Silas winced as more rain lashed at his eyes after he’d dared a glance at the storm around them. It had come upon them so suddenly in the night, only the relentless and violent tossing of the ship could adequately dispel the hope that it was a simple nightmare. He heard his fellow sailors screaming on the deck far below him, and above the howling winds and gutturally roaring waves, his ears caught their awe-struck cries. Silas chanced a look down, and what he saw drove almost all the rest of the world away. In the wine-dark waters churned an aurora of brilliant colors…

A ley line.

Massive ribbons of green and streaks of violet cut swathes of mercurial silver and indigo against the abyssal darkness of the sea at night. Within those colors sparkled crackling stars, like embers of a cold cosmic fire that ebbed and flowed with Thalassa’s own pulse. The immense strength of the storm swelled, pulling up a twisting wall of water. The cyclone gripped the ship, lifting it from the ocean’s seat. It drew the mystical colors up around them as a web, surrounding the ship and its sailors in it as though swaddling a babe. Seamen screamed and planks of the deck were ripped into watery oblivion.

Alone in the crow’s nest, he felt his pruned, aching fingers gripping the wood, desperate for any purchase and bleeding into the grain. He did not want to die. He could not. He had a need to return home so desperate and primal but to only be the gods’ gift to mortals. At last, he dared a glance at the sky. Primal, chaotic pressure swelled, and upon being noticed, it loosed. Alabaster lightning cracked from pregnant clouds, reflected in Silas’s eyes.

And it struck him.

He felt it in a single, phenomenal moment stretched across eternity. Within it, his life became a story indivisibly told. He thought of home, of white gulls against blue sky and the sandy fronts of Sanplona. His mother’s laugh, the warmth of her breast, and the months of cold pain following her death, all silently remembered in a fractured second. The sickly desperation of life alone, the relief in being found by his mentor, Brunah. The fulfillment in his hands, holding coins he’d earned with his own sweat, then by his first trade. But overshadowing it all were his wife’s eyes and his daughter’s face, standing over the memories like monuments.

Agony unlike anything he’d ever mortally known burned every fiber of his body, but not alone. Golden joy. Bitter and resentful scarlet. Ever-present lavender wanderlust. The violet of unfulfilled ambition. Sickly green anxieties and worries. Love’s warm magenta. They were all felt in an instant, and then, in that same moment, he was scattered, spread across the sky like paint on an artist’s palette.