Prompt fic (original)

[icarus_chained]

Title:  The Rig
Rating:  PG
Wordcount:  312
Notes:  Inspired by this image: http://swineblogger.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/pier-trail-path-fog-1a.jpg, courtesy of jij 

The Rig

 

It was foggy out. In every direction as she turned, the world was grey and dense and dim, lit only by the ghostlight of a sun, wrapped close and whispering. But that was alright. It was always foggy here, and it wasn't as if Echo minded. She'd been born on the Rig, after all.

Ignoring the bulk of it behind her, the ramshackle collection of wood and steel and iron, of shacks and mansions and catwalks and scaffolding, she faced out onto the pier and started walking. The grey, salt-stained wood creaked and groaned beneath her feet, and she listened with the odd intensity of hearing of all etherfolk, to the clack-tap-creak of her feet, and the wind-whisper of fog, and the phantom echoes of long-lost waves beneath them all. She didn't know why the ghost-waves were there, in this place that had never seen a sea, in the Ether where the fog was all you knew. She was pretty sure no-one else did either. She had asked, when she was younger. But no-one knew, and no-one said, and that was just the way things were. And she was late, and had no more time for questioning.

She looked up, on the heels of that realistation, up through the fog, tracing the lines tied to the pier to the ships that they moored. Up into the halflight, to the looming shadows of whalers and skyships and spaceships, to the Ether Fleet, the ghostships of worlds. Her eyes danced among them, picking out the shadowed bowsprit of the Dutchman, moored to her left, the boxy shape of the Calhari shuttle, bobbing beneath her, the evil maw of the Shadowsailer floating in the void to her distant right. And there, above them all, dropping down through the Ether towards home, returned from her voyage to the worlds, her love. Her home. Her beauty.

The Ethership Persephone.