•••

Gideon Darquish finds himself bored, wandering the vast, empty wasteland of the Refinery, a tight-lipped, scowling sea-captain his only companion. Boredom is a dangerous place for any to inhabit for too long as evils often arise from the occupation of this mindset. Segways, all forms of cryptocurrency, platypuses, subscription boxes and gluten intolerances, are but a few examples of what comes when excitement lapses.

And true to his villainous façade, Gideon fends off his boredom the worst way possible - by telling Stormholden everything. No on-purpose purple prose or cryptic language. No air of mystique or mystery. He feeds the captain straight facts one after another about what he is, and more importantly what he is not.

Now when you believe you are something, only to find out you are, in fact, not that something, the world can feel like it has crumbled. And this feeling of free-fall, this sense of never finding the ground again, can cause one to spiral into an existential crisis.

This is where the captain finds himself now. Dread mushroom clouds inside the captain's aura, coloring his normal light blue with that of harsh, uncomfortable mustard yellow as he attempts to confront the meaning of life. He stops trudging through the dunes, a single name echoing in his head.

Nep.

According to Gideon, she is another devil; the curse pumping through her veins as easily as blood. And to belie this demonic nature, Stormholden has learned she is the originator of all his suffering.

His father's fall from grace - his alcoholism, and frequent brothel visits, his violent outbursts. The war, of which Stormholden still wore his scars deep on his psyche and soul. The Red Blight, the death toll so high, the air had often been suffocating, the dead's ashes coating his teeth and throat with each breath he took. From city to village, the corpses couldn't be burned fast enough.

And Matilda - lovely, exquisite Matilda. Stormholden's one true love. Ripped away from him, an irreparable hole gouged upon his heart. Their parting had almost killed him, had led him dangerously near the path his father had once trod upon. Many nights he lay in back alleys, on his back, soaked in urine, rolling an empty bottle on his palm, and gazing up at the stars, wondering. Why, why had it been him? Why was it always him? Why, had it seemed, happiness was to remain a dream to him, as unattainable as the very stars he stared up at? 

But what if...

Gideon had told him he didn't exist. And if Stormholden wasn't real, was Matilda? What of their love, so strong a force the captain thought it capable of moving mountains, but, what if he'd been made to feel that way, and the same went for Matilda? What if their choice of partner had been made for them? 

Gideon wets his lips, relishing in the captain's turmoil. It is not just the cherry on top, but the whole diabolical sundae. In a way, he's perverting the captain without resorting to magic. Gideon congratulates himself on a victory won with only words. Like Crispen, he too is incredibly short-sighted, much to his own detriment. 

• Thunder And Lightning •

With a thousand journeys under his belt, Captain Ire Stormholden had believed he'd seen it all, from the werewolf infested grottos of Lucifer's Reach, to the mermaids of Cadin's Cove who had sought his destruction on more than one occasion. He'd done more in his life than a man thrice his age. He'd loved, lost, outraged, rebelled and finally, resigned himself to the lot he'd been given. All of that and for what?

To tell a good tale. To make the prying eyes of unseen entities fawn and coo and sympathize with his plight. To be stripped of his humanity and boiled down to a narrowed list of character traits, some good, some damning, but all needed to keep him from being too one-dimensional. His suffering made people feel for him, want to comfort and console him; his good looks made people desire him, lust after him; his temperament, so steady, straight and narrow, colored in blacks and whites with no grays in sight, made him heroic, and albeit, a bit stubborn.

He had been an idea, one of rough exterior, bloated ego and a straight and narrow sense of justice, birthed from the mind of this Nep to please. To entertain the masses while he, himself, suffered. While he laid on his back and cried out for the gods' mercy. His life ended; at times, he could think of nothing kinder.

Ire Stormholden, a story for weary parents to coax reluctant children to sleep. An inspiration to some, a let down to others.

And if he wasn't real, was anything? The violet sky overhead, adorned with a crown of seven moons, all in different phases of their life cycle, all raining moonbeams down upon him, slatting his back in harsh angles of dark and light, making him a prisoner in his own skin - was that real?

