He awoke to the sound of the sea, and the mournful call of carrion birds.
Water, frigid and cruel, washed up beneath him, shocking him awake. He gasped, or tried to, but some liquid had settled in his lungs. The gasp turned quickly to a violent fit of coughing and he rolled over, his body spasming as it attempted to eject the foreign matter. He was vaguely aware of a sharp, irritated caw! as he vomited the seawater out in hard contractions. As he finished, left dry-heaving several times, he opened his eyes.
A bleak desolation awaited him.
He lay upon a cold, rocky beach, the seawater coming in on gray waves, like liquid stone. A few feet from him, a giant black bird rested. It peered at him with shiny dark eyes, head tilted. It cawed at him and hopped from one skinny foot to the next. It had a scar on its large black beak. Seawater beaded on shiny feathers. As he tried to wave it off, he realized just how weak he was. His body felt ancient and withered.
A muffled sound escaped his throat and he swatted at the bird once more, coughing. It let out another irritated caw and hopped back two paces, but otherwise remained. The man slowly sat up. Even this act was torturous in how much it seemed to require from him. Breathing slowly and heavily, he sat on a rocky beach beneath a dull slate sky next to a huge bird that was probably waiting for him to die, and he wondered.
“Where am I?” he asked softly.
His voice sounded strange to him. He surveyed the area around him.
Long, lonely stretches of rocky shoreline to his left and his right. More birds, and other, more uncertain shapes farther away, lurked. Ahead of him, the vast yawning eternity of the sea. Which sea? He could not recall.
Behind him…
He twisted around, and several things popped in his back, along his spine, relieving tension. Behind him was dirt and trees, a dense forest swaying in the winds coming in off the sea. A cold wind gusted across him, and he shivered.
That brought on a great deal of pain.
The pain was faint, numbed by the cold and by…
He returned his attention to the front and looked down at himself. He was naked. Not a scrap of clothing on him at all. All he wore was a mélange of bruises and scratches and cuts. They ached and hurt and stung, and he could tell his suffering ran deeper than that, his muscles and bones hurting, but it was all faraway for now.
Another wave crashed upon the shore, this one more violent than the last, and hit him, snapping him out of his dazed state.
He needed warmth, shelter, a fire.
Or he would die.
The man rose slowly, his legs unsteady, his whole body as uncertain as his mind, but he only lost his balance once before standing. He looked over at the crow, which lingered, staring at him with obvious curiosity.
Another thought occurred to him, one that erupted inside of him and brought on an intense panic. It was so powerful he spoke it, too, aloud.
“Who am I?”
Another wave crashed at his feet more intensely than the last, and in the far distance, thunder cracked the sky, threatening rain. But he could not move, not until he had answered that question. Hugging himself, rubbing his arms, he thought furiously. Images came to him, emotions attached to most of them, but it was all so confused and jumbled. A bewildering proliferation of memories assaulted him as he sorted frantically through, trying to find something familiar, something that meant anything to him.
And then he had it, a single, short word.
A name.
Jak.
That was his name, he was sure of it. Jak let out a sigh of relief, but the feeling was short lived. Lightning split across the stone gray clouds, and almost immediately more thunder cracked and boomed. His heart lurched to match it and he looked as the crow took to flight with another call. He watched the huge thing gain altitude and disappear off to his right, heading deeper inland. It seemed like as good a direction to go as any, so Jak began to follow the bird, though he quickly lost sight of it. He walked away from the rocky beach, the stones painful on his bare feet, and came to a strip of land that was mostly dirt that ran parallel to the shoreline.
Jak walked.
He thought.
He tried to remember, rubbing his arms and looking around as stronger winds gusted off the sea and battered the nearby forest.
Already, the memories were slipping away. Becoming more clouded, more convoluted. Something was wrong, he knew that much.
A bad thing had happened.
Even apart from the obvious situation he now found himself in, that notion persisted. He clung to that, tried to use it as a beacon in the mists of amnesia. There were things he could recall. Impressions, if not specifics.
Jak recalled fighting. Lots of fighting.
Even as he thought of combat, saw images of broken bodies and sprays of blood, his hand ached for some kind of weapon. He felt naked without one, but another thought promised him that he could defend himself, even unarmed, if that particular desperation fell onto him. Still though, he began tracking the dirt and grass around him for some sort of armament. All the stones and sticks he saw were insufficient.
Another thought came to him, one that was as clear to him as his name had been: he was an outcast of his people.
That brought an unexpected jolt of several different emotions, all screaming to him at once. Terror. Rage. Guilt…
But a certainty that he was right. A conviction that he was right.
