The numbness that wracks your body changes but does not dissipate as you find your breath again. You tighten your grip on the piece of wreckage that happenstance has thrown your way, feeling strangely alien from the rubbery limbs that you wrap around it.
The sky is very blue, but no birds fly in it. You are alive.
[[Continue|You hear her]]
You are clinging to a massy piece of splintered wood, half submerged in the painfully cold ocean. You could not hear anything in the seconds immediately after you brought your head above water, but the beat of the tide eventually finds its way to you, and with it comes a faint gasping, half-cry. Spars and stays bobble around you. The feeling of pain and salt sting bites into your side.
[[Try to find the source of the sound]]
[[Attempt to examine your injury]]
You do not move at first. You almost think your arms would break should you try to unwrap them from whatever it is they are holding. As you blink the water out of your eyes, you look around you, trying to find the source of the one animal sound amidst the surf. In the distance, floating in the midst of the broken ship, you see a ragged blotch of bright purple: a stark splash of color that could does not naturally arise on any sea you know of.
The something that sobs continues to do so. The burn that pierces your side continues to throb as you feel something slide across your rigid body: something like a coil of cord or cloth.
[[Swim towards the purple shape.]]
[[Grab about for whatever has brushed against you.]]
It takes well over a minute to pry one of your arms off of the piece of wreck to which you so tightly cling. Your body loses its balance for a moment, and you fear that the wooden thing will cast you off, leaving you to sink into the fatal blue. Quickly, you draw your free hand to your side and grope about for the source of the pain. Your fingers find a smooth seeping mouth opened in your flesh, nearly two inches across. You realize at that moment that you feel sick and that you think you might float or fall away at any moment.
[[Try to pull yourself on top of the piece of wood.]]
[[Let yourself float or fall where you will.]]
Your arms and legs remember themselves somehow as you plough through the ruin and wreck, the ache of injury biting into your stinging side. As you push ahead, you can make out the thing before flapping and struggling, like a bird ensnared or an animal bleeding out.
He -for it is a man- gives a cry as you approach and finally casts his Tyrian garment, sodden and torn, into the sea. You feel dizzy as you draw near, and your vision seems to narrow before you can find your breath again.
"You are alive!" he coughs, his hand gripping your arm as though he had always been joined to your body. "You are alive!"
[["Who are you?"]]
[[Grab onto him. Try to stay afloat.]]
You fling an arm back into the cold of the dark sea, and try to sound out whatever it was that slid across your body, expecting it to be some rope or rag trailing about in the wreckage. You think for a moment, as your body slides slightly from the edge of the wrecked to which you cling, that you will lose your balance and sink, numb and insensate, into the deep.
Your head swims. The tearing pain in your side cuts into your body swordwise, and as you touch the smooth object, you feel a growing nausea. You realize are grasping a human hand; its fanning fingers are stiff and unmoving.
[[Try to drag the hand and its owner to the surface.]]
[[Let go. You cannot help.]]
You slap the hand palpating your injury back onto the wooden slab and try, almost comically, to fling yourself from the cold sea and onto its surface. You fail. The thing sinks beneath the water and bobs back, shoving you away. You try again. You fail again. You try and fail. Try and fail. Try and fail.
And then you try and succeed.
You are atop a piece of floating refuse, your cold-wracked body drying in the wind and sun. You no longer hear any sound save waves and clatter.
[[Look about and try to get your bearings.]]
[[Wait. It's warmer here.]]
It's as if you unexpectedly missed a step and never regained your footing; you keep tripping without hitting the ground. Your head feels a rush and then a sink. You roll into it, and your arms effortlessly go limp. It's as natural as sleep.
You aren't sure when you first breath in ocean, but there's a tightness as your throat constricts, and the blackness gives way to deeper blackness.
You drift, and each darkness proves the light of that darkness you saw before. There are no torches or flowers here; there is substance only in lamentations.
These you join in, if you are to have substance at all.
You are on your belly, and you lift your head up, looking anew at the shivering remnants of the ship all around you. You begin to notice new objects and new shapes: sodden balloons of sail, snaking rope, the gaze of a painted eye, the blade of an oar.
What you do not see is any sign of animal movement; you cannot find or fathom any sign of life around you.
