The sound of his board slicing through the water in harmony with the sound of the wind in his sails and the feel of the boom in his hands. The currents of the ocean below, and in the wind above flowing as one with the currents in him. All powered by Phateon of the heavens above. A singular force of oneness, it seemed, propelled him forward.
The crystalline clear blue waters of the shallow sea grass and white sands below his sea-skipping board receded into the unfathomable azure of the ocean deep. Thenea ever falling below the horizon behind him.
“If I could choose my final sunset…” he thought. “… these could very well be my final hours on E’ricle.”
Tomorrow he would ascend into the heavens to take his first command of a Stellar Patrol Boat in the Space Fleet. And he sped forward as if to outrun the many voices in his head.
“Have my experiences in the surface fleet prepared me for what is to come?”
“Am I prepared to take command?”
“Were we really at war with Ced’-a-meon?“
“How could we ever think to defeating them, on their home world?”
“Are we not leaving E’ricle unprotected with so much of the fleet deployed?“
“Patrol Boats have never been deployed this deep before, what would be our ultimate assignment?”
“Could they reach us here?
“Could we lose this war?”
“Will I ever see home again?”
To calm the voices, he sped with the speed of the wind to the calmest place he knew, deep out in the ocean of his quiet mind.
With Thenea no longer in sight nor even sign of her lights and as Phateon slipped into the ocean, he slowed the boat to a still. While perfectly balanced, he sat crosslegged on his board and so drifted. Calmed.
Long into that dark night he sat. Any other would be panicked to be so far out to sea alone and without means of navigation in hand. But he knew exactly where he was. The heavens told him.
As the waxing crescent of the First Sister, called Carnas by her inhabitants, rose he wondered if he would ever see her full again.
The voices asleep, he picked up his sails and dipped them into the wind. He felt the wind fill the sails and he channeled that energy flow from his steady hands, into his arms, into his body, his legs and finally into the board as he skated over a black ocean leaving a phosphorescent wake behind.
Looking back he wondered, if he had known then what he knew now, would he have sailed back to shore that night. Or instead would he have followed his heart and sailed deeper into the blue.
As the powerless hulk of his patrol craft drifted so far from home and with no hope of rescue he knew without doubt he would never again see his beloved sapphire ocean.
He suppressed those many voices and their existential questions..
As the dead ship spun without control in the black of space he was saddened at being closer to Ced’-a-meon then to home.
Entombed in the ruins of his first command
destined for eons hence to orbit great Phateon out between the worlds, he came to peace with the thought that from here the sun would never set.