#but she can’t let Neve go around on her own. not in dock town with threads and cultists and blood mages all around

[selunesfavouriteprincess]

words can’t describe how much I need to know more about Neve and Rana’s history. did they meet as late teenagers, Rana barely enrolled in Templar training and Neve a curious kid who hadn’t quite grown into her cynical facade yet, both of them hoping for a better Dock Town? or were they both established by the time they met? did Neve waltz into the Templar’s headquarters and decide Rana was the least awful to work with, did Rana’s fellow templars shove her into working with the nosy private eye who couldn’t mind her own business because Rana had the most patience with her, did Rana herself see that Neve had good intentions for the city and secretly start helping her outside of Templar orders? when did they start to realise that they cared about each other, that they’d be upset if the other was hurt on a case? I want to know everything about them

[pig-brain-fucker]

He dreams of the sea for the first time in a long time. He wakes up retching, empty and shrivelled stomach producing nothing but painful cramps and the faint taste of salt.

Thinking back to the island is easy. He can think rationally, detached from those awful events, leaving behind the horror and thinking only of the facts. But dreaming? Dreaming makes him relive it. He can taste the meat, feel the hunger, the thirst, and, eventually, the madness.

It started on a ship. 

Before that, a slave plantation. He remembers the sugarcane they harvested, the heat of the fields, and the mistreatment of the owner. His owner. He doesn’t remember much more than that. Memories of it are only awakened years after the events took place, startlingly clear in the hazy fog of his mind. He doesn’t know if it’s because he wanted to forget them or was forced to by his mind to keep him sane, but he remembers fire, smoke so thick it filled the quarters, choking him, suffocating everyone, burning those unlucky few who the fumes didn't finish. Everyone but him.

This was the first time he escaped death by a hair’s breadth. The first in the longest line of near misses and close calls.

Except he can’t call them that. Near misses. Close calls. That would imply he survived them all, when he did anything but.

The ship. What work is there for an escaped slave? Nothing proper, so he joins a crew, and meets the sea.

He wonders why, when he escaped death so narrowly that first time, would he fall in with pirates? Drowning, fighting, disease, hanging to the neck until dead - all fates he’d seen men befall. Men he knew, men he may have called friends. He preferred to not think of it. 

Maybe running parallel to death was where he was always supposed to be. If he was a more superstitious man he’d call it fate. Most said idiocy.

He and two other men are marooned. 

In many years to come the island they’re abandoned at would be called idyllic or paradisiacal; heavenly. When he thinks back he can only remember it as hell.

The white sands didn’t look so bad at the start. He almost resigns himself to it, dying on a pretty island in the Caribbean, as opposed to suffocating surrounded by the cries of his trapped companions.

Then, one of the men speaks up.

He seems to speak in riddles, of hunger and thirst, of heat and sun. 

His name is Isaiah, he says.

He knows how to survive. It’s too terrible of a way to survive for him to even consider. Until ten days after the ship leaves.

He’d tried eating the sparse grass and leaves from the island, but it had done nothing to quell his hunger. He supposes they must have done something for his thirst for else he would have died, but then again he never saw Isaiah or the other man attempt to eat anything.

Later on, he thinks the third man must have been drinking seawater to have gotten into the state he did.

He approached in the evening of the tenth day. Spouting of words in a language known only by himself, raving in some unintelligible way. He recognizes the lunacy in this man.

When he doesn’t respond, the man gets physical. Then violent.

He strikes out and is answered with a shove backwards. He doesn’t know where he mustered the strength to push him hard enough to knock him over, to cause him to hit his head that heard. It’s another one of those things about the island that doesn’t quite make sense in retrospect.

But he knows it was real as well as he knows the sky is blue.

Although the sky wasn’t blue then. The dawn sky was steadily turning black, deeper than he could have sworn it was the night before.

Isaiah is there immediately when the man dies, crouching at his head, staring in his eyes the moment they go blank, unseeing like the fish markets at the ports they used to dock in.

Isaiah stands.

He knows what’s coming.

He doesn’t watch as Isaiah smoothly cuts into him, but goes to sit at the edge of the island. Escapes the sight of the man he killed getting butchered in preparation.

He can’t escape the overwhelming scent of it though, and he sure as hell can’t escape the taste of it as he’s gorging himself on it next to Isaiah. They eat like the starving men they are, consuming the meat raw as they are without any resources to make a fire, but it tastes better than anything he may have tasted before, and after.

They sleep, Isaiah lying next to a murderer and himself next to a man who calmly cut up a man like a pig. It’s better than he’s slept in any of the previous nine nights on the island.

