[Flashback] Fall from Grace, Part I

[Pash'nar]

Timestamp: Fall 31, 396AV Location: Somewhere in St Matthews Bay The crisp autumn sky that night was cloudless—just a perfect black velvet sheet stretched thin from one undulating horizon to the next. The tiny lights of Zeltiva hardly distracted from it's dark, seamless beauty. Leth's own face, yellow with the glow of the harvest in its fullness, barely peered over the dark expanse of the sea as if even he was afraid to watch all that was to unfold in the night he'd been given to reign. Stars twinkled, the brightest belt of them arching across the sky like a fisherman's net tossed out over the sea. Only motionless. And useless for catching anything but the eyes of those who bothered to look upwards into the sparkling landscape. Indeed, if anyone had watched that night, they might have even fancied themselves a bit of luck in the form of what could have been (for all they knew) a shooting star. Something small and bright shimmered as the seeming between the visible and the invisible ripped, black velvet expanse hardly shuddering as a fine pearl slipped from its well-tailored hem and plummeted toward the quiet stillness of Saint Matthews Bay below. Only this falling star was no lump of stone. It was moonlight poured carefully into the mold of a man, stretched with opalescent skin, and ornamented a crown of timeless shapes the mortal folk below would mistake more for horns than memories of immortality. Wind whipped pale hair and roughly handled semi-conscious flesh in its decent. Calm waves as dark as any scribe's ink seemed to rise to end the creature's fall like the dark cavern of a creature's maw, swallowing the drop of moon-colored beauty as if it had never existed save for the smack of flesh traveling at high speed against the surface water. Then, it was quiet again. Pain and cold. Unfamiliar and unwelcome sensations ripped the still-dreaming thing from his slumber, sucking the breath (breath?) from his lungs and plunging him into a very silent and very wet darkness. Alone. Alone? The rush of the waves and of a pulse he hardly recognized as his own filled his ears as he struggled to keep the dark tendrils of seawater from crawling into his lungs through his open mouth and the flared nostrils of his aquiline nose. The ocean heaved him steadily in one direction with the pounding of the surf not so far away, but the shard of moonlight still had no idea which way was up or out or down. What was this? It felt vaguely familiar, but yet so alien and horrifying. With a sputtering gasp, the ethaefal found the surface, eyes wildly searching while he greedily inhaled precious air into a body that suddenly felt heavy and strange. The bright glow of the moon caught the edges of his panicked glances, snagging his cerulean gaze like shards of broken glass, and he gasped. This was not home. The face he knew, but the distance he could not fathom ... and worst of all, everything was silent. He sank again, confused, letting the cold hands of Laviku pull and tug his somewhat familiar yet somehow strange form back downward, staring up at the canopy of stars from beneath the burning salt water. He watched his own breath escape from his pale lips, loud little bubbles above the hum and roll of the sea. This wasn't right. This was a strange dream. A vision. A memory. He let his lungs burn and vision darken. Surely, he'd wake up and all things would be right. Surely, Leth would notice he was missing and reach for him. And yet, nothing happened. Almost unwillingly, he shattered through the surface again and wheezed, exchanging brine for air with a strange feeling of resentment. Leth's blank face offered no answers, and the ethaefal found he had no words. Cerulean eyes trailed back upwards to the stars that burned so coldly so far away overhead. All of them, he knew, their names and rotations still so fresh in his stunned mind. Laviku continued to shove his pale body about in the surf as he stared and waited, straining his ears to hear anything other than his breath and his heartbeat and the waves. A few birds. The wind. But only silence answered him with any sincerity. What was this? What went wrong? The water was colder than the air, both chipping away at his shocked consciousness with timeless precision. He drifted a bit, the darkness all looking the same whether it was the sky or the sea or the back of his eyelids. He couldn't tell. He strained his ears to hear some familiar voice, the heart that beat in his chest aching to hear some word of Leth assuring him that this was planned and purposeful. His pulse held no answers. He was too afraid to speak in this place. What would his voice ring like in his ears? He let the tide wash him further, unaware that the shore was slipping closer until shells and sand scraped his flesh and the waves pounded him in the shallows with renewed force. He may have drifted for minutes or hours. He had no concept of time. By the time the surf spat him on the beach, he was too numb with cold and shock to care about the sand or the tide. He let his vision blur, only the stars in focus, moonlight mirrored on opalescent flesh. This was not a dream or a vision. This was real. This was wrong. His mouth moved without sound, lips shaping pleas to Leth that went without a voice to carry them. The ethaefal had little strength to make his lungs do more than breathe. Everything that wasn't cold hurt. Everything that didn't hurt was cold. Yet, the stars still twinkled with a mocking sort of cheerfulness. Something was right in the world, somewhere, surely. Just not this.

