RP:A Wrinkle in Tides

Part of the The Day I Tried To Live Arc

This is a Warrior's Guild RP.

Summary: After Khitti's demise, Brand struggles to carry on.

The Tranquility, off the Rynvale Coast

The first days crawled without Khitti. Each minute seemed a terrible and futile labor, adding up to hours that dragged, slithered, clawed themselves onward. Every evening choked out its last moments before dying as a shriveled, moonlit husk.

So of course all manner of marine life would pick now to start beaching itself. Brand might call it morbidly poetic, if he had the heart to see the poetry in anything of late. He’d asked Lionel for a task to keep him busy, and here it was: Khitti’s beloved sea creatures gasped and wheezed and died on Rynvale’s shores in droves, as if her existence had been tied to theirs, and no one knew the cause.

At least she wasn’t here to mourn them. That was some small comfort.

The Tranquility sent parties to shore, documenting the whats and whens and wheres of the mystery, but the data was indecipherable. Was there something toxic in the water, perhaps? A curse laid on Rynvale itself? Lennier waded knee-deep in scale samples and tomes of aquatic biology, all to no avail. Even those of the crew who’d spent more years at sea than their Captain found themselves at a loss. These things don’t just happen. Not in these numbers.

As the days stretched on towards the better part of a week, the theories grew ever more farfetched. Revenge of the leviathan, with the aid of a some mermaid witch? The restless, corrupted ghost of Lydia, Amarrah, or both? The ill omens of a coming maelstrom, the likes of which would soon wipe Lithrydel off the map? The work of the secretive Onyx, who still had not returned? Brand dismantled more than a few of the betting pools that had formed amongst the crew -- it was disrespectful to the dead, he said -- but he may as well have asked the tides to cease. Nobody knew what was happening, but everyone was eager to guess and gamble on the answers.

Brand threw himself as deeply as he could into the task assigned to him. It was good work, important work. It should keep him grounded -- figuratively, if less so literally. But as the days stretched on and they came no closer to solving the riddle, determination gave way to frustration, and frustration succumbed all too easily to listlessness.

The insomnia didn’t help. Sleep evaded him more nights than not since Khitti had passed. Too often he closed his eyes and began to drift, only to start himself awake as he envisioned her falling. Some nights he gave up on sleep entirely and took to pacing the decks, or he took Francis out on lengthy, aimless walks. Alas, this too was little respite. He thought he saw her everywhere he turned, day or night. Every glint of red he imagined to be her hair. He found Khitti in every lithe form, in every black dress, in every lilt of a woman’s voice.

She was everywhere, and she was nowhere.

Two weeks, two endless weeks since Khitti had fallen, and Brand was at his wit’s end. Lionel was back to whatever Lionel did, and likewise with Meri. Brand’s crew had moved on, not that most of them had known the vampiress well enough to feel her loss so keenly in the first place. Dozla stepped in seamlessly when Brand struggled in his duties, which only served to make his presence seem all the more pointless. If Khitti was gone and his crew didn’t need him, what else could possibly be left for him?

Two weeks, two excruciating weeks since Khitti had fallen, and Brand turned back to the bottle. Just one drink, to dull the edge. Just two drinks, to ease the pain. Three drinks, to still his thoughts.

Just one more.

Just one more.

Just one more…

Dark tendrils creeped at the edges of Brand’s vision. The ship lurched hard to port, then banked to starboard. His chair leaped out from under him and the table drenched his clothes in whiskey as he staggered to the wall.

...Oh, he’d really frakked it up now, hadn’t he?

Whatever. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

Just one more.

Just one more.

Just one more…

The floor rose up to meet him, damp and stiff against his cheek and oddly comfortable. If he closed his eyes now, maybe he could…

A speck of blue beneath the wardrobe snapped him back to alertness. He reached out, dragged, clawed himself forward. A speck of blue, blue as a cloudless sky. Blue as Rynvale’s waters. Hands touched metal, and he pulled out a necklace.

-The- necklace. Lapis lazuli, the gem that had started it all, that reawoke Amarrah, that cursed Khitti with a dream of things that could not be. Of course it would find him now -- life never failed to mock a man in grief. Why let such a wicked sense of humor go to waste?

Or maybe… maybe the necklace had meant to find him now? It had shown them other possibilities before, other ways of living. And in this moment, most anything seemed preferable to the present...

Brand clenched the necklace in a fist and shocked the charm to life.

"The Glade"

Two hundred sixty-two thousand, eight hundred and three weeks gone by in a blink, in the single beat of a wing. A span of time unfathomable to most, and yet here Brand was at its end.

So many other possibilities, so many other ways of living, but the memories were already fading. Where had he been successful? Had he faltered, done too little or done it too late or interfered too much, too soon? Hindsight claimed to possess perfect vision, but Brand’s mind could contain only perhaps a single frame of each year he’d just lived through. Everything else slipped through his fingertips like so many grains of sand.

