The Scatter

[Grey]

@PixelWitch


You cough bile and seawater onto the rocky shore, until eventually your lungs recall that you are dead and breathing is mere habit. But the sensation of water sloshing around in their is unpleasant enough to spend a little longer voiding them all the same.


It seems you've washed up surrounded by corpses - some you recognize as fellow prisoners. Not all have woken. Perhaps some won't.


The sun is a bright, distant dot and while you fancy it should be hot, the wind is cold. Clouds gather on the horizon.


Up the shore, squatting on mossy rocks amid coarse grasses, is a small town. Silent. Empty, it looks like, though smoke still rises from one or two chimneys.

 

[PixelWitch]

Well now.


Death wasn't quite what he expected.


He wasn't sure what is was he had expected, but it certainly wasn't this.


Or more to the point that he was able to expecting anything after it had already happened.


 

Not many things had changed, and yet there were so many new things to get used to.


The lack of breath, the coolness of his skin, the strange murkiness that wasn't comforting darkness any time he blinked. He would almost think these things a blessing if he didn't know their source.  Human instinct runs deep though, and he spits the caustic mix from his chest until it no longer gurgles and whines. He staggers upright, his bare feet barely leave tracks in the smatterings of sand and rough glass-like shells and thorny pebbles. He barely registers them cutting his soles.


The occasional rabbit scampers out of sight among the limpet packed rocks or a crow ruffles in it's nest high in the boughs of the creaking, bare and windswept trees. Everything is almost achingly sharp. Straining. Hypersensitive. Dizzying. Setting his nerves on edge.


How long has it been now? A day maybe?


I wonder if they have performed a funeral yet... what words they would say...


He laughs to himself, a bitter wheezing sound. Of course they wouldn't. Don't be so stupid. Why do you think you're out here in the first place?


He overturns a fellow corpse with a foot, and glances over their dead, pale eyes and sunken skin.


None are wearing shoes.


Dammit.


Time to start walking regardless.

 

[Grey]

You've never been out here, so far from the capital and the nice little hinterland villages where one could lie low for a month or two. But you've heard stories.


This must be The Scatter, the wide archipelago of tiny islands that stretches out toward the Abyssinian Reach, from the cold waters north of Albion into warmer climes. They say the only inhabitants of these rainswept rocks are shepherds and hermits, hiding among them the lost and damned who have passed beyond any hope for redemption. They say witches dwell in the caves and converse with the devils of the deep sea.


You crest a grassy hill and can see the town in shades of washed-out yellow and faded gray. The only signs of life are the curling tendrils of smoke from a couple of the cottages, and a faint light in the window of the modest church. Still, you feel a prickling on your neck as you would under the gaze of the watch. You are certainly not alone here.


A small forge lies cold at the nearest end of the settlement. A tawny billy goat regards you suspiciously from atop a pile of stones to the west.

 

[PixelWitch]

He shivers, hairs raising on his nape. At least that was a familiar feeling.,, He turns the collar of his coat up and trudges onward, grumbling.


No doubt there were others on the boat who'd wake sooner or later, and he was not really feeling up for a post demise chat.


He pouts, gives the billy goat stink-eyeing him a withering stare, shoves his hands into his pockets - out of habit however, his hands a shade of pale blue but unable to feel cold -  and clambers awkwardly down the weedy knoll and towards the village. Church seems the best place to start, if there's anything valuable to be had - information, gold or otherwise, it'd be there.