Sea of Shadows, Sea of Dreams

A shore in the night. No sun and sun will never rise there. The atmosphere is clear there and the stars are bright and stable. They do not glimmer but they wait.

There is another world in the sky and that world is vast. It is a blue-white world of could and storms and though it is always night here and the sun will never rise, the blue-white gas giant in the sky still shines in its reflected light. It is brighter than moonlight over the land, but not too bright. At all times the sky is black and the stars can be clearly seen. There are black cliffs there, and a beach of cracked black stone.

The sea is dark, but lit by trails and waves of phosperesence when the great leviathan pass.

A forest on the shore where the wind is heard. Quiet. Moving slowly amidst the boughs. A river and a bridge of dark wood over the river. A slender bridge.

White shells moving amidst the trees. Dangerous crabs.

The tower where I live is secure, the sea smashes against it. Solid stone. It is safe in the tower, there are lamps of blue-white flame, like the world in the sky, mirrors hold reflected stars and there are tame lumescent squid.

It is a phantasmal shore.

A warm phosphorescent sea of dreams. Sink holes full of strands of glowing light. Blood-warm water. Or cold and dark.

A labyrinth in the warm unfolding dark. Like veins of time.

The paths of the cephalopods make light under the waves.

White crabs clash mournfully on the silent sand. Huge slow white hermit crabs.

Warm saline water sinks down and forms currents and river under the fresh. The upper water is cold Atlantic-black.

Brave divers risk the freezing water and lee shore to dive through the cold uppers and fish the squid of the warm, light saline deeps. The Day Below, or The Deep Dawn. If they evade the storms and the many dangers, I hear them speaking as they pass back beneath my slender bridge.

So the sea is dark and the storms on that sea are higher than any storm seen on earth. The atmosphere has different layers and the cumulo-nimbus seem not like squat piles, but like slow towers advancing over the dark sea. The storms are towers reaching to the stars. If the storms here and on that blue-white world that takes up half the sky in its rising align, then lightning can reach between the worlds

And under the dark and the cold of the ocean are the strands and mazes of light made by the squid and plankton in the slow warm rivers that run undisturbed under the black storm-wracked sea.

Sometimes there are scrapes and scars where one of the sea-leviathan has dived down into the warm salt water in search of prey and the lights and warm water have scattered. But they heal quickly and return to their proper place.