Author's Preface
It is known that after the Paper God had abandoned the Here for the Otherwhere. Its unutterable consort, Sufa the Braided, descended into a maelstrom of horror and unbalance.
Shedding tears of salt a thousand-fold more caustic than the anguish of any living mortal, Sufa massed its embalmed host in an armada of broad, uncanny sea-craft wrought of knit papyrus, and the lurid sinews of its once-living supplicants.
Lowering like a knotty, baleful cloud of blistering platinum and rippling quartz above the appalling flotilla.
The mourning god-thing, with Its lamenting breath lashed its unspeakable fleet forth across the lightless, torpid waters of the Great Lower Sea .
A mad, frothing swell of horror scraping the black wash down to its blind, fathomless roots.
A bright nightmare hurtling towards the Gate of Candles, and the Paper God's obscene sepulchre.
At that time, one Captain Inin Koom , a distant ancestor to Lord Meshmin , held the admiralty of the Lower Houses.
While upon the Copper Seat, sat Ferin the Faint, Lord of the Gate of Candles .
Ferin was a sickly, self-indulgent ruler, ill-regarded by the vast plurality of his court.
Furthermore, the unyielding whispers of secretive communion with the supplicant Concubines of the Paper God , had assiduously poisoned his character in regard to the cream of the Lower Houses , if not the broader preponderance of his subjects.
So it was that when the mad god-thing Sufa and its grim, ineffable entourage boiled out of the pitchy cauldron of the Great Lower Sea, Captain Inin Koom sought no counsel nor license from his detested cousin.
Marshalling his undergalleys, arms and a patchwork of sundry other seaworthy craft.
Captain Koom set out into the perpetually dusky sea, on a confrontational course that led his modest fleet to a small, then unnamed string of blanched and chalky shoals. Which ran like a gleaming spittle across the waters, one-hundred and fifteen leagues out of port.
For five bells his flotilla drifted amongst the ossified islets and uneasily watched the horizon brighten into an unnatural dawn, as glistering Sufa and its appalling armada ferociously crested the false horizon of the Great Lower Sea .