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Over half of them had been lost outright during the shift, the vast majority of them vanishing into thin air. Perhaps dead, wiped from existence, or perhaps back wherever they had come from with the rest of the ship. Some of them found the idea that others had made it a comforting one. As if they would not have been stuck on the sinking aft of a halved vessel rapidly being swallowed by sea. The ones that had not vanished were drowned as the destroyer settled on the isle that was its unlikely saviour, taken by the rushing waters.
Commander Shahi’s preferred explanation was that the storm must have disrupted their instruments and a great wave had enveloped them, giving the false impression of slicing the ship in half. Except, ah, the ship was sliced in half, and they had beached themselves on a rocky sandbar that didn’t previously exist. At first, it was claimed they had gotten turned around in the storm and arrived offshore of some other country, but it grew increasingly evident that the shore ahead was Floridian landscape, so the newly espoused claim was that whatever they had been attacked by whatever they had been sent to investigate.
What attacker cuts a ship perfectly in half? ‘Foreign entity’ was the term oft used, but no indication as to who. ‘Attacked by a foreign entity’, Shahi just kept saying. It was of little comfort. They could not raise the mainland or any other ships over their radio channels, which spat out only static and warbling. They were alone. And with the destroyer gutted, mechanical intestines spilled into the sand and the sea, it was useless. The first hours were frenzied and forced, attempts to cross back over the invisible threshold yielding nothing but four more vanishings.
With no other choice, the remaining 112 survivors gathered on the prow of the ship and took the remaining lifeboats in groups, gradually shuttling everyone that was left towards the perceived safety of the coast, the comforting presence of human architecture that was the lighthouse. Its shining light had been their saving grace in the dark. Later, they would recognise it for what it was, an angler-lure designed to entice. It would spell the end of them all.
They explored the lighthouse before dawn, and when morning came, a loose base camp was established on the beach. The first day was one of back-and-forths, detachments ordered back to the wreckage to begin salvaging supplies—rations, equipment, guns, anything they could carry and the lifeboats could withstand. Attempts to contact superiors continued to fail, the radios still sputtering static and the occasional burst of gibberish. Directionless, commander Shahi settled on holing up in the lighthouse and waiting for a rescue to arrive. It was not an agreed-upon stance, but those were her orders. Wait, and survive.
By the end of the third day, there were already strange occurrences, stranger than whatever had taken them here. Birds soared in staccato, at times seeming to stutter in flight like the pausing of footage. At times, strange lights filled the sky. The ocean churned with unnatural levels of animal activity, no creatures that any of them could identify. Perhaps they were in some manner of purgatory, some suggested. Others suggested Hell. The commander and her officers held onto their hope for rescue. Panic was a patient thing, slowly tightening its grip around their throats. Settling over them was a grand sense that every hour brought them creeping closer towards some inescapable fate.
Inland, lieutenant Bradley argued. If no rescue was to arrive, they should begin moving northwards for signs of civilisation, or move up the coast towards the island on their maps, where there was known to be not only another lighthouse, but some degree of human activity. It was too quiet here, not an outsider in sight. They needed to find someone. Anyone. Shahi did not agree with him. They would stay. The lighthouse was trustworthy, at least for the time being. Already, the seeds of an internal divide were being planted, Bradley wanting nothing more than to depart, with Shahi and the other officers preferring the beach.
The fourth day yielded half of their food supplies inexplicably turning putrid, befouled overnight by some kind of fast-growing mould, killing two and cutting the time they could feasibly hold out in half. Bradley’s wish was half-granted, a group given guns and sent into the wilderness to gather anything edible. Berries, animals, and so on. Most returned by nightfall. Bradley and four others did not, striking out in search of humanity. Attempts to contact them incited the radios towards a frenzied agitation until they were all screaming and cackling and howling. It did not do the rapidly-fraying morale any favours.
At dusk, two of the crew held several others at gunpoint and seized their radios before discarding their guns and charging into the sea hand-in-hand while screaming all the while. They vanished into the water, and could not be found in the dark. Shahi ordered the rest of the radios gathered up, smashed to pulp, and locked in the lighthouse basement. Beyond the occasional burble, they mercifully went silent.
It was not until the next morning that Bradley returned with only two others, all three of them shaken by an event they chose not to speak of, one of the men never speaking again. In spite of his untold experience, Bradley continued to advocate for heading north, as if whatever he had witnessed had instilled within him a fear of the lighthouse itself. Or, it would later be suggested, that whatever he had seen had set within him a fire, a fierce compulsion to lay eyes upon the unknowable once again.
On the fifth day, the war began.
