Dark inversions

 The moon was quickening, or at least that is what she had heard it called, down in the old streets, at the low of the harbour; were across the years, many tales had come in on foreign tides, with even stranger men to bear them. Back in the half century, these dark ships had sailed under crescent moons, with mysterious crews, that never spoke, and were rarely seen. But the whisper of them, spread, even as their strange ships had sat low in the waters, often for days at at a time, before they left.. These ships had runners, men of other parts, who would do their bidding during the waking hours, other than that, whilst in the belly of the port none other than the runners exited or entered this black carved boats; and no one was seen on deck. But those things had not been seen for many a century or more now, until all thought of them eventually passed away. Lowton in time had become a quaint and sedentary town, with a harbour master, and a wife, and two children that had grown fat. It was a civil pace that  now docked at the shore, or was carried in land by porters and men. But still somewhere, within the old, stones, that lined the sewers that moved in other currents below, knowledge of what was old and lost and buried beneath, continued to exist.

Merite had been an outsider, her family like all the others, brought in on the gossip of prosperity, and the rich trade plied by the unique position of a bluff of land straddled, between too great ranges- the low east and the great western high ground. Low town was a place where the aeons had carved out a great centre piece of rising toppling land, half jettisoned into the ocean, in megalithic dark and ague d rock, drawn out like the long terrain of an accusing finger. Here low-town had been tossed, beholden to all the strange vagaries of water that had stormed, molten and melted,then eventually cooled, into a territorial drift, never quite comfortable with where it stood. Here for 4 centuries the two great terrains had traded, the harbour acting as a conduit, for all that had stood , even further to the west and east. Places where strange, wanderers had come and gone and gathered and ungathered, hurled across great tapestries of water, in undulating currents and ships. MB