“It’s always like this,” sighed a voice, disembodied. “You humans are so limited. You can’t even remember crossing over your own footsteps.”

Had he been here before? If so, he didn’t remember it. Brand stood in a still and solemn glade. The trees around him were only just beginning to shed their autumn dress for the nakedness of winter. Underfoot were marbled tiles in shades of grey and blue and black, tiles that stretched out in an intricate circular pattern right up to where the glade became forest again. Pillars of stone surrounded him, each etched in glowing runes. A light dusting of snow was falling, but the temperature was as balmy as a mid-spring day.

No, he surely would remember a place like this.

“I had to try,” the voice continued. “I suspect it would have resulted in a much cleaner outcome, had it been successful. But no, I suppose some things really -are- impossible.”

“What in the seven hells are you talking about?” Try as he might, Brand could not discover the source of the voice. It was not behind the pillars, it was not above him, it was not behind him or below him. It lingered in familiar space, intimately close and yet nowhere.

“The glade. Obviously.” Now the voice sounded annoyed, impatient. “If you can’t remember, there is no point in explaining further. Perhaps all futures truly are equally doomed.”

“Oh, come the frak on.” Mystic nonsense. Brand could not help but chuckle. “ ‘All futures’?”

“How did you get here?” The voice spat the words out, acid on Brand’s skin. A shiver coiled around his spine, and he stepped forward as if to escape its grip.

“I... I don’t know.” Hadn’t he always been here? Where was ‘here,’ anyway?

“You know.” He could feel the sneer.

“I -really- don’t.” Brand took another step, and another. He stood in the shadow of one of the pillars now. A rune like a mollusk shell glowed crimson, in and out, in and out, matching the cadence of his breath. He reached a hand out, hesitated… touched it.

Across a thousand other pillars, the mollusk runes lit up in unison. In and out, in and out, crimson. The forest and the snow and the taste of spring were gone now and Brand was wrapped in stone after stone, each pillar bearing a rune of slightly differing orientation from the next and spiraling ever outward from his position.

Before him, the closest mollusk blinked into nothingness. The runes surrounding it faded. Some dimmed entirely. The effect cascaded outward until almost the whole of the pillar seemed contaminated by the darkness. And then, it started tipping, tilting further and further as if the lost runes were adding weight to its nearest side. Brand leapt back as it crashed at its feet. The runes on what had been the far side of the pillar still remained lit, but the pillar as a whole was cracked and ruined.

As his vision faded away to the glade once more, Brand felt the meaning deep in his gut, even if the full scope of that meaning evaded words. This place was somehow both not real and the only thing that was. And something had gone wrong, maybe many somethings, to bring him here in the first place. The voice had tried to explain, and he had forgotten. Like holding finely ground sand in his hands, the harder he tried to hold onto it the more the memory slipped through his fingers.

The voice sighed.

“There’s no use fretting about it. It’s my fault. I will simply have to have another go at it and try not to botch it this time.”

“Another -what-? Botch what?” Brand asked, to no response but ocean waves rushing in his ears.

The Tranquility, off the Rynvale Coast

Wicked, screeching brightness streaked across the floor. Overhead, three faces, blurred. Voices… concerned? Familiar.

“Sir?”

“Captain! Oh, praise the gods, he’s alive.” A woman. Not Khitti.

“Sir, can you look into my light, please?” The healer, perhaps.

A cool blue mingled with the candlelight, searing through the slits of Brand’s eyes. Brighter and larger it grew until all his sight was as sea foam on the Cenril shores… and then it was gone. Lennier met his captain’s gaze up close, the elf’s brow heavy with vexation.

“Ah, he’ll be well enough in time, I suppose. But please do fetch the water.”

The woman -- Dozla, Brand now saw -- tiptoed over his sprawled legs across the floor and back. “Water, m’dear. Drink up, but do it slow. We… we thought you might go the way of your ladyfriend for a bit there...” Her dark eyes glistened. Painted copper lips buckled into a frown. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time,” she sighed.

Lennier backed away, and Brand’s eyes slid shut again as he emptied the jug brought to him. He was leaning back against the cot now, though he couldn’t quite recall when he’d sat up.

“Right. Back to business, then.” This voice hardly waited for Brand to clear the last of the liquid from his throat. He’d surely have choked, had it been a moment sooner; instead, he spewed out curses.

“Seven gorram hells -- Onyx?!”

Brand’s ears had not deceived him. His first mate had at last returned -- how long had he been knocked out for, exactly? -- and was peering down from their perch upon the bed, legs kicking outward in impatient rhythm by his side.

“Onyx indeed,” the child confirmed. “Sober up. I want to show you something. I have not been idle, nor have I returned empty-handed...”

Brand twisted at the hips to get a better look. In their lap, Onyx held Khitti’s black ice bow, and in their hands they cradled the length of her violin.

Both artifacts were littered with fresh and glowing runes.