Contrary to popular belief, dying is actually quite easy. It’s everything that leads up to it that’s a load of piss.

Take, for example, being thrown off the side off a merchant’s ship into the sea while besieged by a tropical hurricane. There’s the terror as you fly through the air, limbs flailing and raging winds tearing at your clothes as the roiling waves rush up to meet you. Then your body slams into the water hard enough to drive the air from your lungs in big, fat bubbles. You find yourself sinking into a void of grey, the salt water stinging your eyes as you stare up at the rapidly retreating surface, the cold and shock keeping your arms and legs from fighting back.

Then realization hits, and shock is replaced by pure terror. Though you know that it’s hopeless, that you’re all alone miles from land with your only point of safety swiftly fleeing, you still frantically kick with your numbing legs and pump your arms, desperate for air. The surface stops moving away, but you’re approaching too slow, and already it feels as if your chest is caving in on itself, squeezing the life from your lungs.

Then your head breaks through, the watery blanket replaced by the torrent coming down in hammer-blows. But your relief is short-lived, because as soon as you open your mouth to gulp down your first lungful of air a wave runs you over, sending you spinning back down.

Now your lungs are screaming. You had accidentally swallowed some of the seawater, and you cough violently, sending more bubbles billowing away. Again you force your way back up. You try to inhale, but all the coughing is getting in the way, and the rising and falling of the sea makes keeping afloat nearly impossible.

As you struggle to keep your head above the waves, your manage to blink enough water from your eyes to catch sight of the ship, barely more than a silhouette in the dark. You panic and start waving your arms, praying that someone on board would take pity on you, that one of the sailors will throw out a rope or maybe even dive in to save you. After all, some had protested throwing you in. Surely they wouldn’t leave you to die.

But either they don’t see you or they don’t care, as the ship now has its back to you as the pounding wind pulls it away further and further. You stare in disbelief as your last hope withers and dies. This can’t be happening. After everything you had endured and survived, it can’t end here like this, abandoned to die alone and forgotten in the middle of the Caribbean.

And then, as you watch your only chance of salvation leave you to your fate, another wave, larger than any other, swells up behind you. Before you know what’s happening it swallows you up and sends you tumbling head-over-heels back down below.

Again you try to fight it, try to force yourself back to the surface, but you now have no idea where the surface even is. Everything around you is dark and endless.

You whirl around to try to find some clue of where to go, some part with just enough light to indicate the way up. You find it, but as you reorient yourself you find your limbs strangely unresponsive. Again and again you order them into motion, but your body and mind no longer share the will to live. What’s the point of fighting, your body reasons, if there’s nothing out there to fight towards?

And in a terrible moment of clarity, you realize that you don’t have an answer.

Then both body and mind start to sink, one descending into the black of the sea while the other is enveloped by an entirely different type of darkness. The further you fall, the easier it becomes, and soon your mind concedes the argument and surrenders itself.

This isn’t so bad, you find yourself thinking while you’re still able. At least it won’t hurt anymore.

Anyway, to make a long story short, that last part really isn’t as terrible as it’s made out to be. But everything leading up to it is pure misery.

But there’s another part that most people don’t get to experience, so it’s often left out of the poems and tales: just how hard and painful waking up again from all that is.

Nuriel Cunningham found that out in stages that played out in reverse from before. First was the uneasy border between restful darkness and consciousness. Despite how valiantly she had fought off the darkness of oblivion before, she now found herself reluctant to leave it. She had already succumbed to its cold, comforting embrace, so she ought to be allowed to remain.

But now it was the light calling to her, and it turns out to be just as relentless as the darkness had been before.

Piss off, she thought sleepily. I’m dead. Leave me be.

But just as she hadn’t wanted to be thrown off that boat and hadn’t wanted to be swallowed by the sea, her wishes were continued to be ignore. Slowly and surely awareness seeped back into her body. It began a faraway blob of sound that steadily grew louder and more distinct, until she was able to recognize the sound of waves gently crashing against a shore mixed in with the calls of seabirds.

She then became aware that one side of her body was lying against something soft and gritty, while the other felt curiously warm. The smell of salt fills her nostrils, further dragging her back to reality.

