Day 3, June 1st, 703 CR
The night was uneventful and silent, with even the sailors not saying much, at
least for the portion that Zyn deigned to stay awake. He stayed up until what
he thought was midnight, though he could not be certain with no concrete frame
of reference. He awoke sometime not long after dawn, next to a snoring Lorian.
By this point the thirst was becoming unbearable, and all of them began eyeing
the water like madmen, knowing that they could not even take a single
satisfying drink. All would have been hopeless, had they not had a mage of
course.
“I still truly have no idea what I am undertaking,” he complained in his thick
aristocratic accent.
“Just shut up and use those pyro spells of yours,” Pols shot, “We’re thirsty
for a drink, damnit!”
“But I am not even trained in any of this” Parn protested, “I study in
enchantments, not-“
“Shut up!” Bresan, Lum and Pols all shouted at once.
“But this has not worked in all the previous attempts,” Parn complained.
Grumiah smiled ever so slightly. “Practice makes perfect, boy.”
Sighing dejectedly, Parn set his mind back on what they had all been
repeatedly egging him to do, boil water. The hope was that if they could get
some water boiled they could separate the water from the salt.
All fine in theory; but theories in Zyn’s experience tended to be treacherous
things that could at any moment fall to pieces. For the most obvious problem,
they were trying to capture [i]steam[/i], not just liquid water. The steam was
the good stuff that didn’t have any salt in it, and if they could capture it
and let it cool they’d have nice pure water.
They had tried this before many times the previous day, both before and after
they had found Zyn. Apparently Parn had divulged (or had been brusquely forced
to admit) that he knew rudimentary fire and ice spells, though he kept
insisting that they were “not his specialty.” After (roughly) getting a flame
spell down, he’d try to freeze the steam as it came back up, but even with
training it would have been hard to do anything with it. Multiple attempts
yielded a whole lot of nothing, just rising steam that wafted away into the
air. There was one exception, though this happened when Parn misdirected his
spell causing it to hit Bresan dead in the chest. Fortunately he hadn’t
received any serious injury, though it had made everyone quit for the night,
despite their growing thirst.
Today, they were trying it differently. They decided to forgo entirely the
use of Parn’s lackluster freezing spells and tried to physically capture the
rising steam. How they did this would require an odd request.
“Take off my clothes?” Parn gasped.
“Just your shirt kid,” Lum said, “We’ve gotta get something for the water to
condense on, you said it yourself! We’re all chipping in. What’s wrong with
it, we’re all men aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Pols jumped in, “Let’s see them chest hairs!”
Much to everyone’s surprise, in contrast to his bare chubby child face, Parn’s
chest was hairy as a bear. “Damn,” Bresan said.
“Aww, seems he ain’t a little boy after all,” Pols said sadly. “Looks like
you won’t be able to fulfill your preferences this trip, Lum!”
“Yeah, such a shame for you, isn’t it, midget?”
“Enough!” Grumiah bellowed.
Once they were all naked on the top, they tied the shirts together to for a
large solid surface that they could hold up and catch the rising steam. Or at
least they [i]attempted[/i] to tie it together.
“You’re doing it wrong!” Pols yelled.
“My knots are just fine, you’re the one who’s going under when you should be
going over!” Bresan shot back.
Great Eli, stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of sailors
who couldn’t tie knots? Zyn’s mind immediately recalled the Three Sailors of
Whales, an old song about three drunks who tried to sail a galleon all by
themselves and ended up lost at sea, with the three buffoons in front of him
acting the parts to a tee.
“No, no, no, no! Look at this, this whole thing is wrong. This isn’t
supposed to be a rope, it’s supposed to be spread out like a blanket over a big
area. This thing sucks!”
“Your mother sucks,” Pols retorted.
“Eli damnit!” Zyn shouted before the inevitable shoving match occurred. “Are
you people all incompetent or something!? How hard can it be to tie a bunch of
shirts together? Just let me do it.”
