Better to be safe than sorry. We changed course clockwise from the planet’s magnetic North until the lights grew distant like the stars above, drifting playfully across the horizon.

The winds were favourable. Soon we approached a field of icebergs, at which point we decided we would continue on our original path.

For a few hours we skirted dangerously close to the towering ice, sandwiched between impassable terrain and something we could not possibly explain. Those blue lights, they almost reminded me of the alien sightings the people of Old Earth had long claimed. I did not know if it terrified me more or less to encounter such a sighting thousands of light-years from that ancestral homeworld.

Were they growing closer? Those lights had remained on the horizon the entire time, and now they had become brighter than before.

When one of the two other travelers sharing my boat pointed out that they were darting toward us across the surface of the ocean, it was too late to change course again. They stopped perhaps half a kilometre away from us, as though expecting something.