It was then that she started to consider the possibility that she might not be dead.

Damn it.

Her eyes were still closed, but there was enough light shining through her eyelids to tell her that it was currently daytime…ish. Still, she was in no hurry to open them. Where she was and whatever it was that had brought her there could wait.

But then she became aware of yet another sensation, one that wasn’t at all familiar. Something was tickling her face around the nose and upper lip, like someone was brushing her with a cattail, and for whatever reason felt like chittering while it did it. She frowned and her face twitched, the only protest she felt like making.

Still, didn’t stop, and in fact was becoming kind of annoying. Finally irritation had drawn her far enough back to wakefulness for her to crack one eye open.

The immediate onslaught of sunlight made for a painful blur. She blinked and squinted. There did seem to be something nearby, something close to her face and-

The next thing Nuriel knew, she was wide awake and several feet off the ground, arms and legs thrown around the trunk of a palm tree like a terrified monkey, gaping down at the thing in the sand below.

The thing had turned out to be a great big hideous…bug…crab…thing. It looked like someone had combined all the worst parts of a cockroach and lobster together, resulting in something with a wide, flat back made of segmented parts, a great many legs, and two waving antennae, which had been the things tickling her face. And in addition to being hideous, it was just so damned big.

The nasty thing seemed to be perplexed by her sudden exit. It turned itself this way and that, antennae stretched to find some trace of her.

Well, Nuriel certainly wasn’t coming back down again while it was there. She looked around, wondering how the hell she was going to get rid of it.

Then her eyes fell upon a cluster of large, oblong husks hanging from the tree, right above her head. Coconuts. She had fled into a coconut tree.

Gripping the tree with her thighs, Nuriel reached up to grab a coconut. It took some twisting and yanking, but it came free. She then looked down at the monster, plotted the trajectory in her head, and let her missile fly.

It missed, landing with a plop in the sand next to the monster. A spray of sand fell over its back, causing it to jerk around in surprise.

Scowling, Nuriel yanked another coconut down and tried again. Another miss.

Now Nuriel was more frustrated than frightened, and hitting the damned thing was becoming a matter of pride. She wrenched a third coconut free and threw it down.

This time it hit. The coconut bounced off the monster’s back and sent it skittering away. Nuriel watched as it fled the beach to disappear into the sea. She smiled. Good enough.

Her relief was short-lived though, as she then came to realize that she was higher up than she was really comfortable with, and now that the strength that her panic had given her was wearing off, her ordeal had left her exhausted, and scaring that thing off had taken what little she had left.

She fell.

She didn’t remember actually landing, but sometime later the world decided to give her a break and stop swimming around her. When it did, she was lying on her back in the sand, staring up at the tree.

Though she had regained her senses, Nuriel remained still, listening to the sound of the ocean. She didn’t feel hurt, but that in itself didn’t mean much. She had seen enough sailors fall from the masts to know that it sometimes took time for the pain to register, and for all she knew her body was broken to pieces.

Still, though she ached a bit, the agony never came. Finally Nuriel tried to lever herself up into a sitting position.

She was still a little woozy, but still she managed to get up without much trouble. A quick self-assessment confirmed that, yes, she was unhurt.

With a slow exhale of relief, Nuriel stretched out her legs and reclined back, elbows in the sand. Wow, that had been a bit of luck. Though to be honest, the fact that she was falling out of trees in the first place instead of having her bones picked clean by jellyfish was in itself quite a bit of luck as well. Hopefully she hadn’t exhausted her quota.

Shaking her head, Nuriel finally was able to take stock of her surroundings. The best she could tell, she was on a small beach that curved around a bay. Across the water she could see two massive cliff walls wrapped around the bay’s other end, with a small gap in the middle leading out to sea.

Nuriel let out a low whistle. She didn’t have a clue how she had gotten from the depths to the beach, but if it had been chance, then her luck had been greater than she had thought if she had been washed right through the gap instead of being smashed against those walls of stone.

