Indebted (working title)

A Drifter's Curse (part 1)

It was an early morning when the warped wood of the lifeboat came to a stop on the sandy beaches of "île Sanguine". The small Island's name was etched into a wooden sign that hung from the weather-beaten door of a nearby tavern, sloping on one side and barely clinging to the other as it had all but given up on clinging to its frayed ropes. The two drunks that laid strewn across the powdery white sand like starfish were barely roused when the stranger walked past them, they'd drank so much the night before that even the sounds of soft footsteps on the beach proved to be a nigh unbearable irritant. They groaned and huffed as they rolled onto their sides, one of them going so far as to pull the collar of his filthy, vomit-stained shirt over his head in a futile effort to block out Shakale and the glare of the slowly rising sun.

Shakale walked past him without looking down; in fact, he was almost oblivious to their presence. He limped forward, dragging his feet through the sand, motivated only by the desire to eat and drink, desires that were primal and untainted by the vestiges of higher thought; he knew only the two things that his exhausted body and cloudy mind allowed him to know, that the boat had brought him here of its own volition and that he had not eaten in days. Behind him, the call of sea birds and the gentle sloshing sounds of dying waves caressing the beach petered out and gave way to a beautiful and familiar melody played on a guitar. In the afternoon, similar strings of notes would be played for drunken crowds that gathered in the tavern and tossed coins while possessed with the spirit of liquid generosity, but for now, the music would be played only for the man who played it and even though the tavern was empty save for a few scattered souls that were essentially fixtures within its dim and dingey walls, the music was played with the same passion and perfection that it always was.

Today the song was slow; its melody comprised of a series of whining notes that elicited a feeling of finality, it felt like a requiem for something, and only the man with the guitar knew what that something was. His face mirrored the music. Sad brown eyes stared blankly at the floorboards in front of him, hidden from the world with the brim of a grey straw hat. He was the only one to look up when Shakale burst through the door of Paula's tavern and collapsed onto all fours. The music stopped for a moment as the man known colloquially known as "Wren" shot a passing glance at Shakale, allowing the soft hush of the wind and the unintelligible murmur of distant conversations to fill the vacuum of sound. Wren had said his real name when he'd first arrived on the tiny island, but it'd long since been forgotten and had never been repeated, instead, he took to telling people that he'd left his old life behind, and with it, his old name. Wren turned away and continued to play his tune.

"You're back", He said without giving Shakale another glance.

Shakale looked at him but said nothing; instead, he scrambled to the bar table and slammed a hand full of coins onto its surface. On impact, a few metal pieces scattered and fell to the floor, spinning and vibrating on the hardwood with metallic rattles.

"Stew... and water", he said. His voice was a shaky whisper that barely escaped sticky, dry lips.

The woman behind the bar was pretty and young. Concern spread across her pale, freckled face as she hurried off to the kitchen. Pots clanged together, and water trickled into a heavy mug. After about a minute, she came scurrying back and placed both the steaming bowl and the mug in front of Shakale. He was face down now, and he tilted his head slightly so that a single yellow-tinged eye could peek out at the meager offering before him. Suddenly, as if he were afraid the stew would get up and walk away, he snatched it towards himself, tossed the spoon aside, and began pouring the brown, watery mix down his throat. It was awful, it was always awful, but Shakale didn't care. Within seconds the bowl was gone, and he moved on to the water, which he drained in a few quick gulps. He was panting now, his eyes wide with the shock of having been pulled from death's door.

"Another...", he said as looked down and reached into his pocket for more coins, but when he looked back up, he noticed the room had grown a bit darker. The walls and floor seem to tilt back and forth at slight inclines, and the colors of Paula's tavern, which had never really changed for as long as Shakale could remember, were blurring together into increasingly indistinguishable circles. He tried to steady his breathing but found when he pulled in a deep breath, he was compelled to take another rather than exhaling it. His head tilted back, and his eyelids flicked for a few seconds. He caught a blurry glimpse of the ceiling as his body fell backward,s and then... the world went dark; he hit the floor with a thud that made the old wood squeal and shake, then he heard himself groan before the world went quiet too.

The darkness held for a long moment, and then... shapes began to form in the distance, the intricacies of their forms slowly becoming intelligible in an eerie and unnatural red light that shone from a sun that seemed to almost shake in the skies above. Shakale saw a pool of crimson at his feet and could tell by the smell of iron that hung it the air that it was blood. He looked around to see that what he'd mistaken for a puddle was in fact an ocean. He felt it shifting beneath him, he felt it arch up to touch his knees before falling back down and settling, moving seemingly of it's own accord. Shakale suddenly felt the sensation that he was standing on something that was alive, that he'd somehow ventured onto the body of some gigantic, horrible beast, but as the blood ocean rose and settled again he realized that there was nothing truly alive here at all. There were no birds, no insects, no creatures. He saw only dead shapes, tall, stagnant rock formations so distant that they looked like shadows but so massive that their tops would scrape the clouds... if there were any clouds to scrape.

The pulsating, vibrating sun beat down on him and stung his eyes when he tilted his head to look at it. Beneath the bloody ocean, he felt a wooden floor and rough, sometimes sharp bits of loose rock that littered it. He moved forward cautiously, dragging his feet to avoid stepping on one of the jagged pieces of debris. The blood sloshed beneath him, its surface periodically raising and lowering in height in a slow, steady rhythm. His bare foot caught on something hard and he tripped, landing on something round and small that shattered with a loud crack beneath his weight. He twisted and writhed in the liquid for a few seconds. He could hear himself panting heavy breaths that were so loud that they almost drowned out his furious splashing. His heart pounded in his chest like he was being punched from the inside and he scrambled to his feet, still clutching a bit of the thing he'd broken... the thing that he would have mistaken for a stone had he not crushed it. He looked down to blood sliding off the glossy white surface of a jaw bone, a human jaw bone. It was missing a few teeth and had snapped off at an odd angle, but it us undeniably, unmistakably, human.