Ishmael's Viewpoint: New Haven

I laid flat on my back, staring up at the vast, endless sky.

Carcosa's heavens stretched above me in their eerie, unchanging hues—deep orange bleeding into amber, framed by the distant flicker of unknowable constellations. A sky that never truly darkened, never truly brightened. A sky locked in its eternal twilight.

I had never seen a sky like this before.

It was different from the ceaseless, starless abyss of the Unloving Sea. Different from the cracked, fractured skies of the dimensional distortions I had witnessed before.

It was… stable. Static.

And in that stillness, I finally noticed it.

The exhaustion.

A deep, dragging weight settled over my limbs, pressing into my bones like lead. It wasn't just physical—it was something deeper, something that seeped into the very fabric of my being. I felt wrung out, like I had been plunged into ice-cold water and left to dry under a scorching sun.