Oda La Brin leaned on the dusty workbench as he witnessed the two fat women fight each other for dominion of his doorway. The first, a rather red haired monstrosity that hobbled into his shop, knocking over a stand of silk scarves from Bish. She leaned toward, reaching over the climes of fat that had decided to nestle around her midriff.

Oda watched keenly as the obese red head leaned and showed her stretchmark ridden tits, dangling rather haphazardly, beguiling the old shopkeeper. He discretely rubbed his groin as the fat brunette behind her helped with the debacle.

This one was not at all unattractive, quite comely in fact. Huge yes, but her eyes belied a confidence that compelled Oda to investigate further. She slinked through his haberdashery, toying with the old fool. Laughing and fluttering her eyelids, casually and eventually making her way up to Oda's table.

The brunette leaned over the counter, her belly acting as a cushion. Oda leaned forward, his erection pressing hard against the wood of the counter. He eased his hips and rubbed it against the cloth of his toga.

The red head joined them leaning on her friend's shoulder, her cleavage low. Oda licked his lips.

'We're looking for something rather special,' the brunette said.

The red head swiped her tongue along the trajectory of her teeth and Oda squeezed his cock. 'Something rather - momentous.'

'Well of course,' he continued, rolling the cloth of his toga around his shaft like a warm blanket. 'We have silks from Vaneer, woven rugs from the heights of Mount Dayus.' The red head placed her hand on his and stroked the tiny hairs on the back of his fingers sending a flurry of sensuality up his arm which swirled into a tickle in his chest. He tugged on his toga, squeezing his cock against the coarse fabric.

The brunette leaned closer, whispering into his dirty hairy ear.

'We've heard the fishing in the Black Swell is good this time of year?'

He immediately let go of his cock and it slapped between the hinds of his bony legs. He stepped back from the counter, flustered and apprehensive.

'Who sent you?'

'Who do you think?' asked the redhead. 'Saint Qwibbus?'

'I don't know you, both.'

The brunette shrugged. 'Times are changing Oda, the same people can't be seen to come here every week. The Watch grow cautious.'

The red head jumped in, 'And you know what that means, your little corner of paradise will have its last hour. You are already in the shit house and you know it.'

Oda stood proud, hands wrapped in his sleeves.

'I will not be blackmailed by two fat pigs, tell your master-'

'WELL, that's just it, Oda,' remarked the red head. 'Our master is your Master. We want the spunk. No drama, or the council of Jango Fey will find out about all the boys, Oda. All of them.'

The old fool turned a faint hue of purple, their speech turning into a distinct drone that diminished the light in the room.

'So, what will it be, Oda?' asked the brunette.

He wandered over to the front door and turned the key, locking out any curious eyes and purses.

He swallowed hard.

'You know of that?' A tear scaled his left cheek, almost bathing in its mediocre warmth.

'All of them, Oda.'

He wiped the tear away. 'This way.'

Oda led them into the basement. Down a flight of steps that creaked horrendously with every footfall. The light was dim but there at the centre of the room was their prize.

It moved under the dirty blankets, sheepish. The whites of its fabulous eyes shone in the murk while its smooth mahogany skin glistened with a faint luminescence.

Oda lit a candle and placed the glass cover over it, illuminating the sparse surroundings. There was nothing, just a flight of ancient steps and a bed caked in god knows what.

The shape in the bed shifted, the cover revealing the rare beast.

The brunette stopped in her tracks, gobsmacked. The red head looked at Oda with contempt.

'Kraken Brood. You have Kraken Brood?'

'What did you think it was?' Asked the lecherous fiddler. 'The tooth fairy?'

The brunette steadily moved forward, offering her hand.

'Hey, you can't touch her.'

The red head grabbed him by the neck and took the candle from his clutches. 'And I bet you've tried haven't you, you old cunt?'

Oda squirmed in her vice-like embrace. His face a red mess of pain.

'Kraken Brood, what the hell? What's Hadigan -?'

The red head immediately shushed her.

Kraken Brood. Everyone had heard the stories. Fables for the children of the Construct. Out there in the Black Swell, the most dangerous parts of waters any sailor or fishermen had ever seen, to traverse its barriers was sheer lunacy.

Passed waves of black watery mountains and maelstroms of liquid night. If you got this far then you would wish you hadn't. The periphery of the Swell introduced an archipelago of harsh islands of black slate, crevices and deep bores spewing black smoke and the occasional gobbet of magma. Through the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand wrecks, across obsidian rocks and undertows created by serpentine majesty. Whirlpools of perpetual night will drag you screaming into the cold void where a billion eyes and mouths chow on your blue broken corpses.

Mermaids, Garralox, Wenterlaix, these creatures will take you to their larders, kept warm in cold bellies.

There had been expeditions, the most notable and documented by that of the Cooz explorer, Hannibal Schmit. His ship the Praetorian crossed the waters of the Black Swell never to be seen again. Schmit became shipwrecked and over the course of forty years lived with a tribe of men and women dubbed the Kraken Brood.

He learned their ways and even took a husband and bore a child, and over the course of his preternatural years discovered the meaning of their lives.

The Islands of the Black Swell existed - apparently - in partial darkness. The milk from the Kraken, washing up in the surf as a bioluminescence. On the isle of Cutlass (named by Schmit) the Kraken's milk hung in the surf. From the north of the hard black shore you would look down and see the stark beauty. The long stretch of black with the milk lapping at the coal shoreline, the bioluminescence glimmering like shining steel. The isle of Cutlass, his home; his prison.