[[Continue|Continue (Alone on Wreck 1)]]
You rest on the makeshift raft that bears up your body and let the sun soak into your sea-sodden skin. The wind hurts, the thrumming pulse from your leaking side hurts, but hurting is different from numbness. You feel as though you are waking from a dreamless night. You appreciate the burning star above you even as it leaves dark spots in your vision.
[[Continue|Continue (Alone in Sun 1)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Alone)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Alone)]]
You tug at the hand you are grasping, trying to pull whomever else it is alongside you back above the surface and into the light and air. You begin to realize that you do not remember what ship you were on or who your fellow travelers were. You do not know whose hand this is.
Their hand does not return your grip. They do not respond to your touch. You begin to think that they are dead when you feel the tug sinew and flesh jerking downwards, dislodging your precarious grip on the fragment of shipside to which you've clung.
You thrash and flop, trying to wrest yourself back from the deep, but the cold hand in the cold water pulls you down with it, its fingers entangling with yours as you begin to panic. You open your eyes as you fall, trying to find your companion, but no form or face meets your own. As your body gives in to the inescapable compulsion to breath and your lungs fill with fluid, you think you can make out the edges of another swimmer, but their face is shrouded and their body still.
When you hold their hand again, you are both at the shores of a long black river, and coarse sand clings to your unshod feet.
But there is nothing else there to recollect.
You loosen your grip on the dead man's hand and try to regain your hold on the wreckage. There is something that wounds you, deeper than the cold that pierces your skin or the rent that pierces your side. You feel that you have committed some unforgivable betrayal, but this sorrow is not one you can name.
You look upward toward the heavens and watch thin streaks of cloud stuff roll swiftly across it, as if the foam had found its reflection in the sky.
[[Continue|Continue (Escaped Dead Man 1)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue|Continue (Escaped Dead Man 2)]]
The sea swallows you and you struggle to hold on to your piece of the wreck as you are battered within its entrails. In the whirl of foam and water, you can make out the broken form of what was one a man for a single instant: a still image caught but briefly by your stinging eyes.
You are drawn back to the surface and to light and air. You find yourself deafened again, but you do not think that there is anything left to hear. Your wound weeps. The air stings. The sun burns.
[[Close your eyes.]]
[[Tend your injury.]]
He is young, smooth-faced, tanned. You can feel him tremble through the arm that links his body to your own. His water-slick black hair lies plastered against his skin, half-obfuscating his features, as he speaks
"Do you not remember me!?"
You feel the darkening swell of something tugging you away from yourself, your vision contracts again and as you slur out a "no."
He seems to pause as if he would say something, and then with strange suddenness, he shouts.
"Grab onto something!"
He drags your arm with his, and by the time you find substance to hold to, your vision is black. You grip the thing to which he's drawn you nevertheless.
[[Continue.|Continue (Grabbing Board 1)]]
You grip his shivering body with your own, and there is a moment when you can feel the animal warmth of his blood make you warm. He struggles, trying to cast you off while never loosening his grip on your arm.
"What are you doing!? Do you want us both to drown!?"
Despite the waxing sickness in your limbs and the growing blackness over your eyes, you somehow maintain a hold on him. You sink beneath the waves and reemerge. You sink deeper and manage to reemerge again.
And then you sink.
[[Continue|Continue (Grabbing Boy 1)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Grabbing Board 2)]]
There is a crash that sends you deeper into the black of the sea's belly, and although you maintain your hold on the plank to which you've been led, you lose any sense of the youth that dragged you to it. Your open eyes feel the hard rush of saltwater against them, but they do not see. Your body feels gush of blood mingling with ocean, but there is no pain.
You hear the sonorous toll of bells as your ears fill with fluid, and your fingers loosen on wooden thing that they once held. You are directionless and drift into the cold. Your heart feels as though it will burst with the fullness of one struggling beat and then empty. The sea feels warm as you pourinto it.
[[Sink.]]
[[Sink.|Sink. 2]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Grabbing Boy 2)]]
You feel hands gripping you tighter as the crash of water plunges you both into the foam. You think that you will dissipate: that your body will scatter like generations of leaves. There is a sudden clarity in which the hopeless nature of your allotment confronts you, and you consider trying to break the boy's grip on you.
He does not let go. You do not struggle. You gasp and choke as the water pushes you into the sunlit sky again, and then you feel the pain of your wounded side tearing anew.
