[Mkguild] Prepared for Sacrifice pt 4

[Radioactive Toast]

Day 4, June 2nd, 703 CR


 Zyn would have slept late if he had gotten any reasonable chance.  But he received no such reprieve.

 “Time to get up, Zyn,” Lorian greeted him, shaking his shoulder back and forth.  “We’ve got things to do.”  For a moment Zyn was confused by the old man’s tone, but then he remembered that in their collective fatigue they hadn’t buried Bresan.  Or had they?

 It was dawn, a little bit before dawn, actually, and Zyn looked around to see Bresan’s body covered in various leaves and vegetation.  Apparently the others, or at the very least Grumiah, had at least covered his body before falling asleep, which left only one thing yet to do, for which all the others were being awakened to perform.

 Digging a grave was not an easy chore as they had no tools to heap up mounds of dirt, or sand, with.  Grumiah, however, had found one patch of ground that was mainly a pile of rocks, beneath which was simple dirt.  When the rocks were removed it created a hole about six feet by four feet and about three feet deep, more than enough to hold Bresan’s body.  Zyn shook his head; it must have taken Grumiah hours to clear out those rocks, though now that he got a good look at Lum he saw that he looked quite worn out and exerted, so perhaps he had helped.  

 As far as he knew, the ship had been mostly crewed by Pyralians and Southlanders, so most if not all of them had been Followers, and when none of his now five companions flinched in the slightest at burying a man in a grave rather than burning him on a pyre, he figured they were all such.  Together they hoisted Bresan’s body and lowered it gently into the grave, and one by one replaced the rocks to cover the burial place.  Lorian, using a rather sharp rock, inscribed into a boulder that had been rolled to the head of the grave to serve as a tombstone, etched out a simple epitaph reading:

[i]Here lies Bresan Drekmaan
Died upon reaching this island the first of June, 703 CR
May Eli grant him clear horizons[/i]

 Finishing placing the last of the rocks, they all stood back.  “Should... uh...  Should we say anything?” Lum asked.  Everyone gave each other questioning looks; normally a priest of some sort would give some rites, but with no priest they weren’t sure what exactly to do.  Finally, Grumiah stepped forward.  

 “This ain’t easy; it never is.  This time... with Bresan we’re lucky to have a body to conduct a burial, because dozens of our shipmates are never going to get that opportunity.  But for us, we’re alive, we’re still kicking.  So we’ve got work to do.”

 With that simple speech, if one could call it that, Grumiah walked off; moments later Zyn and the others followed.  They were on this island here and now, and in the here and now they had to survive.


* * *


 The first order of business was food and water.  One did not have to look very long or very hard, however, before noticing that the entire area was littered with coconuts.  

 Zyn reached down, finding a nice brown coconut right in front of him.  Wanting to dig into its contents as soon as possible, he grabbed it by the husk and looked it over, noticing its hard, firm surface and wondering how he was possibly going to open the thing up.  Experimentally he tried bashing it against a nearby tree, but his efforts to open the coconut up were fruitless.  Becoming more and more frustrated at the thought of food and refreshment being so near and yet so inaccessible, Zyn starting throwing it at the tree and then at the ground at his feet, which unfortunately included his feet as poor aim sent the hard-as-a-rock fruit smashing into his toes.  

 Lorian and Lum came barreling over at the sound of Zyn’s incessant screaming, shouting “What!  What is it?”

 “Gravity!  Eli damned gravity, that’s what it is!”

 “What, a coconut fall on your head?” Lorian asked.

 Zyn was about to answer in a resounding negative, but then suddenly realized that what he had just done probably hadn’t been the brightest thing, especially considering how badly he had just missed.  So instead of the truth, “My feet; damn thing fell down right in front of me onto my toes!”