That one stopped him and Jak stared down at his muddy feet, shivering in the wind, for a moment ignoring all other things.
He hunted fervently for the context. Why was he so certain that he was right to do what he had done...whatever that was? He was an exile of his people, this specific piece of knowledge was available to him, but lacking context, it felt almost meaningless. Why? Whatever he had done to gain their ire, to be punished, to be made into a pariah, he felt strangely certain that it was the right thing to do. Not only that, but it was the only thing to do.
Somewhere too close for comfort, something growled.
That was a sound that forced itself through everything else, and Jak jerked his head to the right. Another person he could probably fight with his bare hands, if it came down to it, but a wolf or one of the big cats or the giant lizards?
No, he would be beyond saving then.
Shelter. He needed shelter.
Rain was coming, and he was already cold from laying on the shore. Jak looked up and tried to take a measure of the light from the sky, but it was difficult. The clouds covered the skies from horizon to horizon. The ones above him were stone gray, but he saw some farther off, some that seemed to be drawing closer quickly, that were the dark gray of flint. Those were the ones swollen with a heavy rain, and they were eager to unleash themselves on the land.
He knew he should be inside, or beneath something before then, given his nude state.
Ahead, the land seemed to dip, while the shoreline rose. Jak began moving forward with greater intent. There was a depression in the land, a trench with a wall of trees to the right and a wall of earth and rock to the left. There might be a cave, or even an overhang in that wall of earth. Some part of his mind whispered to him that there would be risk of flooding this close to the shore, but it was a risk he would have to take.
As he strode towards the trench, finding the pain in his battered body becoming more acute as his blood flowed more freely, something else came to him. A sharp memory, this one felt recent, though hazy. He remembered…
A figure, standing over him, against that same stone-gray sky.
The figure was tall and...blue? Jak pondered over that as he walked on. What species did he know that was blue-skinned? Or that painted themselves blue? He thought of the elves and their light tan skin. He thought of...of...what were they called? Large, green, scaly. They were big and dangerous, with sharp teeth, but not monsters, no, they could talk and build, his memories whispered to him. Jak looked down again at his own flesh.
Marred and bruised though it was, he could see a tawny bronze sheen to his skin. It covered him head to toe, uniformed and smooth. Not the result of time spent in the sun, then, though that thought brought on a cascade of sweaty days toiling beneath an unforgiving ball of flame in the sky. Practicing. Practicing what?
Fighting.
He had a brief but vivid vision of himself swinging a bone-club into a man’s skull and crushing it, blood and pulpy stuff flying out in a vicious spray…
Jak turned back to the original memory. Who was the blue-skinned, tall thing he remembered seeing over him while he lay, nearly dying, on the rocky coast?
After a moment, he let out a soft grunt of frustration and dismissal. Perhaps he was confused, or seeing untruths, his mind clouded by an injury. Perhaps it was an earlier memory, some other shore, some other gray sky.
He didn’t think that was true, but he could not be certain.
Jak made it down into the trench and the natural wall to his left rose until it towered over him to the height of three men. The light was fading, and the winds were coming more quickly now, accompanied by other cracks of thunder that seemed to shake the very earth around him. That shelter needed to happen soon, and then he could see about making a fire. But as he hunted the wall in the fading light, Jak felt a bolt of searing pain tear through his skull. He groaned, coming a halt, grabbing his head.
A fresh bolt of pain came again as his hand touched a particularly sensitive spot. He winced, hissing at the sheer agony of it, and pulled his hand back down in front of his eyes, expecting his fingers to be wet with blood. They weren’t, but the pain persisted. It was getting harder to think, to focus.
Something shifted up ahead of him, farther along the trench, something that garnered his attention reflexively and instantly.
Jak looked up, fear flooding his gut, as a dark gray shape detached itself from the dense treeline a little ways ahead of him.
A wolf.
And not a small wolf either.
A quick survey of his immediate area told him that there weren’t even any stones of any decent size he could grasp and use as a quick weapon. The wolf was coming towards him now, head lowered, teeth bared, growling deep in its throat.
His mind, abused though it was, shifted into survival mode and ran quick calculations.
He didn’t like his odds. Another quick survey of the area yet again turned up nothing, but he did see a cave in the wall to his left.
Shelter! A place to get in out of the encroaching storm.
But this wolf, creeping closer, teeth bared, a primal promise of brutal slaughter…
Jak bunched his hands into fists, considering the best way to take it down. If he could move in just the right way, he’d be able to tear its throat out, or perhaps take an eye. That would dissuade it from attacking him. Either that or enrage it past the point of madness and make it all the more dangerous.
