The nature of Madeira's madness was such that when she threw a rock, she never expected it to hit the ground. In her mind there were equal chances it could float away, or combust, or grow legs and walk away, because living two decades in Ionu's playground had reduced her concept of predictability to rubble. She was one of those people who understood the laws of reality and logic to be pliable, negotiable, and unreliable.
So when she went to sleep in her feather-down bed and woke up on a slab of moss with her arm flung over a man she had never seen before, her lungs filled with the stench of humid decay, her mind skipped neatly over the shock and questions and landed somewhere in the realm of oh petch.
The air around her and the mystery man was humming with a constant low drone of buzzing insects, punctuated by the sharp cries of animals she couldn't see. Daylight was slicing through the thin canopy of bendy trees, illuminating shallow-looking brackish water choked with plant matter and debris. Little islands rose out of the muddy water, here and there connected by marshy and unstable bridges of scrubby grass. Everything was wet. Water dripped constantly from the trees and dewed on the bark and in Madeira's lungs, and it felt like she was getting closer to drowning with each dragged breath.
She sat up carefully and pressed a hand to her chest to chest to check that she was indeed still alive, and it was then that she realized she was naked. This didn't alarm her too much, as she had gone to bed naked, but there was something she was missing that sent bolts of panic down her spine.
Where were her rings? Her necklace? Her gloves? Turning her left hand inward, she saw even the embedded djed stone she was certain she had fallen asleep with was gone. Without her trappings of magical artifacts, without her rings and the soulmist inside, she felt naked and vulnerable in a way that hit soul deep.
She wanted to sit down and cry, to give in to the hopelessness for even just a moment, but she was a Craven, and she had shyke to do. So she wiped her sweaty forehead with her sweaty hand and stood, taking pains not to disturb the man passed out beside her. He was naked too, and by the rise and fall of his lean, ropy back she concluded he was still alive. She might have been mortified to be naked with a stranger, but her civil sensibilities were being roughly recompartmentalized. At least she wasn't alone.
Hanging on a thin, rubbery tree on their island were two burlap sacks. They were the only man-made thing in sight. With fumbling scar-thick fingers she untied the bag and looked inside. There was flint and steel, a rough stone axe, a pair of moccasins, and a short stake and several coils of wire noose that she belated realized was a snare. At the very bottom was a thick piece of parchment. A map, she realized as she opened it. A crude one, even to her wildly untrained eye, marking the rough shape of the land around them and a legend of foreign and decidedly scary animals they will presumably find there. It was marked with a big X that drew her eye. It seemed to expect her to follow it.
How nice. Someone wanted them to survive. Or wanted them to last long enough to be entertaining. This wasn't her first or even second death game with a god (and this was to do with a god, she was sure of it) but if this was something new, if this was some idiot god's idea to release a man and a woman into the wild like rabbits and hoping to breed a race of swamp babies she would-.
That thought stuttered and stopped, and she squinted back down at the man. He was her age, with a whip-like outdoorsman build topped with tangled, scruffy black hair. But beyond that, into him, where her eyes couldn't reach, she thought she could sense something else. Was he actually dead? No. He was possessed. But this possession was tangled so deep it was almost... symbiotic.
Getting back down on her knees, she rolled him over by the shoulder and shook him roughly. Oh please, she inwardly begged, oh please be one of mine. Don't leave me here alone.
"Jomi?' she gasped hopefully. "Alice? Autumn? Oh please, we're in trouble. Wake up!"
WC: 765
So when she went to sleep in her feather-down bed and woke up on a slab of moss with her arm flung over a man she had never seen before, her lungs filled with the stench of humid decay, her mind skipped neatly over the shock and questions and landed somewhere in the realm of oh petch.
The air around her and the mystery man was humming with a constant low drone of buzzing insects, punctuated by the sharp cries of animals she couldn't see. Daylight was slicing through the thin canopy of bendy trees, illuminating shallow-looking brackish water choked with plant matter and debris. Little islands rose out of the muddy water, here and there connected by marshy and unstable bridges of scrubby grass. Everything was wet. Water dripped constantly from the trees and dewed on the bark and in Madeira's lungs, and it felt like she was getting closer to drowning with each dragged breath.
She sat up carefully and pressed a hand to her chest to chest to check that she was indeed still alive, and it was then that she realized she was naked. This didn't alarm her too much, as she had gone to bed naked, but there was something she was missing that sent bolts of panic down her spine.
Where were her rings? Her necklace? Her gloves? Turning her left hand inward, she saw even the embedded djed stone she was certain she had fallen asleep with was gone. Without her trappings of magical artifacts, without her rings and the soulmist inside, she felt naked and vulnerable in a way that hit soul deep.
She wanted to sit down and cry, to give in to the hopelessness for even just a moment, but she was a Craven, and she had shyke to do. So she wiped her sweaty forehead with her sweaty hand and stood, taking pains not to disturb the man passed out beside her. He was naked too, and by the rise and fall of his lean, ropy back she concluded he was still alive. She might have been mortified to be naked with a stranger, but her civil sensibilities were being roughly recompartmentalized. At least she wasn't alone.
Hanging on a thin, rubbery tree on their island were two burlap sacks. They were the only man-made thing in sight. With fumbling scar-thick fingers she untied the bag and looked inside. There was flint and steel, a rough stone axe, a pair of moccasins, and a short stake and several coils of wire noose that she belated realized was a snare. At the very bottom was a thick piece of parchment. A map, she realized as she opened it. A crude one, even to her wildly untrained eye, marking the rough shape of the land around them and a legend of foreign and decidedly scary animals they will presumably find there. It was marked with a big X that drew her eye. It seemed to expect her to follow it.
How nice. Someone wanted them to survive. Or wanted them to last long enough to be entertaining. This wasn't her first or even second death game with a god (and this was to do with a god, she was sure of it) but if this was something new, if this was some idiot god's idea to release a man and a woman into the wild like rabbits and hoping to breed a race of swamp babies she would-.
That thought stuttered and stopped, and she squinted back down at the man. He was her age, with a whip-like outdoorsman build topped with tangled, scruffy black hair. But beyond that, into him, where her eyes couldn't reach, she thought she could sense something else. Was he actually dead? No. He was possessed. But this possession was tangled so deep it was almost... symbiotic.
Getting back down on her knees, she rolled him over by the shoulder and shook him roughly. Oh please, she inwardly begged, oh please be one of mine. Don't leave me here alone.
"Jomi?' she gasped hopefully. "Alice? Autumn? Oh please, we're in trouble. Wake up!"
WC: 765
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