[Pash'nar]

The ethaefal watched the stars dance their familiar circles through the sky without moving, the tide lapping at his bare skin as it receded slowly down the beach, leaving him even more alone. The black curtain began to fade into hues of rich blues, slowly becoming lighter and lighter until a fire teased its edges just below the horizon. Leth's face had long-since disappeared, abandoning him to his fate on this strange beach without a single word of comfort or apology. He laid as he was all night, not knowing that the dawn would claim his flesh of poured moonlight and Syna's light would replace it with someone else's body entirely. A body that may had once been his, but one he certainly did not remember. At first, the sensation across his chilled flesh was strange, and being so aware of just his body at this moment meant he felt as though he could tell something was actually happening, though he was beyond willing to comprehend just what it was. Opalescence slowly faded into a more human shade of tan, limbs shrinking with an almost-noticeable ache and burn, pale hair clouded and darkened into an inky black like the waves that had first caught him in the night, and intricate hand-tooled lines stained once-perfect skin. Though it would be quite some time before he himself knew the truth, only the bright cerulean of his eyes remained the same as one seeming slipped into the next, a sea-stained reminder of who or what he'd become. Still, the ethaefal took little notice of the strange transformation, half conscious and confused. He was too focused on the sounds of voices he could barely make out over the crashing of the morning surf on the otherwise quiet beach he'd become a part of through the night. The voices were getting closer, but he couldn't make out the words. He just knew none of the voices were familiar. None of the voices belonged to his god. Not a one. He closed his eyes against the sun and exhaled, willing to hold his breath instead of take another. Maybe he'd wake up in his place if he could just end the dream. Someone shouted. They were closer than he'd known. Not that he seemed able to calculate distance in his state. Laughing. Confusion. A gasp or two. Maybe a few words did sound familiar that morning on the beach, but the ethaefal refused to hear them. A mix of aged faces peered at him. Smirking. Judging. Figuring. Assuming. They spoke to each other, they spoke to him. All of it was garbled and mixed in his mind. Then—no one bothering to ask his permission as far as he knew—hands grabbed him without gentleness. Swarthy fisherman scooped him from the sand, forcing a gasp of breath back into his lungs. They asked him things. They pointed. They smiled. Were they welcoming him or mocking him? It was hard to tell—both involved the baring of teeth in some form or another. The sounds that spilled from their lips were of little contextual help. To them, he was just some naked Svefra on the beach. What the petch was he doing there? Had he lost his clothes in a hand of cards? Had a sea nymph seduced him and left him for dead? Had he fell off his boat and drifted to shore? Hardly. He had no idea what they were saying, but they carried him off with them anyway, pointing and cajoling, smelling of the morning's catch and so much sea water. All of them were haggard, tired, having somehow missed his fall in the night while they prayed for fish to land in their nets instead. They dragged his unwilling (but unresisting) body along, strung up between two grinning brothers. He was their joke. At least they gave him a cloak, though it wasn't without some indecision as to who's cloak it should be. What if they didn't get it back? His feet dug into the sand, toes curling in the warm wet, legs too weak to protest. He made a few noises, glaring at them. The men laughed again. Maybe this one was still a little drunk. Breakfast would fix him, they said. A breakfast fixed any man.

[Pash'nar]

"Oh for gods' sakes, Narrin, put some petchin' clothes on that thin'." Hissed the fisherman's wife in surprise as their motley party staggered into the main house, after dragging their man of a catch along with their more fishy one. Harrie was hardly a delicate or diminutive woman, and the color that rose to her freckled cheeks as her two eldest sons deposited the naked creature on the floor of their kitchen belied her lack of any particular strain of innocence. A few of the other wives turned from their tasks around the oven and the sink to ogle as her statement reached their ears, laughing and rolling their eyes. The younger ones forgot to return to their duties, suddenly acting as if nudity was something of a new discovery. Their eyes ran over tan skin, sand, and tattoos with some fitting giggles before Harrie was swatting them all with her apron back to their duties for their men, "'Urry up, ya good for nothing' lil' birds. Ain't like they 'aven't been out all night puttin' dresses on your arses by catchin' 'em fish, what them boys." She chided, removing her apron entirely to toss it over any more distracting parts of the no longer conscious man on their floor. The woman cast an accusing glare at the eldest man who she marked as her own, "Were y'all petchin' drinkin' again 'stead of fishin'? Whassat on my floor?" The tired fishermen all shrugged in unison before each offering their own form of explanation, "Found 'im on the beach we did." "Aye. Ain't but a piece of flotsam. No'even a scrappa clothes on 'im." "He's prolly some drunk done got lost wanderin' back ta 'is ship." "Jus'nother piece'o'Svefra scrap if ya ask me, which ya didn't." "Shudyap!" Narrin finally raised his voice above his cousins, brothers, uncles, and sons, spittle clinging to the rough curls of a gnarled beard that clung to the entirety of his weathered face, "'E was alone, wife, an' on th'beach. I ain't gonna leave a man to pirates if I ain't sure he be one. Bear, get 'im some clothes an' mind'jer missus." "But—" "Go on, 'fore I make ya gut all 'em fish yerself." The youngest scurried off to the loft of their humble house to find something clean for their strange charge. Pants, he supposed. He grumbled, fully audible above the din in the kitchen as breakfast was finished below Proudly scrambling back down, Bear produced a pair of pants that he could only hope fit the Svefra still unmoving on their floor, "'Ere ya go." He had no desire to actually put them on the other man, so he simply held them at arm's length and waited for them to leap from his hands and dress themselves. Harrie smirked, "Gimme 'ere ya useless barnacle." She resisted the urge to swat the boy as he scrambled to set the table and get out of her way. She'd dressed enough of them not to have a hint of shame in the act of dressing unconscious strangers.