Then she turned in her seat to get a look at what was behind her. A wall of green greeted her, a thick and lush jungle. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign. She still didn’t know if she was on an island or the mainland, but if it was an island than a jungle meant that there would be food for her to find. However, it also meant that just about anything could come at her through it, and she’d never see it coming until it had her: panthers, leopards, ocelots, even howler monkeys if they were feeling nasty enough. And that was to say nothing of the chittering bugs coming for her from the sea…

Nuriel shivered, but she banished those thoughts from her mind. No, she was alive, and that was a miracle in itself. She wasn’t going to dwell on death.

Though speaking of which, exactly how was she alive to begin with? Nuriel frowned. All of her memories from before she had woken up weren’t exactly clear.

She remembered being thrown into the sea; that probably wasn’t going to dim in her mind anytime soon. And she vividly remembered her struggles to keep her head above water. But between then and waking up was nothing.

Nuriel pressed a hand against her forehead and slowly breathed in and out. Her fingers were starting to shake. She was no stranger to having her life threatened, and this had not been the first time that another human being had tried to take it. But none of them had gotten that close before. And it had been years since she had been specifically singled out like that. The last time had been when she was still a scrawny little child, when Papa had-

Then her eyes popped wide open as the air caught in her throat. Papa!

She hastily drew her legs up. Her boots were still there, somehow having been prevented from being torn off during her struggles. And hidden in a small sheathe inside her left boot…

Nuriel felt a surge of relief when her fingers closed around the band of gold that enclosed the slim ivory handle. She pulled out St. George from where she had him hidden and turned him over in her hands, letting the sun glint off the steel and gold.

St. George was a knife: small, easy to hide, but wickedly sharp. The handle was carved from an elephant’s tusk into the shape of a dragon’s head, with two tiny rubies set into the eyes. A golden band was set around the grip. Papa had, as Nuriel’s insistence, named it after St. George the great knight from the stories he had told her, renowned for his slaying of dragons and rescuing of maidens. The name had been a bit of irony on her part. Papa had thought that it was the knight that had enraptured her, but to be honest, she had always like the dragons best. After all, they were just acting in accordance to their natures. Most of the time they merely minded their own business, sleeping away in their great caves. And even those known for terrorizing villages and hamlets only did so because they were hungry. In her mind, if St. George was going to go around stealing away their lives and treasures, then it was only fitting that her dragon would take his name in return.

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Nuriel still wasn’t sure how Papa had come across such a beauty, but she had her suspicions. He always had a knack of relieving those more fortunate than them of easily missed valuables. Then it was off to the type of shops that their kind never thought to visit, and they would leave with enough coins to feed themselves for the next few days, maybe even to buy a new coat or pair of shoes.

But St. George was different. From the moment he had shown it off to her Nuriel knew that it was to be theirs, and had begged him not to let it go. He had been hesitant. After all, it was one of the best acquisitions he had ever gotten his hands on, and would fill their bellies with better fare than they had to make due with. But in the end he had relented, though he had warned her to keep it hidden and never, ever let anyone see it, lest they themselves be targeted by thieves.

This she had done, and was glad for it. Now, nearly seven years later, it was all that she had left of him.

St. George looked to have survived the sea without damage, though she would have to be on the watch for rust spots. She wiped away what bits of moisture remained and looked around again. By her estimation, it was early afternoon.

It was then that she finally noticed just how hungry she was, as well as how parched her throat was.

Licking her lips, she stood up and warily examined the green wall of the jungle. There was a break in the trees, and what looked like a path beaten into the jungle itself. It didn’t seem to have been made by man, so it was probably due to some large animal.

Nuriel frowned. She was not in much of a hurry to take her chances. If said large animal was unfriendly, then it wouldn’t take kindly to her using its path. And there were any number of other things that would be more than happy to gulp her up.

Still, she needed food, and that was her best chance of finding it. Hopefully she would have to go far before coming across a fruit tree, or some wild tubers, or-

Then her eyes went wide. Wait a minute, she didn’t need to go looking for food! She had just been up a damned coconut tree!

The tree in question still towered over her, and still bore several of its ugly brown husks. There were a few others dotting the beach here and there, but this one seemed to be the one she had the best chance of climbing. After all, she had gotten up it once before, even if she no longer remembered the actual act.

