by Jason Fry
Stax sat there, frozen with horror, and then he jumped at another sodden groan. This one was behind him, close enough that he could hear water bubbling in its throat.
Before he was conscious of it, he had scrambled away from the fire, and at the last possible second—the drowned that had snuck up behind him took a huge swipe at Stax, but fortunately connected only with air. Meanwhile, the first drowned had found its way around the campfire and stood side by side with its fellow undead, eyes fixed on its prey.
Stax leapt to his feet, eyes wild, and screamed at them.
“Come on, then! What are you waiting for?”
The drowned trudged through the sand, their hands reaching for him. Stax ducked, then backpedaled frantically, his feet struggling for purchase. Another flash of lightning revealed something glimmering in the gloom—a trident, clutched by a third drowned who was still waist-deep in the water.
“Oh no,” Stax said.
He was so worried about the weapon that he failed to look behind him, and backed into something soft, squishy, and cold. A terrible smell filled his nostrils: stagnant water, and beneath that something rotten. The drowned he had bumped into groaned, and the water it coughed up ran down the back of Stax’s neck, making him shiver as the creature fumbled to smash him with its fists.
Stax twisted away from the dead thing and shoved it, wincing as his hands sank into the spongy flesh. His fists beat at the drowned while it swung wildly at him.
Then the drowned fell backward with a blubbering sigh. Stax staggered farther up the beach, breathing hard.
Something flashed past his ear. It was the trident—and it had nearly hit him. Stax followed its pale purple arc through the darkness as it returned to its owner’s hand, guided by some dreadful magic. A blow from the fist of another drowned caught him in the back and he stumbled forward, crying out.
This is the end if I don’t think of something, Stax thought. He was faster than the drowned, but there were too many of them, and if he stood his ground they would eventually batter him into unconsciousness, or the trident would find its mark. And then he would die—or become one of them, doomed to live out eternity on this bleak shore, consumed by rage and a hunger that could never be satisfied.
He ran between two of the shambling figures, certain that at any second he’d feel the trident strike home, and scrambled up the sandy hill, repeatedly falling to his hands and knees. He reached the top just as lightning flashed, revealing barren desert as far as he could see.
There was no escape that way.
Stax flung himself down the other side of the hill, hearing the drowned gurgling in confusion at having lost sight of him. Halfway down he began to dig, his hands moving frantically. In a moment he was through the layer of wet sand on the surface and flinging dry grit behind him, frantically trying to make the hole he was digging even deeper. Thunder rumbled, and as it faded he could hear the drowned’s groans of frustration.
Stax kept digging, ignoring his stinging fingers and palms. He’d hollowed out a little space in the hill now, just big enough to turn around in. He clambered into it and was relieved to find sandstone above him, hard and stable. Stax began to dig down now, farther into the hill.
He stopped after a couple of frantic minutes, gasping for breath. He could see the night sky above him, outside his vulnerable refuge, and the wall of rain falling. He kept digging until he was certain he was out of reach of any arms that might come through the gap he had left.
Should he fill it in? Pack in sand until he was walled inside the hill? Stax knew he probably should; there would be nowhere to hide if the trident’s owner found him. But the idea of escaping the drowned only to suffocate in sand filled him with horror. And he was exhausted, bone-tired in a way he’d never been in his entire life.
Stax huddled in the hole he had made, shivering, until he’d recovered enough that his breathing slowed and his heart stopped pounding in his ears. His fingertips were raw from scrabbling at the sand and his palms were red and scraped. Outside, the rain continued to pelt down, and he could still hear the thunder rolling—and the groans of the drowned, searching the beach.
Stax was sure that any moment he’d hear the slow, labored steps of undead feet outside his refuge, followed by a choking gurgle of triumph and hands working, slowly but methodically, to strip away his meager defenses.
But a minute passed and that didn’t happen.
And then five minutes.
And then Stax lost track of how much time had passed.
And then he was blinking his eyes in confusion, because bright light was streaming through the gap in the sand. It had become a strip of blue above him, the color of the sky at morning.
Wincing at the pain in his hands, Stax carefully pushed enough sand out of the way to be able to stick his head out of his refuge. Yellow sand stretched out around him, and below him was the strip of green with its ruined tower, and the dark blue water beyond that. The drowned were gone.
Stax shoved his way through the sand and trudged down to the beach, trying to shake the grit out of his hair. Here and there in the sand were bits of loot the raiders had left behind in their haste to escape. There wasn’t a weapon to be found, but Stax did spot a bruised apple and fell on it frantically, eating it core and all. He also found a few lumps of coal that hadn’t been burned for fuel. And, best of all, he discovered an abandoned bed at the edge of the water, wet and salty but intact.
He had survived the night, but now what? It would be night again soon, and he had no boat or refuge. There wasn’t so much as a tree.
Stax dragged the bed up the beach to dry. He looked at the wrecked tower, eyed the hull of the shipwreck in the shallows of the bay, then turned his gaze to the horizon, hoping to spot a more hospitable island he could swim to. Then he looked back at the pale keel of the wrecked boat, lying above the water.
