I stand on a sleek boulevard overlooking the dock and my bones are filled with frost and duty. They tell me someone from my family has always stood on this spot, this or one very much like it, looking out towards the Wavering Sea which lies outside the City. My hands ache, tugged towards the water as if the ice in my veins longs to return to its former, more relaxed state, to roll gently to and from both sides of the body of water. Around me, the busy traffic on the boulevard is as brisk as ever, although its easy to detect people picking up their pace as they pass by me. The man next to me, clad is he is in his crimson raiment, walks softly towards the boys and assures them that everything is alright in his golden voice. This one will be a problem. They tell us that the sea was here before us but not by much; right after the glacial melt turned this massive dust bowl into an enclosed ocean, we came from somewhere and looked out across it. That somewhere constantly changes, revolving around a choice of tired tropes; we either came across a mountain or from a forest or from a land so far away that its name only means “The Far Place” or some other nonsense that the storytellers feel would loosen people’s purses. Wherever we came from, we’ve been here for ages; now there’s a City here which mistakes us, me, as part of it, rationalizing our presence so that it makes sense inside their municipal narrative. Almost like a physical extension of that narrational effort, the lights of the City spill out over my shoulders and towards the sea, obscuring the stars and lending the wave-foam a glitter, as if a thousand pearls were scattered into the night air with every susurration of the waves. They call it the Wavering Sea because, like all bodies of water, it defies definition and demarcation. But they also call it that because, without it, the City would waver, and they feel that inconsistency, that dependence in their bones, in the same place frost and duty live in my own skeleton. They don’t like to recognize the unusual nature of their demesne, shoveling the remnants of how the world was made into the realms of stories and histories, so that they can ignore that the stories are real and that they walk their streets. And we? We’re the postman stationed at the door underneath the bed, the portal through which the magic pours in, holding it closed enough to keep the worst of the night out but not so closed that the nocturnal part which makes brains exist, disappears. All of this while our more visible counterparts destroy the odd thing that makes it in. A perfect balance then, one which affords the City the wavering of reality on which its existence relies while keeping out the worst of what would seek to undo its precious routine and stability. Which is, of course, nonsense. Magic does indeed pour in from the Wavering Sea but we were here long, long before the City ever needed a psychological scapegoat, a guardian whose job it is to allow them to forget that which he is guarding from, long before these…Guards ever began their assignations. The pain in my fingers increases and my heart starts beating faster. My sailors must have hoisted the sails; I can feel it deep within, my own personal, internal glacier shifting in the face of the prospect of return, another voyage on the skin of its ancestors, its liquid forefathers. The voyage is inevitable now, not that there was ever a real doubt of that; the narwhals have been riding high recently, the tell-tale surges of their presence increasing in size, the more philosophical parts of their existence pushing against the proverbial door. "Out there”, I point gruffly at the sea from the boulevard, drawing the soldier’s attention from the scampering children, “the brighter you shine your light, the bigger the shadows become. Do you understand?” He nods and tries to swallow his panic stealthily, so that I don’t see it. But I do; he is not ready. His mind is too sharp and there’s too much weight behind it; the bones of who he is, the words that make his story and his family’s story and the story of his house and his street and his City, are too brittle. My bones ache, the terrible onus of my family’s years and calling descending upon my shoulders, the frozen torrent of eons running alongside my blood, freezing the core of me. We’re all going to die on this tour, probably.

Seek and in seeking turn swiftly around; draw from your cartilage scabbard a broken sword and in drawing strike Swiftly down; shatter tightly clenched arterial chains forged from mithril fears and in forging hold All you are; tether swiftly escaping guttural dreams weaved in gossamer fears and in weaving find A measure of peace; anoint fast decaying cerebral hopes masticated from digested pain and present them for the world to destroy.