The sea crept backwards, then surged like a hungry thing, growling towards base camp and enveloping it like the invisible wall had once eaten their destroyer, shredding the makeshift tents and devouring 41. The lighthouse was untouched, the food supplies and most of the guns safely held within, Shahi and her officers spared from the slaughter. As the lilting sea receded, the survivors once again regrouped and moved into the lighthouse, trusting the beach no longer. Like the radios, the sea had betrayed them. It would do so again.
Mere hours later, still scavenging the remains of the beach, another softer surge unleashed nameless enemies first perceived in a different light by all who gazed upon them, then forgotten as fast as they had been witnessed. The hours were stolen, the security of memory sundered and cast aside, and the only certainty by the end was that they had lost 13, and they had burned through numerous magazines of ammunition. They could not remember what they had been shooting at, nor could they locate any of their supposed dead. Vanished, all, taken by the sea. More rationalisations of mass hallucinations, of sea surges, of swarming alligators. These brought no comfort.
Shahi ordered a defensive barrier to be erected facing the unquiet waters, as well as a secondary wall guarding them from anything that may emerge from the land. For two days, they tirelessly gathered rocks, stacked them into makeshift walls, and the sea frothed and spat at them and the weather grew ever-stranger. The followup strike did not come until the end of the first week, another wave of uncertainty that took four more of their numbers, the attack nevertheless repelled and the wall holding strong.
The desolation, as it became known, was soon joined by marine life violently throwing themselves against the sea wall at high tide, dolphins and crabs and sharks and others bashing their bodies open, a grand decay settling on the abandoned beach as the corpses rotted. There were no explanations. The madness in the sea was beginning to spiral through their minds as well. Few words were spoken by now. Shahi’s was the only voice that mattered. There was only survival, only holding out. Food rationing became ammo rationing, and the numbering of days began to lose meaning. Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. Midday sundown, midnight sun-stutter, afternoon witching hour, sunset.
Some still entertained the island or the mainland as escape routes, but the island was so far away that some believed they had imagined its existence, and there was no way to tell that the marshes would not betray them like the sea had. There was no way to tell if their own minds were betraying them or not either. Indeed, there were some who had begun to believe that everything in their lives before this point had been a dream, that they had always been fighting this war. Journals became the last refuge for some, but the conflicting entries and perceptions drove them further away from their own minds.
The desolation continued. Two today, six tomorrow, lucky zero the next, an alleged eighteen that was really an eleven that was really a twelve. Despite the thinning of their numbers, they began to lose sight of who was who. For a time a confusion seized them over whether Shahi’s appointed second-in-command, lieutenant commander Lawson, was still himself or if he had been among the invisible dead in what passed for yesterday, as foreign of a concept the idea of ‘yesterday’ now was. There was only the mercurial present, and the headcounts always produced different numbers. Every single time. Twenty-six, or was it nineteen, or was it thirty-one?
‘Morale is low’ became a new sort of joke. Morale was a foreign concept. Sanity was a foreign concept. Bradley had started talking to the radios in the basement and three of the crew had done nothing but scribble ‘the ocean is the destroyer of all death’ in every page of one of the journals and lieutenant commander Lawson and most of the other officers had begun construction of a barbed collar around the lighthouse balcony as if a thorned noose could fend off the desolation whenever it eventually came from the sky as their dreams supposedly foretold, and commander Shahi had started screwing Parsons, her new third-in-command, even though the freshly-christened lieutenant claimed that the lighthouse was speaking to her.
Madness was the world. They were the madness.
Two, four, six, the desolation spurned more into the sea. Or were they walking into the water themselves? Sixteen left, or perhaps they still numbered 40, or perhaps there were only four of them, but a clarity struck Shahi one midday-dusk, and she ordered a third of her personnel—whether that was nine or seventeen or ten—to take the last of the lifeboats, drifting softly in the shallows and row back to their former ship, its silhouette hanging dark on the horizon. “The missiles,” the commander was saying, “We can kill it.” Kill what? The border? The sea? The lighthouse? What could death-seeders do to any of them? None were certain. Shahi herself did not seem certain of her own words. Nevertheless, ensign Kearney followed her orders, shepherded a group of six or eight or none into the lifeboat, and began to cross the sea.
Unstrategic as it was to stand on the beach without the wall to shield them, they could not help but race out and marvel at the survival of that boat, the way it crossed the sea and the sea did not devour it but instead permitted its passage to its parent destroyer. How victorious that moment tasted, how glorious the sight that occurred five minutes or thirty minutes or an hour later, a streaking fire so bright that for a time it killed the day and became the only sun. The missile rippled as it soared, a translucent dagger that swirled through the humming air and burst into brilliance when it hit the waves. Burning, boiling, roaring, and another missile followed. Then another. Then another. Something low was groaning through their bones, but they didn’t care. This moment was theirs.
