Lost, the Sea: Stonewaker

Part 1

Sunlight seared Carnelian Bay like a branding iron. The turquoise sea had spent itself throughout the sweltering day throwing off as much of the oppressive heat as it could, leaving only a pitiful effort to smear thin waves upon the sun-weary shore. The shacks lining the cove had given up their colors long ago. Where there used to be vibrant pink and teal and bright orange roofs, there now was only a lilting chorus of muted pastels with paint peeling off like sunburn. The pale beach snapped with hot fangs at the feet of anyone foolish enough to step onto the white sand, and anyone with a lick of sense had retreated into the safety of shaded buildings before the sun ever broke over the edge of the cliffs that cloistered Carnelian Bay. But where the light could not penetrate, the heat persisted.

Men—pirates—stinking of sweat and sea, navigated the thick, tropical air toward cooler shelter, sucking at an atmosphere burdened with enough water to drown a man in his own bodily brine. Even the ladies of the docks did not bother painting their faces on days like these, knowing any effort of powder or rouge would slough off in an ungodly horror to make even the most starved seaman drop mast. So they leaned tragically from balcony and balustrade, wearily fanning themselves and making half-hearted gestures and sounds at passersby, biding their energy for nightfall.

Out in the harbor, the very pitch on the ships bubbled and spat at the miserable afternoon. Cabin boys relegated to ships’ watch while their masters enjoyed the harbor treaded carefully from plank to plank to keep the tar from tacking their shoes to the deck, hooting at those despondent ladies before finally retreating—fruitless and frustrated—into the safer caverns of the lower decks. Only one woman did not abandon them.

On the tangerine roof loaded down with all manner of storm-flung debris, the Buxom Wench—that massive, pale lady—lounged over the entryway of her domicile with a painted flagon of bubbling mead eternally dribbling over her last remaining breast (the one had been blown off by stray canon fire in some other lifetime) while she grinned from a face nearly erased by decades of direct exposure, which did not tan or wrinkle in the sun but erased it entirely. Within her sweltering shelter, similarly disappeared fellows sipped ugly ale, while they dripped in their chairs. While the various shacks and buildings rimming the white sand edge of the hidden cove each stood to receive the full barrage of the noontime on their thin walls, the Buxom Wench was a little higher up on the slope of grey stone that the sea had carved away over years and years of steady tides with a little more coverage from palms and ferns, so that the whole lowermost floor of the wayward inn—the tavern proper—was built into cool, damp rock. So it was here that the tide washed in as many stinking scallywags as could crowd into the cool, lantern-lit underskirts of the Buxom Wench, including a particularly despondent dwarf.

Though the noon sun was still beaming almost directly overhead, Kolbe toyed with an early flagon, taking small, dejected sips that were really no more than an exchange of liquid—sweat for ale, drop for drop. He smeared the back of his sleeve across his forehead again and grimaced at the sodden cuff. There would be none of this kind of vicious heat back home. His mind drifted back across the sea to the forests and draws and dales of Larishai; to verdant valleys that allowed for a cozy fire even in the summer months; to winters blessed with snow and the deep caves full of cool, cool darkness. A darker shiver wracked his body and trembled along the damp pools beneath his tunic, and for a moment he did not know which he hated more: the furnace of the present or the frost billowing up out of the past. Kolbe fled the quarries of Larishai, slammed the door against the wind blowing up from deep caverns of memory, and punctuated the refusal with another half-hearted swig.

“A dwarf south of the equator? How are you holding up?”

Kolbe lifted his eyes along the rough grain of the bar, pock-marked with several knife wounds and the scars of clientele, to behold a curiously clean-clut fellow.

He was dressed in as much crimson as he could get his hands on, capped with well-oiled boots to which the white sand still clung like sugar, and on his tunic there glistened a golden lion. Copper skin glowed where his hands and face were not covered and he looked out on the world with large eyes of a dependable, earthen brown. His dark hair was slick with the heat but he kept it pushed out of his face, away from the eyes, which must keep looking—keep drinking the world and delighting in the flavor.

“Finn,” he offered with a hand that Kolbe shook after wiping his palms on the tunic.

