The Pale Strand

A long bleached beach on the open Pacific side of the south headland, drift-strewn and gull-loud, where the great ocean swell rolls in unbroken — the literal western edge of the world.

There is no land further west. The swell that breaks here has crossed the full breadth of the Pacific without interruption, and the strand it raises and combs is bone-white with it — bleached shells, salt-pale driftwood, and the occasional thing the open sea delivers that the mere never could. The Silt Hands comb it after every storm, because what the Pacific delivers tends to have left its port of origin under circumstances that mean no one is coming to claim it.