A minute later, Zyn held up three shirts that were all tied neatly together.
“There, see?” Lorian reached over with his one arm, grabbed one of the
sleeves, and pulled, unraveling the whole thing.
Pols slapped Zyn upside the head. “That didn’t work either genius!”
“It’s not supposed to be a rope, you stupid ass; it’s supposed to be held over
the water, not hold two things together!” Zyn shouted back.
“That still won’t hold very well,” Lorian calmly assessed.
“What, you want to do better?”
In response, Lorian reached over and grabbed the whole mess from Zyn and the
others and with his one good arm, his stub of a right arm and his [i]teeth[/i],
Lorian started putting together their sweat stenched water collector. Zyn sat
incredulously as Lorian held up his final product and told Grumiah to pull on
it, which didn’t unravel it in the slightest.
Zyn grunted, flustered. “Ok, you know what, screw you!” Lorian didn’t even
flinch.
Next came the dilemma of how to hold the whole contraption [i]over[/i] the
water. After berating and interrogating Parn for a good five minutes trying to
squeeze a levitation spell out of him with no results, they all argued over how
to hold the thing up. Finally it was agreed that someone had to rest on the
wooden plank that Zyn had floated on and hold their home-made water condenser
in place. After much deliberation it came down to a game of Rock, Paper,
Shears, which technically Bresan lost, but since Pols saw fit to cheat by
claiming his paper was actually shears after the fact, he was unanimously
chosen to be the one to get wet. Grumbling about cursed fates and some other
crap, Pols climbed into the water and balanced himself awkwardly on the plank.
Precariously balanced, he almost dropped the blanket of shirts when it was
handed to him, causing Zyn to wince; if the thing got soaked they’d have to
wait several hours for it to dry out, if even then with all the salt
.
Problems immediately surfaced when Parn’s fire chanting caused intense heat to
break out not in the seawater before them but on the raft at their feet. Zyn
spotted the flames first, and immediately the six men onboard disintegrated
into a chaotic mess of limbs and panic until someone belatedly realized they
were surrounded by water. After drenching the would be conflagration, and
screaming at a sheepish and horrified Parn to watch where he directed his
spells, they tried again.
This time Parn’s spell was right on the mark, but Pols’ balance was not as he
tipped over and splashed into the sea, taking the shirt blanket with him. Lum
berated Pols’ for his clumsiness and Pols screamed back, saying that the stupid
waves had knocked him off balance. The shirt blanket was absolutely soaked
with salt water and in any case would take hours to dry. Rather than wait for
that, the decision was made to strip off their pants and make a condenser out
of them instead (Pols was excluded of course as he and his pants were already
wet). This time they just gave everything to Lorian to tie up for them, who
gave them a pants blanket “condenser” in short order.
Setting up their second attempt, everything seemed to be going fine until Pols
started squirming when Parn started his chanting. A moment later Pols started
twitching and they all quickly guessed what was going wrong. “Parn!” a
collective shout went out that made Parn practically jump out of his
undergarments, which had the bonus of stopping his spell and consequently
stopping Pols from become crispy.
After giving poor Parn another berating, which he couldn’t seem to apologize
enough for, they tried again. Not wishing to jinx anything, no one moved, even
Pols who was still perched oddly; as things ended up he was literally hanging
from the blanket of pants, his back on the plank and him pulling backwards to
be balanced by the others on the raft. Zyn still couldn’t believe that the
relatively diminutive sailor could keep his balance on that tiny plank while
holding the end blanket up with both hands, leading Zyn to comment that maybe
Pols would have been more suited for a traveling troupe than a sailing career.
Finally, after several arduous hours of standing around and Parn’s ceaseless
nervous chanting and boiling of water, they examined the cloth, which was quite
moist to the touch. Carefully reining it and Pols in, they gingerly collected
it before they all started sucking on it. Disgusting, yes, especially
considering all the sweat and grim that was caught in these pants, but the
threat of dehydration could do extreme things. Yes, thinking about it, Zyn
thought it tasted like crap, but it was water, and more importantly not
seawater, so it might as well have come from the purest forest spring.
