Day 2 - Wraeclast

(You can find the entire saga thus far (Day 1-11) by "chapter" here: http://ryukaki.com)


A flash of icy pain woke me, sharp in my head like fragments of shattered glass. There was a drumming, thumping feeling, which pulsed like slow thunder in my head; a drum, I thought, low and angry. Then I realized, no. A heartbeat. My heartbeat. It was painful in my skull, gradually getting louder and louder until it was nearly all I could hear. Everything else came to life, then. I could feel an ache coiling through my bones. Like the water, pain had soaked into every muscle and ligament in my body and held them stiff. My head felt bloated, and I could feel grainy sand below my cheek. The sand shifted beneath me, with the tide, which lapped at my exposed skin and tugged at my clothing as if to gently wake me from my slumber. I could feel my cracked lips burning as I tried to form sounds, and my throat, dry and hoarse when it refused to make them. The sun had come out, and it was warm and soothing on my back, a welcome reprieve from the storm that I still was not entirely certain that I had survived.

As I lay there, the pounding sound in my ears began to fade. It was replaced by the sounds of birds singing, and by waves as the ocean drew in and out of the shoreline. I attempted to move the fingertips of my left hand, and they responded by pressing into the sand below them. Excited by my body's ability to respond, I flexed my right hand then. It moved as well, though the way I was laying caused it to grasp at only air. My toes were next, and all ten of the small digits, as well as my ankles and my feet responded to each command given, though they were sore and convinced that I made unreasonable demands.

I hesitated then, not wanting to open my eyes. I expected the sandy beach to fall away if I did, for the sun to disappear behind caustic clouds of rolling thunder once more, and to be embraced by a new, muffling blanket of nighttime mist, in the bowels of a ship at sea.

When I finally did attempt to open them, I was left unsatisfied.

At first, they would not even separate, the two lids held closed by sand and by the little crusts of sleep that build up when one is exceptionally tired, or exceptionally sick. After squinting, and flexing my eyes several times, my eyelids opened, just barely, unwilling to contend with the bright sun reflecting off of the shallow pool of water I had woken up in. It took several minutes for them to adjust to even tiny peeks, but it was enough to confirm that I was indeed on a beach, made of sand.

I rested in the gently lapping surf for a time, letting my senses come back to me. I let the drums relent their savage pounding, melting away into mellow thuds, affixing nausea to me with each beat. My eyes gradually adjusted to the sunlight, but it took much longer for me to begin moving, and when I managed to finally muster the strength, it was misery.

Getting to my knees was the easy part, and it gave me a chance to look out across the sand. It was sudden, and harsh, when my stomach knotted and my throat became tense. The saltwater that had worked itself into my clothing, my skin, my muscle and my bone, decided it no longer wished to be in my belly, and I threw up. Several minutes were spent there, throat burning and face twisted in pain and dissatisfaction, nose filled with salty bile and my eyes marred with tears and anguish. The thumping pains had been forgotten, the ache in my joints and stiffness in my muscle discarded, I was consumed, for a short while, with simply ejecting as much stinging water as I could from my body. When no more would come, I finally wrestled control of myself, hands clenched and white-knuckled in the sand. I took in great gulps of air and spat after each one, ridding my mouth of the taste.

In the calmness that followed, I crawled several feet along the shore, remaining in the water just slightly, and every so often splashing it in my face and rinsing out my mouth. When I felt I could go no father, I fell down on my back, and closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I could still see the glow of sunlight, mixed with strange, whirling shapes and spots popping at the edge of my vision. It was warm, and inviting.

I must have rested for several hours. By the time I again had a sense of where I was, the sea had descended; the tide had left me, the day was moving on and the heat had gone from a pleasant warmth to a heavy, hot presence in the sky.

I sat up, in the daylight. I did not open my eyes again, not at first; I just sat, and listened. Now that the pain in my head had subsided, and I could hear more than an unhappy heartbeat, more than the water, I could hear small things shuffling around on the sand, and the voices of sea birds flying overhead in long, swirling loops while they searched for food. There was a wind blowing, it was traveling inland, and it smelled of nothing but the sea. Finally, my eyes cracked open, the brightness not so glaring this time, glittering off of the water that surrounded me. I glanced around myself, not so sick and not quite as weak as I had been, and there was an endless ocean sitting before me, perfect, and unperturbed. There was no sign of the great beast that had wrestled the Sea's Lament from the water, and there was not even the tiniest hint that a ship had once sailed the waters near here. The sky was nearly cloudless; I could see its reflection on the surface of the ocean, calm after a storm. It was as though someone had simply wished it all gone, and it had vanished, leaving me the only witness to the terrors that lurked in the waters, blue and clear.

I turned around, then, facing away from the water, and towards the beach that I'd woken up on. An impenetrable stone wall flanked my small section of beachfront, and seemed to stretch forever along the shore. The sand was littered with boulders and other large stones, some half-buried and some resting atop the surface, freshly fallen from the cliffside. Old debris littered the shoreline, made of ships that had been savaged at sea, made of sticks and logs, tree-trunks and discarded lumber.