Though now that she was examining closely, how had she gotten up it so quickly? Yes, it sat at a slant, but not a very sharp one, and while the rough rings of its trunk provided hand-and-footholds, they weren’t exactly a ladder. In fact, they barely protruded much at all.

Well, if she had gotten up there once before while in a blind panic, she could do it again. Nuriel spat in her palms, rubbed them together, and set to work.

She got about maybe a fifth of the way up before her fingers gave way and she slid back down.

Scowling in annoyance, she tried again. This time she barely cleared the ground.

A third time! This time she did much better, actually making it more than a third of the distance before she slipped and fell hard on her ass.

Nuriel stood up, wiped off her bottom, and glared up at the tree, which seemed to be mocking her with how un-climbed it was. She kicked it. Stupid thing. It had let her up once before, so why was it now being so stubborn?

Plopping down in the sand with her legs crossed, Nuriel moodily stared out at the ocean as she considered her options. She needed food, there was food right above her head, and so she had to get to it. She had gotten to it once before, so it obviously wasn’t impossible, but for whatever reason that didn’t seem to be happening anymore.

Nuriel sighed. She looked down, where one of the coconuts she had used to pelt the sea-bug with was lying. She reached out with a finger and nudged it back and forth. Of course when she wasn’t even thinking about food she was able to pluck down as many as she wanted, but when she actually needed to-

Then Nuriel blinked.

Waaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiit a minute.

Moments later Nuriel was feeling profoundly relieved and incredibly stupid as she had the coconut resting in her lap. After this was over she was going to take a good, long nap. Maybe then her brain would have rested enough to actually turn on.

Nuriel attacked the thick fibers of the coconut’s husk with her hands, but to her frustration they refused to come loose. She tried biting them off, but just got a sore jaw for her troubles.

The coconut remained as protected as ever. Nuriel rolled it back and forth in her lap. She rubbed her jaw. She scratched her head. There had to be some way to get in.

Then she glanced back up. All around the beach were several clusters of white rocks, worn smooth by the elements. Hmmm.

Nuriel walked over one particular long and flat stone. She laid the coconut on it and searched around until she found a large and heavy rock with enough of an edge. Then she knelt before the coconut, lifted her rock up high with both hands, and brought the sharp edge down.

The first two whacks did absolutely nothing except bend the fibers in a little. The third slipped across the coconut’s body and sent it tumbling across the sand.

As for the rock, it struck the stone slab and a large portion of the edge snapped off.

Nuriel stared down at the two pieces of rock, one in her hands and the other lying next to her knees. She felt her throat start to tighten. As setbacks went, this wasn’t that much of one, but she was having a really, really bad day.

Still, she didn’t let herself cry. Survivors didn’t cry. Survivors didn’t feel sorry for themselves. Survivors used frustration and failure as motivation to find a way to succeed.

Close your eyes, her father’s voice echoed inside her head. Let the anger and pain flow through you without damming it up. Then look at the problem again. Quite often, the solution is right in front of you.

So she did just that. She closed her eyes and slowly breathed in and out, releasing a little more of her anger with every breath. She concentrated on the sound of the waves and the cry of the gulls. Soon the shaking stopped and her throat started to loosen.

When she opened her eyes again, she was no less hungry and thirsty, but she did feel a little bit better.

Propping her chin on her fist, Nuriel nudged the smugly unopened coconut with her finger. Maybe St. George could…but no. If her teeth couldn’t rip away the husk, then she wasn’t going to risk blunting her most precious treasure. But the rocks though…

Frowning, she stood up and looked from the coconut to the rocks. Okay, so she probably wasn’t going to be able to cut off the husk, but maybe she could get it off another way.

Picking up the coconut once again, she looked around until she found a gap between two large rocks that was the right size. She jammed it in, this time right-side-up instead of on its side. Then she found another large rock that was more blunt than sharp.

It took a few bashes, but each once crushed the husk a little bit more. Soon the fibers started to separate. Excited by her success, she yanked the coconut out of the gap, sat down with it braced by her legs, and kept smashing it.

Soon the fibers had been separated enough that she was able to stick her fingers in and pull them the rest of the way apart. It took some work, but soon she managed to get her fingers around the hard, brown nut inside and pull it out.

