Never before had I considered the vastness of the great sea. For day after day it was nothing but a little disk of blue surrounding me. By day the disk was lit with an unimaginable brilliance, and the deeper blue produced by a passing cloud became the most desirable color in existence. By night the blue was replaced by a lustrous silver. At dusk and dawn could be seen all of the colors of the perla that I had known and loved since birth. But regardless of the color, the disk remained unchanged: day, after day, after day.
Food became an issue very quickly as I was a full blooded and growing young man, but I was more or less successful in this regard. My net that I used to collect the osteos was also handy for other uses as well. I could not really capture any ichthys with it, but there were small kalmari in great numbers that I came across on a couple of occasions. They were so numerous and apparently interested in one another, I probably could have captured a dozen with my bare hands. As it was, the bottom of my boat was filled with dozens of the creatures, each roughly the size of the palm of my hand. I ate them raw, wet and wriggling. If only I had managed to preserve one or two shells of the osteos, I could have fashioned a hook, and used some of my net to create a line, along with the less appealing kalmari as bait. However, between the two instances of kalmari, and one rather fortunate collision with an exocoetus that flew into my little skiff with me, I was not near to starvation, even after a week at sea.
The far greater problem was water, fresh water. On my second day at sea I was blessed with a shower that drenched my hair and slaked my thirst and filled the bottom of my little skiff. The water at the bottom of the skiff was drinkable for another day, but slowly it dwindled, and more and more salt-water came in and mixed with it, to the point that I had to stop drinking. Another danger I had never considered was the sun itself. I had thought that no amount of sun could damage my skin but I was wrong. After two days with no protection my back and shoulders began to burn rather shockingly. For the next three days I spent most of the day hanging over the side, trying desperately to derive some shade from my skiff, and preserving my skin in the water. By the sixth day at sea my strength began to fail me. The lack of water began driving me mad, and my muscles failed in their duty and would sometimes cramp intolerably. Consequently I could not hang over the side of my little boat, nor row. I simply laid in my little skiff, adrift with no plan in mind, continually recalling a phrase my father used to utter so often surrounded by water with nothing to drink.
It was during the sixth day that the visions began. Thoughts of my mother and father, Haepha and even Astree, and many other extended family and friends from my lost home of Atalantia were never far from my mind by day or night. But at some point on the sixth day they came to me as never before, as if they were in my boat with me in corporeal form. On several occasions I would reach out to touch them, failing to understand why I could not. Words cannot express the heartache I felt by not being able to embrace the visions. I began to understand that if I closed my eyes I could see them even better; that they existed on the other side of some now recognizable border. They spoke of a darker place, and a river they had crossed. I began to feel as though my little skiff might cross this river as well.
However, I began to take greater notice of other presences as well around this time. Sometimes it seemed that there was a greater intelligence to the sea than I had previously imagined. The second occurrence of kalmari seemed to have almost been herded toward my craft, and on the night that the flying fish jumped into my boat I swore that I saw some lithe female-like form beneath the surface, chasing exocoetus up into the air. On the sixth night I began to notice voices in the water, in opposition to the characters of my friends and family in my boat. These voices were calling for me to hold fast, to open my eyes once more, to inhale and exhale again. I could no longer lift my head to look over the side of my skiff, as my muscles would no longer respond correctly, but I could feel appendages touching my craft, and I perceived a motion that slowly gained in speed. I asked these phantasms repeatedly who or what they were, and what purpose they had for me. All I could perceive from their responses was a name or a sound: Neriedes.
On the seventh and final day of my time in the skiff, one of the most vocal of the nymph-like creatures climbed over the rim of my craft and introduced herself as Calypso. She managed to convince me through various tricks and charms that a long and significant destiny awaited me on this side of the dark river that separates this life and the next. Her charms were of a distinctly feminine nature, and I was shocked to learn that some deep unknown supply of vitality remained at the base of my mortal coil. In fact, so effective were Calypsos methods that I actually found myself sitting up in the middle of the seventh day, in an effort to reach out to touch this strange phantasmagoric creature. At this very moment of my rising a great rendering crack occurred above my head, and a blinding flash lit the strangely darkened midday sky. The heavens opened and blessed rain began to fall so thick that I could hardly breath. The water soaked into my briny skin, through my eyes and ears and nose and mouth. For several minutes I was awash in happiness, becoming drunk on the blessed fresh water, and enraptured by the visage and motions of Calypso.
Every bit as suddenly as the storm began, the clouds parted, rays of sunlight exploded through, and Calypso winked and dashed from the front of my craft without a word. Before my feelings of immense disappointment and betrayal could even fully form, I found my eyes staring at a great sea craft that was boring down directly upon me, flying out of the curtain of the storm