the candle flickers . . .
They dreamed of a white dragon, a tree, a streetlamp haloed by moths. A glossed fangy grin, a shimmer of scales, twisted dark trunks that swayed and creaked and snapped, a deep howling hollow, a flicker in the lamplight. The wind smelled like salt and moss and blood and indigo. The leaves on the tree were shaped like faces. Someone was coming. The dragon opened its molten eye.
Wake up.
Alicia, Zosime, Dakota, Christopher, Sidwell
They'd been lying stiff on the floor for awhile now, rocking gently, surrounded by the wooden creak and muffled waves of a ship at sea. Gray foggy sunlight splintered through the seams of the domed ceiling and cast a dim light upon the room.
The floorboards and panels -- which had once long ago been straight and polished -- were rough with new bark. Sprigs of tiny bright leaves dotted the floor and the walls and quivered under the ceiling.
Thin vines webbed up the hexagonal column at the center of the room. The wooden column was also veiled in bark and little branches, but the intricate reliefs and carvings were still visible under the growth. On one side of the hexagon was an empty hollow and a faint imprint of a hand in the wood within. On the opposite side was a door.
The column rose six feet, and atop it rested a magnificent -- if tarnished -- brass telescope. It dominated the room, and must once have shimmered splendidly, but now it only stared blindly up at the closed ceiling while the skies passed outside.
Access to the eyepiece of the telescope could be obtained via a short staircase that rose along the wall. The stairs led to a small weedy platform from which the eyepiece could be grasped. There were, of course, stiff valves and switches attached to the eyepiece which could be used to adjust the view of the dark ceiling.
Farther along the wooded wall was another door, and then a mechanical lever fixed into the wall. The lever was rusted and knotted with stringy vines. A tough black cable ran up the wall from the lever and disappeared into the ceiling.
There were books here, crumbling in bookcases set into the walls and secured by creeping vines. A weathered, lichen-spotted table was nailed to the floor, and on it an orrery gleamed.
The orrery was the only thing that seemed untouched by age, though it sat dormant. Its clean brass sun -- the size of a grapefruit -- was circled by an array of mechanical planets supported by rods and gears and springs.
Below the floor came the low murmur of voices.
Moss, Tamara, Tommy, Elin, Chris
They lay among musty parchment and scattered pencils, a chaos of thrown books and two runaway globes that rumbled and rolled with the tilt of the room. It was dry here, and it smelled like old paper and ink and glue. All around them, wood creaked and groaned. Occasionally a ring of old iron keys tapped and jangled against the wall where they hung. Beside the keys was a door that -- given the glow of pale sunlight behind it and the louder sounds of the ocean -- must lead outside.
The floor, the walls and the ceiling were coated in new bark and sprouting little sprigs of leaves, as if the wood had come back to life. Few of the new sprouts on the floor had survived the constant trek of the globes that crushed them, and leaves lay withered and dead among the frayed maps. Almost all of the maps on the floor bore at least one X, scrawled in thick ink.
The center of the room was filled by a wide hexagonal column that stretched from floor to ceiling, and it was sprouted and rough with bark as if it fancied itself a tree. There had once been beautiful carvings in the column, depicting scenes from seafaring folklore -- but they had long ago been carved over by a madman's hand, which had gnawed runes and arrays and a crude carved picture of a dragon into the side of the column with a penknife. These carvings had been smoothed long ago by bark and thin webbed vines.
A crude map of an island was tacked to the column. On it was scrawled "Last known strike of feather" with an arrow pointing to a mountain at its heart.
On one side of the column was a small hollow, at chest height, in which sat a ratty stuffed bear with one eye. On the opposite side was a door.
Bookshelves spanned one wall, and wispy vines and struggling saplings filled the gaps where most of the books had been yanked and tossed on the floor long ago.
One shelf near the ceiling had been entirely cleared away, leaving only a small silver box. It was carved ornately with flowing patterns, and sat on silver feet like talons. All of the keys on the wall were far too big to fit the little silver lock.
Another sprouted wall held a dozen glass boxes, each of which contained the skeleton of a strange small creature -- some with two heads, others that appeared to be not quite lizards nor birds nor mice. Two of these boxes were empty.
A long table and four red-cushioned chairs were nailed to the floor, all of them covered in dust and scrolls and maps and ink. A long map of an ocean passage was held down on the table by two empty mugs, a magnifying glass and an oil lamp. A tripod was positioned over the map, and a sharp gleaming pendulum swung back and forth. There were traces of dark old blood on the pendulum and the map.
Beside the map was a hammer, and the crushed remains of bones in a shallow bowl. One of the little skeletons sat beside the bowl as if awaiting its fate.
Garren, Samira, Suichiro, Risa, Connor
They had been lying stiff on the floor for a long while before the gentle rock and creak and clink of wood and metal roused them. The stifling room was pungent with copper and cedar and oil and soot. The floor was spattered with old oil stains and charred by ancient accidents, which were hidden by new bark and sprigs of little leaves, as if the floorboards had begun to come back to life.
Four huge, lichen-pocked boilers dominated the room, surrounded by pipes, valves, gauges, levers, buttons and sprockets that crowded the thin corridors. A network of cold pipes crisscrossed overhead. Four deep wells -- two along each wall -- were filled with giant gears and slack cables. At each well was a ladder that led down into the dark crawlspaces below the floor.
The gears of one of the wells were jammed by splintered bones and tattered gray cloth.
Each of the six levers throughout the room had been locked into position with crude knotted chains. Wrenches and screwdrivers had been crushed and lodged between the gears' teeth. Buttons had been yanked from their seatings, the springy disks littered the floor.
The boilers were empty, and the burners hung open and black, invaded by creeping vines. At the far end of the room, plenty of coal sat unused in a metal closet. Beside it sat ravaged boxes of tools and oily singed gloves.
At the other end of the room was a locked door that led deeper into the ship; what dim light there was to see by shone down through a grate above the door. Beside it was a brass horn connected to a pipe that disappeared into the ceiling. Attached to the pipe was a switch, no doubt for the purpose of opening or closing communication with other decks.
On opposite walls, vine-wrapped metal ladders led up to locked trap doors in the ceiling. Dark oil lamps hung from nails on the walls.
At the center of the room, surrounded by walkways and boilers and ladders, was a tall, complicated nest of thin pipes, cables, gauges, gears and wires that undulated and wrapped around one another like the ornate trunk of a tree. The core of the messy and beautiful sculpture was a glass cylinder with delicate clamps inside it. Whatever this had been meant to protect was now gone.
