Chapter 201
from the last page, frozen at the rail. Then moving: vaulting over the side onto the jetty, shoving past Bastion guards, running toward the white water.
in the shallows of the white, watching Drekk run toward her. Her half-face shows nothing. Her shadow, standing a second behind her, tilts its head.
very quietly.
peeling away from her, sliding up out of the white water and onto the jetty: a flat, upright, girl-shaped dark that moves on its own, a second late.
The shadow pours along the jetty's planks, and wherever it touches, the wood goes grey. Colour. Then shape. The planks soften, blur, and un-be. The jetty is vanishing under the crew's feet.
The whole end of the jetty goes, and the crew falls: Vigolas, Kompis, Rougeina, Smurjan, Öde, Drekk, Mingus, all of them, not into water but into white. No splash. No sound. (Empty SFX box.)
The crew falling through blank white. No up, no down, no ground. Their outlines starting to go dotted at the edges, like drawings being rubbed out. Kompis's pulse-line on the panel border skipping. A Null scene: grey bleeding in from the gutters.
falling, reaching for Mingus, who is falling beside him, the only thing in the panel still drawn in solid gold.
In the middle of blank white nothing, a burst of gold: Mingus unfolding into the Griffin, a golden eagle-lion, wings so wide they could carry a ship, gold feathers blazing against the white, a great hooked golden beak, a lion's golden hindquarters, and the same warm brown eyes. He swoops under the falling crew and catches them all on his back and in his talons: Vigolas by the coat, Drekk by the collar, Öde clinging to his neck-feathers, Rougeina and Kompis and Smurjan sprawled across his back.
And he climbs, wings thundering, up out of the white toward the grey sky.
Below, in the blank, one shape is still falling: a great maw, Smurjan's third shadow, Bakasura, torn loose in the fall, tumbling down into the white, going dotted, going grey.
on the Griffin's back, twisting round, reaching down with everything he has.
far below. Bakasura's huge shape, half-drawn now, outline dotted, sinking slowly into blankness. A faint rumble, fading:
The Griffin hovering above the Tideline, wings beating, the crew on his back. Below them, the white. Above, the Bastion's walls, the guards staring down. Smurjan has two shadows now, not three (and Bali's faint one).
gripping the Griffin's feathers, staring down at the place where Bakasura went.
Not from the white. From within it. Water. A heavy, sucking slosh, like something huge wading through mud.
Out of the blank white, far below, something rises, walking up out of the Null as if out of a lake. Huge, bloated, slow: a man made of waterlogged grey-green wood, two metres and more, barnacles crusting his shoulders, black weed for hair hanging over his face. Water pours out of his open mouth. His right fist is closed against his chest.
wading waist-deep in the white, colour draining from everything just past him to blank. A drowned knot on his chest, thick with barnacles, glowing faint sea-green. Puddles pour off him, and where they fall on the white, they stay: small patches of real, grey, counted water.
DRÄMMEN · FERDINAND-9 · unranked · not on any board, and not on any map
tilting his drowned face up at the Griffin, water gushing from his mouth as he speaks, his voice gargled and far away.
leaning down off the Griffin's back.
turning, wading back into the white, deeper, deeper, his outline going dotted, until he's a grey sketch of a man walking into nothing.
the Griffin hovering above the white with the crew on its back, and the sky changing behind them: noon, afternoon, dusk, dark. One hour. Two. Three. Four.
on the Griffin's back, not moving in any of the four panels. Kneeling, staring at the white. Kali in his shadow, silent for the first time in the series.
A small sea-green light, deep down. Rising.
as he climbs up out of the white, and a heartbeat SFX, starting from nothing and counting back up, each beat a little louder:
And in his left arm, hauled against his chest, a huge grey maw, filling back in with colour, one beat at a time.
Drämmen wading up out of the Tideline onto a patch of his own wet puddle-ground, dragging Bakasura's great shape behind him by one tooth. The Griffin swooping down, the crew leaping off onto the puddle.
sprawled on the wet grey ground, counted again, colour back, jaws heaving. But wrong: a streak of blank white runs straight through his jaws, from tooth to hinge, like a stripe of unprinted paper.
lifting his huge head, blinking, licking his lips with an enormous tongue.
standing over them, water pouring off him into the puddle, drip, drip.
staring up at the drowned giant.
closed against his chest, barnacled, never opened.
Across the white water, on the far side of the Tideline, standing in the shallows with her shadow a second behind her: Ysel, watching them. Drekk on the puddle-ground, staring back at her.
turning his drowned face toward Ysel across the white, water dripping from his weed-hair, his voice slow and sad.