"Save us!" he shouts. It is not directed at you.
[[Tell him you will die.]]
[[Tell him he will live.]]
You cling to the edges of the flotsam as the sea batters you over, choking you anew with water and multiplying the sickness you already feel. Your muscles burn. Your injury bites. Your brain reels.
You do, not, however, let go of your prize. Knowing that fate cares little, you keep your hands pressed vicelike against the sides of your perch. It buoys you up but little as the water tries to take you, but in the moment of calm that finally follows the crash, you are still attached to it.
By blessings unknown, you land with your body still in the sun.
[[Give thanks.]]
[[Begin to paddle. Get away from the wreck.]]
The dark sea bleeds into you. You bleed into it.
You see nothing, but that nothing grows darker.
You drown.
When you come at last to a new shore, you have nothing upon which to stand. Sensations pass through you, and you pass through the crowd. The toll is not paid, and you are no longer.
The dark sea bleeds into you. You bleed into it.
You see nothing, but that nothing grows darker.
You drown.
[[Continue (Spat Back)|Continue]]
Your heart races as you are spat back into the light. There is blood and salt in your mouth. There is no logic to this reprieve.
Water, salt, blood, and bile spill from your throat. You float and fall, but you can make out no sign of the youth that once held your arm. A broken foremast splashes near your body, and you try to hold onto it. You manage to make contact. It slips away. You catch it the second time.
[[Look for your companion.]]
[[Hold on and wait.]]
Ill beyond what you thought living men could endure, you spend what energy you have in shouting after the lost youth. You think, at first, that no sound escapes your lips, and you cringe with fear at the wild, inhuman howling that sounds across the waters.
Your body burns as you scramble, beastlike, to find some sign that you are not once more alone. You can feel your side rip, but you are strangely numb as the pain mechanically draws you into biting through your burning tongue. The voice of whatever daemon stalks this ruin continues its chatter, maddening you with its shrieks.
Your flailing arms find nothing to which they might anchor. Your phrenzied brains find no human face upon which to fix. When the next wave drags you down, there is a relief - a mercy you find in the silence that drags you down to waters darker and to places more lonely.
You cannot gamble that a miracle will befall two men. Fate is not so beneficent. You take the boon allowed you and cling to it, not letting your arms loosen from the beam that they grasp.
[[Continue.|Continue (Undrowned and Alone 1)]]
You tell him that there is no land to which you can drift. You tell him that there is nobody to save you. You tell him that other waves will come and that one of them will drag the two of you down.
"Then let go of me!" he shouts.
[[Let go of him.]]
[[Don't let go of him.]]
You tell him not to panic - tell him that you cannot focus on surviving if he demands help where there is none. You cannot think of how you will live, but you demand that he live nevertheless. There is no plan you make; no reprieve you have in sight; but you tell him he will live, and between injury, shock, and sickness, you haven't the strength to dissemble.
You do not lie. You tell him that he and you both live. Dizziness drags at you, but true to your word, both of you continue living in that moment. He looks at you, terrified but silent.
[[Try to make a plan.]]
[[Keep telling him that he will live.]]
Your hands do not grip him, and it does not take any real effort to throw him off. He continues to shout, looking to the sun. You do not grab on to anything else - no spar, stay, or sail that passes tempts you now that you have made your pronouncement.
You look up at the sun too. It sears a hole in your vision, and the shouts of the doomed youth fade in your ears as you refuse to swim.
You feel almost noble as you realize that you will no longer contend with what is allotted you, and as the glare of unrelenting light burns deep into unrelenting black, you do not resent dying. You taste the salt of boiled blood on the seawater as you inhale it, and you think -as best you can- of bluegreen fields, tembling as you fall.
He tries to throw you off as you cling to him, but even wounded, you are stronger. He flails in your grip, trying to writhe free and return to the ruin of the ship.
"Leave me be! You can die alone!"
He tells you what you did not yet know: that you do not want to die alone. You tighten your fingers around his body, your nails digging into his skin as his struggles sputter to a series of stops and starts. He calls you by epithets less than noble, fitting though they may now be.
"Why?" he groans.
You tell him the truth. He stops struggling. You both go slack in the shadow of the next wave, and you do not fight the downward suck of the all-consuming sea. Despite the sacrificial victim you clench to your breast, there is no comfort as darkness overtakes your eyes and clogs your throat. You do not know if your grip ever loosens as you die.
