Drowning Iron by Megan Mader
She sits aboard the Iron Maiden, a ship not meant to cross the seas that rage and ravage with a flag waving breeze. When the winter storms come, the bolts creak and the iron masts lean. Waves send themselves over the bow; salt water courses down her face and drips off her chin and splashes the back of her throat. It flows through the cabins and bilge and everywhere around her feet, dragging her perilously close to the sea that laps at the edges of her sanity, drowning it. Clinging to the rigging that’ s been singing of a sinking fate, water assaults her. Bolts break free and masts snap into iron splinters.
She descends, the Iron Maiden pulling her along by its own gravity. Past jellyfish and sharks, down into the caverns and chasms of the ocean floor. Darkness and icy water push at her chest threatening to crush her like a fish snapped in half by the beak of a giant squid. Past the creatures that stalk the depths, and through the sediment, she sinks. Unhindered by layers of fossils and tectonic plates, straight through the mantle and to the center of the earth. Curled around the core, rests the Iron Maiden.
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