text: Over the next few days, the airship you’re on continues to drift at the mercy of the wind. You see no other inhabitable islands within range, and have no way of turning the ship around towards the islands you do see. Progress is painfully slow, and you feel sure that you will die here. Your supplies have dwindled down to almost nothing.
  
  The captain’s condition worsens near the end of the week. You manage to get her conscious enough to eat what little food and water you have left, but she barely eats anything at all. You don’t have much hope for her survival, and every day she seems weaker than ever. A realistic approach would be to leave her to die and save what precious provisions remain, but you can’t see what good that will do. This ship isn’t going anywhere, after all.
  
  It’s difficult to sleep at night on the hard wooden deck. The stink of the corpses is too much to bear, and you spend hours dragging them off the ship and shoving him over the side. You thought that removing the extra weight would help the ship move faster, but it doesn’t. Nothing works. Nothing you do seems to help anymore.
  
  You run out of food in the middle of the second week.
  
  There’s still water. Water can keep someone going a lot longer than food deprivation will. It hasn’t rained for so long. No storms. No rainfall. You almost wish for a storm to hit the ship, something to break the monotony, but right now this isn’t a ship anymore. This is just half a ship, and you’re just half of the skeleton crew.
  
  Just mere skeletons now.
  
  You’re getting weak from lack of food. The gnawing pain in your stomach won’t go away, and you don’t want to waste what little water is left. You think about denying the captain water altogether. Someone has to survive.
  
  When the next week begins, you awaken to see a strange red mist rise up ahead, out of the gloom. You’ve never seen such a thing before, and something about it frightens you. You feel that the airship has entered a part of the sky that nobody should enter, like a forbidden area. You don’t want anything to do with this mist, just want to lie on your bed and clamp your hands over your ears and block everything out.
  
  You’re so hungry. You’re so hungry and tired, tired and hungry, sick and tired, tired and sick…Does it really matter anymore? Does anything matter?  
  > You stay up on deck to see what happens
  You stay on deck as the red mist descends upon the airship. Something doesn’t feel right about this, but you’re too tired and hungry to care. The unconscious captain is lying nearby, just as vulnerable to the mist as you are. For a moment you consider taking her inside her room to give her some better protection from whatever effects the mist might have, but it’s too late for that now. You brace yourself, ready to act if anything untoward happens.
  
  Slowly, you feel a strange feeling come over you. The pains of your body begin to recede, here within the red mist. What’s going on? The gnawing hunger in your belly is beginning to disappear, along with your fatigue. There is a movement next to you, and you turn to see the captain open her eyes and slowly get to her feet. Could it be that the effects of the red mist are actually beneficial?
  
  Even if it’s nothing but an illusion, you are grateful for the relief from the constant pain that has plagued you for the past week or so. Your body feels light now, lighter than air, and you feel almost as if you are floating. The captain turns to stare at you, and you realise that both of you are moving upwards. You don’t know what’s going on, but this doesn’t seem too bad. Perhaps you could rise up to a greater height and find an island, where help may be found –
  
  You chance looking down and see a sight which fills you with horror.
  
  Two dead bodies lie on the deck of the airship, directly below you. They belong to you and the captain.
  
  You turn to call out to the captain, thinking to warn her about what’s happening, but no sound escapes your lips. Your face and body is changing, splitting apart, slowly disintegrating…into just another part of the red mist. The same thing is happening to the captain. She opens her mouth in a silent scream just seconds before she, too, is absorbed.
  
  The red mist marks an uncharted region of the sky, beyond which no wind blows at all. It has one primary, deadly purpose: to leech away the life-force of the poor souls who drift this far away from the sky islands, far away from any hope of civilisation. Your life-force has now been converted into new energy to facilitate the mist, and you exist no longer.
  
  You are just part of the red mist now, drifting eternally across this patch of sky to prey upon any survivors of doomed airships which come here. You perish here within uncharted territory, yet live on as part of a mass entity, claiming the lives of others who have already given up hope.