Finality of Man (saved post)

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Category: Towns
Topic: River's Rest
Message number: 12472
Author: GS4-SCRIBES
Date: 11/08/2007
Subject: Finality of Man

--Somewhere near Maelstrom Bay--

He was not a learned man. He knew his letters and his name, but he owned no books, nor speculated on thoughts and theories that demanded great intellect. He knew his trade and every dawn met the rising sun on the waters of Maelstrom Bay and the sea beyond. He knew his prey and when he cast his nets into the water always drew back fish, but no more and no less than he needed. Thus, it was that surprise found itself into his routine and rather heavily, at that.

The net always pulled heavy with the bounty of the sea, the literal meat of his table, and it was a weight that was familiar to his calloused and scarred hands. Not that day, as autumn rolled along on the path to winter, the weight was different. It was more.

It was the weight of a man where fish should have been. The effects of the sea are not kind to man, an alien in its house, and the fisherman could discern little from the man's face. What flesh remained, clinging stubbornly to the bone, was evidence of a wide girth. It was this that offered the first clue to him, as he looked over the body that sagged in his net, and even still dripped pieces of the mortal clay back into the sea through the netting.

No, for as uneducated as he was, he knew the symbol that graced the belt that clung to the pants that were wrapped desperately around the bone and filled with the remnants of what once was man. It was the symbol of the empire that he knew of, was a part of, but knew nothing of being of. The lord of the sea had elected to retain the body and so sunk it not far from where it had been set to water.

His first instinct was to release to Charl what Charl had kept, but he was man and not Arkati. A reluctance filled him to offer any man back to the anonymity of the depths and so he began to row, towing the body behind his small boat. And so he landed, his feet finding the sand of the beach, familiar and foreign beneath his soles as one who grows used to waves.

The body he dragged further, his eyes gazing at the wrecked carrack further down the shore, and crossed over a berm of black sand. It was work, but different from the strain that pulled on his back, shoulders and arms out on the water, and soon the grave was dug and the body rolled in. It disappeared with a promising finality under the black sand, free of wave and creature.

He paused then, his back to the grave, the sea sparkling before his eyes and could step no farther. There remained one final thing and this he did, carefully stacking one piece of coral after another into a small pile centered around a large piece of driftwood. Upon this wood, he applied his knife, and on the wood, he applied the letters he knew.

The tide had turned and his boat with its owner had departed from the beach. There, in the shadow of the berm, the marker stood and the man who was forgotten, was known again, and for now, at least, would remain a man of a name.

GM Scribes