Author's Preface
Amongst the detritus and dolor of this long ago struggle, Lord Emberbole's undergalley now bobbed and pranced.
A copper-hued cork in a vast, black, subterranean bottle.
Umin's gloved fingers in thoughtful idleness twisted the atrous, crackling salt-rime of the rail as he pondered this vast unholy wrack.
The piled islets inched past.
Their looming incongruence surfeit with filth and shapeless impurities, where Sufa's suffering once made dense and temporal, had long ago flung those broken, clawing, grinding, biting terrors down upon the shrinking craft and crews of Koom's wilting armada.
Were it not for House Niim, and its small legion of nonpareil Weavers, placed shrewdly here and there about the decks of Koom's fleet, the annals of Umin's world might have bent into other histories more unholy and unknowable .
And even as most of the woeful Weavers were spent like matchsticks, leaving behind only empty and fleshy heaps of unwholesome somethings, stretching ghastly across the lashing decks. Sufa was boiled in the arc of their wondrous singing.
Resolving into gobbets and spittle like a searing wax to drop into the lightless, licking tides.
Her legion of clawing and hungry ordure then collapsed, a rain of rotting carrion that cracked the hulls of whole ships, as Sufa and her harrowing illuminance dissolved into the softening, suspiring waves.