The giant waves of the Advent had come and washed over Evening Island like it wasn't even there. Unlike on the Sillaribes where they went up the slopes of the mountains as far as they could and washed back down into the ocean dragging all with them but sparing the high villages, fields and temples; the almost flat, gently upward sloping island only had the effect of a ramp, the two towns built on the Rising shore had been scraped to rock bottom and all the trees of the island had been uprooted and dragged to the sea on the far side. Sole three bird catching communities living in cave dwellings on the cliffs of the Setting side had survived. They witnessed as the waves crashed from above their heads and saw, flashing before their eyes, the trees of the forest, the cattle of the fields, the houses and their inhabitants falling to their doom from the tall cliffs.
One hundred and twenty they had found themselves after it all and no ship, no tree to build one and no food to stock it for the long pull back to Sillaribes. They were now two hundred almost and the first thing they demanded was the woman's right to new blood. An ancient Balà law that allowed a Balà woman to ask any man not of her family to lay with her and give her a child with new blood; it was plain to see that the youngest were not healthy, some looked dumb and a few had deformities, forty years of inbreeding had done some damage and it was time for new blood to be given. Atacherel announced a blood fair and the local women chose among them the men who would lay with them when the time would be right.
The elder took the captain and his second to the forest and they saw that the trees were all of the same kind as on the Sillaribes islands giant trees perfect for ship building but it was like being in a miniature version of the forest back home, they were all forty at the most and still young and thin, impossible to build a ship capable of a crossing with that.
The locals told the tales of many sightings of ghost ships after the Advent and they even witnessed twice large Balà ships on approach being set upon by the ghost ships and sunk to the loss of all on board. They had two fishing ships, small things barely larger than a dingy with a single sail for coastal fishing, one of them had been salvaged from the wreck of a small ghost ship on the austral breakers during a particularly vicious storm, there were other ghost ships nearby, larger ones but they did not assist the floundering ship nor they waited for the storm to abate to explore the wreck and the shore of the island where it had happened. No bodies were found but strangely harnessed beasts of the kind no Balà or even Triad men had ever been confronted to.
Often odd and erratic storms happened within instants of them spotting the silhouette of ghost ships on the horizon, but when Atacherel's sailors blamed it on the Advent changing the weather the locals looked on in silence making with their fingers the sign for protection against evil. The priest, upon being questioned later told him that the survivors had taken to the belief that the One himself protected them and the Sillaribes from whatever the Advent had awakened.
"What do you mean awakened?" Artabanes had asked, startled. The lanky priest had gathered his worn grey robes about the thin frame of his body and sat on a boulder nearby. His temple was one of the lowest cut habitats on the face of the cliff and a cut stone flight of stairs climbed down to the bouldery beach below and the frothy waters. At high tide the waves covered it and standing in the opening one was almost right above the water. They had wandered down the steps and onto the rocky beach while the priest explained to the captain why he had constructed his temple in a position vulnerable to the storms.
"I wanted to be as close as possible to them, to be able to chant for them too during service." He noticed the unformulated interrogation in the young man's eyes and went on explaining: "I know we Balà do not celebrate death like they do in Triad, we remember the dead but as the canon goes: dead is dead and gone, but I felt I had a duty to do more, most... all my friends and all the people I knew ended here, I should have too if I hadn't been in the cellar of my house... You see the entrance faced the Setting side and the ceiling was vaulted, when the water came it did not have the strength gathered on the ocean and even though the stones of the house were ripped from their foundations and thrown down here," without looking he made an encompassing gesture at the chaos of rocks by the shore, "The air under the vault prevented my drowning and When I finally gathered the strength to swim out by the door I found an island devastated. I prayed to the One to shed light on why I had been so spared only to die of hunger on a barren rock and on the fifth day they found me wandering aimlessly on the beach that had once been filled with people, friends and lovers, family and colleagues."