“Kolbe.”

“You’re with a ship?” the man asked.

Kolbe weighed the question carefully. Captain Zaikri’s offer to join the Khahadari still hissed in his mind like a lit fuse. It conflated with the sound of the waves pressing off the rocky sides of the portal into Carnelian Bay as the Wyvern had slid into the cove. Even the sea behaved strangely toward that ship as if the whole vessel worried the world it passed over. Since they had defeated him in combat, Zaikiri had been exclusively accommodating, even doting, toward Kolbe and those traveling companions with whom he had become entangled, purchasing their room and board at the Wench despite having interrupted the slaver’s errand. Zaikiri’s hospitality was undeniable, yet Kolbe shuddered at the thought of spending another moment on that weird, charred vessel. And the thought of those fellow-travleres, wherever they were, filled Kolbe with a knot profound confusion that he was still trying untie.

“I’m here on my own,” Kolbe finally decided. The young man took well to this, relaxing into the bar and into his drink.

“What a relief!” he grinned. “Here I thought I was the only one.”

“You came there without a ship?” Kolbe asked.

“Who could get here without a ship?” the man laughed as he wiped his face. “Wasn’t that something? Riding right through the rock of the bay? I thought for certain the whole crew had gone mad, and I was about to throw myself overboard when a few laid hands on me to keep me on deck. Lucky they did. There were some who were, obviously, going to let me go through with it. Would have given them a good laugh, I guess.”

The man took a swig from his own flagon and winced.

“Gods, this stuff is awful,” he said, smacking his lips with a frown. “You’re a dwarf; you must know good ale. Have you ever had worse?”

Kolbe shrugged and was saved from having to answer by the loud clatter of chairs falling back and twin drunken voices yelling obscenities across the sweltering room.

“No fighting!” the barkeep—a hulking goliath of a man who stooped to keep his head from brushing the beams running the ceiling—roared across the room. At this call, the bickering fellows cooled just a bit and grumbled back into docility. The boiling agitation of cooped-up men settled back to a simmer—for now.

“It’s an explosive lot ‘round here,” Finn observed, leaning back on the bar and resting his elbows on the wood, when he did, his left arm crunched through a weakened portion of the wood and coughed a shower of splinters onto the floor. Righting himself, he cleared his throat and took another swig.

“Are you some kind of knight?” Kolbe tried. The crimson man guffawed into his drink.

“Indeed,” he grinned. “And that would be ‘Sir‘ to you.”

Kolbe felt his face grow hot with embarrassment.

“You’re wearing sigil and colors,” he tried.

“And you’re wearing…mud,” Finn countered. “Yet I don’t think it’s necessarily your station.”

Kolbe flushed another shade darker. His clothes were still entombed in a cracked layer of dried mud dirt and forest foliage. Was it only a few weeks ago that he was clean and celebrated as a hero among the vales of Larishai? Even his beard, he guessed - probably still bore witness with its own wretched collection of mud and twigs to the weird events of the past few days.

“It’s been a strange couple of days,” Koble started.

“I didn’t ask,” Finn replied. It was not meant to be specifically dismissive. Rather, Kolbe felt—for the first time since he could remember—the freedom of disinterest. This crimson fellow truly did not care where Kolbe was from or where he was going. There was a flicker of disappointment that passed through Kolbe, then a twinge of fear that finally melted away—dripped off like sweat—into peace.

He was alone—his companions had moved into the town somewhere—perhaps never to be seen again. Zaikiri and his ilk lounged in their rooms upstairs and Larishai was a million miles away, leaving Kolbe exposed and unmoored. After a lifetime of constantly giving account for his every action and movement, Kolbe had finally arrived in a dark corner of the world where no one knew his name, where no cared to know it all.

Beside him, Finn winced again at his ghastly drink, while the rich brown eyes looked out the door at the shimmering world. Kolbe closed his mouth and contented himself to drink beside the crimson fellow, neither one of them necessarily needing the other’s story. And Kolbe pondered what to do and where to go and how to get off the beautiful, boiling rock called Carnelian Bay.