Chapter 4: Sanctuary

“What?” I asked. They know us? “Of course we’re alive.”

The white guy who had spoken just stared blankly back at me. “M’lord? Are you hurt?” He had an American-sounding accent with just a tinge of a deep Southern drawl. His face was flushed and covered with dirt, and he had a chipped hand axe hanging from his belt.

“M’lord?” I asked. “What do you mean by that?” I was very confused at this point. Do they think I’m some kind of nobleman?”

The guy just stared incredulously back at me. “Well, you’re Lord George, m’lord,” he said after a minute. “It’s your name.”

“Huh,” I mused. I turned to him and looked him in the eyes. “My name? Who exactly is George? Who are you? What happened here? What is this place?” There was no point in dallying in getting important information from the man, but it came out in a fast garble.

He stuttered, trying to formulate a sentence. “Y… Y… Are you actually Lord George?” he asked after a few moments.

Am I? “Well, I wasn’t until a day ago,” I said. “I just woke up in the middle of the forest with her here.” I pointed to Jake. Eliza?

“You… ain’t George?” he asked. “No, you can’t be. I saw those moss boars impale you like meat on a skewer. Nobody survives that. Nobody can.” He looked down, shaking his head. The other man was looking at the ground, and the woman was surveying the trees. A hefty-looking crossbow and a case I assumed contained bolts were strapped to her back.

“Wait,” I said. “I was impaled? I was killed by the boar?”

“Yes, you were,” the man said. “I saw you. That damn boar charged right at you. Broke my spear trying to kill it. Barely made a dent. Heh.”

“Back up, back up,” I said. “So we - that is, the bodies Jake and I now have - were hunting those things? Why? All that did was make those fuckers want to kill us!”

He flinched, seemingly taken aback by my coarse language. He scratched at the back of his head. “George ‘n’ Eliza weren’t exactly the most sensible lot. But th’ lady wanted pork chops for dinner, so out hunting we went.” He let out a barking laugh. “Guess you two got what was comin’ to ya.” He sighed. “Even if I am a coward.”

“You’re not a coward,” I said. “Those boars were fucking nasty. If I was in your shoes, I’d save my skin every time. Except if she was stuck. Then I’d sacrifice myself.” I laid my hand on Jake’s shoulder, and she smiled at me.

“Anyway,” Jake interjected, “who are you? Information about who George and Eliza were can wait. Can you tell us your names and where you’re from?” She sounded so regal and confident when she spoke, and I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of… something at that.

The guy grunted. “Oh… Yeah, that. Names. I’m Isaac.” He gestured to the nearly-identical man. “My brother Felix. He don’t speak much.” I could see the resemblance in their builds and hair. “An’ this is Zufan.” He gestured to the woman. “She’s our best tracker. Found th’ boars for us, but it’s not like we had much of a chance against those blasted boars without spears an’ longbows.” Zufan looked down from the trees, walked towards Isaac and whispered something in the man’s ear. His face grew pensive, then he nodded.

“Well, there’s nothin’ notable in the region save for you two,” Isaac relayed. “No predators, large game, nothin’.”

“Region?” I asked. “Why were you out here?”

“Huntin’,” Isaac said. “There ain’t much food left back at camp, but there’s hardly anything out in the forest that ain’t poisonous or predatious.”

“Camp?” Jake asked.

The dark-haired man shrugged. “It’s best if y’ see. Jenna’ll tell you the whole story, seeing as you two clearly don’t remember nothin’. C’mon, Felix, we’re leavin’.” He turned around and began walking down what I now saw was a well-worn trail. It wasn’t devoid of foliage or trampled flat, but I could see that many people had walked this path in the past few days. His silent brother followed behind. Zufan adjusted her cap, then slowly walked into the forest and began trekking adjacent to the brothers.

I turned to Jake. “Do you think we can trust them?” I asked. “I mean, they didn’t seem to think highly of George and Eliza, whoever they were.”

