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annathepiperThis being flashback #1--the wreck of the Windrider from Arnos' point of view. Interested parties may want to reference the roleplay log Battle on the Vastdeep, which has the scene where the Vraeyans were originally attacked by Zalehrin's monster in the Vastdeep Water. Arnos was not actually referenced in the log at the time--so with the help of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ssha, I've retconned in what happened to him at the time and come up with the explanation for how he got wounded during the wreck in the first place. Also, Part 1 is going to be several scenes, as I've divvied up the story into three primary parts.
EDIT 6/28/04 2:50pm: Adding in the word count tally.
Written today and yesterday: 1,228
Story total: 2,858
(crossposted to my personal journal and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
willowholt)
TM Year 154
He pieced the whole of it together later from what the survivors had to tell--but when Arnos remembered the Windrider's destruction for himself, it came to him in scattered fragments strewn like driftwood along the shore of his recollection.
The storm with winds too fierce for their ship to ride, and which had instead hurled them out of the waters they'd known. The weeks of desperate voyaging with no land in sight beneath stars from which they could not glean a course back to their homeland, while their stores dwindled down to barely enough to keep any of them alive... those who remained, that is, after some of the crew succumbed to hunger and thirst. Spirits flagging, till the songs to set the rhythm of hoisting the sails lost their vigor--and the songs sung when work was done became plaintive calls to the gods for the men and women of the Windrider to be shown the way home... or to be shown a quick and merciful death.
What death awaited them beneath the waves of a northern sea was swift, but as unforgiving as lightning.
Alkione's glad cry from the top of the mast turned their eyes as one to the blessed sight of land on the horizon; Vardeus' orders, bellowed in a voice given back life and power by that glimpse of salvation, seemed to give their vessel joyous wings undaunted by the squall that had blown up around them all.
But then something rammed the hull. Sailors called back and forth to one another through the rain and wind, wondering in dismay if they'd run aground so temptingly close to the shore... until the monster rose up from the deep, seized the Windrider in great lashing tentacles, and proceeded to batter their beloved ship into splinters.
Arnos remembered the sickening lurch of the deck that pitched his crewmates into the brine... Vardeus and Tiana thundering orders for all available hands to seize their bows... and then Dharce screaming as her slight form tumbled towards the port side of the ship. And for all that his heart was that of a scholar and a bard, his body had been honed to keen-edged quickness by his years upon the ocean. He leapt for the young woman without a second thought, seizing one of her wrists in one of his hands while he flailed with the other for a rope, a rail, anything he could grab to keep them both from tumbling overboard.
A rain-slicked rigging line met his frantically questing fingers; he caught it and held it with every scrap of strength he could muster. But it wasn't quite enough to keep him and Dharce from slamming into the railing. His forearm took the impact, and as pain spiked up through his entire limb, Arnos very nearly lost his grip on Dharce's wrist. She broke through the railing, sending shards of wood raining down to the churning water, and she shrieked out a plea to the Skyfather and Seamother as she fell out into open air.
His arm seemed to shriek, too, at Dharce's weight pulling at it. Red, fiery agony flooded Arnos' mind, and for a few blank moments he lost track of what his crewmate wailed up at him in her terror.
Then awareness raggedly returned, bringing him the bellow of Nefis just behind him.
"--on! I'm comin', hang on, lass, dinnae let go!"
"Dinnae let go, Arnos!"
Dharce's high, thin plea and her huge black eyes gazing up at him in mortal fright snapped his attention back into focus. "I've got you!" the singer called out with all the assurance and strength he could manage, while he struggled to shove his own fear and his pain back behind a wall in his mind, where they could not distract him. "Hang onto my hand! I won't let you fall!"
Then Nefis was beside him, a rope lashed about his brawny waist to keep him on the deck while he lunged forward to catch Dharce's free hand in both of his own. "Give me your other hand, lass!" he roared. "Let us pull ye up!"
That got through, enough for the frantic girl to clamber back up through the hole in the railing. As she did, a mighty impact tilted the ship in the opposite direction and spilled Dharce over hard onto both of the men. Nefis pulled her clear of the edge of the deck; then, without warning, both their figures blurred in Arnos' vision. The rain pummeling them all should have doused the fire in his arm, but the pain surged up again the moment he released Dharce's wrist. It kept him pinned to the deck's drenched planking, unable in that instant to quite remember how to make himself stir, how to get up, how to do anything but cradle his damaged limb to his chest.