 Lum let loose a callous chuckle at Zyn’s luck, but at least he wasn’t laughing about him throwing rock-hard fruit onto his feet.  That, combined with the nasty gash on his left arm he had secured himself on their wonderful jaunt through the coral reef getting to this island, made him feel less than comfortable now that he ached more than a wooden dummy after being chopped up during sword practice.  Massaging his foot while Lum and Lorian went off to tell the others it was just raining down coconuts on Zyn’s toes, in the corner of his eye he saw Parn ambling about aimlessly.  The slightly ponderous mage rummaged through some leaves, looking for something that wasn’t there, turned about and made eye contact with Zyn.  Immediately he broke off, trying to look busy moseying around the brush with no obvious goal in mind.  Had he in fact seen that his injury was not a random accident but a blunder of anger and frustration?  Or was he simple avoiding eye contact?  It wasn’t out of character from what Zyn had observed.  Parn showed himself repeatedly to be easily cowed and unwilling to challenge others assertions or authority, even though he might have objections.  But that only made it seem stranger as to why Parn was traveling across the sea by himself.  What was his deal?

 In the hours that followed they set to work in ensuring their survival and confirming that they were on an island.  “We gotta be sure,” Lum explained emphatically, “we’ve gotta be absolutely sure.”

 “Even though it’s almost certain that it is an island?” Zyn asked.  

 “Come on, what did we see?  We saw one side of this landmass at night of all times.  That small mountain up there,” Lum pointed at said mountain, “it’s gonna take us an hour to get to the top of that, max.”

 Lorian looked thoughtfully at the mountain, though to Zyn it seemed to be more like an over glorified hill top, despite its rocky craggy features and its sheer bluffs.  “It’d be a good idea to get an accurate lay of the land, regardless of whether this is an island or not.”

 That seemed to sway the group, and it did make sense to Zyn.  However, Pols jumped in voicing another concern.  “What if we’re not alone here?”

 “W-would not that be a good thing?” Parn asked, stuttering as seemed typical for him.

 Letting out a rueful laugh, Pols shook his head.  “You haven’t heard the stories.  If we went as far off course as I think we did, we could be in the Lypomese islands for all we know.”

 “Give us a break, Pols,” Grumiah said dismissively, “You’ve been listening a bit too much to those stories.”

 Parn, however, seemed to catch the foreboding in Pols’ voice.  “Lypomese?”

 “Yeah, they say those islands are populated by cannibals.”

 “Abba, not this again,” Grumiah groaned.

 This Zyn actually found amusing.  “Cannibals, eh?”

 “Hey, I’ll have you know-“

 “Look,” Lum interjected.  “I’m sure that we can figure out just all that’s going on and what we’re going to do once we get a good look at what this place is from above, alright?”  This at least quieted Pols’ spouting sailors’ legends that had only himself and Parn going.  Lum and Grumiah headed off to the summit almost immediately, leaving Zyn, Parn, Lorian and Pols to see what they could do about shelter and supplies.  

 The raft, or at least the largest piece that was still intact that Lorian had ridden to the shore on the previous night, had been salvaged relatively intact.  It made an excellent roof for whatever structure they hoped to build, keeping out most of the rain, so that left whatever they could scrounge around for to support it.  After finding several nicely sized sticks of wood, they propped it up against a heavy palm tree and voila: shelter made.  

 At first it seemed as though water might be somewhat annoying as they had to crack open coconut anytime they wanted one, which after his last debacle Zyn had managed to do so with some effort.  

 “Hey,” he said, mostly to Lorian but also to Pols, “I got some milk out of this thing, but where’s the white flesh part?”

 Pols responded by giving him a slightly contemptible look.  “That ain’t milk.  It’s coconut water.  Coconut milk is something you make from the meat.”

 A scowl crossed Zyn’s face at being lectured by the “midget” whom he didn’t have a great deal of respect for.  “Well excuse me for not knowing the finer points of coconut anatomy.  And what the hell is the ‘meat?’”

 “The ‘white flesh’ part, you stupid landlubber,” Pols grumbled as he stacked wood.  

 “Well that’s just fine and dandy, but how come there’s only milk in this thing instead white flesh?” he asked, deliberately choosing to call it milk instead of water mostly to tick Pols off.

 Pols let out a string of expletives and shot Zyn an evil look.  “Because mature ones have meat and young ones have water!  Are you just intentionally stupid and ignorant?”

 “Depends.  Is it pissing you off?”