The commander did not see when it happened, a soft sound over her shoulder forcing her to turn to the treeline and lock two eyes with the six of the not-deer that was staring back at her with a predatory curiosity and in that moment, not knowing how long her crew had been standing on that beach, she did not see when the sixth missile fell from the sky in a tailspin and left no explosion when it finally hit the sea, and she did not see when the seventh missile inherited its predecessor’s detonation and erupted as soon as it had launched. The destroyer wreathed in searing orange, the victorious minutes butchered, and the lighthouse was shining out shining out shining out, and settling over the world was not silence but instead a cold ringing in all of their ears, and shapes were looming from the water, but it was not the formless desolation. That would be too kind.
Everything the desolation had taken, everything and everyone, striding out of the water like they were coming home, tattered not-clothing sticking to their jagged frames, false noise filtering through their fake mouths. Dozens, or perhaps merely ten, or perhaps hundreds. Neverending. And the returned crew were screaming, or the still-living crew were screaming, or the sky was screaming, and Shahi still could not tear her eyes free from that sixfold gaze, the way it blinked all at once, how it was so far away yet right in front of her at once. And it was only when Parsons grabbed her arms, shrieking with joy at the looping lenslight and screaming in a manic pitch because the dead were returning from the sea, that Shahi turned and found that everyone she had lost was coming back to haunt everyone she had left, and they were completely exposed on the beach.
The ocean is the destroyer of all death.
Ammo-rationing was a long-ago order, and none obeyed it, not even the commander herself. Shooting right through the not-crew, crumpling like they were made of paper and collapsing into the surf to be washed away even as more marched out of the water to replace their fallen ranks. A sea-surge of a different sort, the desolation by another form, the not-crew ceaseless in their advance towards the survivors, towards the lighthouse, as if playing out a foreshock of something that hadn’t happened yet, wouldn’t happen for a long time. It didn’t matter. There was only the uncertain present. The terror.
“Retreat!” The commander was shouting, and retreat they did, in all directions. One or four or eight rip-roaring into the marshes, firing over their shoulders as they went, six or two or five sprinting up the beach even though the not-crew were coming from everywhere along the shore, Shahi and Parsons and Lawson and three or seven or nine of the other officers sprinting into the lighthouse, and one of the commander’s own loyalists charging into the waiting mass of fakes, arms wide as if to embrace them. The front door slammed shut, hastily barricaded as the not-crew crashed upon it as one, half-speaking in utter nonsense soon joined by the ravings of Lawson, rapidly eclipsed by the squawks and whines of the radios from the basement below.
The survivors stampeding upwards amidst a low thrumming from the walls, a daylight darkness outside as the not-crew surrounded the lighthouse with the void of their selves. Barricading the landing, avoiding gazing out the windows as the sea disgorged endless not-crew and the destroyer flickered with a sourceless light, periodically blazing with an emerald fervour whenever the furthest reach of the fixed light passed it. The fixed light, still circling. Had Bradley turned it on, or had it awoken of its own accord? No way to know but to go up. Lawson and two—or perhaps four—of the others volunteered, and followed the spiralling staircase to the top. Ceaseless droning from below, and a fierce silence from above.
There had been others, or so Shahi thought there had once been others, but no, beyond Bradley in the basement and Lawson and his officers moving upstairs—because they were his now, she was only now realising, taken with his madness in a silent coup—it was just her and Parsons left, and that may as well have been the whole world. She was going to die. Far from home, waiting for a rescue that had never come. What a fool she’d been. Sensations followed. The rifle sliding from her grasp, cold metal giving way to hollow air, collapsing to her knees. Sucking in oxygen through grit teeth and a clenching throat.
Parsons taking her commander’s shaking hands into her own. Words whispered in Shahi’s ears with a terrified giddiness, It’s shining Marion, it’s shining so beautifully , and the recognition that Parsons’ reverence for the lighthouse eclipsed her fear for the armada outside collapsed the last of Shahi’s defences. Sobbing, scrabbling, screaming. Parsons held her as she fell apart, still crooning whispers into her ears, her comforting words never far from twisting into veneration for the light. Venerating her too, kissing her all over, hands roaming up and down her body, for a time even biting her cheek with a suggestive softness as if this was no different than the intimacy of her first floor quarters, so far away. She couldn’t understand it. The madness was in Parsons, as it was in her too. It was the world. The world, which had shrunk to the lighthouse landing, with the ghosts of the people she had failed hammering to be let in.