The amount of water they gleaned from their desperate attempt was meager and
barely assuaged their monstrous thirst, but the work required to get that much
water had been quite draining and tedious, especially on Parn who had slumped
on his side resting as soon as there was no more water to drink. They didn’t
try again for a long while, though they did put their shirts and pants back on
to cut back sun exposure which was already singing their skin. Parn began to
look like he was permanently blushing, and Zyn wasn’t looking that great either
when he examined himself. He also noticed his facial hair growing out from his
last shave, leaving his face a mess of dark stubble. Scowling, Zyn grumbled
for a bit then laid down flat on his back.
Everyone just wound down after that, even Lum and Pols. That much work to get
a few sips of water? The collective despair on the raft thickened to the point
where one could cut it with a knife, its heavy shroud stifling all
conversation. There was no way any of this was sustainable; no food, and that
meager amount of water was not going to satisfy the thirst of seven grown men.
The only thing that changed in the following hours was that the sun
accelerated its trek down, giving them respite at least from its scorching
rays. As the sky changed from blue to yellow to orange, the silence remained.
Zyn felt as though he was going to choke on the hopelessness of their
situation. Ironically, alone he might have been able to deal with it, but with
the misery and gloom magnified by six others it seemed to be amplified and
continually grinded his spirit down. As laughter was contagious and jokes
funnier when there were others to laugh with, so too despair seemed to thrive
in their collective midst. The sun’s setting did little to alleviate the mood,
and indeed only seemed to herald the coming of darkness.
As the sun made contact with the horizon in the west, Lorian suddenly moved.
Looking up at his mentor, somewhat perturbed by being disrupted just as he was
falling asleep, Zyn turned to see Lorian squinting in the distance. Following
his gaze, Zyn scanned the horizon. The old man gave him a reserved but wry
smile, the kind he usually gave when he just noticed a potentially promising
looking bet. Zyn looked again, straining his eyes to see... a speck.
“Is that...” Zyn began.
“Let’s wait and see,” Lorian said.
Minutes past by at and agonizingly slow pace, crawling along like a drunk
quadruple amputee across the floor, while dragging a boulder for good measure.
But as that time agonizingly crept on, dismal hope grew voicelessly, as neither
of them seemed to want to jinx it by speaking beforehand. The dismal hope grew
into cautious hope, and when the others noticed and all watched like a group of
children anxiously sitting before an adult telling a story of exotic far off
lands, it blossomed into what none of them would have believed was actually
before them: a fighting chance.
They were looking at an island. And it was getting [i]closer[/i].
“Come on you ladies, paddle! PADDLE!” Pols shouted, caught up in the
enthusiastic euphoria and dreaming of dry land like the rest of them. Zyn
almost didn’t believe that it was even possible; part of him thought that all
this was an elaborate hallucination. Perhaps they were still just drifting
aimlessly and seeing things in the distance, or maybe he was still alone with
his wooden plank left to live his few remaining hours in endless cycles of
fruitless thinking of the past.
Faster than he could have dreamed, the island stood before them; it might as
well have been Heaven itself the way it’s lone peek thrust up magnificently
against the dismal flat featureless horizon of endless ocean amid the backdrop
of twinkling stars in the sky.
It had to have been hours, and the sun was well set and a full moon reflecting
upon the seas by the time that they noticed the odd way the waves were coming
in. In the excitement no one noticed or didn’t bother to give a second notice;
Zyn saw the way they seemed to be breaking early but given that he knew little
about the ways of islands, shores, and seas he didn’t think much upon it
anyway. Though he should have.
The raft lurched violently as a trough carried them against something,
something solid. “Shit, coral!” Grumiah shouted. Pols shouted a longwinded
series of explicitives as the wave crest came upon them again only to be
followed by another trough, which sure enough sent them crashing into the edge
of a coral reef.