You quickly try to jolt your fading consciousness back from the precipice by trying to make good on your assurances. Dragging your arms about you, you attempt to find wreckage to which you can cling, and it occurs to you that there might be enough to lash together into some makeshift raft.
You relay the plan and bid him try to gather what pieces he can find together with you. You ignore the pain of your injury as you scramble for whatever material you can find.
You tell yourself that you will live.
[[Continue.|Continue (Making Raft 1)]]
You tell him that he will live. You tell him you both will live. You tell him that death will not take the two of you again and again and again - until something shifts in your body and your wound penetrates deeper into your entrails, bringing you the first insight that you have been lying.
In manner like the prayer you bade him cease making, you tell the heavens that you will live. You can feel the seawater snake into your body, filling you with cold and sickness from the inside. Still, you will live. He will live. You will live together.
Those words pass and shape the contour of your lips until your lips move no more. In the sunless lands to which you descend, you think you can feel the lips you do not have shaping them still.
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Making Raft 2)]]
Before the water subsumes you, you lunge you body desperately towards your companion. He must live, you tell yourself. He and you will live.
Your pale hand catches him, and he pulls himself towards you. The wave devours you both, and sparks of fading flame dance at the edges of your vision as the sea tries to rend your bodies apart. You fall upwards as the churning water calms, and you are both alive when the sun once more looks over you.
[[Tell him something will save you.]]
[[Tell him that you love him.]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Undrowned and Alone 2)]]
The wave beats you, but does not dislodge to from the mast. You tumble and choke as you fall, your body aching and burning as the sea toys with it.
When you stop, you are alone and adrift again. You think on how the water must have swallowed the boy and how it has spared you. You wonder what powers there are that determine such things. Your head burns even more acutely as you think on the personage that might be fate. You haven't time to philosophize.
There is you. There is the wreck. There is the sea. You have not yet been spared, and the absence of any other man attests to this.
[[Rest.]]
[[Swim.]]
You feel as though the sun mocks you by gilding this tragedy with light, and you feel in this instant too prideful to bear mockery. You ache and choke as the water caresses you, the darkness making it unclear what is your own motion and what is that of the sea.
Pallid as horn or bone, you see his face before you. It comes unbeckoned, and you cudgel your brains to think from whence the image comes. You did not see the visage of dead man as you sank.
He does not speak, but his eyes are open. You realize that you have no name by which to call him, and a quiet fear takes you as you struggle in vain to recollect anything before the crash.
[[Ask his name.]]
[[Bid him leave.]]
You loose one arm from the flotsam and nearly sink anew into the dark blue. Somehow, you grope about your side and force your fingers to find the tear.
It hurts. It hurts very badly. As you press your hand into it, you feel as though a bolt of levin has transfixed you. Your head swims. Your strength is as water. You wish that you hadn't been thrown back only to die thus.
Images flash through your head as a rush of gore spills into the rush of sea. There is dust and shouting, fire and lamentations. The scent of smoke: of immolated bone wrapped in fat.
And then there is the taste of blood, and the shade takes you.
"Do you not remember me?" the dead man says.
You do not speak the "no" you give him. A look of anguish lights across his features.
"Why have you left me unburied!?
You do not have any answer. As the pain from your injury touches the edge of your ribs, the fear comes that none will bury you.
"Why have you left me unburied!?"
You do not know.
"Why have you left me unburied!?"
[[Continue.|Continue (Ghost) 1)]]
Double-click this passage to edit it.
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Ghost) 2]]
The wraith is with you through the dark of the ocean. You open your eyes and you see his, hollow and pale, shining back at you in every bead of the sickgreen foam. He wails with the lash and the fall of water, but he does not question you further. Salt and sand rip at the throbbing injury on your side, and you think that you will be rent and scattered - like grain threshed and winnowed.
You are blind when you next breathe. Something in the deep took the light from you, and you are left with the pallid, accusing face of your only companion.
He does not question. He only cries.
[[Offer him rebuke.]]
[[Offer him comfort.]]
You look to the light that pierces the sky above you and gasp an invocation to what forces you know not. The sky offers no response; the sun continues its transit. You feel a slight unease at the quiet of the scene, for you do not think you have been deafened once again.
