Columbus's log. Day 10 since our departure from Spain. The sailors are a superstitious lot. I don't tell them anything, but they know the stars as well as anyone, and they know we've been heading due west into the unknown. The argue about falling off the edge of the world, of dragons, of testing the patience of God. They're all chattering idiots. I'm more interested in proving the world is round, rather than pear-shaped like the academics claim.
Those academics look at parallax of the moons and stars and planets, and they claim the earth has a circumference of 1 million miles. But any fool can look at the angle of shadows in various cities and show the circumference is only 10000 miles. So the academics split the difference, saying we're on a little bump on a gargantuan earth. Bah. The heavens love geometry. Even the moons all have periods that are clean multiples of a day. So earth has to be round, because a sphere is the perfect geometric shape. The parallax is just due to universal harmonics.
The weather has been fair and the winds favorable so far.
Day 30 since departure. The weather has become uniformly cloudy. There is a curious thing: the night is lasting slightly longer than it should. The sailors are spooked. I'm not sure what to make of it myself. But the water remains wet, the sky gray, the horizon a straight line, and the wind pulls us onward.
Day 40. The night continues getting longer. However, the night is getting LIGHTER. As if it were deep twilight all night long. The winds and rains are continuous, with lightning. Some sailors are driving themselves mad with fear at the changes. There was an attempted mutiny. I had five loudmouths tossed overboard, and we continue on.
Day 50. The night has broken in two: one period of normal length, except twilight remains after nightfall until shortly before morning, and a two-hour very dark period that happens currently 8am to 10am. The lightning has increased. It seems the lightning comes in two forms, one normal lightning, and another much stronger and lasting up to a minute. The second type has been happening regularly. Everyone knows we are seeing something new: not dragons, not the edge of the world, not even God's wrath. I continue to make sure they fear me more than they fear the unknown.
Day 51. The Santa Maria was hit by the strong lightning. It was hit continuously for 30 seconds and was consumed in incandescent flame. When the bolt stopped there was nothing left, not even a board.
Day 70. We've come upon a new land. It seems unpopulated by man, but it does have insects and giant birds. Volcanoes are everywhere, with lava actively flowing to the sea. Tropical trees cling to the new land in spots. You can see where the forest used to be but new lava has mowed it down. The strong lightning seems to prefer hitting the volcanoes. The nights are quite bright now: around midnight it is nearly as bright as at sunset. The two hour dark period around noon, though, is as black as an unlit catacomb except during lightning flashes.
Day 71. The skies have cleared, and all the mysteries have been revealed. All the men just stare at the sky transfixed. Our world clearly is round, and 10000 miles in circumference, just as I always said. But there is a tremendous moon spanning a sixth of the sky that we had not known about. It does not move, it stays in place both day and night. It must be much bigger than the earth, with the earth going around IT each day, which explains the apparent 1 million miles of parallax. Its surface is bands of roiling brown clouds that change over time. The light during the night is from the moon: it is full during the night and new during the day. The two hours of total darkness during the day is when the sun goes behind it. The strong lightning comes from the moon: you can always see bolts radiating out from it. The sailors have named the moon Zeus.
Another bolt from Zeus has consumed the Nina. We have one ship left.
This was first posted to reddit/r/WritingPrompts, in response to my own prompt.