Nuriel grinned. She felt like St. George himself, pulling out the heart of a slain dragon.

Okay, now that had been taken care of, it was time for the sharp rock again.

Whack. Whack. Whack.

Nuriel hammered down on the coconut. Almost there, almost there.

Whack. Whack. Crunch.

Nuriel froze as the hand holding the coconut steady was flooded with fluid. She had managed to break the coconut open, but unfortunately she had forgotten to devise a way to save the milk, which was now pouring out onto the rocks.

She quickly opened the coconut into its two halves. There was very little of the milk still collected in each, but she still gulped it down like fine wine. Her eyelids fluttered as she did so. Oh, it felt so lovely going down. Nuriel drank it down and licked what she could get off of her arm.

Now it was time for St. George to do his duty. She pulled him out and used him to cut and pry off chunks of the coconut’s starchy white flesh. It wasn’t much, but if one were to see the way she crammed them into her mouth one might excused for thinking them delicious, not that she’d know.

Once the shells had been scraped dry, she grabbed up another coconut and repeated the process, this time taking care to only crack off a small bit at the top rather than split it in half. This time she was able to save most of the milk, and by the time she had finished off all three coconuts she felt much better.

Now that she had taken the edge of her hunger and thirst, Nuriel was able to sit back and look out at the sea and consider her situation.

It had been her fault, at least in part. She had known that she had been getting too old to play the part of the silent cabin boy, no matter how short she cut her hair or how tightly she bound her breasts. She had gotten stupid, thinking she could play the same trick over and over, that nobody would notice. If Father were still around, he would have boxed her ears for having dropped her guard. The last voyage had earned her several sidelong looks from the crew, as well as more than one suspicious inquiry that might have turned to disaster had someone less curious about her sex but more invested in keeping the peace not stepped in to intervene.

She had hoped that that would have been the end of it, but then the storm had hit. It had hit and it had kept hitting, assailing the ship for days on end. More than one man was swept overboard, and in time, even the doughtiest sailor began to fear.

And with fear had come panic, and with panic came the willingness to blame anything and anyone for their predicament.

Which had ended up being her.

Nuriel had been sensing the danger that she had been in for quite some time when they came for her. Of course the storm had scared her as much as any of them, but things had taken a swift turn for the worst when she had noticed the looks she had been starting to get and the mumbled conversations that were taking place around her. And when those conversations had stopped being mumbled and looks stopped wavering when she returned them was when she knew how much danger she was in.

She had tried to hide, of course. She had sailed in ships of the same make in the past and knew where all the best hiding spots were, but it did her no good. If she had still be small, she might have made it, might had managed to fit in a tight, out-of-the-way hole to ride the storm out and hope that tempers would have been quelled along with it. Alas, she had kept up her game longer than she should have, and could no only fit in a few.

They had come for her, just like she had always feared. They had come for her. They had found her. They had seized her and pulled her kicking and shrieking up onto the deck, into the fury of the storm.

From there, while two men held onto her arms and another her neck, her trousers had been yanked down, exposing her sex for all to see. That had been it. In calmer times, the more levelheaded might have come to her defense still. Some might had even laughed it off and made jokes, while the officers would have settled for simply locking her in the brig for the rest of the trip and dropping her off at the first port of call.

Those had not been calmer times. They had turned on her. All of them, even the ones that had stood up for her in the past, even the ones who had taken a liking to her, who had told her stories, who had snuck her rum at mealtimes and stood up for her when the others had gotten suspicious. They all turned on her, they all betrayed her. Every last one of them.

And when she had been lifted up by her throat, kicking and helpless, and thrown into the sea, no one had tried to stop it from happening.

Nuriel gazed balefully out to sea. Well, they had failed. She had survived. And somewhere out there were the men who had betrayed her, who had tried to murder her.

She wondered if the ship had pulled through the storm intact, if the men who had done this to her had also survived. She wondered if any of them felt remorse.

She hoped to find them again one day, after she had escaped this island. Then they could try to justify to her what they had done. Maybe they would even ask for forgiveness. She would enjoy that.

