She had always found their winces and green faces somewhat amusing.She suspected she would have more sympathy for them in the future.The light did not merely hurt her eyes—it stabbed it with rotted, rusty old swords. Her heartbeat sent pulses of pain through her skull and down her neck as if on wires, and for the life of her, it was everything she could do not to simply roll to one side and commence evacuating the contents of her stomach.Wait a moment. Had she become drunk? The last thing she remembered was the mad old etherealist singing sadistically unfortunate lyrics to a truly disgusting aeronaut’s song, and then . . .And then . . . an enormous surface creature? Though surely that was an artifact of the feverish barrage of nightmares she’d endured for she knew not how long. Perhaps this was simply a hangover. If so, she had some apology notes to write to Esterbrook and his men.She found herself letting out a groan and that hurt as well, on top of everything else, as if sudden fingers of fire had dug into her ribs and her back.
