Our craft is a four chambered vessel that sails a sea within her. Her sails are red and her decks swim with brine all day and all night through long years on her own. The sheets that trim those sails are spun of the finest jute, and not a single splice is there to be found. Multitudes mark her passageways on their way beyond the temporal horizon. Ungainly of hull and lacking any kind of contour designed to breast the waves, her lines resemble those of a boulder more than a racing sloop.

We steer by touch, heading always into those harbors we recognize from our dreams. So smoothly jointed together is the decking, scarcely a creak when the weather rises, nor no howl in the rigging when the gale bears down. The bite of her keel is absolute. But anyway we recall the footprint of a foe we all share and stop our tongues. The monsters of the deep are mere legend, and yet... Something spoken in elders' voices. Something adorned in totems of our tribe. We tell of some vessel blasted by a broadside, leaking like a worn-out colander, maybe cracked by too much sand for her time, which takes on rats and shipworms the way gamblers take on debt or astrologers take on lies. No drydock exists to mend her hurts, restore her youth, soothe her laments. Weighted down by ancestral ballast, rudderless, shuddering, still our figurehead strains to remember her shipwrights and return to familiar hazards.

The barometer is high yet ever rising and the winds to come do be savage. Dry lands surround our craft and block the tradewinds with ash. The young curse the passage to come in her service, and the old frankly fear coming days as they count them like hairs. Truly, none of us were made for this craft nor she for them. All that is left is to tip up a horn - drink and she drinks a quaff with you.