"Black Sea" excerpt

She sat very still and straight in the dingy. Only in her mind was she hunched and curled around herself in fear. Apprehension and dread permeated everything here, in this place between. She had been Summoned to this dark place outside of time, though she knew not why or how. Her eyes darted from the shrouded Boat Keeper to the midnight expanse that ought to have been sky. The emptiness of that sight filled her with dread, her stomach knotted tight and her heart thumping against her ribs. Her gaze flickered to the water that was not water, black as pitch. It held her trapped fast. No reflections or ripples marred its glassy surface, though she knew it ought not be that way. Instinctively she knew its touch would burn with a salted acidity. It was death, this whole place was death. Death of all that was light and good.

She pulled her eyes away, forcing herself to look forward, beyond the Keeper and its long pole... To the island in the too near distance. She did not know how she could see it, that obsidian shore placed in the middle of this unnatural water. Yet she could see the individual shards that was the gravelly sand. It shimmered in the most peculiar way, absorbing what light might have ever been, like uncounted black holes. The void was total and complete and she did not want to go there. But she was Summoned. She had no choice. So very straight and still she sat in the dingy, struggling to stay sane and alive.


All these years later I still wonder at the Black Sea, and its Island... And at the other alive one in the boat behind me...
This is the place of my darkest despair, my deepest fears. The place to which more than one Summons have been given. And each time, I am sent back alive, if not whole. Were it not for the light and beauty of the Grotto and the Tree, I should have been insane and dead long ago.


-Excerpt, a very rough one from the first draft, of "Summons"