Recollections push at the thresholds of your consciousness as you begin to think on the vastness of things missing. You do not know how you came here. You do not know whose ship this was. You do not recall names, kinsman, friends... history or deeds. You know not know who you are or even to what God it is that you almost prayed to.
Wind whips painfully over your body as you contemplate these things. You are naked and alone.
[[Try to remember.]]
[[Try to escape.]]
You know that if you are to live, you must find land, and trying your best to maintain your balance, you rake your arms in the bluegreen sea, trying to put as much distance as you can between yourself and the ruin of the ship. You do not wish to risk becoming further injured in the midst of the scattered wood and rope.
You make some headway. Your vision is blurred, and your eyes can barely open for the sting of the saltwater. You try to scan the horizon nevertheless, and you think, perhaps in error or in phantasy, that there is an unmoving line of white that does not shift with the roiling blue.
[[Continue|Continue (Island 1)]]
The light bakes your body, and you try to remember land. You know that a man, who can so easily drown, does not arise from the sea //ex nihilo//. Images of hills and plains pass through your mind, although they have not particulars to them that tie them to specific locations. You can only remember generals: cities without names, women without faces, livestock without owners. There is nothing that you can seize upon that is your own
Your injury weeps and burns as a growl rattles your stomach, and you hunger despite your unwellness. Suddenly you can recall comforts you once knew: unmixed wine in a painted bowl, sheep's cheese in soft doughy curds, bread drawn fresh from the ashes of the fire.
It begins to return, like smoke uncurling down from heaven and back to its source. You look up to the sun.
[[Continue|Continue (Amnesia 1)]]
It matters naught what your origin was; you are a dumb, scattered creature who aches to live more, and you know you must move from here to land in order to do so. Somehow, you must escape the open sea into which you seem to have been born.
You loose your arms, struggling to maintain your balance on the makeshift raft upon which you float, clawing at the rippling tide.
You refuse to be swallowed. You refuse to return to the ocean's guts. Your eyes scan the horizon, and you think you can make out something in the far distance: a stationary white line atop the foam.
It might be an island.
[[Continue|Continue (Island 1)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Amnesia 2)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Island 2)]]
The raining foam sucks the shapes of memory away from you. Your brain, starved for air makes phantoms of things you could not have seen: shapes and forms unnatural and unreal, sights you never saw. You flounder, trapped, fishlike, on the line of the current.
There is something uncomprehending and wrong as you are drawn back into the shimmer of sunlight and air. Your head rushes, your vision contracting and swelling, as you behold the shivering expanse before you. The murmuring water coils with packed feathers and spittle, insect chatter and dusk prayer.
You fear your torso, knotted and well-muscled, go slack as the water around it, an you feel your limbs flop and flow in pelagic sympathy with the world around you.
[[Close your eyes. Steady yourself.]]
[[Surrender to the flux in which you are trapped.]]
The sunslick wave vomits you back, but it tears your prize from your hands. The broken ribs of the ship batter and bruise you within its disemboweled belly, chewing your corspe white flesh before spitting you back.
You are injured and faint. You wretch bile into the green around you, trying to open your swollen eyes to find the shining shore you spied. Blinking, weeping, you make out the line of two blues joining and look for that gilding of unfoaming white.
[[Keep searching. Find the island again.]]
[[Swim. Swim away from the wreck.]]
You have no place to rest, but you are too drained, too tired, to stricken to do otherwise. You lay your neck against the side of the foremast and let it drop there: just for a moment, so you tell yourself. Just until you have the strength to make use of the gift given you.
Your face is buoyed up out of the water as your wiry arms stiffen around the thing they grasp.
As you lapse back into the unconsciousness of a death you thought escaped, the melody of birdsong rings in your ears.
You must have been close to land, or at least so you dream.
The mast will be an encumbrance. You must move quickly.
If there are gods to grant miracles, they have favored you. You cannot think otherwise. There must be somewhere away from this wooden ruin in which you are meant to land.
You push yourself into the violent blue and determine that the next wave will not take you unready, your body burning inside and out like a torch as the salt mingles with your blood.
Phateon-like you seem to fly through the water, benumbed to the point that you are unable to realize just how slowly you are moving. You think to yourself that you must live - that your life could not have been spared only to be taken again. As the chill of the unrelenting sea reaches your marrow, you fly still - not noticing as you pass to Stygian waters where the sun will not find you.
