The Key She Did Not Try
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
She found the scar on waking, pale as old moonlight, tracing a coastline she'd never seen. She passed her palm over it, wondering what she might find, and saw a vessel ride the dark.
She tucked the seas etched upon her skin, and down the cove it led her. Down through crag and cave, moss and skull where waters merged, the dark caves cool and subtle.
Darkened doorways, flooded shafts – Death will find her down there, she could hear echoes jabbering behind her, warning her still – but what would she do in surface's air?
No worries – the dankness aided her move without sound, and without her snorkel wreathe she saw no one approach, vessel locked among deep caverns, while deep within the sea, the stars locked with their guardians.
She found the vessel within those caverns, a thing reborn from ashen bones, and with a touch, the Doors opened – and she stepped beyond the cove.
She found her grandfather's Formless one less sturdy than she remembered, perched among the sea-bottoms. He was staring at a wall bound in glyphs she could not read, signifying the chain of gods dividing Time by way of balls.
"Grandfather," she called – Axel – but the minute lifted upon her, unable to tell where the floor left off and the sky dabbed in at the periphery of vision, color so faint she was afraid of blurring it.
He looked her way with old eyes, and whispered quickly – "Not here – Liriel – who knows what would catch us other than the forefathers?" – and like the others before him, she followed his Formless to the cove where tiny lighthouses lightened the rocks with false-reflections from either side.
When they reached the cove, a pair of gods rustled in the skybound rock-shores, and at once Axel set her beneath the sea, where time grew slower than the chilled water above; above, all was still and silent.
She did not see where he disappeared, but she remembered the musty smell of an old archive, and with that, saw the walls with their haggard waves of wafting patterns of minute attachments holding off the cove's blizzard of a bubbly song.
She found nothing that resembled the sounds of her ancestor's footsteps, but the gravel floor pricked with each of her fingers and the walls crawled cold upon her skin.
She rested a moment, knowing her path only rudely at this point, and looked into the conceptual cave – the one with shells on the◆ About the ending
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