The deep song

You sing, your vocal cords stretching as you invoke the deep places in the world, the wonders so beautiful Lady Black must cloak them in her skirts from sight. You sing of the Neathbow, each colour found out on the wide and lonely zee. You sing of the communities that find each other in the dark: on land and below. The ecologies of flesh and fin, the communions that occur between the twain, sacred and profane. You sing of home, so far away. You sing of the wonders that never cease. You are Neathstruck. You sing and it echoes around the cave, bringing your voice back to you in uncanny echoes – and echoes – and echoes.

And echoes. The water is bathed in luminescence that shifts and shines like film on the surface. The Midnight Whale answers in a song that pulls you deeper: it sings of a desire to be no more alone. It sings of death, of glory: of a fire in the blubber that cannot be quenched. It sings of envy of the aminscenent, who go before their time. It sings of its deserved fate, as cinders among the stars, for all who have loved her are now gant. It is not a song of ascension; it is a song of death. The desire to sink is as much a desire to die – and it is sinking.

Firmament The whale must depart, in one way or the other.