Jake looked thoughtful for a moment. “I think they’re all right,” she said. “They could have easily killed us when we first met them. Seeing as they didn’t, it’s safe to assume we’re not in immediate danger.”

“You’re right,” I said as I began to follow the two men.

Suddenly, Zufan popped out of the forest. She’d been camouflaged so well I barely noticed her presence until she made it clear.

“You’re definitely not the real Eliza and George,” she said. Her voice was soft and mumbly, like she preferred to not speak but did so anyway on occasion. Her accent sounded somewhat African, but I couldn’t exactly place its location. It was like that of the two brothers- similar to Earth accents but vaguely different. Curse my Euro-centric education and culture!

“I mean, we obviously aren’t,” I said. “But why did you point it out now?”

“The Watney lords were not very wise,” Zufan replied. “They just bumbled into things like a fish into an alligator’s maw. No strategy, no caution, not even any debating. The fact that you even entertained the idea that Isaac and Felix could be hiding something just goes to show that you are both not Eliza and George, but you are smarter, wiser, more careful individuals than they were. What are you? Are you some kind of spirit or demi-god?”

“I guess you could say that,” Jake said. “As far as I can tell, we died, then woke up in these bodies. The world we came from was… different to this. The animals in this land are different from the ones back home.”

“So you were living beings before coming to this realm?” Zufan asked. She put her fingers around her chin in contemplation. “I’ve been in taverns all over Salazar and I’ve never heard tell of any such legends. I’ve even seen a few ghosts, myself. They’re always malevolent and can’t even form coherent thoughts. You two are very odd indeed, but it always helps to have an accepting worldview.” With that, she disappeared back into the forest, her beaver-fur hat perched snugly atop her head.

I had several questions. Salazar? Is that like a country? Ghosts? We definitely aren’t on Earth.

“If I had any doubts before,” I said to Jake, “I have none now. We’re not on Earth anymore.”

“I know,” Jake said. She shuddered. “I think we’re dead.”

“But this doesn’t feel like the afterlife,” I said. “This isn’t like any depictions of the afterlife I’ve ever heard of. And if we were dead, the people’d have told us by now.”

“Do you suppose we got reincarnated?” Jake asked.

“That seems like the most logical explanation,” I said. I’d read many stupid-ass web novels where the lead had gotten reincarnated in a fantasy world and just wreaked havoc and went on adventures. Maybe get a girl/boyfriend or 200. As much as I loved fantasy, I’d always knew that these tales were far-fetched. Now it was as if I was living in one…

As we followed the brothers, I could see the forest thinning, with slender, short deciduous-type trees standing alone from one another. Instead of moss, dead leaves coated the ground. Their withered, desiccated forms hosted lots of beetles and other bugs, which I tried to avoid. I shuddered as a particularly large bug scurried a few inches away from my shoe. When it reached Isaac, he wasted no time and brought his boot down on the creature. Jake and I gave the crushed insect a wide berth as we passed it.

As we hiked farther down the track, a familiar rushing sound began to reach my ears. A memory began to play unbidden in my mind. I was about six years old, with my mother, and we were standing atop a sandy hill. Below us, the Atlantic Ocean roiled beneath a cloudy sky, its deep green contrasting with the austere bleakness of the heavens above. I’d been complaining because I really wanted to swim that day. It was funny - I had many memories of swimming and splashing about in the water whenever we took a day trip to the ocean in the summers. It was just this one that came to me now.

As I sort-of-cried, my mother had come up to me and put her arm around me. “It’s just clouds,” she’d said. “The sun will be back another day.” We’d then gotten ice cream with Jake, who had gleefully splattered his strawberry cone on the pavement for no apparent reason and then cried for an hour afterward.

We had arrived at an ocean. I could all but see the waves crashing against the rocky sand of whatever beach this foreign world held. I picked up my pace, running the last few hundred feet to the end of the tree line. I burst out into the wide, open world, breathing the now-salty air in deeply.

