Excerpt:

As Captain Alice wandered through the market she knew she had been wise to leave the others on the ship. There were many oddities to be seen in the stalls and in between the buildings, down the alleys that even the light didn't dare visit. People were moving about, the hustle and bustle seemed familiar to the Captain in a way that she couldn't quite describe – like she'd been here before somehow, though she knew she'd never set foot on this land. She was fairly sure that she'd sailed her ship through this part of the sea before, she told herself, watching a man devouring a large stick of fire, and yet – she'd never seen this small island. It was shrouded in a shadow that she couldn't quite describe or understand – there was no way to shadow an island.

Shadows were created when light hit something and couldn't pierce it – it was the solidity of an object hanging over another one that caused a shadow to appear in stark contrast of the light behind it. But there was nothing looming over this island. And yet there was no daylight on the land. The sun was high above her, she could see it, but the street was as dark as night with torches and all manner of lighting devices lining the market and sitting on the stalls. She didn't get a good feeling about being here, and Captain Alice was not the type of person who spooked easily. She was more the type of person who saw something terrifying and laughed in its face, gave it a Melvin, and went on her way. But this place, this dark place where the sun didn't make an impact – ever-dark, she called it in her mind. This ever-dark place was a bit too much for her. It was unnatural – even more so than her glass eye. That was another thing she had noticed. Her glass eye felt very cold here.

She had gotten used to magical places making her eye cavity feel strange but she had never felt something that made her glass eye feel like it was an ice cube – and eyce cube? - so much as this place did. It disconcerted her in a way that is wholly understandable to those who have ever had something other than an eye in their eye socket and probably pretty reasonable sounding to even those who have not had the displeasure. She walked the length of the market strip a few dozen meters in from the dock and saw all there was to be seen there – people selling meat on sticks was all right, she supposed. There were a few fruit and vegetable merchants who had set up shop, though some of the produce looked very new. She had never seen such spiky fruits and unwelcoming, inedible looking food. It made no sense to her that these people chose to eat these things and survived. In her experience, the food that didn't look like it wanted you to eat it would usually make you pay stiffly for your indiscretions. But they were all alive and well... perhaps a little pale, but alive and well all the same.

There were a few musicians playing music on stringed instruments and percussion that made the picture all the more eerie. The songs were almost hypnotic. Alice realized that she'd been listening to them for more than a minute, phased out, and in that time someone had gotten a bit too close to her personal space – and she hadn't noticed. Having been a pirate and an attractive woman or cat her entire life had made her very sensitive to people in her space, but this scruffy looking bastard had crept up on her while someone was playing the music... it was all too much. She turned and walked back the way she came, toward the ship.