The time to decide was nearly upon him.
Thunder roared almost directly overhead, making him jump and giving the wolf pause. That was when the rain opened up, a curtain of droplets plummeting across the land with a nearly imperceptible speed, racing towards him from the seaside.
He and the wolf were drenched in seconds.
Jak prepared to fight. Even though he was wounded and his head felt like it had met with a cloud, he wanted to kill the wolf.
That was meat.
That was food.
Beneath the layers of encroaching numbness and pain, he knew he was hungry. Food was fuel and he would need it.
As he tensed, shifted his weight so that he had a more stable stance, his mind filling with thoughts, visions of blood and death, his own hands covered in–dripping with–blood, all that bravado abruptly collapsed like an old log deep in the forest as three more wolves slunk out of the treeline to his right.
One wolf, he might be able to fight.
But four? Unarmed and injured? No.
Certain death now approached him on large paws, all teeth and shaggy gray fur and black, black eyes.
Jak ran.
He sprinted into the forest with all that he was.
The forest was much darker now as the rain began to fall. Jak grunted as he bumped into a tree, his head spinning from whatever injury had stolen his memory, stomach roiling like the sea he fled from. He rebounded off another tree, stumbled.
His foot caught on an exposed root and he nearly went sprawling, instead managing to wrench his shoulder as he caught himself painfully on an outstretched branch.
Behind him, a wolf howled.
Something shifted within him, something fundamental and crucial at the core of his being. Something important. The world seemed to slide around him for a brief sliver of time, everything growing brighter, sharper, and then everything slammed back into place and he could see. More than that, he seemed to know.
When he began running again, Jak didn’t bump into anything, even as he picked up speed. He cold sprinted through the woods, dodged a tree, ducked beneath a heavy branch, shifted so that his foot wouldn’t hit that rock sticking up out of the ground.
The air carried a hundred different scents.
Flowers, creatures, the sea and the rain, the earth…
Living things that surrounded him in all directions. Trees and plants and four-legged beasts, birds flying overhead, seeking shelter. Small furry things and insects burrowing in the loose earth beneath his feet.
His mind sorted through it like a flash of lightning.
Wolves behind him, closing in.
Something large and dangerous off to his right.
A potential threat somewhere above and to the left, among the branches.
Nothing ahead that he could sense. Jak ran faster, his motion through the darkening forest becoming fluid, smoother. He vaulted over a fallen log, slipped between a pair of trees, raced up a hill, slid down the other side, kept on pushing…
Jak could sense it was burning some reserve in his body, some crucial source of energy, something that was already drastically low.
He couldn’t keep this up for much longer.
But he didn’t have to. The wolves were behind him, the other things he had sensed gone too, and nothing new had appeared on his periphery of awareness. Slowing to a stop, he came into a tiny clearing and looked around.
Abruptly, the heightened awareness dropped away, and he staggered. Almost falling to his knees, Jak looked around, knowing that he needed to get in out of the cold and right now. There. At the edge of the little clearing, he saw a huge, hollowed-out fallen tree. It would have to do. He walked over, breathing heavily, his body hurting everywhere, his movements sluggish. Sleep was coming, whether he wanted it to or not.
In the wan light from the dim skies above, Jak looked into the hollow log. He’d have to duck to get inside and it leaked in a few places, but overall, it was shelter. Not ideal shelter, but shelter nonetheless.
There was the problem of security, though.
He ducked in and walked the length of the log. It was maybe twice his height lengthwise, and it was open at both ends. Coming out the other end, Jak looked around. His gaze fell on a good-sized rock not too far away.
Overburdened mind working, he judged the size of the rock against the size of the opening on this end of the log. They were roughly similar. It would have to do. Jak walked over, got a grip on the rock, and grunted with effort. His muscles strained as he liberated the rock from its home in the mud and rolled it towards the opening.
It took some doing, but he managed to fit it into the rear exit. Once he got it lodged into place as much as he could, Jak walked back around and in through the front. He gave it a few experimental pushes, then studied the edges.
It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. Nothing big could get in without him noticing, at least.
There was more to do. He should build a fire, make even the most rudimentary bed, look for something to eat, but his body was shutting down.
Even as he thought this, the last vestiges of his strength slipped away, and he sat down in the driest spot, towards the back. Away from the front entrance, but far enough from the rock that it would not crush him if it fell over.
Jak stared at the ring of space the entrance showed, the dark clearing and the trees around it. The plants that hung down. The rain as it fell from the skies. It was very dark now, growing darker with each passing minute, it seemed.
He watched the entrance for as long as he could.
And then he tumbled headlong into unconsciousness.
