A Dark Wave

Somewhere out there, deep and distant and dissonant, surrounded by the stoneground dark of the night sky, somewhere I felt there was something watching me. Carefully. Slowly. Gathering its evidences and examinations. Something huge and impenetrably dark, way out in the center of the sea, a thousand miles from the shore in a stretch so barren that no country claimed it, where the waves lap so deep down they barely make an impression on the oil-slick mirrored surface. A Swedish tree, or an ebony mineshaft, a transparent column that rose up and walked on all fours. It was just swelling there, a huge black wave growing like a mountain just for me, and I could feel it, like a magnet pulling in steel shavings toward the center, slamming its fists hard into the drums it had placed against the sea floor for all to hear.

It was a church, it was a religion: ageless, boundless and cold and it growled like a slamming, discordant piano. It was angry at all the things that would pass, all the things that wouldn't last, and that fact just fueled its growth, that fact just sent out black spiders of ash ink that wailed like women across its mass. Somewhere out there it was growing darker and more unknowable, somewhere it was coming for me, somewhere the surface of the sea looked like the great plains, just endless rolling wheat and chaff as far as the eye could see, and somewhere a choir of male voices were repeating my every word to this swelling wave, this swollen lump on uncharted waters, feeding its anger and stoking its flames.

Their plan was unclear but the black wave was for me, that much I could tell. Would it wait for me to come find it, riding the crests and docks on a dawntreading ship? Or would it grow impatient and rise up, spilling like a trio of semi-solid horses charging across the coasts and the cities, spreading ink across the map of America and swallowing every man, woman and child in its path until it could reach me, touch me, and carry me away on vacationing currents to drown again and again and again in the center of the sea.