The sand and the odd way it moved under the captain's feet, rocking him back and forth as though he stood upon his ship's deck once more - real? The wretched reeking of vomit curling up his nostrils, had he even stepped foot inside the Song? Been served by a skeleton? Been strangled by invisible hands? Had anything since he fell into this accursed plane been real?

What of Gideon Darquish, living nightmare, and a perpetrator of evils most egregious, was he real? Or could he claim to be no more real than the captain himself?

"I most assuredly am," Gideon replied, coolly. "No one wrote me. One day I didn't exist and the next I did."

Stormholden scratched the stubble along his chin, fingers rough, dirt-caked. Nails black. His boots slipped further into the hungry mouth of the undulating sands. "If what you say of my origins is true, then what you described just now sounds eerily similar."

Gideon whirled. Face towards the moons, their light, which penetrated everything else in the layer, lost before it could graze the boy's skin. He stood surrounded by brightness, the one and only impenetrable speck of dark, standing atop a dune, the sand steady and solid under his feet. "I am nothing like you." His black shroud hovered overhead, trembling with every word.

The captain leaned forward, plucked a patch of moss from a rock, and mopped the sweat gathered at the nape of his neck. "Just because you wish it so," he unstuck his feet and stepped toward the horizon, where the speck demarcating their destination resembled a dying spider, several metallic tubes jutting from a flattened abdomen, "does not make it so."

Gideon frowned and sidled up beside the captain, bird skull necklace swaying like a pendulum along his chest. "Pessimism doesn't look good on you, Cap."

Beaten down by the harsh truth of his reality, Stormholden, muttered his words bereft of any prior tenacity. "I am what I've been made to be."

Gideon sighed. The fingers of his non-gloved hand plucked at the fingers of his gloved one. Dust scented with the aroma of grease freshly worked into the animal hide to soften its cracks, wafted to the captain's nose. It took him back, to the thrums and lively chatter of Prisdiam Port, where drum skins were pounded at all hours of the night, where song and drink poured freely, where people enrapt in fevered joy witnessed their dreams dance among the stars and believed them achievable. None of it had been real.

"If I had known the truth would break you," Gideon said, "I might have reconsidered telling you."

Compassion from a devil roused a self-deprecating smile to curl Stormholden's lips. He cocked an eyebrow. Though he despised conversation with Gideon, and acquaintance with the boy had brought nothing but misery into the captain's life, silence now seemed the harbinger of an even deadlier misery, one that would swirl and spiral until Stormholden found himself caught in an inescapable maelstrom of woe. One, where he knew, once he was dragged under its current, he would not find it in himself to swim for the surface.

"Does my misery not delight you as my anger has?" Stormholden asked after a pause.

Gideon shook his head and for a moment, the boy shone as clear as darkness could. Much like an oil slick, reflecting a fraction of the world's color, he reflected a fraction of its sincerity. "No. It doesn't." His brow knitted together. "In fact, it makes me think of—"

He broke off as a whistle cut through the silence of the layer. They both turned to face in its direction. Twin beams of light rode down one of the metallic tubes, heading straight for the spider's belly, what Gideon had referred to as the platform.

The boy's eyes alighted. "C'mon, Cap," his voice abandoned the low, thoughtfulness from before, and came out anew, gleeful. "Chin up," he chirped, a skip in his step as he started walking, "Almost there." He acted as though no prior conversation had been exchanged between them, that all interaction had the airy pleasantness of two equals, not of a prisoner and his captor.

Stormholden admired Gideon's singularity. He had been the same in his youth, when he only ever saw the sun when it reflected in Matilda's gaze, when he only felt happiness when she captured it in her smile, when he only felt alive, when her heartbeat pulsed underneath his touch, reminding him such wondrous blessings existed.

Stormholden would never be able to be that way again; Gideon's truths made sure of it. He would be haunted by the reveal of his nature, for whatever time he had left.