Soong, my darling, I cannot wait for you to see this place for yourself. We haven’t yet reached land, but on this ship there is already so much to discover. Even the quarters they’ve assigned me are strange: a room of metal, gold and gemstones embedded in the walls as casually as you or I might hang a scroll. My bed rests upon a rectangular iron platform set upon four legs, and I’ve been given a taller platform to serve as a writing desk. Even the blankets shimmer like precious gold, though they are as soft as silk.

  Perhaps when I’ve brought you back, we’ll take a cruise and you can see it for yourself. But first, I should continue relating to you the events of these past days.

  I only have the vaguest memory of what came next. I was in a state of delirium; there was some amount of blathering quietly to myself, and I perhaps spent an entire evening staring out the porthole at the stormy sea. Every so often, a crewman would come by and feed me thin broth like I was a child.

  I fear I didn’t make the most dignified impression during this, our first contact.

  On the third day, my lucidity had begun to return. Word must have reached the captain, as he came to pay me a visit. In the bright, steady lighting of my cabin, he presented a rather different image than he had in the storm.

  What I had thought was crimson demon-skin was more of a mottled red, perhaps from days spent working under the suns. His nose was frightfully large, yes, and his eyes sunken and round, but his countenance was gentle, almost pitying, rather than cruel. Ah, but perhaps this is more remarkable! His hair, sparse though it was, was the color of fresh clay dug from the ground, and his eyes were the color of precious emeralds!

  His uniform, too, was quite unlike anything in Guntao. I believe it was made from the same material as my blankets, judging from how it shimmered in the light. His overcoat was heavy and draped down to his knees, the material a faded green reminiscent of weathered copper. Under it he wore a short silver tunic closed in the front with round buttons; the bottom of the tunic was tucked into his narrow-legged trousers, and he wore boots made from a similar fabric to his jacket. He wrung his hands together nervously as I looked him over, which presented an interesting contrast to his flashy clothing and gaudy jewelry (I noted three or four rings per hand, as well as a large gemstone that hung about his neck).

  And then he opened his mouth, and more of those strange, guttural words tumbled out.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” I told him. He smiled at this, let out an anemic laugh, and shrugged his shoulders to his ears.

  He said some more things I couldn’t understand, pointing his finger this way and that in a terribly rude manner, and then clasped his hands together and looked at me expectantly.

  I gave him a nod, which seemed to satisfy him. He backed out of the room, sloppily bowing his head over and over as he went.

  Once he was gone, I fell back onto my bed (which is surprisingly soft—how exactly they make such a material is one of the many, many questions I hope to have answered someday).

  I turned the problem of language over in my head. I felt raw and hollow, the loss of your body still a fresh wound on my soul. The puzzle of it all was a welcome distraction.

  In our own history, there have been secret societies and wars between the isles that have necessitated discretion, and from time to time these would give rise to codes and ciphers that don’t use the common tongue. I summoned up a minor reference cantrip, perusing my mental library for any writings I might have on how such ciphers were created—or cracked.

  This could all be solved with a spell, I thought to myself. I simply need to devise a system that will match their words to mine. How hard could this possibly be?

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  ***

  On the fourth day, I decided to explore the ship.

  It wasn’t an immediate decision. I’d stayed up all night working on my latest obsession: a spell to unlock the mysteries of this world’s language. In its first iteration, the spell was designed to pick out words from conversations around me and derive their meaning based on context. I was fortunate enough to find an old cipher-cracking spell in my mental library that I could build off of.

  But once my initial prototype was finished and it was time to test it, I faltered. I began to think again of you, of the hopelessness of our situation, and soon I lacked the will to leave my bed. A morning and afternoon were passed in this manner, interrupted only when crewmen came to feed me. I drank the thin broth obligingly, though I could hardly taste it.

  I’m not sure what finally roused me from this melancholy. It is a terrible thing, I think, to become a source of misery for the one you love. Had our positions been reversed, I would want you to draw strength from my memory, that you should continue our expedition in the spirit of our shared love of discovery. Let us suppose, then, that it was this same spirit that motivated me to finally set foot outside my cabin in the evening of the fourth day.

  A crewman stood in the corridor just outside—so I was under guard, after all. He was a little shorter than me, with darkly tanned skin and a long, narrow nose. He looked at me with startlingly blue eyes and jerked towards me. My instinct was to pull away from this strange man, but instead I stumbled forward and he braced himself against me.

  I was still weak; he was merely trying to help me stay on my feet. Of course four days wouldn’t be enough time to recover from starvation. As firmly as I could manage, I pushed myself away from him and grabbed onto a handrail that was fixed to the wall. I did have some dignity left.

  To say that the handrail was fixed to the wall is perhaps misleading. Where we used planks of wood to build our ships, these people used long, wide sheets of iron or steel. Rather than being bolted in place, the handrail melted into the wall that it was connected to, as if it had all been forged from a single piece of metal.

  Staying as upright as I could manage, I made my way down the hall, one hand on the railing and the other casting my language spell. Vocabulary acquisition was, after all, one of the purposes of this outing. My guard followed close behind, helpfully muttering after me in his strange tongue that I could not yet understand. I did detect a tinge of irritation in his voice, but he made no move to apprehend me.

  It was nice to have confirmation that I wasn’t a prisoner, at least. They must be a trusting people, or else they deemed me harmless.

  This first corridor was lined with rooms much like mine, five or six to a side, all of them vacant. It felt less like a ship and more like a fortress, though what purpose the ship served, I couldn’t rightly say. Would I find mighty, advanced weaponry if I made my way to a lower deck? A cargo hold filled with exotic goods? When these quarters were occupied, exactly what sort of person would occupy them?

  I came to a stairwell that led both up and down. On a whim, I decided to go up, and soon found myself in a vestibule that opened directly onto the deck.

  In my previous entry, I mentioned that the ship was at least thrice as long as our own boat. It was also two or three times as wide, and the deck lacked a mast from which to hang sails. Behind me, a sort of enclosed platform rose about a story and a half above. A helmsman stood at the ship’s wheel within, protected by the clearest of glass, and I could feel his eyes on me as I took my first unsteady step into the open air.

  This time, I grudgingly accepted my guard’s help as he took my arm, and together we walked to the deck railing.

  The cloud cover had finally broken. In the sky, hanging over the horizon, was a single sun.

  The sight gave me pause. We had theorized that any other realms we found would, naturally, have their own suns. Somehow, I had taken for granted that these other realms would each have two suns, like home. This world’s sun—similar in size to the little-sister sun of Guntao—was half-full and waning into a crescent as the evening turned to night.

  I stood there for a long while, transfixed by the sight of the lonely sun. The only sounds were the wind and the waves and the strange, constant hum of the ship. I tried to empty my mind of all thoughts. To simply feel the moment, without thinking of you, without missing your presence by my side or the way you used to tap your fingers together when deep in thought. Yes, I gave my entire conscience over to experiencing this new world around me, just as you would have wanted.

  The guard at my side muttered a few quiet words, reminding me of his presence. I suddenly realized that I was quite hungry; it was already dinnertime. I wiped my cheeks dry and followed him back to my cabin.