Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #11 February 2015 | страница 5

there is a gap where the path turns. My legs carry me
onward, step by step.

this Dreadnaught point their guns skyward as if reaching for some salvation in the heavens.

To the corner and beyond, the passage is the same, the
crude walls towering above me on either side and the
worn path sloping up before me, until it ends some
hundred paces hence. No not an end, it is another
turning, another sharp turn to the right.

The golden sands are thick with the dead, bones clad in
rags or rusted armour. Some in tattered finery, others
in loincloths of linen, rich and poor now just bleaching
bones. Sticks of wood or sticks of iron, bows or muskets, rotting away. Swords, axes, revolvers. Nothing
more than rubbish washed upon the shore.

My legs carry me up this path. How many have walked
before me? Who were they that walked here in such
numbers? Why did they walk this way? Were they as
I am, compelled to walk this way, or did they come of
their own choosing?
Another corner and once again I turn right but this
time it is different. The wall to my right is unchanged
but the wall to the left does not rise with the slope of
the path and some seventy steps along this part of the
path I can see over the wall to my left.
My breath catches in my throat at what I see before me
and below me. I am on an island, not the Mediterranean; for where among those islands can you see the
great circled bay of a volcanic isle or look upon the
curve of the horizon far across crystal blue seas?
Below me I see a great curve of golden sand and blue
waters I can see shapes, forms, the wrecks of ships and
the bodies of men. I see pulled upon the sands the
rotting remains of several ships, no more than bundles
of logs or reeds tied together to form rafts and now
little remains save the shapes etched in the sand, Greek
or Roman galleys, splintered oars jutting from the hulls
like the legs of a centipede, the decks and sides sagging
as they rot.
Medieval ships, the high bow and stern still visible on
several of them. There a Viking long boat, or at least an
oval shape of long rotted timber with a weather worn
dragon still standing above the sand.
More wrecks fill the waters just off shore and more still
lay half