‘O wayward pilgrim, what will you do? Your stars have fled, the suns turn their back and there is still so far to go. What will you do, lonely wanderer, when the ghosts in the dust come to drag you down?’
As might an ancient king, cloth-wrapped and jewel-adorned, the crumbling ship emerged from cold and restless sleep. Draped in banners of dust and sand, wizened and blind, it strained towards clearer skies. Sickly sunlight in time found its way to portholes clouded with soot and scratches, to wooden decks stripped of paint, to ageing hulls blighted with rust. The violet aurora that wreathed its mangled prow began to flicker and fade, no longer needed. Hatches were unsealed, like the lids of sarcophagi, that those pitiful souls within might steal a gasp of air less foul. One by one the soot-stained, thirst-wracked wretches forsook their caverns of oil and sweat, steam and soot, and squinted in this dust-choked twilight. What lay before them, as ever, brought them only shame.
To the port and starboard, two colossal walls reared fit to sour the moons’ bright countenance, two shifting, roiling walls of cloud bearing a hissing river of dust on its eternal pilgrimage. Here they were safe, in this single sliver of clear air. Safe from winds that could tear the hull away like dead skin, from the sands below that hungered ever for the weary or foolhardy. They had seen it happen, over and over, for as many as they were, there had once been more. It was a relief, then, to see shadows moving in the clouds to the stern, to see flashes of violet breaking through the smog. One by one, this great procession, this funeral march, crawled into view. It was a sight both grand and melancholic; over a hundred battered, rusting hulls offering a feeble gleam to  indifferent suns. Those with the keenest eyes and quickest minds took a count and were rewarded with some rare good fortune; no empty spaces in the convoy, no need to mourn souls lost to the storm. The Fleet had endured another day unscathed.