Schmit had little choice in escape. His only salvation that of learning and practicing their unusual ways. The Kraken Brood existed solely on the milk of their god: the Kraken. Imbibing the Xelofremanine became a ritual, a rite. And with it came the walks.

Schmit took it upon himself to embrace the culture. Taking the Xelofremanine into himself, dream walking for nearly half a century. He explored limitless scapes, traversed lands that no other would dare witness. Ever. He had become Kraken Brood: dream walker.

Such were their rituals that at the end of a Brood's life they would offer their dreams back to the Kraken. The anointed would take their dreams with them back into the Swell and swim down into the Calderkahn abyss, be one with the Kraken, embrace, eat of its body and it of you.

On the night prior to his anointment, Schmit slept uneasy. A life lived in unusual hues. He rolled from his bed and kissed his husband and daughter and made his way through black jungle to east of the island. To the very place - forty years ago - where he washed ashore. Pulling a varied concoction of seaweed and plant life from his makeshift craft- long hidden- Schmit pushed his raft into the rolling surf.

Two weeks later a freighter bound for Frica pulled the malnourished Schmit aboard, all in awe at his white eyes, mesmerised by his tales of the Black Swell.

That night he dined at the Captain's table and filled his belly on meats and cheeses that had eluded him for forty years . . .

Perplexed, the Captain asked how long ago the Praetorian had been recorded missing to which Schmit replied 'forty.'

The Captain disagreed and assured the distraught Kraken Brood that he had been missing for over eighty. The attributes of the Xelofremanine tainting his perception; cleansing time.

Six weeks later in a grimy little tenement in Frica, Schmit committed suicide. The walls of his home splayed in blood with one word repeated: Kraken.

Some said the continuous ingestion of Xelofremanine over eighty years and the sudden depletion of it within his body caused a heart attack. Some said the Kraken had come for the dreams that had been denied her. Either way, that night the whites of his eyes washed over back to that of cowardly Cooz.

She watched the burly boy hold the old man and almost giggled. These two, wearing dream like silk scarves and cottahink snoods, transitory draping that echoed elsewhere.

The girl leaned forward. They hadn't been the first. Her capture from the Black Swell had been a surprise, mostly to herself. Her Dojo had always said she swam too far. Silly old Dojo was right. This time she had.

She remembered the net hauling her upwards, the coarse sharp fabric tearing at the flesh between her fingers, then daylight, blinding her, the knock to the back of her head. Months of captivity in a stale old ships hold. The burning need to get home, take milk. She could feel it, her stomach yearning for it, the Kraken calling her home; its call moving blood.

Now this, stuck with the old man in his basement. He had tried! Only last night he had tried to hold her down and bleed her thigh. The old fool trying to lap at her cut like a milk starved cat. She had kicked him square in the chest and winded him, placed the knife against the underside of his chin and nicked him. She would not give her dreams to anyone, least this fool.

And now these two, no, there was another. There was always someone. They always came looking for her dreams, expecting her to give them willingly. Fools, would a mother give up her suckling? This one, this girl with her inquisitive eyes and the muscle behind.

Wait.

Someone else.

Lurking behind the façade.

She looked into the girl's eyes, probed; peeled back the skin of her mind like the flesh of an apple. There, hiding in his Reveries, the boy. The young powerful boy.

She branched out with her mind, found the beat of dream, flowering within the market.

'Hello.'

Xindii turned another page of the paper and stared cautiously at the haberdashery. They had been a while and wasn't sure how much longer he could keep up the Reverie. It was taking its toll keeping up the pretense. He wasn't sure how much longer he could sustain it.

Come on, Tyke. Hurry.

He had to keep it up.

Hadigan would have told him to not think of the distance, just imagine it; create. Bring Tyke and Doolally to you. Distance is immaterial.

Yeah, feels like it.

And as he regained a semblance of control he felt someone perusing his thoughts as easily as he was skimming through the Nuttergut Tribune. 'Hey!'

The girl from the Black Swell appeared in his third eye and smiled.

'Hello.'

Xindii's Reveries snapped.

Oda reached for the knife in his toga as the red head held his throat. The women chattered and spat, taking their eyes away from his hand and the blade that accompanied it. Oda sliced at the red head's arm and she yelled as the metal cut.

Oda fell to the floor and within the blink of an eye the visage of the red head withered and vanished to be replaced by the prominent frame of Doolally. Tyke looked back and noticed the Reverie had been broken.

'Doo-'

Doolally had surmised as much as the old shopkeeper stared blankly at the young thief. Their exchange lasted a mere moment as Doolally picked up the candle holder and smacked it into the side of Oda's skull.

He just stood there, the bloody hole in his head taking a moment to register with the rest of his body. The legs gave out first, falling like timber and bringing down the old man's torso. Oda's body shook and shuddered; convulsed in a display of momentous froth spilling from his mouth.

Doolally clutched the broken lantern in his hand, simply watching the frail lily white legs of Oda La Brin kick and rut. Tyke took the dirty knife from Dolly's trembling fingers and slammed the blade into Oda's brain.

The kicking stopped. The old man in the toga laid still among a haze of dirt.

Doolally looked Tyke in the face and saw the intent behind her eyes.

It unsettled him.

'What the hell, Tyke. Wh-.'

She looked at him, coldly. 'Just finshing the job, Doolally.