The Minstrel

Stranded

 It had felt like being rocked within a cradle. Killian murmured indistinctly - something he could not remember upon waking - and felt the soft touch upon his lips as he was laid down. It was warm, and he could hear the sounds of the lapping waves. So clearly could they be heard that he might have very well been back in his childhood bedroom, resting within the crooked little house in Cantelcross. When Killian sucked in a breath to yawn, he choked and winced at the fierce, burning agony in his chest.

Then he threw up.

Rolling over onto his stomach, he wretched for several long minutes; his fingers clenching together so tightly in the course sand that the grains dug painful marks into his flesh. Eventually, the violent expulsions of seawater calmed into intervals of heavy, wracking coughs, until the last drops of brine-laden bile were forced from his system. With shaking arms, Killian willed himself into a sitting position, carelessly wiping the sickness from his mouth with a tattered sleeve. Light of the morning sun combined with salt and sand to render his vision blurry and uncomfortable. Killian's mind was heavy with the lethargy of near-death, and struggled to make any sense of the foreign surroundings.

He was on a beach - that much was clear - though he had little idea of how he wound up there. There had been a storm. He had been running upstairs when the mast had fallen. Then? Darkness, and the phantoms that he could no more discern between wakefulness and sleep than a blind man the difference between colors.

Shifting slightly, he winced. However he had made it to land alive and in one piece, it had obviously been a difficult journey. His shirt was torn through in multiple places, and he was missing a boot; the one boot that remained upon his left foot was of little use, as its exposure to the sea had been too much to keep the sole fully intact. All of his clothes were soaked through. It seemed as if the warmth of the morning sun he had felt upon waking had been, for the most part, an illusion.

Killian pulled his knees to his chest as he shivered, feeling every aching bruise as he did so. Fortunately, it seemed that he had not broken any bones, at least from what he could tell. Cautiously, he rose to his feet. Looking around the strand, he could see a dozen or so splintered boards, broken lines of rope, and other detritus that had been as lucky as he to have been brought ashore from the wreck. Off in the distance, he thought he could see a couple of small islets.

Just past the thin shoreline, the land rose at a gradual incline. A perceptible divide between beach and forest could be seen where patches of hairgrass sprouted up from the coast. This would have to be a fairly larger island along their route, Killian surmised. Most of the formations that sprung out of the sea in the island cluster were hardly more than sizable boulders. Utterly uninhabitable as they were, there were few land masses in-between the Beak and the Tooth that any sane person would hazard a settlement on.

If he had wound up here, Killian wondered where the rest of the longship had been carried to. He thought about whether or not any of the Orcs had made it to this island, or any of the crew, or ... his next breath caught in his throat. How could he have forgotten something so important? Stumbling on unsteady legs, he frantically scanned the surrounding beach. His knees buckled twice as he began to trudge along the shore with the gait of a newborn fawn.

Worry turned to panic as he searched as far up as the treeline to no avail. It was after nearly a quarter-mile that Killian came upon a cluster of boulders. He lurched over to them at once to begin his investigation anew. When at last he found the case of his lute - battered and laden with seaweed, though closed and intact - he let out an ecstatic cry of glee. He was so excited that he nearly missed the corpse that lay alongside it.

A yelp of surprise escaped his lips as he reeled backwards in alarm. As his knees buckled for the third time and finally relented, he fell hard onto his back, scurrying still further away from the ghastly sight. Waiting until his frayed nerves had been mended enough to gather courage, Killian cautiously crept back towards the rocks, peering over on all fours. There, beside what was certainly his lute, lay the battered body of an orc. It was splayed over the stones, limbs cocked in haphazard positions, as if it were a broken toy cast away by the hands of a giant.