As luck would have it, Sus'syri was placed into the same military unit as I was, but I didn’t know this until we were loaded onto the ships that would take us to Avaliet.

Those ships… they are a curious topic, in that I think they were the one thing that surprised you Surfacers in the war. Even now I still hear of your scholars arguing on how we managed to find our way to your enchanted island without tripping any of the wards you had laid in Avaliet’s stretch of the Reaches. Ah, we are not that foolish.

I do not know how the ships were constructed or how long they had taken to build, only that they were, nominally, Althra’aste’s gift to our forces, to celebrate our certain victory. Such a two-faced lot, those prietesses were... At any rate, not many of the boys had ever been on a ship, unless you count the small ferries used for crossing the various underground rivers running through Vuzsdin. There are no seas that border the forest of Bataklik, and their underground counterpart was at least a week’s journey through twisting caverns to our south, under Krygon. So, the rocking and the sense of disconnection from solid ground as you stepped onto the deck of the ship was familiar, for some of us. It was the wide, endless sky and the great storms of open sea that was not.

In those days, the Seagate, an ancient portal Vuzsdin magi had installed in our underground harbor, still worked. There are rivers and oceans in the Reaches, some salty and some fresh, just as you have here on the Surface. Vuzsdin lay on a network of such rivers, with locks and lifts specialized for sending our little boats over falls or pulling them up to the high docks of the city. They weren’t as easy to use as I understand your Surfacer waterways are, and many akor’mari forgo them in favor of nekru caravans.

When our Seagate was installed, I don’t know, but it gave us a great advantage in maritime travel over other akor’mar cities. The Gate would teleport whatever ship you sent through it out into the world, at a spot chosen by the magi who tended it. Some days, when I was still a child, I remember sitting on the docks and watching the big ships pull in and out of the portal. If you were careful not to blink, you could even see snatches of the Surface each time a ship came or went. The starry sky looked like the crystal-dappled ceiling of the Vuzsdin caverns, and I never realized it was the actual sky — Vuzsdin ships never came through during the daytime. That was so Surfacers never found out where we had placed the Seagates, but, as we Seekers were soon to learn, it was also because the bright reflection of sunlight against seawater made it too difficult for the sailors to see what they were doing. Even though magi handled coming through the Seagate itself, the harbor was small, and unless they came in at night, the sailors’ eyes would not adjust quickly enough to prevent from crashing into the docks or other ships.

Sea travel took some time for me to get used to. Quarters on the ship was tight, tighter than even a Great Den burrow, and, of course, it rocked incessantly. You had a hammock that you could barely stretch your full length on. Above you and below you, no more than an arm length away, were other Seekers with their hammocks. The hammock wasn’t yours, either. When you got up to serve your turn on deck, another Seeker would take your place to get in their own rest. There was no privacy.

Our weapons were stashed far beneath decks, in watertight crates. We were allowed knives, our coin purse, and whatever we could tie on our belts and still be able to sleep comfortably. There were no changes of clothes and no baths, besides standing in sea spray every morning. As one of my officers used to say, “there would plenty of time for that kind of nonsense when we strike land”.

Most of the soldiers were ordered to scrub the decks every day, to keep them out of trouble. Due to my position and stature, I was delegated to the crow’s nest instead. I believed they thought days squinting into the sea would acclimate me to scouting in daylight on the Surface, though it never felt to me as if my eyesight was improving. Quite the opposite.

The sting of my eyes was the easiest part about it, as it was. Climbing up there on my first day was frankly terrifying. I suppose it would be similar to climbing a very tall tree in a high wind. There was nothing to hold onto except the rigging, and nothing to catch you if you fell. The mast swayed with the waves, and the higher you climbed, the more exaggerated the swaying became.

If you had the ill chance to fall on the deck and break your back, you were lucky. If you fell in the ocean, you faced drowning, or being pulled under the ship and grated like cheese on the barnacles that clung there. That was if you couldn’t swim. If you could, you faced a week of starvation and thirst and the elements. See, unless you could be pulled out of the water within a few minutes of falling in, you were left behind. The ships moved too quickly, and out on open sea you became a mere head floating on the water. Some of those waves were hundreds of feet high. Even with good eyes, men who had fallen overboard were nearly impossible to spot.

It was no Little Folk picnic once I had gotten up there, either. The sky was eerily open. Some Surfacers have told me about their feelings of claustrophobia when they come underground into Vuzsdin. They told me they felt like they couldn’t breathe because everything was too close. I don’t get claustrophobic, nor have I known any akor'mar who does, but up there on the Surface, I finally understood a little of how you must feel. Instead of not having enough air to breathe, there was suddenly too much. I would feel light-headed, and I was scared the wind would blow all the air away before I could breathe any of it in. I felt very small, smaller than an insect. And Tymalt forbid if I ever decided to look straight down.

Far below, my fellow sailors looked like grubs crawling around on a piece of bark. I was like a little beetle clinging to a grass stem caught in the wind. The waves billowed and rolled like bed sheets, some climbing as high as even my perch. They sometimes seemed alive, standing up in their voluminous skirts to peer at me, like a noble woman considering a slave and wondering how best to punish it.

At times I was sure the mast was going to crack and I would be blown away into oblivion, the first un-celebrated casualty of the war.

When the sun went down, it was very cold and damp up in the crow’s nest. The wind was ever present, and unless you hunched down, you could feel your ear-tips freezing off. The daytime, while warmer, was far worse in other ways. The sun was bright. It reflected off the water. Sailors down on the deck constantly had migraine headaches, despite keeping their eyes averted, and I was the one who was supposed to be staring into the light, to see if I couldn’t make out incoming ships or land.

I can only say, thank goodness for Sus'syri. I didn’t know where she had gotten her strong eyes from, or why she decided to come up and keep me company into the crow’s nest -- at least not until much later. But when I was huddled down, both to get away from the light and the frightning waves, she would stand over me and do my lookout duties. If she ever saw anything, she would whisper it in my ear, and I would be the one to call down to the sailors below, so it appeared I was doing my duty as I should have been.

When the nights were cold, we would also cuddle against each other. It was the first time I had a woman that close but that I didn’t “do” anything with, yet I found I liked it just the same. We very rarely talked. I would listen to her breathing and the crash of the waves. And somehow, more passed between us and more connected us, than had ever connected me with any other girl.

As I said, I didn’t understand why she preferred being up in the crow’s nest with me until later. She was a handful of only a few women on the ship, most of them officers. It’s a long-held superstition that women are bad luck to have on board, and after those few months on the ship, it makes sense. It was like the patrols all over again; down there were a bunch of restless, eager men, quite a few of them craving someone to share the hammock with, and most still with mixed feelings for how they had been treated in Vuzsdin by the Althrasians. Sus'syri had been given her own cabin and a stout lock for her door, but it still can’t have been very comfortable for her.

I once asked her why she never thought I’d do those things to her, that the others would boast about. She said she’d throw me out of the crow’s nest if I tried, and I never asked again.