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<span class="mu-i">The vast majesties below lie on their grand thrones and listen to the lapping of the waves, the cold flow from the ice floes of the Shimmering Sea, the gentle wind that hurls itself off the little space up Grand North than no human has seen for a hundred years, compacted into a point the mass of a thousand mountains by the last grand invocation of people whose name we no longer recall. Land comes and goes. Shifts. Shudders. changes. Granite cracks and sediment shudders and the wind itself steals topsoil like a theft to dust it down in droplets over Pytherii farms a thousand-thousand miles away.
Land comes and goes.
But the Water remains.
Th Flow is what it is, the Waters are what they are and are what they were. And there are depths of the Sea the Sun itself cannot penetrate, down in the Deeper Blue, where light shifts and cracks and bends and Warmth is a concept half forgotten, half scorned by the quiet monarchs and their silent courts.
A Leviathan is a dispassionate sovereign. They staked their territory by Accord so long ago their title has soaked into the geography of waterways, the whispered words of limnologist, the awed dreams of fishermen in every village on every coast. Perhaps they - like us - squabble in wars of water, bear arms against each others, mark territory somehow, compete for control over particularly pleasant oceanic currents. We don't know. The Ocean is not for us.
In Arashton, the stories say, they raised a fleet to fight the Waters, and went to war, and went to woe, and captured a small thing only half the size of a city district, and stripped it of scale and blood and bone and with and rope and pulley and determination hoisted it home to display in the square across the High House of the Governor.
Arasthon, grandest metropolis on the Kalcmiri coastline, is mud and muck now. First the Tide came in. And then, the Teeth.
... The Ocean, it is generally agreed, is not our Domain.
We cross it but briefly, we try not to linger, and when the Tide rolls in and stops at the height-markers it stopped at yesterday, well, we breathe a little sigh of relief...</span>
