vrykolakas | NARRATIVE. IT WAS NOT I THAT STRANGLED AT THE TOAST.

It kissed us, soft, to cut our throats, this coast,
like a malice of the lazy King.

The sea is empty but for one ship. The deck is empty but for one figure. The ship does not quite follow the movement of the sea as it should. It is not built to be crewed by only one person. There is a blasted, shocked quality to its quietness.

Hands on the ship’s wheel, the Brucolac stares forwards but does not seem to see anything. His tongue unwinds from his mouth and curls, uncurls, curls, uncurls. The air is heavy with salt.

The term fish out of water is used without a thought for spasming gills, bulging eyes, the frantic scrabbling slap-slap-slap of tail on hard dry ground; for hopeless ballet-dancer leaps and twists, and the hard whole-body thud of hitting the deck again; without a thought for the terror of repeating it all in a frenzy of fear until the sun and air dry all life out. This observation ripples through the Brucolac’s mind quite carelessly, not interrupting the other more complex processes occuring alongside it but mingling like a—like a stream of blood in water? Like a jagged and sliced-up shard of refracted moonlight?

The ship flinches like a nervous virgin then tries to turn snarling, a wild thing straining at a harness. She is hyper-sensitive, unreasonably light in the water, as if not in the water at all. The Brucolac shifts his weight very slightly and feels her shudder and cut sharply starboard, something changing: a minor to a major chord, silent. He knows where he is going.

Fish. Water. The Brucolac doesn’t need to breathe and has seen some of what lurks in darker waters face to face on its own terms, though he has no particular wish to risk his ab-life at pressures too intense. Still, he likes the more catastrophic and unearthly parts of sealife which prefer deep water. Their ghoulish mouths and translucent, bursting bodies inspire a fascinated disgust in him, and he enjoys how they instinctively keep their distance. Though he knows himself to be categorically a monster, he doesn’t think there is a chymical or thaumatological reason for the fish-things’ dumb unease. He thinks it is because he is out of place there, on the edge of the deep, conscious of the water above him and unafraid. Anything uncowed by its own strangeness quickly becomes nightmareish.

The salt in the air is mixing now with the hard scent of burning, smoke, metal. Leather. Rotting wood. The bright tang of human sweat, cactus sap, khepri-chatter. Above the sea the moon seems to sweat.

The Brucolac unrolls his tongue and leans with his ship towards the floating city.