Lawson and the others had not returned, but there was Bradley in the doorway now, staring at them with a brightness in his eyes and conviction in his smile. Raising the half-smashed radio in his hands to his mouth, whispering to whatever was on the other side as he stared straight through her. His gaze never left her even as he disappeared up the stairs, still muttering into his broken radio. For a time, Parsons froze, though she did not stop speaking, and then resumed her dual worship with hands roaming up and down Shahi’s body. Coldness at the back of her throat, the rising fear when Parsons’ chant of shining out shining out shining out stopped and was replaced with a soft gasp that gave way to something that made her want to run away as far and as fast as she could.
Because the walls were moving, alive with swirling patterns. Like something sleeping that was waking up because of whatever Bradley was saying, as if whatever he had found out there that he had not wanted to talk about—the unspoken words that were spilling out of him now—was like an on-switch for the lighthouse, a fragment of something taken away and half-returned, fresh and sputtering to new life. And to whatever was in the light that had Parsons so enraptured, it was a missing link, imperfect but pure and that realisation slamming into Shahi’s skull made her want to curl up into a ball and cease to exist.
Not religious, but praying to god now, to anyone. Let it be over. Please let it end. I just want to feel safe again. And her prayer was answered, but not by god or the spiral-light above. For the answer came in the form of a flickering upon the horizon: The destroyer was firing the rest of its death-seeding missiles in a dandelion cloud. Spears soaring skyward, and the not-crew were surging down the beach to meet them where they would fall, an army commanded by Bradley’s words. And in her mind’s eye, too, she could see ensign Kearney standing at the controls, half-dead but commanded to live just a little longer, that’s an order, listening to the words Bradley was conveying over the undead radio. The words repeated in her ears, Parsons echoing what Bradley was roaring above with maddening clarity, the words Shahi did not want to know but could not escape:
I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives.
Shahi’s boots sloshed through the knee-high water. The first floor had been flooded, and the beach itself was drowned. The wall remained standing, and the army was gone. Lawson, Bradley, and the others were nowhere to be found. As far as she could tell, she and Parsons were the only ones left. The destroyer was out of missiles, and the lighthouse had gone still once more. Even the light had stopped spinning along its shining loop. Shahi had a hunch that it would not be long before it woke up again, a hunch reinforced because Parsons had claimed as such. The ramifications of that remained to be seen. For now, there was only water, an overcast sky, and a warm breeze.
It was anchoring, to stand on the beach and have a certainty that, for the time being, the war was over. So much death, and the grief of it all would once again catch up with her soon enough, but for the moment there was peace. That was good enough. Moving across the beach to stare out at the ruin of the destroyer she once commanded, she allowed herself a moment to let her emotions fall upon her all at once. Let the pain in, then let it through. From the corner of her eye, Parsons striding over to join her, adjusting her backpack and then taking Shahi’s hand with a carnivorous wide-eyed grin.
Voiceless goodbyes to the lighthouse and the destroyer, then a departure north, hand-in-hand. Words failed her on the trek. For a fling, Parsons had become something beyond that in more ways than one. She was not who she used to be. Shahi wasn’t her former self either. Once a destroyer commander and one petty officer among dozens, transformed into the veteran of a war of madness and the herald of the unknowable. Barely knowing each other’s depths to begin with, barely knowing themselves after everything, now inseparably bound by survival. A different sort of love. Easier to forget what they used to be. There is no past. There is no future. Only the mercurial present, unbound and ever-unfurling.
That night, they would camp in the marshland. They were setting up their makeshift tent when Parsons paused to point at the horizon moments before it brightened. The lighthouse was lighting up the night as it took on a piercing glow, an iridescent green rippling off it and rising into the sky. Shining out, shining out, shining out. Shahi’s hand finding Parsons’ own, watching the light creep ever-higher. It felt like a reminder. There was no certainty of survival in the long run. They had limited supplies, minimal knowledge of wilderness endurance, and no sense of where the boundaries of this place would end. If they ended. Anything out there could kill them, start the war all over again. But for now, there was peace. And from afar, she could understand what Parsons was seeing, even from a less-enlightened position. The lighthouse looked beautiful. And gazing upon its emerald radiance hand-in-hand, Shahi dared to hope that things would be better, that the next day would get a little easier, and the days after that.
And they did.
For a time.
windowonagreatworld Wed 11 Jun 2025 02:29AM UTC
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corvophage Wed 03 Sep 2025 05:34PM UTC
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