"Evermore Forevermore" (Image Copyright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
The night lay heavy over San Francisco Bay, a vast stretch of water cloaked in shifting veils of fog. The city on its hills shimmered like a cascade of diamonds, its lights spilling across the bay in a luminous glow. To the north, Sausalito gleamed like a necklace of lights, tracing the coastline in delicate, golden arcs. But beyond the Golden Gate, the darkness was deeper, the fog thick and impenetrable, swallowing all it touched.
From that abyss, a shadow emerged. Silent, spectral, a relic from another time. Its tall masts stood against the night sky, its sails whispering as they caught the wind, tattered ghosts of their former glory. The ship moved with purpose yet bore the weariness of centuries. Ropes creaked, the hull groaned—a tired beast of wood and rigging that had seen too many years, too many miles.
She had left Shanghai in 1898, her hold brimming with tea, porcelain, ironstone art, and fine china. She had been young then, her decks bustling with sailors, her course set with confidence. But now, in the year 2025, she was a ship without a crew, without a master. There was no hand at the helm, no voice in the crow’s nest, and yet she sailed on, seeking a place to rest.
The city did not see her. The hum of modern life, the glow of neon, the rumble of traffic—all drowned out the sound of a ship from another age slipping through the bay. She glided past Alcatraz, her hull brushing the waters that had long since forgotten her kind. The past and present converged in the night, the ghostly vessel pressing forward, longing for a dock where time might finally lay her to rest.
Would she find it? Or was she doomed to sail forever, a phantom on the tides, carrying her cargo through the ages, whispering her story to the wind?
As the night deepened, the ship drifted past the piers, her presence unnoticed by the living world. Yet, beneath the moon’s silver glow, a solitary figure stood on the shores of the bay—an old longshoreman, a man of the past yet living in the present. He had heard the creak of her timbers, the soft lapping of water against her hull.
A shiver ran down his spine as he raised his lantern high, casting a golden beam across the fog. For a fleeting moment, the ship's name shimmered on her bow, 'Evermore,' letters worn and faded by time. Then, as if answering an unseen call, she veered toward the light, her sails tightening against the wind.
Perhaps she had found her harbor at last, or perhaps the longshoreman had simply become another soul to witness her eternal passage. The fog swallowed her once more, and the bay returned to silence, save for the whisper of the waves and the distant call of a foghorn.
~Wylddane
(Copyright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
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