cups into the beach, ruffling the undisturbed, virgin dune. Some vestigial childishness within her quietly wondered how much of the beach was hers to fortify, and since she couldn’t see the end of it was happy to assign herself everything and anything. She let the helmet drop.

Petrified wood the colour of bone crackled under her boots. For a moment she’d considered stripping down to her toes but the shingle glared at her in shards. Just walk on us, they’d clack. Just press your weight down on us, feel us slide between your metatarsals. We won’t hurt you. She picked up an offending slice of ashen stone and skimmed it over the waves. Once, twice, thrice, plop. three ripples painting whorls against the prism of the sea.

Up in the cargo hold, Nishi’s body lolled.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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