Storm's End (short story)
Storm's End was a short Jenny Everywhere short story written by Scott Sanford, serving as a direct sequel to Aristide Twain's earlier, standalone PROSE: Psychopomp, which had established that an incarnation of Jenny and a version of The Sandman's Death of the Endless were now travelling together.
Contents
Plot
Somewhere, a ship that's been at sea for much too long is caught in a storm. The familiar event is interrupted, however, when two woman mysteriously appear on deck: one an Asian girl wearing a trousers and a preposterous scarf, the other a chalk-white woman in a black dress. Strangely cheerful, they ask to speak to the Captain, who is none other than Hendrick Van der Decken. He does not remember the woman from her previous incursion onboard the ship, when “everyone was busy”, and is initially annoyed when she inquires about the specific wording of the vow he took all those centuries ago to “round the Cape if it took [him] until the Last Day”. However, the two soon explain that the pale woman has finally devised a way out of the vow: he didn't specify the end of which world would be the time-limit on his oath, and in the scope of the Multiverse, there are worlds being created or destroyed every day. Thus, they suggest that he let Jenny take the wheel and steer the Dutchman into another universe which has already reached its end, which will free the cursed seamen from Van der Decken's vow and finally allow them to return to habour.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- This story features the incarnation of Jenny previously seen in PROSE: Psychopomp. She appears as a woman wearing “sturdy trousers and a gaudily colorful scarf”, with the Flying Dutchman's crew thinking she has “the look of the East Indies lands that they’d once sworn to reach”.
Universes
- The story appears to take place in Death's native universe prior to its destruction, as Death alludes to having met Van der Decken before on the day he should have died.
Other
- The Flying Dutchman is described as a “three-master fluyt”.
Continuity
- This story follows on from PROSE: Psychopomp, where a version of Death of the Endless agreed to travel the Multiverse with Jenny.
Behind the scenes
Background
When posting the story, Scott Sanford appended a foreword:
| Who could find one lost ship in the immensity of the seas? Who would want to find them? And even if they did, who could do anything about it? If you haven’t read Psychopomp by Aristide Twain yet, go read Psychopomp. |
| —Scott Sanford |
And an afterword, after the Paragraph:
| You should recognize the other characters, too. You might not remember the name Hendrick Van der Decken, but you’ve heard of his ship. And Jenny's pale friend? Yeah, she's got this. She's very good at endings. |
| —Scott Sanford |
The story was also prefaced with a few lines from Thomas Moore's poem The Flying Dutchman, and a black-and-white piece of preexisting official art of Death of the Endless was used to further clarify the pale woman's identity to readers who failed to read Psychopomp, a piece originally drawn by Chris Bachalo for Death: The Time of Your Life #1 (1993).
Read online
The story is available on the author's Dreamwidth website.