That’s made of wood, he thought. A lot of wood.
His eyes returned to the forlorn spike of the tower, scrutinizing it the way he might have examined a tumble of rock he encountered in a cavern far beneath the ground. He thought about the condition of the stone he could see, and measured the gaps in the tower’s walls.
I bet I could repair that.
Harvesting wood * Shoring up the tower * A last errand before nightfall
Stax was half-convinced that some terrible creature—one of the drowned, if not something even worse—would be lurking in the shallows, waiting for him to stray too far from the shore. He waded in up to his waist, ready to retreat to the relative safety of the broken tower, then peered into the water, alert for any sign of danger.
But there was nothing. It was a beautiful day and the water was gentle and cool. If not for the terrible things that had befallen him, he might have been able to pretend he was on some carefree excursion, taking a dip after a day at the seashore or on a long hike.
Tentatively, Stax swam out to the keel of the capsized ship and heaved himself up onto the spine of pale wood. He could tell at a glance which planks were rarely, if ever, submerged because they were bleached by the sun and free of the seagrass that had colonized the wood below the surface of the water.
Stax ran his hands over the wood, looking for a weak spot, and found a place where the planks had warped slightly and sprung apart. Wincing at the pain in his hands, he began working the planks back and forth, until one gave way with a groan of distress.
One down, goodness knows how many to go.
He set the plank carefully aside on the keel next to him, and looked for another weak point. Within half an hour or so, he had a stack of planks, and the keel was starting to look like giant worms had been gnawing it. Stax rubbed his arm across his sweaty forehead and looked back at the stump of the tower, trying to calculate how many planks he’d need to fill all the gaps in the stonework.
The sun was directly overhead, about to begin its
descent toward the horizon. For a moment the task seemed too big for him, and he was grimly certain he couldn’t be finished by nighttime. But then he shook his head. That was no way to think. He’d do whatever he could, and if the job was still incomplete at sundown, he’d hide in the sand bank again and hope his luck held.
Stax worked all day, as the sun sank in the sky and sweat ran down his neck. He worked until his hands were raw and cramped and his back was stiff and his knees hurt. He was hungry, and thirsty, and whenever he stopped for a moment he thought of his ruined house and his lost cats and he felt despair creeping into his mind. When that happened—and it happened several times during the long hot day—he’d swim awkwardly back to the shore with a load of wood and pile it near the tower. That way, when he got tired again and looked back at the tower he’d immediately see that he was making progress.
Finally, with the sun nearing the horizon, Stax waded ashore with a last armload of wood. The inside of the tower was cool and shadowy and, he was glad to see, free of vermin, briars, or other unpleasant things. Stax thought about taking a brief rest, but knew he shouldn’t; it wouldn’t do to wake up and discover the sun was down and one of the drowned was putting its hands around his throat.
The first thing to do, he thought, was make a crafting table. He grabbed several planks, and ten minutes later produced a serviceable table on which he could work.
Another hour of work, and he’d banged together a door out of planks that fit into the doorway. Then it was time to begin filling the gaps in the stone. Stax sweated and hammered and sweated some more, annoyed with himself each time he made a mistake and had to start over.
The sun was an orange ball on the horizon when he wedged a plank into a gap between two stones, stepped back, and realized there weren’t any more holes in the tower. They’d all been filled—in a cockeyed, haphazard way that his grandmother wouldn’t have approved of, maybe, but then Stax had nothing but scavenged material and was half-starved. He allowed himself a brief moment of satisfaction, after which his eyelids started to droop.
That was when he remembered the bed.
Was he too late? He peered between the planks and saw the sun had sunk almost out of sight. No, he still had time—but only just. Pushing open his makeshift door, he hurried down the beach to where he’d left the bed, overshooting it but then spotting it in the gloom behind him. To his relief, a long day beneath the sun had dried it.
Was that a gurgle somewhere behind him? He heaved the bed onto his shoulder and forced his tired legs to run, his feet kicking up sand, made it back to the tower, and shut the door behind him, careful not to dislodge it. He took a piece of scrap wood and jammed it into one of the lumps of coal, hoping not to break it, coaxed it aflame, and jammed the scrap of wood into a rusted sconce on the wall. Warm yellow light filled his refuge. Stax just hoped it would repel any creatures that spotted it through the cracks in the boards, instead of attracting them.
Stax lay down on the bed, moving his shoulders back and forth to rearrange the clumps of wool inside it. It was lumpy, stiff with salt, smelled damp, and the frame might give way in the night, dumping him onto the tower’s flagstones. But in that moment, it felt as soft and inviting as his feather bed back home.
Stax sighed. He knew he should get up, that he should perform a last check of his hasty repairs to make sure they couldn’t be battered down. But he was bone-weary, his mind fuzzy and his energy utterly spent.
I’ve done the best I could. I just have to hope it’s enough.
A moment later, he was asleep.
Stax makes an aquatic discovery * A hated food from childhood gets reconsidered * Remedial tool use * Laughter in the dark
Stax woke with a start, but this time he knew exactly where he was. His stomach clenched and turned over, demanding food he couldn’t give it.
