Page 33 of Bound By the Beast Man

P ain is the first anchor. It is a sharp, methodical reality that cuts through the disorienting fog of unconsciousness.

My right arm is broken, the bone grating with a sickening finality.

Several of my ribs feel cracked, each breath a fresh agony.

I force my eyes open, and the world swims into a blurry, mud-colored focus.

I am lying on a bed of jagged, black rock that slices into my skin, the waves of a grey, angry sea crashing over me.

My mind, the strategist’s mind that is my greatest weapon, begins its slow, painful inventory.

I am alive. That is the first, and perhaps only, positive assessment.

My armor is gone, torn from me by the sea.

My weapons, including the Osirian longbow I have carried for fifty years, are lost. I am defenseless, wounded, and utterly alone.

The memory of the storm, of the impossible shadow in the clouds, crashes down on me.

I failed. As the mission’s strategist, I should have anticipated a magical attack, should have had a contingency.

I have led my brothers to their deaths. The thought is a heavier weight than the water that fills my lungs.

I push myself up, my vision clearing, and see a sight that does not compute.

Half-sunken ruins of a vast and ancient city rise from a misty, grey sea, their toppled spires jutting from the waves like the skeletal fingers of a drowned giant.

I have no idea where I am. The stars are wrong, the air is wrong, and this city of ghosts is unlike anything I have ever seen or read about.

“Where am I?” I said, my voice a raw croak.

I do not know where my brothers are. They could be on a shore a thousand miles from here, or at the bottom of this cold, unforgiving sea.

“Corvak? Tarek?” I called out, my voice swallowed by the waves.

I have no map, no plan, no hope.

The manticore in my soul tells me to act. But, the gods push against me.