I was standing on a grey, slightly pebbly beach. My feet began to sink slightly into the rocky muck as I looked around. About 500 feet in front of me, the sand gave way to crashing waves, then the endless blue sea beyond. There was hardly a cloud in sight, and the entire view looked pictureque.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

A few thousand feet to my left, the tiny river we’d followed emptied itself into the ocean next to a series of swampy inlets and tiny coves. Aside from that, the coastline was relatively straight as far as the eye could see, save for a tiny, rapidly-flowing stream less than a thousand feet from us. In the far distance, the shore began to curve backwards somewhat, like we were on a very broad peninsula. All throughout the beach, chunks of driftwood and larger pieces of detritus were washing up or lying on the sand.

Closer nearby, I could see what could only be a small encampment. A hundred feet or so to my left, a small circle of campfires, lean-tos and even a ratty tent had been set up. Around two dozen people, as far as I could tell, were moving around. Some of them were chatting, some were sitting, some were stacking boxes, others were moving around. The sounds of chatter and hubbub drifted to my ears.

I could see Isaac visibly relax, his shoulders drooping. “Welp, we’re home for now,” he said. Felix immediately began sprinting towards the fires, letting out an elated yell. It was the first sound I’d ever heard coming from his mouth. Exhaling, I followed them and walked the last few hundred feet to the camp.

Up close, it looked a lot smaller and more ragged than I’d thought it was. I counted fewer than twenty-five heads, not including Isaac and his companions. Three campfires, each surrounded by circles of stone, were arranged in a rough triangle in the center of the camp. A few lean-tos made from sticks draped with canvas stood forlornly in the area, as well as a decent-sized lemon-yellow tent, but the majority of the furniture consisted of simple bedrolls and sleeping bags. Several dozen pale wooden crates lay scattered around the encampment. Most of them were opened, and of those, about half were visibly empty. The other crates were full of what looked like hardtack biscuits and bolts of lemon-yellow cloth. Everyone wore the same yellow clothes. Most of the people, including all of the men and most of the women, wore the long tunics and pale trousers the scouts had worn. A few of the women wore long yellow dresses that looked vaguely like ancient Greek attire.

The people present in the encampment were a diverse lot. Some of them had dark brown skin, others had a creamy hue, and there were many shades in between. Most of the people had black or dark brown hair, but there were a few lighter brunettes, a couple blonds, and I swear I even spotted a redhead or two. An unusual feature I noticed was that about a fifth of the people had a strange marking in their hair. A dark red, almost purple, stripe of hair coloring ran vertically across their head like a mohawk. It wasn’t red like normal hair; it looked like a color someone would dye their hair. The people themselves had a variety of skin tones and hair colors, the red mark being the only distinction.

Interesting. Is this some kind of religious practice? A cult? What do they even worship in Salazar? If that even is a place?

A young, tan-skinned man with one of the red streaks in his raven hair walked past me, carrying an open crate of biscuits. He looked at me, and glared at me. I could feel it piercing me like a dagger before he turned away and carried on with his task. A brown-haired woman with fair skin who was carrying buckets of water on a yoke on her back glanced our way and muttered something under her breath.

Damn, George and Eliza really must have been assholes, I thought. They seem pissed off that we’re even alive.

At this point, Isaac and Felix had split off from us and had moved to a distinct circle of bedrolls around a fire. Surrounding it were three women and two more men, each of them having identical black hair, light skin, and ruddy faces. I guessed that they were relatives. Isaac returned to them and began chatting enthusiastically with the eldest of the women.

It was at this point that I noticed that there were three distinct groups in the encampment. Isaac and his group claimed one fire, the six or so people with red streaks in their hair congregated around another, and the varied remainders rested near the third. They seemed to have no trouble mingling with each other during work, but when their jobs were done, they seemed to avoid each other. Interesting… I wonder what the dynamics in play are. Why are they separate? Jake was just glancing slowly around, taking in the sights and atmosphere of the camp’s motley denizens.

As I glanced around the camp, I saw that Zufan had arrived when I hadn’t been looking. She was going towards the big tent near the third campfire, silently greeting the people as they went about their tasks. She disappeared in the tent for a minute, then came out and started walking our way.

