The Ship of Dreams

From The Ship of Dreams 2013 to buy the book click here

Prologue

Lilly thought back to the first time that she was here; but the memory was so lost in the mists of time and circumstance that it took her a moment to recall it.  It was as if that ‘’before time’’ had its own dimension, hidden from all that she has become, so that she felt the memory like an old song that she had to remember the lyrics of to gain access to the tune . The words tumbled into images in her brain, just behind her conscious view, as she strove to fit the pictures to the tune of time; but then all at once the past revealed itself to her again and became visual. The fog cleared, the darkness fell away and she stepped once more towards the light.She was looking out over the undulating waves in front of her, wind, water, foam and a brilliant sea with no land in sight to obscure the perfect symmetry of the horizon. Out there, where the world dipped away from her in a symphony of texture and colour, out there where she was free again.  Impatiently she brushed her hair back from her cheek and sighed with happiness. She watched a pair of lovers take a turn around the deck, walking so close that they could almost touch her. For a moment she felt the tremor of loss, but it passed with a shrug of her shoulders and a twist of her mouth, no one was truly ever gone from her, just out of sight for a little while.  A foaming spray smashed up over the bow sprite, the water drenching her and slapping noisily on the deck. Lilly shaded her hand to watch the pale sliver of a crescent moon balanced against the darkening sky, shadows on the rim of her world and the memories arrived again, vivid unheralded, sending her tumbling back to the beginning of it all.*