They had walked some time in silence and Atacherel's eyes had wandered aimlessly on the many boulders until he saw it. The perfect cut shape of a window, it was buried in the ground so that one could only see a fine angle cut with the grooves and nooks for the wooden frame of the shutters against the ocean winds and the seasonal changes, and suddenly they were all around him, every single stone that he had taken for detached rocks from the cliff above bore marks of having been once used and shaped by the hands of men. Fragments of a capital here, the curve of a door lintel there; butting stones that had once supported the timber frame of a roof, the flagstones on which the many inhabitants of Evening Island had walked. In his mind the ruins of the old harbor in Vulgate and the washed out cities of the island merged and the unimaginable human tragedy of the Advent flooded his mind. He remembered an overheard conversation between his dad and one of his friend late one evening back home, the night was too warm to sleep and Atacherel had been listening idly to the reassuring sounds of the voices in the garden, one sentence had stuck in his mind 'The losses of the advent are too many to count' at the time the little boy had been revolted by such lazy contempt for the dead, he remembered almost getting up and walking to the little window to shout 'The sooner you start counting the earlier it is done, it's the least we can do for the dead' but the little boy had refrained from doing so out of respect for his father and no small amount of shame for his dad's friend blatant laziness. For a while the question had floated between them until one day he had stopped thinking about it like children do.
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"They are too many to count, indeed," the young captain whispered to the oceanic wind finally understanding the fatality and resignation in the immeasurably sad words of his father.
"What do you mean awakened?"
"Evening island had always been the place on the surface of the oceans where sightings of the infamous elusive ghost ships were the most numerous. But the constant trades and the currents cutting across the surface of the ocean have, ever since we settled here, kept them afar and oblivious to our presence. The winds have changed indeed since the Advent and even the currents that crisscross the oceans are somewhat modified as older captains have certainly told you during your formative years at sea." The priest looked at the young man's face with his pale eyes and smiled a sad smile showing teeth that shone brightly white in his dark face. "I too dismissed it as superstition at first but I then witnessed it with mine own eyes, the sleek shape of the ghost ship approaching, the skies turning unnaturally fast from blue and pleasant to dark and full of unchecked wrath... So, I went to see the Sky-Watcher and asked her about it. The woman was old but her eyes were piercingly sharp and she had kept recording the events linked to the skies even in the days just after the Advent. She told me that the sky had only started being angry at the ghost ships since they had passed Evening Island and sunk the two Balà transports that had been spotted on approach the day before. Ever since that day not a single ghost ship had been allowed to come close to the shore or pass it by without an instant storm blocking their path. Except on one occasion, when the ghost ships had been three, with the smallest being hunted by the larger two. The Sky-Watcher told me they purposefully forced it on the island knowing that either the storm would sink it or the breakers would or a combination of both. As soon as the storm took shape they sailed off leaving it to its doom." Atacherel stared at the priest in utter shock, but before he could say anything the gaunt man softly said.
"Why do you think we call it 'the Advent'?" Realization dawned on the young man and the many stories from the sacred texts of the Wandering Balà his father had read to him at night as a child came back to his mind.
"You, you are talking of the story of Renachel and the Spirit heralding the vindication of all Balà in the world?"
The priest merely shrugged.
"You do not seriously believe that forty years ago, the mountain that fell from the sky and destroyed Rabatea, was the god-sent offered to us by the One himself in order to lead us to our rightful place under the sun?"
"It did strike Rabatea hardest from what I was given to read in the texts you brought us of the recent history of the world. Our most ancient and bitterest enemy, in which harbors none of our ships have ever been allowed to berth even after such a long time. Don't you think the signs are here?"
"The signs of what?" Atacherel's incredulity was obvious, "you are referring obscure apocryphal texts that are the rambling of a lunatic."
"Obed of Napel only lost his mind after consigning his encounters." The priest said defensively.
"Yet they are known across Sillaribes as the 'Insanities of Obed' are they not?"
"This title is a mere mark of the sneer of a hermetic mind; they were not given to the collection of tales by Obed himself. Nonetheless," the priest added, preventing another passionate retort from the younger man, "the Advent happened almost word to word exactly as described by Obed in his forty-fifth text, I think you could try to read it before you scorn the belief of the many people of this island."
Atacherel was troubled for he had always been taught to never dismiss a thing that he had no intimate knowledge of this he decided to ask the priest:
"Do you not happen to have a copy of the Insanities on the island for me to read, then?"
The priest looked at him hard and seemed to come to a conclusion, "there is a copy of the seventy-two transcripts of Obed that I could have sent to your rooms as soon as tonight, if it pleases you?"
"I thank you for your kindness and I pray you will find it in your mind to forgive my impetuous reaction, it wasn't meant as contempt for your beliefs nor as judgment upon you." The priest bowed silently acknowledging the formal apology of the young captain.
