With a surge of foamy water, the Meridian slapped and grabbed at Kuosh’s stony cliffs, seeking to find purchase on the gray rock in the hopes of dragging this forbidding piece of land down into the Meridian’s bosom. But, as it had since the birth of the eastern Meridian millennia ago, the questing hands of water fell back in failure, leaving spray-lashed rock behind, seemingly untouched and unmoved by the surging foam, scoured clean by the constantly pounding surf.
But, on this day, so nigh the first days of spring, the sea did something it had never done before on Kuosh’s shores: it left something behind! As the waters retreated after this most recent aquarian assault on the rocky cliffs, a bruised and battered body was hooked around a jagged spur of rock and was left behind as the surf made a dash back to the safety of its parent. For a long moment the body lay perfectly still, unmoving as if Life had left it, its skin blue with cold.
Then, just as the surf began another run at Kuosh’s unmoving bulk and battered face, the body shuddered and drew in a deep breath, ended suddenly in a great bout of coughing and retching.
Groaning, Tev Bloodsword, the human pirate late of the Dawn Princess, raised his head with a stiff and cramped neck and slowly looked around with bloodshot eyes. What greeted him left his numbed and sluggish mind puzzled: cold, gray rock, sea-lashed, jagged and bare. ‘Where am I?’ He wondered dully as something began to push at the edges of his awareness. Blinking out the cold water that dribbled down out of his soaking wet hair and eyebrows, he tried to focus his blurry vision even as he cudgeled his frozen brain back into action. As he did this, that ‘something’ that had pushed at his awareness became insistent, . . . much more insistent. Finally, when he was getting enough warm blood to his brain, the ‘something’ registered as a sound. ‘The sound of the incoming surf!’ He thought wildly, looking about himself with quick, jerky motions.
It was in a swing around the top edge of the spur that held him against the cliff face that he caught sight of a wall of water, foam-flecked and filled with visible chunks of debris, climbing up the cliff towards him.
“Kadasa!” He managed to rasp then twisted his body hard in an attempt to free it from the spur’s wedged-in grip. But his muscles, still frozen from their prolonged exposure to the Meridian’s rough embrace, refused to work and he found himself wiggling ineffectively as the water continued to advance! ‘C’mon, C’MON!!’ He mentally screamed, willing strength and warmth to his frozen limbs. But, by the First, he couldn’t even feel his fingers and toes and didn’t know if he had lost any during his sojourn in the water!
Then the surf crashed into him and Tev found himself clinging to the spur for dear life as the sea buffeted him about like a rag doll. With claws of steely water, it sought to tear him away from his precarious perch to drag him back into the Meridian’s bosom, repenting of the mercy it had shown in stranding him on Kuosh’s rocky shore. With the last of his rapidly waning strength, the human held on, clinging like a giant barnacle held fast to the very rock itself.
Finally, with a ‘whoosh’ that left him both deaf from the water in his ears and sputtering with the water in his mouth and nostrils, the surf once again retreated down the cliff base. Shuddering from the cold, Tev took a long moment to suck precious air into his lungs as he silently thanked the Maker and the Seven Dragons for giving him the strength to hold on. Then the realization that the surf would soon return, again and again to pummel his already battered body, made him start.
As the thought continued to fill his mind, he set to with a will to get his legs and arms moving again in the hope of pulling himself out of harm’s way. It was that, or face being swept out to sea, and certain death. ‘And I think I’ve swallowed enough sea water to float the entire Solavar Navy!’ He thought as he raised his right arm off the rock to inspect it for damage. Most of it was too numb to feel pain so he had to check it out visually. ‘Bah! Nothing more than a club of bone and muscle now.’ He thought bleakly as his eyes ran over the pale, bluish flesh, now festooned with long scraps and gouges, still mostly unresponsive to his will. Just then the sound of the approaching surf began to enter his ears.
Taking a deep breath, Tev forced his legs to clumsily swing around until his feet, two more useless chunks of bone and muscle in their present condition, met resistance. Working them into the cracks they had found as far as they would go, Tev pushed up. And was rewarded by his body popping free of the wedged-in position with several flares of fiery, but gladly accepted, pain along scraped and bruised ribs. ‘At least all of me isn’t frozen.’ Tev mused darkly as he pushed his hands down into other cracks he had found near his face. Using the position of both his hands and feet, Tev levered his body up and twisted around to face the cliff face itself. He just managed to wedge both his hands and feet back into another set of tight cracks before the surf arrived to batter him again.
And, again after what seemed to be an eternity of cold water swirling roughly and tugging at his exhausted body, he was left still clinging to the rocky face by his desperate holds. Blinking stinging seawater out of his eyes, Tev looked over his shoulder to watch the surf retreat. Then, setting himself, he began to climb, using his own hands and feet as wedges driven into the cracks of the cliff face to hold him up.
Three more times the surf pounded at Tev’s battered body and three more times it retreated, having failed in its efforts to pry him off the cliff face. By the time the fourth struck, he had managed to pull himself beyond its grasp. Gradually, as he climbed in Kuosh’s shadow on its southern face, Cae’Suran hidden beyond the top of the cliffs, Tev’s body warmed as he exerted it, feeling working its way back into his limbs as he painfully worked his way up the cliff. That, in itself, was a good thing, letting the strength flow back into his arms and legs. But there was a drawback: sensation was also returning to his hands and feet! Tev had to chew his own tongue to keep from screaming when that happened, as he hung trembling on the cliff face, nearly sent tumbling back into the surging ocean below with the pain that shot through his body. It turned his muscles to jelly with its fire as his hands and feet awoke from their chilled slumber and began to protest the abuse he had heaped upon them.