“Miriam wants to speak to you,” she said in her soft tone. “She’s in the tent.”

“Who’s Miriam?” I asked, but Zufan had already began moving elsewhere.

“Well, she’s obviously in the tent,” Jake joked. “And she probably has important information for us.” She began walking towards the lemon-colored tent, and I began following her through the camp. Most of the people ignored us, though some of them gave us dirty looks as we passed them.

When we arrived, Jake bent down and pushed through the tent’s flaps without further fanfare. I followed her in, and I was met with an interesting sight. The tent was cramped, but tall enough for me to stand up in at my full height. Save for a burlap sleeping bag and a weathered wooden chest, the space was devoid of furnishings. Aside from us, the chamber had a single occupant - a woman with greying curly hair with a deep red line across it. Her skin was tanned and wrinkled, like she’d spent her entire life in the sun.

“George, Eliza,” she said. I couldn’t quite place the accent of her raspy voice. All I could tell is that it sounded confident and wise, as befitting someone of her age. “You’ve returned.”

“Are you Miriam?” I asked the woman.

“Zufan was right…” she said. Her brow creased with thought. “The old George and Eliza are gone… You don’t know a thing. Yes, that is my name.”

“Nice to meet you, Miriam,” I replied, extending my hand for her to shake. She looked at it, then confusedly back up at me.

“George would never say something so friendly to peasants like us…” she mused. Instead of shaking my hand, she grasped my wrist in a tight grip and released it a moment later. “Nice to meet you too. Anyway, what exactly are you? Are you ghosts? Spirits?”

“We were people before,” Jake answered. “We died, then woke up in these bodies. We were in the middle of the jungle outside this camp, and we wandered for a couple days before finding Isaac, Felix and Zufan. Then, they brought us here, to this camp.”

“Interesting, interesting!” Miriam said. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of people dying, then awakening in the bodies of different, already dead people. Yes, I heard that George and Eliza were skewered by boars. But there are a lot of unexplained things in this world, and I guess it’s for the better that the old George and Eliza are gone.”

“Were they bad people?” I asked. “Because everyone in camp seems to hate us.”

Miriam sighed and looked down. “You have no idea…”

“Anyway,” Jake interjected, “Why are we here? This place doesn’t look like a permanent village, so you can’t have been here this long. What is this place?”

“So many questions,” Miriam said. “But you are right to ask. After all, you know nothing about this world. So, let me begin.”

“To the north of us is this continent, Abydos. It has a bunch of different countries on it, but there are really only two major ones - Illyria and Salazar. They’ve historically been rivals in trying to settle the rest of the continent, but tensions are really bad nowadays. That’s all well and good, because us original Abydans have been crushed under their boots for centuries.” She gestured to the red streak in her hair. “We were the original inhabitants of the continent, and our pact with the dragons was marked with a red streak in our hair.” She sighed. “But that was long ago.

“Anyway, Illyria and Salazar have had a long history of sending their undesirables to penal colonies. The first one was Haen. Then that became a monarchy under the Pegasus Queens. Next there was Riva. Then outsiders began settling there, and now Illyria controls the region. Now, the only place left to establish a penal colony was Vernys. The Dread Isle. The land upon which we stand right now.”

“Dread Isle,” I said. “Sounds… creative.”

“Save for a handful of city-states on the north coast allied with the League of Athol, absolutely nobody lives here,” Miriam said. “Not even the first Abydans dared to step onto the island.”

“So you came here to establish a penal colony?” I asked. “Are you criminals?”

“It’s complicated,” Miriam said. “I’ll get to that in a bit. Essentially, Salazar made a pact with the Atholite city-states to sell their criminals into slavery there. Through a long and varied string of events, all the people you see here-” she gestured around her “- and a hundred or so others were gathered on the docks of Tuaim in southeastern Salazar. Some of us were genuine hardened criminals, some of us were rebels. Others, like my wife and I, simply failed to pay our rent on time. The lords of Salazar are corrupt indeed.”