It took several minutes for me to ply the strength to stand from the parts of my body that still hoarded it, but when I did I found my balance had not recovered, and stumbled when I tried to take my first step. Eyes closed to concentrate, I opened them again and took another cautious step, which went much better than the first had, and I could feel the warm sand through my thin leather boots as I began to walk.

Unsure of where I was, or where I should have been going, my eyes scanned the distant horizon. I was certain that there was smoke in the distance, rising up into the clear blue sky above. It was faint, nothing more than gray tendrils of something in the air, and I clung to that bit of hope, greedily.

There was no energy to spare running, or shouting, or hoping that I would be rescued, so my pace along the shore was slow, and thoughtful, and undisturbed. Memories of Oriath came back to me in flashes and fragments. It was only then did I realize that I was having difficulty remembering the port city. I could recall bakers on street corners and the scent of cinnamon that lingered in the air until you got to the wharf. I could remember distinctly the streets filled with faceless bodies whom I felt I should be able to name, but could not. I was certain that there was a man with a fiddle, who danced and played music in the great circular marketplace, on a large, raised slab of white stone where a statue had once been erected, but in my memories it did not seem to be there. The firm, perfect, red roundness of a plump apple in an apple tree, branches rattling and creaking in the crisp whisper of the dawn wind. But so much was missing.

The memories were interrupted, suddenly, by a movement at the edge of my sight. It was something small, low to the ground, three or four meters distant, and almost the same color as the sand was. It scuttled quickly, darting behind a large stone and then circling around it to face me. A long tubular tail was raised up like a scorpion's, the creature some sort of mix between insect and crustacean. On six pointy, sharp legs it moved towards me, quickly, and then skittered back, testing my response to it. I simply watched, curious, with narrowed eyes, head tipped slightly to the side.

I had expected it to do something. The sunlight glinted off of its intentions ominously, and something in my gut told me to be alert. Despite this, I did not expect for the tail to lash at me or for hard fragments of sand to spray out of a hole in the tip. I startled, and stumbled backwards, arm coming up to protect my face from the barrage. It sent a second salvo that I blocked with my shoulder, prompting me to move backwards even more. It pursued, and I glanced back to where my footsteps in the sand had been all but washed away by the tide. There was still an assortment of large wooden bits behind me, and I turned my back to the beast and moved as quickly as my fatigued body would let me, until I had come to a chunk of driftwood that could easily double as a club.

The sand-spitter had chased, thinking to press an advantage that it did not have, sounding of scuttling and tiny, excited noises as it advanced on me, but I had turned on my heel to face it, club in hand, prepared to fight back. Its hollow, sandy-colored tail rose up to shoot again, and when I saw it flex as it had done twice before to shoot me, I moved without grace and with all of the speed I could muster. The spitter struck only air with its attack, and in the brief instant where it had been firing, my club came crashing down onto its torso, resounding a satisfying crunch.

I struck it again, and a third time, just to be certain that it was dead, and then tossed the club to the ground, taking in several deep breaths, feeling the exhaustion in every exhale. The corpse of the creature twitched as what remained of its life escaped, a mellow green liquid that seeped into the sand and vanished when a wave came in to take it away.

I cast a sidelong glance at the club I had discarded, cracked, old wood now completed with a mess of crushed bug and green goop on its end. The weapon was obtained once more, hefted over a shoulder where it could rest with relative ease while I walked along the water's edge. The whole beach drifted on almost endlessly, and the smoke that I was certain I had seen on the horizon was no longer there to guide me, or even to remind me that it had indeed been there, leaving a feeling of indecision and uncertainty to linger in the pit of my stomach.

Small insects lingered on the tips of cat-tails that grew around the edges of the larger rocks, buzzing around and making them wobble in the mid-day sun. A breeze, which had changed directions since my waking, had brought new scents my way, faint smells of smoke and of the dead. The sunlight, which had once been a welcome friend in this new place, was slowly becoming a burden without any shade, reflecting brightly off of every surface it touched. A hand rested against my brow to keep my vision as clear as I could get it, and then something in the distance moved, and I blinked a few times to be certain of what I'd seen.

There was a man, resting against a large wooden stump, half sunken into the sand as though some giant had tossed it there and forgotten it. He had dark black hair, and a gray shirt that was still damp with sea. His head hung down over his chest, and it looked as though he may have been injured, so I rushed to his side, and knelt.

"Sir?" I asked, quickly, and without hesitation, "Sir, are you alright?"

There was no response, at first, just silence, and I reached a single hand out and placed slender fingers against his shoulder. I shook him very gently, and there was a groan in response. His head did not move, but one of his hands did, the left, which had been resting at his side. My attention turned to the hand when it shifted, and I could see that under it there was blood, from wound where a fragment of wood had lodged itself into his abdomen.

