Across disintegrating ice, the army retreated. Their colos leaped over widening crevasses. Infantry splashed through new warm streams. Warriors struggled to navigate the calving ice cliffs. They rushed toward the black basalt mountain on one side of the terminal glacier. Even when they reached that rock-solid ground, it too shuddered under them. It was as if the fire gods below pounded the over world with massive hammers.
Now the survivors of the Battle of Twilight camped on a chill ridge of black stone. It was a defensible spot-no Keldon would camp anywhere else-though no Phyrexian foe remained. Alt had died in the world conflagration. The only foe was the flood itself.
At first, the towering terminus had sprouted countless jets across its surface. Water that had fought through twisted passages shot in straight lines from the glacier. Pressurized streams widened and joined. Centuries of centuries of water burst out into a gray river. Enormous hunks of ice bounded free. They bobbed through deeper stretches and rolled among rapids. The serpent of Twilight muscled its way toward the sea.
The flesh of that serpent was filled with bodies. Keldon, Phyrexian, elf, colos all tumbled in a confused mass. The wurm had swallowed them. A Phyrexian's spikes impaled a Keldon's back, and the two bodies formed a new creature. An elf was tangled in the reins of his colos, and with six legs and two arms and two heads, they floated together.
Dead fingers clung to shattered rams and hunks of mast. In places, the bodies had gathered in a ghastly Sargasso.
The Keldon survivors looked down with solemn despair. These dead were the finest warriors in the land, slain not by swords but by fire and ice. Every camp runner and warlord felt instinctually that he should have tumbled in that flood with them.
They did their best to make amends. Warriors stood at the edge of the flood and reached in with polearms to snag whatever soldiers they could. They lifted Keldons and elves out and laid them in orderly rows below the camp. They dragged Phyrexians free and tossed them into bonfires. Even so, most of the corpses were out of reach, even out of sight, schooling along beneath the waves. For every body they hauled from the river, fifty others bobbed past. Even so, the dead below the camp outnumbered the living in it.
"There will have to be a new Necropolis," said camp runner Stokken to himself.
Doyen Lairsen stood nearby, watching the awful tide. His plaited hair and beard were pitted with soot where smoke sticks had burned to their nubs. ' "Why? What is the point?"
The young man was startled by his doyen's jaded assessment. "To honor the dead, of course. To renew our hopes for Twilight-"
"Twilight has come and gone," snapped Doyen Lairsen. His hands gripped the hilts of his brutal swords. "It has turned daylight to darkness. What is the point in hoping for another Twilight?"
Blinking incredulously, Stokken said, "The fire of Keld has burned brightly throughout the day. How much more must we stoke it to make it last the night?"
"Youth!" Lairsen spat angrily. The word was a curse. "Hope is the delusion of the young."
In a low voice, Stokken murmured, "And despair is the delusion of the old."
"What was that!" Lairsen barked, drawing steel. A moment later, the sword was returned to its sheath, and blood wept from a long gash on Stokken's face. The slash was so quick, the sword so sharp, that Stokken did not even feel the attack until his neck grew warm. Doyen Lairsen repeated, "What was that?"
Stokken bowed deeply, dropping to one knee. "I have spoken out of turn, Doyen. Forgive me. I was not responsible for my words, deluded, as I was, by hope."
Lairsen's brow furrowed. The implication was clear- the doyen had done himself a dishonor by striking a deluded man. Still, if he admitted Stokken was not deluded, the doyen would have lost the previous argument. This young man bore watching.
"A delusional man should not bear a sword. Surrender yours to me." Doyen Lairsen smiled, knowing he had won.
Stokken was wise enough not to resist. Even a word at this juncture could be construed as a refusal, as grounds for summary execution. He slowly slid his sword from his shoulder harness.
Receiving the blade, Doyen Lairsen gritted his teeth viciously. "Next you will be seeing visions-the army resurrected beneath a midnight sun-" The grin melted from his face, replaced by a strange golden glow.
Stokken studied his doyen's scarred face some moments before turning to gaze where he did. Forgetting his penance, Stokken rose to stare.
Aback the gray serpent of Twilight rode a dreaming thing. Its hull gleamed golden. Its masts were full-rigged in white-bellied sails. It was queer and glorious and unbelievable, the Golden Argosy from the Necropolis.
Could it be that the ship had tumbled with the rest of the destroyed citadel? Could it be that like its people, the ship had been dragged into the boiling maelstrom? It seemed impossible that the Golden Argosy could ride now, whole and beaming upon the serpentine tides. And who did she bear upon her crowded decks?
"What is this delusion?" Doyen Lairsen wondered aloud before he could stop himself.
"Hope," breathed camp runner Stokken, taking back his sword. "That delusion is hope."
Eladamri had never seen so beautiful a sky. After three days in the bowels of a glacier, any sky would have been splendid. But this boreal blue, with its ranges of cloud above a tossing sea, this was magnificent. Its glory was second only to that of the Golden Argosy herself.
She was a strange ship, stranger even than Weatherlight. There was not a stick of furniture in her, no stores, no ballast, no heads, no crew. There was not even a helm. The ship sailed according to her own will. Indeed, she had a will. She had navigated the tight confines of the glacier with an expert rudder, sliding through impossible spaces. Her masts never ground upon the ceiling, her gunwales never scraped the walls. She made sail and reefed sail not according to the torrents of wind beneath the ice but according to the winds of another world. Always, she found the fastest path. Always, she drew up the thousands upon thousands of Keldons and elves who survived beneath the ice. Though her hull was commodious, it could not truly have held this many, and yet each new arrival found room among his or her fellows. Within her hull, they were warm and dry, neither hungering nor thirsting-healed of all they lacked, clothed and rested, even given to understand the speech of each other.
She was an odd ship, constructed not from material but from ideal. She did not sail true seas but rather the seas of dream.
Amid impossible thousands of others, Eladamri and Liin Sivi stood on deck as the Argosy emerged from beneath the ice. Together they saw the aching blue sky. The sun broke upon the two of them but cast down a single shadow.
"Once again among the living," Eladamri said gladly.
"Once again," Liin Sivi echoed. Her hand found his, and she slid her fingers between his. "I hadn't doubted it, not from the moment I saw this ship."
Drawing a deep breath of the bright air-no more the wet chill murk-Eladamri replied, "Oh, I doubted. I thought we would never see daylight again. I thought the ship itself a dream. I am not certain it is not."
"They are not a dream," Liin Sivi said, pointing to a nearby shoulder of stone. A Keldon camp perched there. Warlords and lackeys crowded the cliff, gazing in wonderment. "Nor is Port Bay a dream." She gestured toward the great Keldon city, its domes and spires jagged against the sparkling sea. "How can this be a dream?"