Being consumed by a dark god was just the beginning.

When Th’yaleh’s great tentacles rose around my little dinghy, I looked frantically for escape, but of course there was none. Perhaps there had never been any escape possible, from the first; perhaps all my travails at the oars of the lifeboat, and the ill-fated voyage of the Robin before that, and the war, and even my love for Eleanor, every breath, every word, every gesture, had all been to lead me here, to the dripping ascent of those serpentine mouth-parts. In unexpected surety, like Socrates presented with his hemlock, I looked then not to those glossy coils, but to the late afternoon sun, another sort of god, who shone down cold and regretful. Good-bye, old friend.

READ MORE…