Koijal awoke from dreams of lightning to a day shrouded in fog.

“It’s like we slipped through the gate in the west,” he remarked to his second-in-command, a dour Eastholder named Stellben. “Like we’re sailing off-course through the Sea of Worlds.”

“That’s water under our keel,” said Stellben, who understood the wind and waves of the world-ocean as well as any woman alive, but whose grasp of simile and metaphor was less masterful. “We’re not so far out from Sandport,” she added. “Passed by the Iljhut Rocks around dawn.”

“Home today, you think, then?”

“Tonight at the latest. Is that,” asked his literal-minded navigator, “a god on the foredeck?”

Koijal looked at the foredeck: a black-on-white presence was standing there—and a white-on-black entity that was somehow the same but opposite.

“Two,” he said, and issued his last order as commander of the Flayer. “Abandon ship.”

Stellben looked wonderingly at him rather than passing along the order, and then the stillness came upon them.

When Koijal saw the oar-thains grow still, saw the sudden stiffness in Stellben’s face, felt the weight on his own limbs, he had one moment left to speak. He wanted to express his frustration and anger for almost returning home, his shame and his grief for the crew of his first command, his fury at the forces that were killing him. He got as far as, “Why—?” and then the stillness fell on his throat and lungs.

“No word will pass from this ship to the Graith.”

“My decree from before time forbids it.”

“My silence, stretching back from after time’s end, has swallowed it.”

“Natural law, the conflict of our wills, informs us—”

“The meaningless pattern of meanings that means whatever I will—”

“The Graith stands as a wall between Time and Time’s end.”

“The Graith has been infected with my Chaos.”

“It has been wounded by my ceaseless sword of Fate.”

“The infection must spread.”

“Liar. It’s a wound, not an infection. The wound must bleed the lies of Chaos away.”

“You’re the liar. But the Graith must not know any truths that will heal your lies, lest they also cure the infection of my empty truth.”

“No, it’s the other way around.”

As the gods bickered, the fog surrounding the trireme thickened and brightened. It worked its way into the oars and the hull, splitting them into fragments, and the fragments into fragments.

Now Flayer was gone; Koijal and his crew were now adrift in the dense dissolving mist. It wormed its way into them, dividing them into segments of themselves, and the segments into segments, until there was nothing left that could feel pain anymore and death was a convenient door to shut against the snarling of the gods.