1. Faint fog-like shadows rise from deep the endless sea below….spiraled snakes of stealth wrapped tightly, riding thermals from the gray Sargasso stillness toward her path across the sky.

Three suns without both food and rest the flight has taken tole upon her Dragon form.

Perhaps some tiny remnant of a lodestone in the blood reminded and refused to let her pass this path without direct encounter with the eons of the souls that reach into and through her present form she holds as dragon of the Moon.

A vessel laden with a million souls of present past she feels the thunder in her dragon blood and wearily relentlessly scans for any place of rest. A floating piece of any mild debris would do, for rest and breath to ease the burden of the past.

She glances to the west…left hand the setting son.

The rising fog holds sway around a half submerged mossed vessel caught within the weeds of plankton pools around a still stagnant curve of ocean where no currents seem to flow.

Two islands of dark weeds and water lustily entwine around this rotting vessel like spent lovers forming a familiar darkened vesica piscus on the surface of the sea.

The maps were set to come this way and yet she has not heard a single bird or seen a single sign to guide her toward the legended abode, the home of the Dark Master of the Mage. This dire forsaken realm looks nothing like the maps of dreams and yet the elements have brought her here insistent on its path, insistent with its bidding as if some seasoned migration held her in its grasp.

Ondine Ninetails descends and falls like some dark angel from the sky and lands with pain upon the rotting deck below. Ignoring the pain and submitting to the exhaustion, she falls into a deep sleep without dreams.

Ondine Ninetails