When they finish eating the other man entirely, Isaiah walks into the sea. 

He doesn’t pause, doesn’t hesitate, just walks until he’s submerged and then carries on.

That’s when he starts drinking seawater. He just needs something to parch his constant thirst.

He thinks it was just a dream sometimes, and that there were only ever two men, that Isaiah never existed; maybe he did lose his mind.

But he always remembers that he never drank seawater until Isaiah disappeared into the ocean. And his memory never seemed to falter after the island.

He used to ponder on what Isaiah was: just something that wandered out of the sea and traded scales for lungs, a witch destined to go back to the sea after cursing a poor desperate man to eternal torment, some personification of the devil staking a claim to his soul, or was he just a man?

Then he thinks that surely Isaiah could not have been a man, for wouldn’t he have run into him? Seen him in the centuries he’s lived through things he didn’t survive?

He thinks that if he did see him, it might just be the thing to make him die and stay down eternally.

He remembers getting off the island like he remembers everything else - clear as the stillest lake, the most flawless glass.

A boat comes past, a merchant ship. Somehow, someone sees him.

When the skiff hits the island shore, he falls to his knees. He can’t remember the days he’s been here, the time, hours dragging on without food or clean water or company. Doesn’t know how long it’s been and couldn’t even give a guess.

He does, however, know that he should be dead. Be a long dead corpse, like the bones he buried in the sand. He’s perfectly aware he should have died long ago, even with the seawater pickling his brain.

He falls to his knees in the sand, and weeps. The men ask him things, questions he can’t answer.

They take enough pity however and let him board their ship.

It takes weeks until he feels like the last traces of seawater are out of his system, the final taste of salt out his mouth.

At some point, years have passed.

He meets a girl. A pretty, white girl, who isn’t wealthy or influential, but he loves her, and she loves him back and it’s enough. If it were up to him, it would always be enough. But it isn’t.

The folk of the town don’t like it. Her family moves, but not before her brother and father and the clergyman and the grocer and the teacher beat him and drag him to the road out of the town.

They don’t leave him to make his own way out of town though.

They tie him by his arms, ropes crossing over his shoulders to avoid ending the fun too quickly.

Then they drag him between the father and the brother’s horses, all the way to the end of the gravel and dirt road, only to turn around and do it again. Two miles out of town, they cut the ropes and spit on him and leave him with sharp biting words. They leave him with so much.

He feels torn, torn up and torn open, love and pain clouding his mind.

He feels like what he imagined keelhauling to feel like. Then he feels lucky. He’d go through this times over to never have to see the sea again.

He bleeds and bleeds and his wounds don’t start knitting together nor his broken and dislocated bones start falling back into place until his skin is cold and his breath all gone.

When he wakes, bloodstained and aching, he walks back to town only to find his girl gone and the townsfolk whispering behind closed doors. Demon, witch, devil, ghoul. 

He thinks he knows what happened, but doesn’t yet think of the island.

At some point, years have passed, but he hasn’t. He looks young still, not aged since he left the sea.

It’s then he starts to think about it. 

He has never lost the lean look starving gave him, but sleep can ease the haunted look on his face and in his eyes.

He hungers and thirsts but it never seems to take any toll other than discomfort.

He does not age though.

He can die, though, it just never seems to stick.

He makes sure he never hungers, for the fear the island instilled in him. Somewhere, some deep, hidden part of him thinks that, maybe, if he starves again Isaiah will come back. And he can’t bear to think of that.

Even when he cannot afford food, he steals it. What can stop him when he can’t die?

He steals, gets punished, he heals. He steals, gets killed, he wakes right back up.

He hasn’t forgotten a thing since the island, so every regeneration, every injury, every fight, he remembers as though it happened mere hours ago.

He remembers burning to death. The first time that happened, he thought he was dying for real. A house fire that threw him right back into the memory of the plantation, so much he couldn’t escape and died with lungs blackened by smoke and eyes watering from fumes and memories.

He remembers getting hanged; the times his neck snapped, the times shock got him and when slowly choked out. He usually woke up before it got to the burial, but he has a single memory of waking up in a pinewood box, only to drown in dry dirt times over until he clawed his way to the surface.

He remembers the drug overdoses. Overwhelming cold only to feel like he was burning when he came back.

But he remembers the joy too. The peace, the love. He can remember every lover he has ever taken, every friend ever made, every family ever had. He has never sired any descendants of his own but many have felt like his own children.

And now he sits, after the last war of many, in a ruined world. There is always a silver lining though; for all his hunger and thirst, in an arid and malnourished world, he has never run into Isaiah again.

There is always a future in which to meet him again, but he needs his hope too.