Gentle Waves and Starless Skies
One of the Myths of Ixonia
A writing exercise on the prompt - floating in darkness. I only allowed myself minor edits and kept it short. Enjoy! Next week’s One Shot will be about a company of dwarven dragon hunters.
Salt water lapped over his lips, the taste potent enough to sting. Instinctively he licked his lips, cracked and white, and spat out the traces of water that had wormed into his mouth. He was on his back, floating – as long as he kicked and waved his arms through the water a little. There was no sign of land. No sign of a boat or ship. The sky was dark but barren. Had he fallen off the edge of the world to land in the Deep? In the Void? The Abyss?
No.
There had been a ship. A crew. Sailing south, or had it been east? No one sailed east, not since the frelokath in their Great Exodus. Fleeing one continent, one world, for another. Fleeing a coming cataclysm. Not all had fled. He hadn't, his entire clan had stayed. Few others had. That was thousands of years ago, why had it come to mind? He floated in the dark and cold wondering when the stars would return, which direction he should swim.
When he next opened his eyes he thought he had spun around, yet the sky was cloudless and starless, the water lapped the same as before. Cold and salty. His tunic clung to him, wet as it was, while his boots were heavy and laden with water. Wriggling his toes he realised he couldn't feel them, nor his fingers, and the more he felt the more he shivered, the quicker his breaths became, the more pain he felt. Death came unbidden in his mind, with her tattered cloak and hollow eyes. The Veiled Maiden. He was not a practitioner of her cult, nor a believer, preferring the idea of death as state rather than a goddess or god. Was he wrong? Had he ignored a vital member of the pantheon?
No. They were not his gods, hadn't been his gods. The frelokath gods... how distant they were. Maybe his ancestors should have journeyed east across the Kysal Sea, maybe then he wouldn't have found himself shipwrecked.
Shipwrecked? Is that what happened?
No.
He trod water in some vein attempt to stay warm, yet the water drained him of all his warmth, all his vitality. As eyelids drooped he felt the salt water trickle up his nose and into his throat. He coughed, kicked harder, and forced himself above the gentle waves.
The sky remained empty.
The darkness unending.
The horizon merely a faint line of black to darker black, velvet and distant.
South. He had been heading south. There were islands south. Many small, desolate things of no use to anyone yet they would save him and come morn he could wave and shout to passing ships. The thought enraged the ember of life within and he swam, it didn't matter which direction. Dragging himself through the cold wet his lungs stung with every breath, his arms ached with every stroke, but there was no other choice. Floating would only lead to a slow death.
Warmth spread from his heart, though his fingers remained purple and numb. The salt tasted sweet, almost, and a ravenous thirst plagued his thoughts and stomach. Yet if he drank the poisoned water he would swim no more. The black line of the horizon had grown jagged, yet he knew not if it were clouds or land. Still the stars evaded him, for with them he would have known where he was. Had he been a sailor? A shiphand? Or less? A prisoner, a slave? Or was he more, a captain, an officer? Memories were scant and seemed as if belonging to another. Women and wine, prayers and incense, storms and blizzards. A blizzard out at sea, what a sight that was to see the snow fall in such spiralling drifts as to bloat out the sea. Had he seen that or –
Dark skies and darker seas grew apart. A third mass of grey, lighter than both, swelled on the horizon to such heights that made the Great Oak at the heart of Valkomere seem a mere sapling. He had lived in that tree once, in a branch high up, overlooking his people's ancient city now home to dwarves and humans instead.
Was he not a sailor from the Dual Cities?
A diviner from Valkomere?
Prayers and wine.
The roar of a tide echoed over the waves drawing him nearer. The waves began to help and hinder him, shoving him towards a coast and then away again. Was he to give in and accept a fate dictated by the sea? If he fought he could reach shore, or just as easy go no where. He swam with a ferocity he didn't know he had. He swam until he felt stones beneath his feet and sand on his cheek. He crawled out of the cold and wet to the cold and dry. The wind bit into him, a faint and icy thing, while the sand sucked at his knees and hands. The sea washed over him, angry and fearful at an escapee. He clawed away from the watery grasp and rolled onto his back, the starless sky greeting him coldly.
His name escaped him, like an eel. Slippery and squirming. Memories bubbled up in a haze, splintered and disparate. Though they did not feel his own but who else's could they be? The sand had grown warm beneath him, his thin linen tunic dry. The sky was dark and the sea continued to growl and yawn as it failed to reach his feet. Once the sun rose he would cry for help. Once the sun rose. Once the sun rose.
Sleep had been heavy and vacant. He had not rolled, moved, nor dreamt, yet still the sun had not risen. Still the stars evaded him. The waters, anything but still, lapped hungrily at the sands.
The sun did not rise but there was a dim light around him. It had always been there. When he was out on the water, when he swam, and when he crawled his way up onto land. A faint light surrounded him, the sort that hung around after dusk and appeared a little before the dawn. Why? His hand reached into the pocket of his tunic and he found a slip of paper. It fell apart, mushy and warm, in his hands. A scrap printed with an anchor and the letters L.V.M. stuck to his palm. An echo of semblance rang through his mind yet vanished before a memory surfaced. The letters meant nothing to him, not anymore. Still the sun did not rise and the stars did not appear. He picked out the flecks of sodden paper from his pocket and deposited them on the sand.
A speck of red appeared in the sky, a dot, a pinhole, of bright red. More joined it. The stars bled through the total night. Yet the stars themselves were bleeding. Trails of red, of blood, dripped down the sky as the cluster of stars glid across the sky.
The sandy earth shook, the sea recoiled, and the sky bled. He rose to his feet and turned inland. A man's silhouette stood over him.
'You should have fled with your people all those many years ago,' were the last words he heard.
Thank you for reading!
The man reminded me of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, when his raft is blasted apart by Poseidon's waves, and he just manages to swim ashore on Scheria.
Too bad for this man, it doesn't seem like he's met flock of young maids.
Really good piece, especially for minimal edits. I liked the sea descriptions: yawning, growling, massive grey silhouettes.