But first she would have to leave the island, wherever it happened to be.

The ship had been far from the mainland, so it stood to reason that she was on one of the many islands that dotted the area. Exactly how, she didn’t know. The last thing she remembered was sinking into the dark depths, and there certainly hadn’t been any land in sight.

Maybe something had picked her up and carried her? She had heard stories of shipwrecked sailors being brought to land by dolphins. But those had always been near the shores, and she had to have sunk deep.

She sighed. Well, maybe the merfolk had found her and brought her to safety! It made about as much sense as anything else.

Well, if she was on an island, then that could be a problem. Infinitely preferable to ending up as a drowned corpse to be picked clean by sharks or what have you, but that did mean that she was all alone, left to fend for herself with little hope of escape. There was the odd island that had things like settlements, forts, and plantations, but those were few and far between and tended to be closer to the mainland. This far out, the best she could hope for was a smuggler’s hideaway, and it was very unlikely that they would be sympathetic to her plight.

Nuriel swallowed. She had heard stories of the dark horrors that dwelt on the unexplored islands far out to sea: stories of savage tribes that dined upon human flesh, stories of wild animals unused to man and unwilling to tolerate having their territories trespassed upon, stories of hordes of insects that could pick a man’s bones clean in seconds, stories of giant plants with thorns that dripped with venom or flesh-hungry flowers that would trap any unwary passerby and dissolve their bodies in their acidic sap, stories of lonesome ghosts that would rip your soul from your body just to have a bit of companionship, stories of lumbering monsters that could swallow a lion whole.

She cast a dubious look at the thick jungle behind her. It looked like it could be holding any one of those horrors, or even all of them at once. There was a sizeable break in the trees that seemed to open to a path, which could mean any number of things. It could mean that she had been lucky enough to wash up somewhere with actual civilization and there was a township just down the road, but it could just as easily mean that cannibalistic marauders would be descending out of the jungle at any minute to skewer her on a spear and carry her off to be spit-roasted.

She shivered and quickly looked away. Now that was a line of thought that she didn’t care to entertain.

Still, regardless of where she was, the rules were still the same, even if the details had changed.

Learn all you can.

Don’t get caught.

Don’t get stupid.

Survive by any means necessary.

Nuriel yawned. Now that she at least had some food in her belly, everything was starting to catch up with her. Her eyelids were growing heavier with every blink, and those were happening with greater frequency. Her mouth split open with a cavernous yawn.

She violently shook her head. No, she couldn’t afford to drift off now. She was still out in the open, exposed to the elements and who knew what else. She had to find someplace safe, somewhere that the chittering water bugs couldn’t find her, maybe put some kind of shelter together, a lean-to at the very least, then she could…

Her eyes closed of their own accord.

When they opened again, she was still slumping up against the tree, looking out at the bay. However, the sun had fully set, the sky above was jet-black, and the stars were out and twinkling.

Nuriel abruptly sat straight up. How long had she been out? She hadn’t meant to drift off like that! Anything could have happened to her while she had been sleeping! Those bugs could have crawled back out of the sea and starting nibbling on her toes, jaguars could have come out of the jungle to gnaw on her guts, smugglers could have found her and carried her off for God alone knew what, or she could have-

Wait.

Why was the bay glowing?

Someone golden and glowing was creeping into the bay beneath the water, illuminating the surface. It slinked around the towering stone walls and started to make its way toward the shore.

Nuriel leapt her feet, her heartbeat hammering away in her ears like a warning drum.

The golden glow slowed to a stop right behind where the small waves rose up. From her vantage point Nuriel could see something gauzy and flowing in the light.

Suddenly the light went out, but the shapes remained, now as hazy shadows.

And then a face emerged from the water.

It was humanoid, but clearly not human. It looked like a young girl, one framed with silken black hair that seemed to melt into the water that hung in wet strands around a dark blue, heart-shaped face. Three dark stripes slashed across the bride of its nose, and its eyes glowed bright green.

The sea-creature locked eyes with Nuriel, and it smiled.

Its teeth were as sharp as a shark’s.

That did it. Nuriel turned and fled the beach, running through the break in the trees to be swallowed up by the jungle.