The ??th day, time - ??
Weather: ??

Chapter 8: A Shift in Perspective

Out to Sea


Much like everyone seems to have falling dreams every now and then, a common nightmare among Zoras is the feeling of being lost at sea. Stuck, paralyzed, in a a current taking you god knows where.
Elruto has the vague, unconscious feeling of being adrift. A vague sense of drowning. He feels like he can hear noises... Grunts, howls, and whispers from beings on the other side of the water from him. He's not really conscious enough to try to make any sense of it. It's just a feeling of fear and discomfort.

Then... there's something hot, suddenly, on his shoulder. He feels a roughness, and a stiffness in his limbs. The idle dreaming sensation of being adrift is gradually replaced by the total opposite, the very conscious sensation of being bound. His entire body feels stiff, and something rough and scratchy is wrapped tightly around his chest, wrists, and ankles. There's still an odd sort of drifting and rocking feeling.

It's dark, but there's a faint and eerie light coming from somewhere he can't see. He hears wood creaking, he hears footsteps and shouts above him, and he hears softer sounds somewhere nearby... Sounds like... liquid sloshing... dull metallic clunks... sounds a little like someone's cooking something.

"Ohh, you're awake" someone says to his left. "I was a little concerned when I'd heard how they got you here." She sounds familiar, but something's off. He can't quite place it. Of course, dazed and disoriented as he is, he probably couldn't place Lord Jabun's voice at the moment.

Elruto instinctively strains against his bonds. His vision is still blurry, and vestigial sensations of darkness and cold and a weird ethereal feeling, of not being totally solid, drift from his mind. The soothing feeling of the ambient rocking is counteracted by the irritating noise of activity, but the two combine to clear his head a little. He half-hears the words of the female voice next to him, but they're interrupted by various "Where am I? Who is that? How did I get here? Where are we going? What am I doing here?" sorts of thoughts.

He groans and twists his body a little, as far as his bonds will allow, but says nothing.

((OOC: How is he tied? Suspended spread-eagle; strapped to a chair; hands tied behind back, ankles together, and arms around waist, but left to lie there? What?))

((OOC: Tied tightly with a perhaps excessive amount of rope, standing, against a wooden pole, probably the under-decks part of the mast. He's tied so that his hands aren't near each other.)

"I thought she off her rocker, attempting a live transfer of a natural creature, but it looks like things turned out well for you, so far."

He can't really see her . She's a little behind him, and his head can only turn so far, but he sees a figure moving, and what looks like a large cauldron. A hand reaches out and plucks a scale off an exposed bit of his shoulder.

"Here you are, alive for now, and your new friends scared off Marla quite nicely."

The sharp pain of having a scale plucked jolts him fully into consciousness. "Ow! Hey, what --" he cries indignantly. Zoras prize their scales, giving them out as meaningful gifts only to the most trusted and worthy; the scale of a member of the royal family is doubly prized. But before Prince Elruto can further express his offense, a wave of nausea rolls through him. It's all he can do to keep from vomiting on the floor before him, but as the rocking of the (presumably) ship sets his head spinning in a completely different way, his will fails, and he spills his day's meals all across the deck at his feet.

He's itchy from the ropes, it's dark, his head hurts, and now everything smells and tastes bad. He groans feebly. "Just great," he thinks."What next?"

The gravity of the situation, and of the amount of danger that he must be in, is only beginning to sink in.

Elruto's new companion was about to speak, but is rather abruptly cut off by his regurgitation. She lets out an exasperated sigh. "...aaaaaohf course... the Zora gets seasick. Can't have that stinking up the place." She walks a few steps, and he can hear her rustling around behind him. "If only I were a water witch."

She walks around to his side, and suddenly she is crouching in front of him. It's a little awkward for him to look towards his feet, but he can see a woman with long, curly hair, probably Hylian (what with having hair) making wiping motions on the ground. "You know, Ganon would rather just kill you all," she says while cleaning up his vomit. "It's a bit foolish, I fear. The goddesses never seemed too terribly picky about who gets the sagehood. Kill one and a new one always manages to crop up somewhere. 's like the sagehood escapes you and floats elsewhere. I think Marla has the right idea, for once. Keep a cork in the bottle, so to speak. No true death, no succession."

She stands up now, and Elruto sees a familiar face. It's Roma. Her soft blue eyes looking cold, distant, and tired. She looks him right in the eye, to the extent that he will look back. "Watch yourself now. Don't go biting my hand, lest you want a mouthfull of flame." She rests a hand firmly on his forehead and reaches up towards his chin with a washcloth.

Elruto's head is cleared by the act of relieving his nausea, and mind is sharp and racing as panic begins to set in. He watches the woman as intently as he can manage, absorbing as many of her words as his frayed mind can get a grip on. That she is a witch of some sort makes him curious and a bit more wary. He becomes a little indignant at the implication that his sagehood is nothing special, and the statement that "no true death" was planned for him fills him first with relief and then horror. On the one hand, he could be spared; on the other, he could be turned into a soulless, half-living hulk, a scaled ReDead or a walking Skullfish.

When at last Roma stands up and reveals her face to him, his racing mind screeches to a halt. Even his rising anxiety falls away, leaving him with nothing more than a dry, hollow, paralytic fear. He would not think of biting her hand; he can do no more than hang there, slackjawed, as she wipes the filth from his chin. He finds himself feeling momentarily grateful - the first positive emotion he's felt since he woke up - and this lights in him the spark for something bigger to fill his heart. It's hope.

"They'll come for me," his panicked mind thinks. They'll have to come for me eventually; they were gathering all of the sages together anyway. But for me, knowing what danger I'm in already, they'll hurry. They... they don't know where I am, but they'll find a way. The foreigners will find a way, or something. Zarala will hurry. She'll make sure they come for me."

She wipes his chin with the sort of quick, clinical detachment of someone wiping spilled milk from the floor, then stops for a moment at the end, now dirty cloth just barely still touching his face.

She looks him in the eye, observing the dazed, hopeful desperation in his eyes. Her blank, distant expression wrinkles slightly for a moment, and she looks about to say something, then closes her eyes, and with the slightest shake of the head, walks back to where she was behind him.

He can hear her rifling around back there for a few moments before returning to the cauldron that he can just barely make out out of the corner of his eye. Silence rings for another moment before she finally speaks again. "We get to see things in our work that others aren't allowed to," she says, with a bit of a dreamy lilt to her voice. A certain enthusiasm. "We've picked at and unraveled the inner workings of the soul, and we understand them in ways normal mages never will. Everyone expects a Zoran royal to be the next sage of water, but I was the first one to know. I could tell the day I met you that your soul was naturally interwoven with the very essence of water.... in a very similar way that I have woven the essence of fire into mine."

"It was my experience reading souls that made them first think I had a gift for The Sight..." She pauses a moment, then bangs the edge of the cauldron with something, and continues, "We don't have the kind of power needed to control the essence of water ourselves directly... But with the gods' chosen intermediary... through you, we can."

A knot forms in the pit of Elruto's stomach, as he is filled with the image of his soul being picked at and unraveled. He swallows hard, the taste of fishy vomit coming to the front of his mouth again. He is too bewildered and disoriented and frightened to be able to speak.

((Bump. ^^))