You try to reassure him again. You try to insist until the words are true. The words don't even come. You sputter and choke, the salt of blood or sea staining your lips as you try to intone some new-invented incantation. They will save you. They will save you. They will save you.
He cries, birdlike and maddened as the fever of hopelessness overwhelms him. You continue your ravings to whatever "they" might inhabit the cruel sun or empty sky.
The next wave offers no benediction. He is not with you as your cracked and chatting lips suck down the water, filling your lungs with pain. There is no clarity to your lies. You tell yourself that you live still when your skin blossoms into floating wrack and your bones decay to coral, but never can you tell if he followed.
You will not live. He will not live. You cling to him as though you were two grafted trees, roots and branches entwining. You say that you love him, lips softly forming words that you do not know if he can hear. You love him because he is alive. You love him because you are alive. You love him because the next crash will kill you, and he will be something living beside you as your life is stolen.
"You are a fool!" he shouts, hoarse and shivering.
In a fever you tell him again that you love him, dearer than son, brother, mother, or wife. You tell him that no thing under the sun is dearer to you this moment.
"Stop your prating," he chattered, "There is nothing beautiful here. There is nothing poetic to death or to dying together. Your love is insipid sentimentality, and we will die." He chokes. "We will die."
You cling to him still, the warmth of his body sending you the pulsing voice of his heart through the cold cloud of sea.
[[Continue|Continue (Peace with the dying)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with the dying 2)]]
The shaker of the earth sifts you, stealing you into the darkest entrails of a sea that will not spit you back. The youth does not struggle back to the air, but you know, through secrets the devouring water whispers, that he requites you not.
The burn of salt tide pierces your side and rips your lungs, leaving you to breath gore and bile. He does not love you. Your eyes lose light and then lose darkness. He does not love you. His head lies in the crook of your neck as foam white horses and phantasms fall alongside you, and you tell yourself that this gesture of closeness conveys no sympathy.
But that gesture, be it real or no, is enough.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with the Dying 3)]]
There is rest here.
You do not die beloved, but you do not die alone.
Death is not kind, but it is gentle.
You find in that, small and infinitesimal as it is, some allotment of peace.
[[Continue|Continue (Credits)]]
You tell him that you and he have no past that you can remember. You tell him that you can bury him no more than you can bury yourself.
You falter as you make that pronouncement, feeling the sickness of your empty stomach as you think of your bones given over to the deep and your flesh food for fish and crawling things. You wonder if you are already dead.
He gestures to you, accusatory and unyielding. You have no recourse. You burn as with fever in the freezing water. Your bowels and blood seem to dissipate in the unseen current.
His lips contort in a scream as your head sinks beneath the water again, arched into a gaping square like the maw of a gorgon. There is pain in the darkness that he draws into you, and you cry lungfuls of water, wasting, melting, wishing that no offense had been offered.
You have no piety, for your blank and emptied brain knows no gods and no proprieties. You think the thing before you is most likely illusion: a phantasy, strange shapes and clouds formed by a dying man's vision.
He is the vision you have, however: the dream of your fading brain. As you breathe the suffocating, sunburnt air that sits atop the sea's dark mirror, you apologize. You beg him to forgive whatever transgression you committed before the storm, to understand that your body might accompany his in the deep and that both of you will therein lie forgotten.
The ghost offers no recognition. He offers no admonition. His glassy eyes, however, whirl with lights you do not recognize, and they bleed from their blackened sockets into the void of your vision, pockmarking it with stars.
[[Continue|Continue (Peace with the dead)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with the dead 2)]]
You feel no pain as the cold overwhelms you. Your lungs are as melted tallow already, and the chill of the wave extinguishes them, salt blooms blossoming and withering on your skin and entrails. THhe blinking lights fall on your head, barleylike, and you bow your neck at the deep.
The faded form of ghost vanishes, and pale hands, soft as elysian fronds, trace the lines of your hardened muscle and sinew, dragging you down to a shore that sees no surf and a river unflowing.
You try to catch your breath to find it flown, and two stars fall and calcify in the sand beneath your feet.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with the Dead 3)]]
There is rest here.
You die unshriven, but you do not die accursed.
