Page 30 of Potions & Pints
“Now get off my bed Vir, and out of my cabin!” he continued, pointing to the door.
The orc gazed at him with a sad look and for a moment Tan thought he might stay. Slowly, though, Vir stood, turning and opening the cabin door. He cast one last glance at Tan as he stepped out and closed it behind him.
Tan was left breathing heavily, staring at the place where Vir’s face had just been but where now there was nothing but scuffed wood closing him in and the others out. He wanted to cry, wanted to find some release for all that was trapped inside him but he couldn’t. If he’d had the courage to admit it to himself, he’d have realized he didn’t know how.
He stood like that for a long time, staring at the door and playing the conversation over and over again in his mind. Every time he got to Vir’s last words, though, he flinched. No one had ever spoken to him like that. In fact, no one had ever treated him as anything more than a ruffian at best. Except perhaps Neda. But that was different somehow. This…
He recoiled from touching that thought anymore. In any case, he was sure that if Vir hadn’t hated him before, then he certainly hated him now. The elf had thrown all of Vir’s compassion right back in his face. If his lying and thieving wasn’t enough to push the orc away, then this had to be.
Tan let his thoughts linger back to the last thing Vir had said. Once again, though, he recoiled before he could allow himself to touch them. Some things were better forgotten, he decided hastily. Some stones were better left unturned.
There was nothing left to do but throw himself on the bed again and pray that night came quickly.
It was hours until it did, and the cabin’s ceiling was the perfect blank canvas for Tan’s thoughts to play out unfettered. He did his best to keep his mind off Vir’s words while he waited for the dark to find him, but he couldn’t avoid them forever. Slowly they began to trickle in.
They cut at him in a way that was unfamiliar and he had no idea what to do with that. The concept of being good enough for anyone was entirely foreign to him. The pain of that had been hidden for a long time though and when his life had consisted of lying, thieving, and double-crossing for almost as long as he could remember, it was no wonder he never allowed himself to get close to anybody.
Those feelings were beginning to bubble to the surface despite his efforts to hold them down. They were dangerous, he could feel it, and he didn’t want to face what might come up if he really allowed himself to examine them.
So much, he realized, had been brewing in him since he met Vir. In fact, it was possible this potent cocktail of emotions had already begun back in Sunfall with Neda and Urza. He didn’t want to think too hard about that, either. Pili had dredged up enough of that rotten history for the both of them.
As the sun finally sank below the horizon outside Tan’s porthole, he eagerly awaited the blissful unknowingness of sleep. His mind was ragged from the afternoon’s musings and he wanted nothing more than to forget, even for a while, what had happened that day. But sleep did not come quickly. Tan spent a long time tossing and turning, trying to calm the Heaving Sea that still roiled in his chest.
When he finally fell into sleep it was far from the blissful unknowingness that he craved. Instead he was haunted by visions of Sunfall.
Neda and Urza were gazing at him, their necks gilled and their faces sickly. They’d been poisoned, he realized and he looked into his own hands — dozens and dozens of flucia flowers were there, more than he could hold. He kept dropping them and every time he did, the women would get sicker and sicker.
Townspeople gathered round, watching him with tears in their eyes. Kal, Ruven, even Frederick, gazed on, watching as he slowly killed his friends and in his sleep, tears sprang from the elf’s eyes, softly falling on his pillow in the night.
This nightmare lasted until dawn and when he awoke the heaving in his chest hadn’t abated. Tan suddenly realized it wasn’t only his chest that was in turmoil though. The whole boat was rocking, giant waves crashing against the hull.
The Heaving Sea had chased them through the night.
15
Tan’s body felt the reality before his mind did. Still groggy from sleep, confusion wrapped itself around the elf’s senses, but his heart was already racing, adrenaline already flowing through his veins, hands already shaking with that half-awake panic of one wrenched from one nightmare only to be thrown into another.
It only took a few seconds for Tan’s mind to catch up but just as it did the ship lurched violently to the starboard side sending him crashing out of bed and skittering across his cabin floor.
He knew he needed to get up on deck, and fast. Scrambling to his feet, the elf flung open the door that he’d spent so long staring at the night before. He’d had no desire to open it then. Now he couldn’t get it open fast enough.
Tan’s feet slipped and skidded on each sea-wet tread of the stairs leading up toward the deck.
“Curses!” he yelled with a helpless ferocity to no one but himself.
The sea was throwing the ship back and forth and Tan struggled to make it up the stairs, crashing and sliding into the walls as he went. But finally he emerged, sweating and panicked, to see enormous waves roiling against the ship. Seaspray flew across the ship’s deck, drenching all and sundry in a salty wash.
Tan knew from experience that this was only the beginning and while his body and mind thrummed with panic, his stomach sank with dread at what awaited them. Through the crashing waves and dark dawn light, he tried to see how close they were to the center of the Heaving Sea.
If they were only on the edge, he reasoned, they might still have a chance of escape.
No one escapes this.
Tan gripped the boat’s railing, edging ever closer to the bow in the hopes of sighting something that would give him hope. He only prayed to Illyria that he wouldn’t be thrown clean overboard in the process.
The waves were angry, but he believed they weren’t yet fierce enough to knock him into the sea itself. Tan had been a sailor long enough to know that time was not on his side though. If they were fast approaching the Heaving Sea’s eye, it may only be a matter of minutes before the waves grew strong enough to knock every one of them clean off the face of the ship and into their watery graves.
As he inched slowly forward, the undulations of the waves afforded him a glimpse of what lay several nautical miles ahead. In the split second between one wave crashing and another rising, Tan caught sight of something that made his blood run cold.