A fiery flare that nearly caused him to pull his hands free marked the last of the greatest part of the pain and the fire that had seemed to consume his flesh, both bone and muscle, ebbed to a bearable burning that left him gasping but able to move. So move Tev did; slower now that he could feel his hands and feet but as methodical as before, and as relentless.
By the time Cae’Suran was swinging low in the western sky, just about to join the Third Dragon in the depths of the Meridian, an exhausted and aching Tev managed to finally reach the top of the massive cliff. Feeling the edge with his tattered fingers, he pulled himself up and over, rolling onto the stony ground with a moan. There, for a long moment, he lay gasping, both from the near fatal exertion and the dull pain that filled his hands and feet as he stared into the darkening sky. Silently he thanked the Maker and the Seven Dragons once again for allowing him to reach the top.
The achingly lonely cry of a selarn, a graceful seabird whose great wingspan allowed it to stay aloft for hours, was enough to pull Tev back from the edges of unconsciousness and, squinting, he raised his head and looked around. Only to find himself perched on the relatively flat surface of a rocky plateau that stretched away into the dimming light to the north to what looked like a jumbled pile of rock in the distance.
A glance at the sky reminded him that dusk was now rapidly approaching. ‘I think shelter, with a fire of some sort, would be most appropriate at this time.’ He thought practically through the thin haze of pain and fatigue that now clouded his mind, slowly rolling off his back to force himself onto his hands, which now oozed blood from several deep gashes, and his knees. ‘And those rocks over there look to be my best bet, considering the stubby-looking mountains behind them look quite unclimbable. Especially considering my recent sojourn up the cliff face!’
Forcing himself to his battered feet, Tev staggered forward, intent on reaching the tumble of rocks before full night bell. But, as he made his way painfully north, across the rough ground, the closer he drew to the rough tumble, the more he could see that, even in the dimming light, not only was the tumble further away than he first had thought, but it was much too regular to be natural. ‘Elven structures here?’ He silently wondered, tucking his bloody hands into his armpits for warmth as the temperature began to drop.
Larger and larger the tumble grew as he continued on, until finally the front edge was right before him, standing almost at the height of 10 men!
“Maker!” He breathed hoarsely, shivering in a chill wind that had sprung up off the sea. ‘Those damn things are GATES!!’ He thought wildly, staggering to a halt. Indeed they were, with massive constructions that, despite their ruined condition, were easily recognizable as hinges even in the fading light. There was a set on either side of a broad passage that ran between two of the largest rocks, one still standing pillar-like on the left, the one on the right broken in half, the top piece leaning drunkenly against what could have been a portion of wall. The doors themselves, made possibly out of less durable stuff, were long since gone.
Tev hissed and pulled what was left of his shirt more closely around his body as the wind suddenly picked up and lashed him with an icy whip of chill air. ‘I’ve got to get out of this wind!’ Gritting his teeth and swallowing the feeling of dread that had been steadily rising in his throat since he had recognized the tumble as artificial in nature, he pushed passed the shattered remains of the massive gates and into whatever this place was.
Almost immediately it seemed the light changed, indeed, the whole FEELING of the place, as Tev shuffled across the threshold and into the ruins. Eyes widening as the light dimmed so significantly in the blink of an eye, that it was as if somebody had turned off the sun, and the air itself clung so thickly it became a second skin, Tev looked around sharply, groping at his waist for a non-existent sword. But the light had failed so completely that the tall human could barely make out the two sides of the path, little yet anything beyond. And, as Tev stumbled in the dim light, strange rustlings began to touch his ears, almost like there was something moving just beyond his vision and sought to keep it so. ‘Great!’ He thought darkly, hunching his shoulders and raggedly pushing on. ‘Just like out of some crazed old fisherman’s old ghost story!!’
Indeed the strange sounds that now echoed all around him, seemingly just on the edge of his vision in the poor light, were something best suited to stories swapped around a flickering fire at the height of night. And Tev’s pace unconsciously increased as the rustling first got louder then gradually changed to furtive scrabbling, both on the rocks and on the path in front and behind him. As the scrabbling rattled around the rocks, whispered croaks and grunts became audible as whatever they were, began to talk out in the darkness.
As the human pirate pressed deeper into the shadow-cloaked ruins, the croaks and grunts multiplied as they grew in volume and Tev began to catch movements out of the corner of his eyes. Of course as soon as he whirled to face the movement, he found nothing. ‘Why do they wait??’ He agonized silently, trying to ignore both the chill and pain of his body in order to remain focused on what was going on around him. ‘Can’t they see that I am stricken? That I’m easy prey? Damn them! And thrice damn those flying crescents for sending the ‘Walker and the Princess to the bottom, stranding me on this Maker-forsaken rock!!’
As the last thought passed through his mind, the scrabbling suddenly stopped and several ‘thuds’ sounded all around him as the shadows began writhing with a life of their own. ‘Looks like I’m about to get my wish.’ Tev mused darkly as he staggered to a halt and tried to set himself as well as he could before they fell upon him. Then he felt a light, yet cold as a tomb and clammy as dead flesh, touch on his hand and he spun tightly, an oath still born on his lips when he just caught sight of something darting out of sight. Then another touch stroked across the back of his right leg. Stumbling, Tev turned to face that and found nothing. Then there can another touch, then another and another, until they were coming from all sides and Tev could feel the chill begin to sink into his bones and knew he soon would be dead, here, in this haunted place.