Below us, patches of blue fungus buoy with the waves like algae. They glow like many eyes. I feel for the amulet. Still with me.

Movement of the fog, far, far away, tall figures, things in the water, so big their heads are in the fuzzy ether. Even with their silhouettes, I can't tell what the giants are. They're too far away, their legs like stilts and the masses of their bodies obscured by twisted white clouds.

A lump forms in my throat, but it's not all that unpleasant. When I was in about fifth grade, I tried to read Moby-Dick. Big mistake. Lots of stuff about ship supplies. Not enough "shirtless man screams at whale with a harpoon in his hand." But there's one part of it I remember, when a black cabin steward almost drowns but is saved and changed from what he sees.

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

I don't understand every word of that, and all the hyphens give me a headache, but I feel every part of it.

My stomach lurches when I think about toppling over into the emerald water.

"What are you doing?" Moggy asks, voice high. Translation: Be careful.

"Just looking," I say, blinking. It's like a spell came over.

I don't like how the sailors look at me. They always look like they're on the verge of laughing. There's some kind of dark humor there like, oh, look at the stupid little girl with her cat and zoog gawking at the water we've seen hundreds of times. Not the first time being this young has made older guys look at me like that.

"I hope it doesn't take too long to reach Celephaïs." If I can reach that place, maybe I can meet Randolph Carter; he's rumored to live with the king there after he died in the real world. The Dreamlands are really just a mix of people who have always been here, ghosts, and me, a little of both. And it's hard to tell much of a difference when there's not exactly a standard of normal.

As we go, mouth is dry, my tongue swollen and scaly. One of the crewmates gives me some water from his canteen. I stop at first, but this world isn't like back home, so I take a sip.

A minute later, I feel a little woozy and try to find some quiet, shadowy spot to sit down. Before I can, though, Moggy gives a worried chitter, and I fall to the deck, vision blackening.

***

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