and we went down in the valley, to pray

and the distant ships come rolling in.   Their masts are bare and their rotten sails litter the decks strewn with ruin.  not a soul come to throw in the bowlines.  Not a soul greets the smiling eyes.  Not a soul catches the last disapearing rays of sun before the darkness runs across the stones to the quay.  Beneath the ships the water ever and after stirs.  the wood creaks and groans and speaks of its own in a tongue thrice forgotten.  The beggar laughs and the crowd looks and he points to the moon, a sliver in the sky, being devoured by a hungry beast.

a mountain in reign leans down into a valley of black water

high up there in the shrouded peaks lurks a dark beast, its hair is matted with the guilty souls that have dared to tread past its keep, up there, high in the hidden, away in the russet grasses and the cold windy barren lands, where rocks are ever cold and the sun is a distant friend whose rare smile is but an echo upon this hungry face.  a thousand steps lead to here and a thousand further still upward into the blackness and the ice beyond.  But here, here waits Sikel, the barren one, the leering sleeper all slumbering in an empty land.  There are not even bones simply shale, crushed up and sucked dry, little splinters of what once held flesh and sinew in place and now, ha-ha tasty sweet flesh, suck it from the brittle bones and grind them down to gain the moist marrow.  Such feasts had Sikel had, times of old where marauding armies came and never left and time when pilgrimages to the old palaces came and never left, ha-ha, such excess.  But time were growing on and Sikel was grey now and its own bones began to creak and bemoan the cold and the wind.  Catechu was the first to get past Sikel since Sikel had taken root here, and to be worse Catechu had laughed and mocked as it fired past and up the step into the mist and darknesssss above.  Sikel began to live of the fat slime fish that inhabited the stagnant marsh pond and after a while realised the humans do not like being chewed.