"You're hurt." I said, attempting to stay calm, but a hint of urgency snuck its way into my voice and I could not disguise it. "Here, let me at least get that—"

I was stopped by a voice, faint, and smooth like polished stones. "I'm already dead." it said, and then there was coughing, and there was blood. He looked up to me when he had caught his breath and said "You must be one of the Exiles from Oriath. You lucky dog." With a voice that had in it a touch of humor and of irony, which curled off of his tongue.

It prompted me to turn my head at an angle, and I raised one thin eyebrow up inquisitively. "You were on the ship?" I asked, leaving the question hanging not so much as a question but a statement that I was all but sure of.

"I saw you, didn't I?" He asked, and then groaned the groan that dead men make in the minutes before their passing, clutching his wound and letting out a sigh. He had relaxed his dark black hair against the fallen stump he sat against, and he was handsome in the sunlight. He had a strong chin, and whiskers were just beginning to color it a darker shade than the rest of his face. He had clean green eyes, and a defeated but accepting smile pulled across his face to mask his pain.

He said, "Yeah, you were the first one above decks." In a voice that said he recognized me, and then he paused to cough up more blood and wheeze a sick, unhappy sound. "You're probably the only survivor."

"The captain?" I said on instinct, and then regretted it. The man tried to laugh, but it was a bloody laugh, and it hurt him, so he stopped.

"So you did know him. There were rumors." He said, breathing now heavy and tired.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" I asked him.

"Just live, Exile."

"I will."

I nodded, and he closed his eyes, letting out a great breath. I got to my feet, and glanced around. I was startled when I heard his voice again, now distant and fading as if he had walked a great length away from me and was half-ghost, just whispering parting words.

"Follow the shoreline." He said. "I saw smoke. There must be people."

He was silent, then, and his breathing slowed. When next I heard a sound, it was a moan that I thought might have belonged to the dead man whose name I had, in my haste, forgotten to ask. When I looked down to him and did not see his chest rise or fall, I was perplexed. The sound came again, louder this time, and I turned around as quickly as I could, just in time to see empty, milky eyes and seaweed hair, old teeth and exsanguinated flesh lunge in my direction.

I screamed.

With the scream, I went tumbling backwards, almost losing my grip on the large chunk of wood I had brought as a weapon. The thing, whatever it was, seemed to look at me, and sniff the air just once while I stood paralyzed.

It appeared, though through no measure of its expression, to come to a decision, and it disregarded me in favor of the dying man.

I could feel nothing but horror and sickness, deep in my belly when the creature fell to its knees and sunk teeth and hands into the flesh of the dead man's neck. There was a sick, impossible crunching sound that came forth, like the snapping of chicken bones or of old branches in autumn. Blood sprayed everywhere, and though I screamed in my head for my feet to move and to carry me away, instead I stood transfixed, immobile, just ten or so paces away, eyes unable to believe what they were seeing.

Something in me, then, snapped. A primal thing reared its head, something angry, and fierce, and full of rage that exploded like sunfire and like lightening. I howled a sound that was nearly inhuman, and my body moved as though it were possessed by an evil, dark thing. I brought the large wooden club to bear, and out of my terror and disbelief emerged every bit of confusion and anger I had held onto, and I swung at the vile creature's head.

I do not know if it died then, and I did not care. The first strike to its skull felt good, and though I could not hear the crack, I could feel it. The second strike felt better, and with each successive blow, I felt a thousand pounds of emotion fly from my shoulders like sandbags that had held me down while this man I had barely known was desecrated. I swung again, and again, and again, long after the hideous thing had stopped moving I continued to bring the club down on its body until the wood had shattered into two halves, and I threw the bit that remained in my hand out into the ocean.

When the redness of rage and of raw, naked emotion had vanished, my actions my own, I looked down at the tangled mess of smashed meat and broken bones, shoulders heaving, my face and arms burning hot, and I cried.

They were tears not just of sorrow, and not just of anger, but of fear and of helplessness and of desperation. Whatever that creature had been, I was now, in my heart of hearts, certain there would be more. There would be more sand-spitters, and more of the dead and drowned come back to life.

It was some time before my thoughts cleared. My shaking hands calmed, and I relaxed in the sand. My face stung with the remains of dried tears, and my mind was focused. I had regained my clarity. There would be no more tears. I would do as the man had asked. I would gather myself, and I would survive what the island had in store for me.

-Senophostria

That was a nice read, thanks for taking the time to write it up.

I really enjoy how you describe everything so vividly.

Ooh, I like. More to come in the future, I hope?

Huge rewrite of Day 2. A thousand percent more enjoyable to read.

Great read mate. Well constructed.

Small edits to the text and the audio recording of this chapter is now up on my website.

Ryukaki, I have to say that you are really talented :). Keep up your good work

Nice read! Great description of the events :D

Thanks a bunch guys, just glad that people are able to enjoy it!

Very nice :D