Death is not merciful, but it is mete.
You find in that, small and infinitesimal as it is, some allotment of peace.
[[Continue|Continue (Credits)]]
You try to look around you, your rheumy eyes salt stained and blurred as your gaze looks for something to land upon. You strain to find the island - //your island// - in the midst of the unforgiving sunlight.
You eventually find it and marvel at how close it now is. You have a long swim -a very long swim- but as your vision focuses and clears, you can make out the engraving of black shapes and figures on its surface: verdure or buildings or some other structure. You have the sign. You have a course.
And so you swim, struggling but emboldened by the promise of sanctuary. The water soaks you, chilling your flapping form, but you push on, even as the line fades, even as the shadows melt, and even as a twilight without a dawn falls across the face of the sea.
You haven't time to find the island. You are desperate and bestial, and you have no recourse save the struggle of movement to battle the death that chases you.
Your arms charge forth in long strides, ignoring the burning bolt that spears your side. You will escape the next wave. You will survive to find land. You will drag yourself, by nails and teeth if necessary, to a warm shore where you can breathe the clear air and let the coal hot sun reignite your frozen body.
It is farce, however, rather than tragedy that kills you. Your churning limbs comb through the wreck with a carelessness that entangles you in one of the ship's floating ropes. The panic of the moment extends indefinitely as you catch your body more and more in the line. Your injury drains you more and more as you struggle, and a jolt of agony blinds you ase something finally breaks inside you, leaving you to bleed out in your selfmade snare.
You refuse the unreal world with which you are confronted. You tell yourself that you have swallowed too much seawater, that you have become drunk on panic and lost sight of what you ought see.
You focus on finding your body again, on drawing up a shape and form with which you might once more swim.
Your own flesh eludes you, however, and the colors and figments that you saw on the waves flood into the dark of your eyes. You try to find yourself and you cannot. You to ground yourself in something -in //anything//- but the more you try to focus, the less there is to fasten you. Material and corporeality fade and flow as some sink of cold and water takes what once was you with it. You have no thought as you dissolve into the terrible blue.
There is something soothing in your surrender to the world of delights around you. You did not think that the water had such secrets. All around you whirl and spin the shapes of birds and animals, men and maidens. You make out the waggling outlines of crumbling columns, of lapis fires and gold-red trees. You know you will die, but it is a beautiful world to die in.
Memories once again flow back to you. The swimming lines that embroider the foam and clouds show you pictures into the past. You remember a smokey womb of flame-hardened wood, the lamentations over veils torn. Yes. There are monsters in the parade of men now. There are flowers that sooth and rumen to chaw. You have the shapes of names now if not the sounds. There is a revelation of your own forgotten life, a truth standing still on the limn of your brain.
And then you sea them.
The foam white and gold gilded oxen of an unpronounceable isle.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with the death)]]
A wave is coming.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with death 2)]]
The leaping bulls dance, white hooves and shining horns glimmering on the crest of each wave. They bound like clouds on the greenblue sky. You breath in greedy gulps of water as you sigh at their form. You were a man once. You had your will and you took your portion. You know not the breadth and name of your transgressions, but you hope they were as beautiful as the punishment befalling you.
Your throat closes and your eyes lose sight of the spectacle before you, your hungry stomach filling with salt and sweet gore. You drop down, stonelike, and hope that someone, someone wiser than you, will remember your name.
You decide, nameless, though you are, there is some epithet you can attach you your falling body, and you die: beloved of death.
[[Continue.|Continue (Peace with Death 3)]]
There is rest here.
You die uncomprehending, but you do not die in darkness.
Death is not sweet, but it sates you.
You find in that, small and infinitesimal as it is, some allotment of peace.
[[Continue|Continue (Credits)]]
You sleep, dull and dark and floating in the sea, but you somehow wake, and watch the gray melt and part into gold.
The sand bank upon which you lie is not cold, even though the sun is absent from the star specked sky. Salt crush clings to your skin. Black blood oozes sluggishly from your side. You do not move. You do not know if you can move. You are alive, however.
You are alive, and the sea could not claim you.
CREDITS
Written by Leah Davydov
Inspired by Book XII of The Odyssey, Woodpigeon's "And As The Ship Went Down You'd never Looked Finer," and a possible fever on day three of the jam.