 Lorian let out a chuckle while Pols approached Zyn with his eyes full of menace.  “You’re lucky you ain’t a newbie sailor, ‘cause if you were I’d bust your ass so hard it’d pop out the other end of the Earth!”

 Unable to back down at the ignorant ruffian’s asinine posturing, Zyn didn’t back an inch.  “Nah, I’m not stupid enough to be a sailor.”  He expected something fierce in retaliation, but somehow Pols misconstrued as he went back to work with his wood.  He had meant it to mean only stupid people became sailors in spite of the fact that Pols might have decked him in the face, but apparently the sailor was dense enough to take it to mean something along the lines that Zyn knew he wasn’t cut out to be sailor so didn’t bother making a stupid decision like becoming one.  At least that’s what he thought, and apparently Lorian had caught onto Zyn’s intended meaning too.

 “Haven’t you learned in all these years of following me around how not to get into stupid fights?” he said softly.

 “I’m not coddling to an incompetent,” Zyn said derisively, “Besides what’s he going to do besides hit me a little?  We’re not in a situation where he could do anything serious.”

 “Damnit Zyn,” Lorian hissed in one of his rare moments where he dropped his nonchalance that he carried with him everywhere.  “Sometimes I wonder if you’re ever going to develop the patience you need to succeed me in the Business.  You’re mouth is fat and it’s going to get you into trouble one of these days.  And I mean worse than what happened in Eavey last year.”

 Zyn snorted in recollection.  “That wasn’t anything, just a scuffle with a couple blowhards.”

 “Who happened to be nephews of the Bishop of Eavey!” Lorian said, still keeping his voice low so as not to let Pols or Parn eavesdrop.  “Just because someone is an idiot doesn’t mean you have to run your mouth until you get punched in the face.”

 “So you agree he’s an idiot,” Zyn said, unable to miss the opportunity.

 “So?” Lorian counted, taking all bite, all the relevancy out of Zyn’s point.  He got up and went back to work after that.  Zyn sat sulking for a few moments before he got up himself and decided to find something useful to do.

 Thinking about what got the whole thing started, Zyn remembered, banging his head for forgetting, the whole ordeal they had gone through on the raft.  If they could just find something better, or build something better than blankets of shirts or pants they could collect all the water they needed by boiling it.  And why not?  Fire would be way easier on dry land with loads of wood around and they had materials, leaves rocks, whatever they needed to make some kind of contraption that could collect condensed water.

 He was about to look into it when Grumiah and Lum came trudging back to camp, with Lum in particular looking quite glum.  “Island then, huh?”

 “Yup,” Lum answered, plopping himself onto the ground dejectedly.  

 Zyn nodded to himself quietly as he piled some stones together for a fire pit.  “No cannibals either I take it?”

 “Nothing,” Grumiah answered.  “This whole island’s got nothing on it.  There’s about a mile and a half of land on the other side of the summit, but there nothing that would point to anyone living there.  No clearing, no buildings, no smoke, nothing.”

 There was a long period of silence before someone spoke up.  “So... what are we going to do?” Parn asked.

 “We get are shelter all fixed up for now,” Lorian said, “Then we can worry about finding some way off this island.


* * *


 Starting a fire turned out to be harder at first than they thought.  Pols and Lum were immediately sucked into an argument that focused around Lum’s complete and utter inability to get a spark going.  Pols kept deriding Lum about how he was rubbing the sticks together wrong, which the latter waved off dismissively.  After another five minutes with not so much as a whiff of smoke Pols’ derisions morphed into screams, with Zyn shaking his head the whole time.  He wasn’t the most knowledgeable person about living in the wilderness, but it seemed pretty apparent even to him that there wasn’t enough kindling or tinder around the base.  By this point Pols became fed up and shoved Lum aside to light the fire himself.  His few minutes of attempting this proved to be just as dismal a failure that ended when his grip slipped, causing the stick he had been holding to gash him across the palm.  After screaming in pain for several moments with the rest of them laughing hysterically at his misfortune, Pols uttered a long string of explicitives that had to go on [i]at least[/i] two minutes; no one bothered to interrupt him because they were all laughing too hard, even Grumiah.  Well, Parn wasn’t laughing, he was more just sort of standing there with a distinctly awkward look on his face that somewhat looked like he wanted to laugh being counteracted by an intense need to bleed out embarrassment.  