Somewhere an eternity away he heard Dharce crying, "Arnos is hurt!"
"Help me with him, we've got t' get 'im below!" Nefis.
There were other gods to whom he could have prayed, others on whom it surely would have made more sense to call: Seamother Lerain, Skyfather Andros, even the Allmother Herself. But as his two aghast crewmates lifted him up to pull him back from the imminent peril of falling over the side, Arnos glimpsed the unholy shape exploding out of the waves--and as it leapt clear over the Windrider and latched onto the ship's starboard side with its massive tentacles, he had room in his consciousness only for a panicked invocation of Soronis the Songweaver, from whom all music sprang. Tiny and plaintive, the prayer tossed and bobbed across the broader, formless fright that engulfed him, like--
My arm--my hand, blessed Soronis, don't let me lose my hand!
--Like the ship spinning helplessly in the grip of those great tentacles, whirling in a direction she was never meant to go. Screams erupted from over two dozen throats--including his own--as Nefis grabbed hold of both him and Dharce and clung fast, jarring his wounded arm in the process.
"HANG ON!"
Then, in a single dizzying, choking rush, the Windrider spun side over side through the water. Light and sound and breath all vanished in the cold salt plunge. Every instinct in the singer's frame howled for flight, for escape, but pain and the iron grip of Nefis washed the ability to move away with everything else.
The ship came back upright in a colossal spill of water. But Arnos was undone. Coughing, hacking, he slumped in his crewmate's hold. Drenched dark hair plastered to his skull, his head lolled sideways without his willing it, turning his dazed attention out to the chaos beyond what was left of the railing.
With dull surprise, he spotted what looked for all the world like a tiny sail out on the water, just past the immense shadowed form of the monster--and, leaping for the attack onto the back of the creature itself, an impossibly small, slim figure, pale as moonlight, with hair whipping through the wind and rain like a banner of fire. And he had just enough time to wonder if Soronis had somehow heard him, somehow sent a warrior of the Seamother's to take on the thing attacking them all, before oblivion pulled him under.
ssha, I've retconned in what happened to him at the time and come up with the explanation for how he got wounded during the wreck in the first place. Also, Part 1 is going to be several scenes, as I've divvied up the story into three primary parts.EDIT 6/28/04 2:50pm: Adding in the word count tally.
Written today and yesterday: 1,228
Story total: 2,858
(crossposted to my personal journal and
willowholt)TM Year 154
He pieced the whole of it together later from what the survivors had to tell--but when Arnos remembered the Windrider's destruction for himself, it came to him in scattered fragments strewn like driftwood along the shore of his recollection.
The storm with winds too fierce for their ship to ride, and which had instead hurled them out of the waters they'd known. The weeks of desperate voyaging with no land in sight beneath stars from which they could not glean a course back to their homeland, while their stores dwindled down to barely enough to keep any of them alive... those who remained, that is, after some of the crew succumbed to hunger and thirst. Spirits flagging, till the songs to set the rhythm of hoisting the sails lost their vigor--and the songs sung when work was done became plaintive calls to the gods for the men and women of the Windrider to be shown the way home... or to be shown a quick and merciful death.
What death awaited them beneath the waves of a northern sea was swift, but as unforgiving as lightning.
Alkione's glad cry from the top of the mast turned their eyes as one to the blessed sight of land on the horizon; Vardeus' orders, bellowed in a voice given back life and power by that glimpse of salvation, seemed to give their vessel joyous wings undaunted by the squall that had blown up around them all.
But then something rammed the hull. Sailors called back and forth to one another through the rain and wind, wondering in dismay if they'd run aground so temptingly close to the shore... until the monster rose up from the deep, seized the Windrider in great lashing tentacles, and proceeded to batter their beloved ship into splinters.
Arnos remembered the sickening lurch of the deck that pitched his crewmates into the brine... Vardeus and Tiana thundering orders for all available hands to seize their bows... and then Dharce screaming as her slight form tumbled towards the port side of the ship. And for all that his heart was that of a scholar and a bard, his body had been honed to keen-edged quickness by his years upon the ocean. He leapt for the young woman without a second thought, seizing one of her wrists in one of his hands while he flailed with the other for a rope, a rail, anything he could grab to keep them both from tumbling overboard.
A rain-slicked rigging line met his frantically questing fingers; he caught it and held it with every scrap of strength he could muster. But it wasn't quite enough to keep him and Dharce from slamming into the railing. His forearm took the impact, and as pain spiked up through his entire limb, Arnos very nearly lost his grip on Dharce's wrist. She broke through the railing, sending shards of wood raining down to the churning water, and she shrieked out a plea to the Skyfather and Seamother as she fell out into open air.
His arm seemed to shriek, too, at Dharce's weight pulling at it. Red, fiery agony flooded Arnos' mind, and for a few blank moments he lost track of what his crewmate wailed up at him in her terror.
Then awareness raggedly returned, bringing him the bellow of Nefis just behind him.
"--on! I'm comin', hang on, lass, dinnae let go!"
"Dinnae let go, Arnos!"
Dharce's high, thin plea and her huge black eyes gazing up at him in mortal fright snapped his attention back into focus. "I've got you!" the singer called out with all the assurance and strength he could manage, while he struggled to shove his own fear and his pain back behind a wall in his mind, where they could not distract him. "Hang onto my hand! I won't let you fall!"
Then Nefis was beside him, a rope lashed about his brawny waist to keep him on the deck while he lunged forward to catch Dharce's free hand in both of his own. "Give me your other hand, lass!" he roared. "Let us pull ye up!"
That got through, enough for the frantic girl to clamber back up through the hole in the railing. As she did, a mighty impact tilted the ship in the opposite direction and spilled Dharce over hard onto both of the men. Nefis pulled her clear of the edge of the deck; then, without warning, both their figures blurred in Arnos' vision. The rain pummeling them all should have doused the fire in his arm, but the pain surged up again the moment he released Dharce's wrist. It kept him pinned to the deck's drenched planking, unable in that instant to quite remember how to make himself stir, how to get up, how to do anything but cradle his damaged limb to his chest.
Somewhere an eternity away he heard Dharce crying, "Arnos is hurt!"
"Help me with him, we've got t' get 'im below!" Nefis.
There were other gods to whom he could have prayed, others on whom it surely would have made more sense to call: Seamother Lerain, Skyfather Andros, even the Allmother Herself. But as his two aghast crewmates lifted him up to pull him back from the imminent peril of falling over the side, Arnos glimpsed the unholy shape exploding out of the waves--and as it leapt clear over the Windrider and latched onto the ship's starboard side with its massive tentacles, he had room in his consciousness only for a panicked invocation of Soronis the Songweaver, from whom all music sprang. Tiny and plaintive, the prayer tossed and bobbed across the broader, formless fright that engulfed him, like--
My arm--my hand, blessed Soronis, don't let me lose my hand!
--Like the ship spinning helplessly in the grip of those great tentacles, whirling in a direction she was never meant to go. Screams erupted from over two dozen throats--including his own--as Nefis grabbed hold of both him and Dharce and clung fast, jarring his wounded arm in the process.
"HANG ON!"
Then, in a single dizzying, choking rush, the Windrider spun side over side through the water. Light and sound and breath all vanished in the cold salt plunge. Every instinct in the singer's frame howled for flight, for escape, but pain and the iron grip of Nefis washed the ability to move away with everything else.
The ship came back upright in a colossal spill of water. But Arnos was undone. Coughing, hacking, he slumped in his crewmate's hold. Drenched dark hair plastered to his skull, his head lolled sideways without his willing it, turning his dazed attention out to the chaos beyond what was left of the railing.
With dull surprise, he spotted what looked for all the world like a tiny sail out on the water, just past the immense shadowed form of the monster--and, leaping for the attack onto the back of the creature itself, an impossibly small, slim figure, pale as moonlight, with hair whipping through the wind and rain like a banner of fire. And he had just enough time to wonder if Soronis had somehow heard him, somehow sent a warrior of the Seamother's to take on the thing attacking them all, before oblivion pulled him under.