Well, this sucked. Seabound pressed his chin into his knees, stared out over the sea and hated everything about his life.
He was the seventh child of parents who hadn't wanted more than three, and by that point, they were sick of them. They had saddled him with this stupid name, one which was tight enough that he couldn't even pull anything good out of it, and then had gotten rid of him the first chance they got. He was calling himself Seabound, because he was right now, but it wasn't special. It wasn't him! It was stupid.
He started out at the ruins of what had yesterday been a ship, feeling the rain run down his face, and he hated it. 'Bound for Sea, Bound for Service' was his full name, and it was a stupid, stupid name. He had spent years of his life staring at it and hating it and had never managed to come up with a short-name that he liked. The closest he had ever got was Forfor, and that was mostly out of spite.
He let out a sigh, and as he shifted the cold rain soaked behind his knees and through into the warm space between the backs of his legs and his stomach. One day he would pick a whole new name, and this one could be thrown into the sea where it belonged.
The only hitches were that you had to be sixteen to get your name changed without your parent's permission, and that it cost money.
In theory, he was being paid for being here, on this stupid doomed voyage, but it wasn't money he would ever see. It passed right over his head and directly into the hands of his parents. His labour, their pay. He had pretty much been sold, and he doubted they were keeping any of it back for when he came of age. He knew better than that.
But, he would live to sixteen, he would get his name changed and he would escape this stupid island. He was not going to die of magic poisoning somewhere in the middle of the ocean. He refused to even consider the possibility.
He kept his mouth firmly shut against the rainwater, tilting his head down so it didn't run into his eyes or up his nose, but it was getting so heavy now that it was hard to avoid, and he could feel it filling his ears and washing away the last ragged remains of his clothing.
Gods, this was the worst. Everything about this sucked.
When he got back to real land, he was going to change his stupid name, official documents or not. Then he was going to go and become a baker. He was going to bake bread and get his lungs filled with flour and retire at the age of thirty with white hair.
It would go back to its normal colour once he washed it, of course, but, there would be nobody who could make him do so.
Sitting on the shore of a god's forsaken island, staring at the mass of branches and flowers which had once been a ship, it was a good dream. He was gonna make the best gods damned bread. Or shoes, he could make shoes!
Sailors didn't wear shoes, so he wouldn't even have to deal with them, hmm, that sounded better than-
There was a shout from behind him as one of the sailors called out that they'd found a cave, and with a sigh he pushed himself to his feet, letting the last shreds of clothing fall away into nothing.
This sucked.
-
It turned out that the island wasn't as deserted as they had initially thought. In the back of the cave, next to the freshwater spring, had been huddled two kids, staring with wide eyes at the storm outside. They didn't speak the same language as any of the crew, Seabound was informed as he helped drag in the half-rotten barrels of food, but one of the sailors said he'd heard it in the past, many years before, and he knew where they could take them to get a translation.
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They both seemed rather shell-shocked, and consensus amongst the crew was that they had been shipwrecked. Possibly escaped servants or runaways, either thrown off a ship or forced to flee.
They stared at the sailors as they went about their work, their eyes wide, holding hands and shying away from contact. Seabound felt for them. However they had gotten here, it obviously hadn't been willingly, and they had been trapped here for a while without food.
The crew had managed to salvage a good amount of food off of the ship, so that would feed them for a week or so, plus whatever the island would provide.
Seabound settled down next to them in the doorway and they sat there together in silence for a while. Whoever they were, he mused, at least their names probably weren't as stupid as his.
-
The rain went on for three days, and Forfor was dying of bordem by the end of it. Or Forfore. He wasn't entirely sure what the difference was, as they both sounded the same, but the sailors told him that it was a good nautical pun, and that he should stick with it.
He refused to have anything more to do with anything to do with boats, so Forfor it was, for now. Captain Southshore had told him that he'd met another Seabound once, and that had cemented it between both him and the crew. It was bad luck to take the same name as another.
The Captain had patted him on the shoulder, and together the crew tried to think of a new long-name for him, to pass the time.
'Not bound for the sea, bakes bread for the Landfolk' was the current favourite, along with 'Unlucky Shipwrecks Lie In Store' and 'The Land is a Pleasant Home For Me' as second and third. There were possibilities there.
Landbound huffed to himself. When they weren't making up names, they were trying to communicate with the two kids. They weren't too old, nine or ten at the oldest, and they seemed to be picking up the local tongue at a good pace, but they were running out of words, each new word an ever-increasingly elaborate game of charades. You could only point at things in the rainy cave so much before you had to start improvising.
They had accepted the sailor's food with gusto, trading words for things in their own language, up until the bag of rice had come out. They had both stoutly refused to eat or even look at it, and speculation was they had been trapped on some sort of plantation or ship? Nobody was quite sure, but it was obvious something had happened there.
Strange, Bakesbread thought, but everyone had their traumas.
-
They had been worried about food initially, when the rain hadn't stopped, but it turned out to be a non-issue. Upon emerging from the cave, the day after the rains had ended, the world was completely different. Gone were the battered, beaten and scrubby trees, and in their place was a lush green paradise, thick with the sound of birdsong and bright with colours and fruits. The storm had taken their ship, but it had left a wild bounty in its place.
Still, it was a boring diet, berries and pigeons, and when rescue came almost three weeks later, it wasn't a moment too soon.
Forland had been helping the mage, a kid named Blanketweaving, to examine the wreck, when the shout went up. The two of them were in the water, floating around the now almost unrecognisable mass, and the two new kids were up on top, messing around.
The first to spot it was… Nobody quite knew the kid's name or intonation, but they had managed to approximate a translation, which was something like Beads? It was a weird one-syllable thing though, and he thought it made them sound rather like a cat. Their friend on the ground, who they didn't have a translation for but had taken to calling "Notrice", took up their cry, pointing to the west.
Blanketweaving had done something to the wreck at that point, floating in the water with his hands on the side, and the flowers above them had bloomed and sung. Then Beads, up on the mast had shouted too, and the flowers had suddenly shifted hues and shape, flashing in the sun.
Forfor almost imagined that the sea around the wreck got clearer, the blue turning to crystal as the ship drank up the magic, but as far as he knew that wasn't how it worked. Anything in the water would have already been eaten by the little plants and animals that lived there. Not that there wasn't a lot of magic around, the whole island creaked with it.
Blanketweaving had run back to the cave, leaving him sitting on the shore with Beads and Notrice. He could hear cries being taken up in the distance now as the ship sailed closer. Hopefully, his permanent return to land was at hand!
All he knew, was that once he got home, he would never set foot on a single stupid ship ever again.