 Suffice to say though with the day wearing on and dusk some hours off they wanted a nice warm fire started, so they grabbed Parn from his embarrassed gawking and shoved the two clowns aside to make a real fire.  After letting out a few more obligatory protests that “this was not his specialty” Parn begrudgingly closed his eyes and began chanting, though Zyn could quickly see this was no panacea and grabbed a bunch of kindling by himself to stack on the fire.  Everyone displayed a measure of caution as Parn’s frequently misdirected spells on the raft were fresh in all their minds, and only got within two feet of the fire pit until the thing started burning healthily on its own and the mage stopped his chanting.  Looking as though he had just pulled a carriage uphill by the strength of his own two legs, Parn literally collapsed onto the ground and just laid there utterly exhausted and, more surprisingly, utterly indifferent to everyone else’s reaction.  Obviously casting spells outside his “specialty” drained him immensely, but Zyn wondered just what on earth the mage’s specialty was if he couldn’t cast a measly fire spell.  

 They had seen several crabs walking along the beach earlier and, tired of coconuts, decided they’d much rather have crustacean for dinner.  When the time came to actually catch them, however, the little pests seemed to catch wind of their potential demise and were nowhere to be seen except for two at the far end of the beach scurrying into the ocean waters.  They decided to wait several hours, but the things sat out invisible in the water taunting them like a parent evilly showing their children delicious treats only to hide them on top of the cupboard out of reach.  As such it was coconuts for dinner; Zyn had only had one meal of the things and his belly was already clamoring for something different.

 As night fell they all gathered around the now roaring fire, exhausted from the day’s hard labor.  Except for Parn that is as besides lighting the fire he had been about as useful as an inebriated three legged mule.  Every time he had tried to help out with something when he wasn’t staring aimlessly around he had instead stared helplessly at whatever chore set before him like he had been tasked with lifting a mountain or raising the dead.  Now he just sat there eyes darting back and forth laughing nervously and uncomfortably and the rest of them enjoyed themselves with rowdy manly talk.  

 Invariably the conversation drifted to their present predicament, six men stranded on an uninhabitable island.  Alone.

 “Of course you know what that means,” Pols pointed out sighing, “no women around here.  If we can’t make it off it means no kids, no community, we’ll just age then die one by one.”

 The statement had the effect of killing all the immediate joviality in the six men, and they all just stared wistfully at the fire as it burned and crackled before them.  

 “Ah,” Lum cut the quiet, “we’ll figure out something with this raft.”

 “How can you be sure of that?” Parn asked.

 “Because we ain’t gonna give up, that’s why!”  Lum exclaimed.  Zyn let out a long sigh at that one.  “As long as we’re alive there’s hope we’ll get off somehow.”

 Zyn rubbed his hands through his hair.  “You sound really confidant of that.”

 “Well why not?  Holding onto hope’s better than just resigning ourselves to this shithole island.”

 “Maybe, but maybe we should put our bets on reasonable possibilities than just blanket feel good hope.”

 “And who says I ain’t got reasonable possibilities in my head right now?” Lum countered.

 Zyn rolled his eyes.  “Maybe you could talk about that instead of this hope crap.”

 “Hey, since when is hope crap, huh?  I’ve been around longer than you, Zyn, and I’ve seen impossible situations turn around ok?  Little bit of faith won’t kill you.”

 Inwardly Zyn bristled at Lum’s use of the word “faith,” as if pithy aphorisms and inspiring life stories mattered when you got the dirt between your nails dealing with everyday life.  But he kept his mouth shut, unable to think of anything to say that wouldn’t just pointlessly escalate things.  So another period of silence descended upon them.

 “Damn,” Pols said, breaking the silence, “what I wouldn’t give for a drink right about now.  And a whorehouse.”

 Lum could only laugh at that one.  “Whorehouse.  That was predictable.  I thought you learned your lesson when you got your crabs.”