"Slavery?" Jake exclaimed. "God, that's horrible!"

“What did I - I mean, George, and Eliza do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Miriam said. “Nobility can get away with doing a lot of things ‘round these parts, so they must have seriously pissed off someone higher-ranked than them. The Watney nobles were craven, selfish bottom-feeders, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what happened. Anyway, we were loaded onto this ship, that was also carrying a cargo of hardtack and bolts of the finest cloth from Muine. Can’t remember the ship’s name. Don’t know if it even had one. Anyway, it was heading to Alford, the southeasternmost Atholite city.”

“What happened next?” I asked.

“About a week into the journey, a huge storm struck,” Miriam said. “We were blown hundreds of miles off course into the open ocean. We sailed in random directions for two or more weeks. Thankfully, we were able to live off the food in the cargo hold after someone mutinied and dumped the captain and his men overboard. Then, another storm struck.”

“That sounds horrible!” Jake said. “Two storms and a mutiny?”

“It was a wonder that we survived the second one,” Miriam replied, shaking slightly. I could see that she was trying to hold back tears. “The ship just… broke apart. We were swept out into the ocean, holding onto the wreckage for dear life. Everyone you see here, as well as George and Eliza, had grabbed onto the largest piece of wreckage. It took us to the shore, and we set up camp here. We were blown hundreds if not thousands of miles off course, and we don’t know where we are except in the broadest of terms - the southeast coast of Vernys. It’s quite a large island, so it’s not like we can easily trek across it.”

“What happened to the others?” Jake asked. “On board the ship?”

“Don’t know,” Miriam said. “We never saw them again. My wife was among them.” I could see her shaking, her efforts to hold back her sorrow failing. “I hope they’re alive, but there’s no way to know.” Tears streaked down her eyes as her voice broke. As I watched her sob, I couldn’t help but realize that I was… numb to my whole situation. Jake and I had died and woken up in new bodies, but somehow I wasn’t sad or scared or anything. I just felt… neutral? That was the only way to describe my state right now, a dearth of emotions.

Give it time, I thought to myself. I’m probably in shock or something. I’m in some fight-or-flight response that my animal brain prepared for times like these.

“What happened to George and Eliza?” I asked, mostly to distract myself.

“Ohh,” Miriam grumbled. “As soon as we made camp, those insufferable, stuck-up…”

“You can swear about them,” Jake said. “It’s fine. We aren’t them.”

“Thanks,” Miriam said. I could see her calm down, her tears subsiding. Nothing like a little bit of detestment to distract from sorrow. It was the verbal equivalent of punching my pillow when I felt down.

“Anyway, those insufferable bastard wormspawn wanted to eat godsdamn boar for dinner!” Miriam shouted. “They weren’t grateful that we had fucking food in the first place. They weren’t grateful that we had over a month’s worth of hardtack to live on! No, they complained. ‘The food is trash’, ‘Biscuit is unbefitting for a noble of my station’, blah blah blah. So they pressed Isaac, Felix and Zufan into hunting with them. As soon as they found boars, the commoners made only token efforts to fight the beasts and then ran for the hills. You can guess what happened next.”

“The Watneys really must have been horrible people,” I said. I normally didn’t feel particularly comfortable with speaking ill of the dead, but these folks had been such pathetic losers that I just couldn’t help myself.

“That they were. Anyway, we’re all here, and that’s what happened. We’re far away from any known city, town, village or shipping lane. We’ve got to find a way to survive here, and rescue our companions if they’re alive.”

“So, what should we do now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Miriam said. “They put me in charge of basically everything once you two died, since I’m the oldest. I’ll find a job or two for you to do, but for now, go out and talk to folks. Make sure they know that the old George and Eliza are dead, and I sincerely pray that the new ones are better.”

“I sincerely hope we are, Ma’am,” Jake said. “I won’t let you down. Right, Stella?”

“Right, babe,” I said. “Let’s get to know our new allies.”