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A storm petrel, winging its way inland towards an annual mating ground, drops into seeming freefall and glides in perpetual circles towards the shore... from so many hundreds of feet above, the coastline is like a crone's mouth to his view, uneven and gap-toothed from decay, punctuated by a single long fang jutting into the water...
Sooty wings beat a tribal whooshing on the air, and the tides down below answer in breakers some twenty feet or more, that curl and crash against themselves in an explosion of frothing sea spray... brackish... bitter with too much salt... and smelling of kelp as they approach the shore, gracing the beach with the kiss of peace...
These northern waters are choppy and unwelcoming to any but the hardiest rudders... Those pieces of driftwood littering the beach, worn smooth by the lapping of time and tamed to homes for hermit crabs and the like, are the remnants of sterns and once-noble bowsprits that dared too close... no, these are not friendly waters...
But not impenetrable...
The frazzled, nervous lines of foliage along the top of the cliff, so erratic that they appear to have been drawn onto the landscape by a child's hand, jagged green crayon marks and slashes of watercolor emerald...
Occasional missed spots, where the waxy residue didn't quite cover the page, form breaks in the cluster of leaves and branches... large enough for a human to pass through, and leading to the single sliver of rock along the top, a balcony wide enough to catch one's balance while leaning forward to inspect the sheer overhang...
It is the kind of drop that crushes skulls and snaps bones like twigs on impact... The beach is soft sand, true, particles of quartz and clay minerals, volcanic residue from the ocean's basin, grains of shell fragments, all smoothed by the ocean currents that brought them here ... but there are enough angry boulders jutting from the sandy surface, in irregular configurations and unevenly spaced, to make any fall a perilous game of chance...
To one side of the peninsula lies the single safe passage down to the beach, a corkscrew path etched along the cliff face... this, too, started with a few natural twists and turns, but was worn into a visible trail, not by the whimsy of nature, but by the solid footfalls of man.
The reason is not immediately clear - the path is no more than a few feet wide, wide enough for one man at a time, and perhaps some hand-carried cargo - but as it spills out onto the beach below, a single shroud of shadows to the right hints at the existence of a cavern...
This is the stuff that novels of Gothic intrigue are made of, this cave whose mouth is obscured by more jutting rocks and forlorn branches that appear from the cliff side to droop down in a veil...
The two waist-high stones that flank the entrance look as though they could have been placed there deliberately, perfectly matched as they are in pitch and roundness... but one bears the scars of an ancient etching, a name, and perhaps a symbol, no longer legible, but whispering across the centuries to tell tales of late night rendezvous and smuggled goods, plunder and prizes, the spoils of raids over the decks of ships that dared too innocently close...
The ghostly resonance of cannon fire can sometimes be heard beneath the gossip of the currents, and the smells of sulfur and rum still hang faintly on the air... but what lies inside, past the barriers of shadow? The sparkle of doubloons? Tattered edges on parchments, their seals broken and dated long past their usefulness?
Or is there anything at all, but ancient footprints, and the memories of a world that was... once...?
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