 Pols’ face darkened as he glared evil things at his fellow sailor.  “The only reason you don’t got ‘em is because of devil worship or something, ‘cause you’ve been down by those docks just as often as I have.”

 “Ah, he’s just sore because of his eternal bad luck,” Lum pointed out to everyone else.  “Because knowing your luck, Pols, if we hadn’t crashed on this island you’d probably ended up in some other messed up state.”

 “Like what?” Pols challenged.

 “Dunno, the predictable kind.  Maybe getting stranded on a real Lypomese island choke full of cannibals, maybe end up all the way in Irombi with a bunch of deadra worshiping heathens, maybe getting stuck up north in Metamor.”

 That sent Lorian roaring with laughter.  “Oh I’d pay to see that.”

 Parn shifted uncomfortably.  “Metamor?  Is not that some fortress that was cursed?”

 Grumiah nodded grimly, taking a sip of boiled water from a hollowed out coconut shell.  “About ten years ago some wizard came and cast some horrible curses on them, making them act like animals or something.”

 “Four years ago,” Lorian corrected.  “And I’ve met with people who’ve actually been there.  They don’t act like animals up there; they, or at least a number of the, were physically transformed [i]into[/i] animals.”

 “...Damn, that’s... wow,” Lum said ominously.

 Zyn of course knew of the Valley, the only passage there was to the inhospitable monster ridden northern wilderness beyond in the far north of the world.  Aside from the fact that it was heavy Lightbringer country, it was well known as the gate to the barbarian lands of the Giantdowns, and as such the full of people who spent almost their entire lives fending off evil hordes of monsters, for which the rest of the world had long held them in great esteem, even somewhat among the Ecclesia lands.  But ever since this curse had been placed, tales of bravery and heroism were replaced by quiet whispers and horror stories.  

 “To be sure,” Lorian continued, “The stories I’ve heard have been somewhat conflicting and contrictory, but they all seem to agree that some curse was cast turning some fraction of the inhabitants into animal men.  Though that was only some.  Others lost their age and become children and infants.  And the rest became women.”

 Lum visibly shuddered.  “That almost seems worse.”

 “Yeah,” Pols said thoughtfully.  “Though, it might not be so bad if that last one were to strike here.  You know, turn someone into a woman so the rest of us could be satisfied, even have children.”

 The groans and dismissals came like a steady wave in response, but Pols continued his line of thought.  “Come on, seriously.  Would it be that bad for the rest of us?  I personally think the chubby mage would make the best woman here.”

 Parn’s face drained of color quicker than Zyn had ever seen anyone’s do in his entire life.

 “Come on, he’d be nice and pleasantly plump, and he ain’t much else good for anything else around here.”

 “Why not you as a woman, Pols?” Grumiah interjected.  “You’re certainly bitchy enough.”

 “Yeah, I gotta admit, you’d make a perfect wench,” Lum joined in.  Dodging a punch from Pols, Lum just laughed and heaped on more.  “See, you got that lovely prickliness that you gotta have in any good wench!”

 “Well maybe you’d make a good woman yourself Lum!” Pols shot back.

 “No, I think I have to agree,” Zyn said, unable to resist taking a swipe.  “I think you’d make the more suitably tempered woman.”  Pols was up and ready to start a fight, but the others all just laughed at him.  

 Soon the moon was rising high into the sky and they all finally fell asleep one by one, though Zyn considered the possibility that Pols might try something to him or Lum in the middle of the night and thus considered acting preemptively, but in the end fell asleep in the midst of trying to think of just such a thing.

 The night wasn’t entirely peaceful, however.  Multiple times Zyn awoke to what he distinctly thought was something rustling in the brush.  The third time or so that it happened several of the others awoke as well.  Then... silence came again and they fell back to bed, but several times more Zyn woke up to what he swore was a rumbling sound coming from far off, but as soon as he strained his ears it vanished.  No one got much sleep that night.

 		 	   		  

!DSPAM:4af0cd77215108154786014!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.integral.org/archives/mkguild/attachments/20091103/fee3f8a9/attachment-0001.html>