Zyn didn’t know much about coral reefs. He only knew they were something that
made certain stretches of coast in tropical areas impassible to ships as they
were liable to break it apart. What he saw now was some kind of oddly colorful
rocky growth that seemed to carpet everything that was made briefly visible by
the wave trough. What he felt was the violent crash of wood against this
coral; a shearing which saw the wood give way and the raft break apart into
pieces, causing Grumiah, Lum and Pols to lose their grips and become swept up
by the waves.
Another wave crest lifted them up, mocking them with its height before it cast
them back down into the sheering, bloodthirsty coral, shearing the grip of
everyone except, ironically, Lorian, who had only one arm to hold on with. Zyn
had scant moments to consider the paradox of that before being thrust under the
waves, tumbling about in the frothing mess. He bumped into someone else, who
exactly was something he couldn’t tell, but was then smacked across the left
arm by a sharp serrated edge that was probably coral. Screaming underwater,
Zyn fought to keep from inhaling as the rush of his heart and veins exploded at
the searing pain that the saltwater only magnified. He had heard old
expressions of pouring salt into wounds, but growing up not terribly rich salt
had always been something that he would never have wasted on testing such an
adage; now he could attest to its basis in reality as the salt in the seawater
burned against his newly torn open flesh as it oozed out b
lood that appeared quite black in the darkness under the waves, like a light
sucking fog.
Struggling against the screaming pain in his wounded arm and in the chest for
the urgent need for air, Zyn kicked and fought his way to the surface, taking a
breath like he had just been born into the world. Working his way out of his
shock, he attempted to collect himself as he surveyed his surroundings. They
were now within spitting distance of the soft sandy shore that they had been so
arduously trying to reach, and unlike when he came up from the depths when the
ship broke apart in the storm, this time he was not alone. Parn was just ahead
flailing in the water next to a still cursing Pols who repeatedly kept coughing
up seawater as he did so. Far to his left amidst the moonlight he could see a
couple pieces of the now shattered raft drifting in, one of which was still
ferrying Lorian.
Coughing up water from his throat, Zyn turned around to see if he could spot
the other three, which miraculously he did in short order; Grumiah, Bresan and
Lum all swimming close together. However, looking at them something seemed
distinctly odd; he instantly saw that Bresan was barely moving on his own,
ferried forth only by his fellow sailors. “Come on, help get him to shore!”
Grumiah shouted commandingly. Zyn blinked for a moment, fully catching his
breath before he kicked off and swam over to the three sailors, swimming mostly
with his right arm as the throbbing in his left made it exceedingly
uncomfortable to use.
Bresan was indeed not moving, and when they finally piled onto shore it was
apparent why. Where the coral had given Zyn and nasty and still bleeding cut
on his arm, it had given Bresan a deep, piercing laceration across the abdomen,
exposing his inner organs which even now threatened to spill out onto the sand.
Zyn stared in shock at this for a moment; he had seen splayed open animals but
never had he glimpsed the inner guts of a human being before, and certainly not
one who was still living.
This state of affairs did not last long. With nothing they could possibly do,
they watched as the life quickly bled out of Bresan along with his blood. His
mouth fumbled, trying to form his dying words, but death reached out and
snatched him before any such thing could be uttered. So he died, his lips
eternally silent.
Perhaps, under more normal circumstances, there would have been a moment of
mourning, of grieving, especially among the sailors. But the heavy fatigue of
being tossed to and fro to the edge of the Earth on the verge of death had had
the same effect on them as it had on Zyn. Breathing heavily, Zyn plopped down
on the soft sandy beach and felt the sublime touch of solid ground beneath him.
That, at least, was one thing that he did not have to be weary of, but with
the weight of mortality having just moments ago finally lifted from him, he
meandered up the beach to the vegetation line and fell into slumber.
!DSPAM:4af0cbc2213251080519667!
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