Stax carefully opened the door. The beach was quiet, the water serene beneath the rising sun. Stax scanned the shore for signs of trouble, a little disturbed to realize how well he’d already come to know this miserable little bay. Maybe that was his future: to memorize each hummock of mud and drift of sand, each particular of his shrunken, forlorn world.
But then if he didn’t find something to eat, and soon, that problem would take care of itself. Stax kicked through the ashes of the fire in hope that he’d missed another apple or something else useful that Fouge’s raiders had left behind in their hasty departure. But there was nothing.
Stax struggled up the sand hill where he’d spent the night hidden from the drowned, giving the little hollow of his refuge a brief glance before forcing himself to look away. His situation was dire, but now at least he had a roof over his head—however haphazardly patched—and a bed.
He stood at the top of the hill and shielded his eyes with his hand, gazing out into the desert and turning slowly around in a full circle. He’d surveyed his surroundings only briefly, during the night, while under attack. It was entirely possible he’d missed something: a patch of woods, say, or the mouth of a river.
“Why stop there?” Stax asked himself. “Why not a farm with a barn full of warm hay? An inn that doesn’t charge travelers for rooms? A castle whose aged owner needs a young heir?”
But there was nothing but low hills of sand marching to the horizon, broken by the green spikes of cacti and the brittle sticks of dead bushes—remnants, Stax supposed, of some bygone era when these shores had been green and pleasant.
Stax mechanically gathered the sticks, thinking they might be useful as firewood, and dumped them in his patchwork tower. He stared out to sea, hoping to sight something, anything, that might deliver him.
His belly rumbled again.
Fish. Could he make a fishing pole? He’d just gathered an armload of sticks, but he had no line. At home, they’d used spider silk for fishing line, but the thought of battling a spider in the night made Stax shiver.
No, that wouldn’t work. He couldn’t see anything beneath the water except sand and stones and kelp.
Kelp.
A stray memory from childhood came back to him: his father, unloading his boat after one of his trips across the sea to tour Stonecutter outposts. He’d handed Stax a chunk of dried kelp, explaining that he’d eaten it during his travels and inviting him to take a bite.
Oh, how Stax had hated it. It was tasteless at first, tough and chewy, and then the tang of salt overwhelmed everything. Stax had spat it out into the water, running his finger along his gums and across the back of his tongue in an effort to get rid of even the smallest bit of it.
Well, now he’d have to learn to like it.
Stax swam out to the overturned ship, its keel mostly stripped of planks. Now that he was looking for kelp, he could see that the wreck was surrounded with strands of it, reaching up from the seafloor toward the sun. Stax wrenched a plank free, held his breath and dove into the water, forcing himself down as far as he could go. The seafloor here was a strange gray—gravel, maybe, or clay.
Whatever it was, it would have to wait. He yanked at the surprisingly tough stalk of the kelp until he was desperate for air.
The stalk finally parted. Stax kicked for the surface, gasping when his head cleared the water, and draped the length of kelp over the ship’s keel. He heaved himself out of the water and sat on the keel while he got his breath back. Pieces of kelp were floating nearby. When he’d rested a bit, he’d collect them. Though there were more of them than he’d thought there’d be.
Wait a minute.
It wasn’t just kelp that he saw floating. Something shiny was out there too, glinting in the sun. A dead fish, maybe?
Stax swam out to it, worried it might sink. To his astonishment, it was a compass. He held it in his hand, awkwardly treading water, and gazed down at the red needle. He supposed it must have fallen overboard while the raiders were making their getaway.
Stax’s father had carried a
compass with him during his ocean journeys, and Stax tried to think back to what he’d told him about how they worked. To his frustration, he realized he didn’t remember all the details. There’d been something about an origin point, and making adjustments from there, and during the explanation Stax’s mind had wandered. He’d already known he had no interest in sailing all across the Overworld, and if he ever changed his mind his father would be next to him, and able to take care of the navigation.
But it was useless to get angry at himself about not having listened to a long explanation back when he was a teenager. The important thing was that Stax’s father had used a compass to find his way home, and Stax now had one of his own.
Which meant he could get home. Or close enough—his father had made those adjustments that Stax couldn’t remember. But close enough would be a lot better than his current situation.
The thought of being able to get home was so amazing that Stax shivered despite being in warm water. He shook the compass gently, half-wondering if he was dreaming. But no, it was very real.
Stax reminded himself that he had work to do; it wasn’t as if he could just start swimming in the direction the compass was pointing. Clutching the compass in his hand, he swam back to the keel and set his new discovery carefully on one of the highest planks.
While he rested, he peered at the patchwork tower. He had plenty of wood. Enough, even, to replace some of the tower’s stone blocks. That would let him use the stone for other things. Such as building a furnace. If he built a furnace, he could dry his new supply of kelp, using his precious stock of sticks and few lumps of coal. And once the kelp was dried, he’d have food.
And then…he was so excited that he almost tripped over his thoughts, and made himself calm down and start again.
And then I can build a boat, use the compass, and go home.
