Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

No, Dar Oakley said. I’m not of this realm. You can’t keep me here. Fubun on all of you. Corve! the Brother whispered,

couldn’t admit to himself that such a thing as the sea could exist. The blue-black waves topped with white fangs were like no water he’d ever seen, the vicious slap of them on the little boat’s flanks, their salt spittle, the creak of the oars in their locks and the groaning of the frame as though all of it suffered continuously—none

Watching them dash and flit, training up their young in their trade, Dar Oakley thought a thought no Crow has likely ever thought before or since: that if only he could, he would become a being of another species; that there was a species better than his own to wish to be.

There aren’t many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been so shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving.