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Reply| Recommended listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHEkzLQyG48 |
Gwynek was tired; tired, sore, aching, and endowed with a clamminess in his flesh he thought was strictly the domain of the drowned. With a sloshing thump, his armor wetly smacked against the hearth, followed by two dull percussive thumps as he dropped his boots. He peeled the remainder of his clothes off heaping them by the fireplace.
All was salt and soak and chafe - tiny wounds beneath the notice of empathy, raw and red abrasions from soaked leather rubbing and buckles biting, rope toothed bruises from rigging mad with liberation born on fierce winds. His mouth tasted like salt, his drink tasted like salt - somehow the Inn's room smelled like salt.
The voyage was a blur of mountainous waves, sheets of rain, thunder and roaring wind in dissonant and furious chorus. But they made it in one piece. Gwynek asked Eni to take refuge in the Captain's Cabin primarily for the young man's safety. Gwynek knew Eni was exhausted and unfamiliar with vessels the size of the FFZ, and was just as likely to get himself hurt or killed facing the tempest through which they sailed. Eni protested that he might sleep for a month were he to fall asleep then. Gwynek would not have minded, sleeping passengers are ones he needn't speak with.
Not that Gwynek had anything against Eni. He just wouldn't know what to say. Eni's kith and kin were dispersed, his home would soon be consumed by the sea. Gwynek rubbed at his feet in a vain effort to restore some sensation other than a singular ache, his rain and sea soaked callouses made soft and peeling. He could have offered succor, kind words, hope...but Gwynek didn't have it in him. Eni and his people had lost their homes, and all the attendant beauties and sorrows that go with such a thing. He imagined Omiko remembering what the sunset was like from her fishing village, or Eni gazing idly at the sky as cloud waves raced and broke apart, he imagined the chores, the tedium, the idling hours of companionship and petty resentments and how all of that was lost to them. Forces beyond Gwynek's ken or mortal power was taking it from them, and nothing could stop that. All their lives were saved while all their lives were lost - and something about that struck the elf as brutally sad. What comfort could he offer, "This is enough," or "Wherever you are, you are home"? Those affirmations came better from the lips and hearts of a higher quality sort.
They had their lives though, and their memories...which struck Gwynek as preferable to death. The young elf took a sip of his drink, some kind of alcohol which in the aftermath of less enervating circumstances might taste like something other than brine and burning. Pulling the blankets of the bed back, he crawled under them, shivered and clutched.
It was better that Eni slept. "Oh - they have brunch in a tree," Gwynek had called out to Eni when disembarked, trying to tell him of one of the few things he knew about the town. He didn't know if Eni had heard him. It didn't matter, really. It was a stupid thing to say, stupider than the reassurances he couldn't bring himself to say.
Parts of Gwynek's flesh warmed quickly under the covers, others remained stubbornly chilled. He kicked his feet a bit, rubbing them against the fabric of the sheets and blanket trying to warm them. He attempted summoning a sense of satisfaction. It wasn't a grand rescue, or an especially heroic one - it was a tumultuous trek of manic activity - but it was a rescue nevertheless. Eni, Omiko, Rory, and the rest of the villagers would make a place, they had enough iron in them to do what needs demand. Gwynek wanted to do the very thing he had done - sail around the world and rescue some folks...yet he couldn't quite shake the feeling that he could have done more, been a better hero, a more kind rescuer.
Silence was easy for Gwynek. Sleep was easy for Eni. This chapter of his kin's story concluded as well as it could, and that ought to be enough. More than enough, if he were honest...ambitious to hope for such things.
Gwynek twitched as he drifted off to sleep, a pitching sense of vertigo pulling him from his nascent dreams. Shifting beneath the covers to stretch a knotted muscle in his calf, drink half finished on the stand, fire in the hearth reducing to ruddy glow. "It should be enough," his thoughts struggling to rise to consciousness before dissolving into the kaleidoscope nonsense of soporific liminality.
And he would believe that it was enough - at least for a short while, at least long enough to sleep.
Vignette from the very recently concluded Tale of Survival. I'm really happy I was able to participate in it and play a small part, and I wanted to get this written before too long had passed in the world. Big thank you to Thandiwe, and all the GMs that have contributed to this story.
