It was the most pain he had ever felt in his very short life.

In both volume and intensity, this searing, burning, slicing of his tendons, crushing of his bones, peeling of his skin had eclipsed anything Myrl had ever experienced.

It was exactly this pain that made it clear to Myrl that his life had hardly begun; which was so startling to the young king. On the surface of his thoughts, Myrl often considered of himself as having lived more than maybe he had been due. But now being confronted with this experience of abject agony, were Myrl able to voice his opinion on the matter, he would have to admit that a scant twenty-three years was a trifling number.

Waves of searing pain washed back and forth through his skull, making his sinuses crackle like insects underfoot. It was a jarring feeling of blades inside of his eyes that had him thrashhing his head back and forth. The pressure inside of his head rose and fell like the tides, making him nauseous.

There were loose stones under the sole of his left boot. The scree shifted, moving beneath his foot, and the end of the crutch under his right arm sank suddenly, making Myrl lose his balance. As he felt himself fall Myrl’s right eye opened momentarily, catching fleeting glimpse of a courtyard he didn’t recognise before the world spun away into absolute blackness, and his burning limbs were bathed in the icy grip of far away glaciers for a few moments as the world again swam into focus.

He lay on his side on the edge of a sandy beach, the dark gray-green curl of incoming water rolling toward his face where it sat in the pebble strewn sand. His one opened eye half in and half out of the salty water that retreated before the incoming swell. Closing his eye again, he felt the pressure in his head swell, and pop with a brief relief and the feeling of water around him dissappeared before cold clutched at his bones again.

Myrl was certain his skin was being flayed away from the muscle and to the bone beneath. Each breath he took lent itself toward continuing a scream which he could not stop. His body was accepting of that state somehow and worked to take in more air, forcing ragged screeches from his tortured throat as it attempted both sharp intake of breath and rapid yowling exhale simultaneously.

Without warning his head and torso were slapped by a great hand of cold water, salt burning his throat and the tender flesh inside his nose.

The fire-like ripping sensation crawled across his body, registering itself at each nerve and joint as it clawed and scraped its way from his spasming right hand up his arm, and then wrapped the entirety of his form in agony.

With a marshaling of his scattered Will, he reached as far up into the sky as his Talent would allow to draw down around himself the great weight and force of the very air that swirled between where he crouched up into the rarest of climbs, Myrl centered himself and let loose a full atmosphere of force about himself in all directions, thinking that what or whoever it was that was trying to skin him alive was so close to him as to be shoved away by his flexing of his Talent.

Next to him! He could feel the resistance of… something as the force he had pulled to and then shoved from himself encountered unmoving opposition.

Darkness again tumbled him now limp form, freezing his now wet body. Tendrils of frost and thin ice crackled as it crawled up and over him, though his clothing and around it all.

Light. Flames on his skin.

Darkness and the return of those hated, frozen fingers that clutched and cawed at his body.

The feeling of landing on his back startled Myrl, and there was a series of screams followed by the sounds of something breaking. Shattering sounds all around him.

Several somethings… plates?

A voice. Yelling in sudden anger and surprise as Myrl stopped a fall he hadn’t been aware he was in the middle of with a jarring impact.

Wielding knives and torches as his skin was surely being ripped from his body. He tried to scream again. Or still, he wasn’t certain.

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A sharp cracking noise in his ear sounded, along with a deep voice shouting “Fucking what the Seven Hells is this Whaleshit?”

Something was wrenched painfully from the grip of his right hand, and the world popped back into focus.

At least briefly.

There was a garbled murmuring.

Blinking up into the light of what had to be the light of the midmorning sun, Myrl groaned. “What…?”

“I said, boy, what do you think you’re doing with this thing?” The voice was sharp, and had a thick Kjolta accent. He had met many of the Ghorma traders over the years who sailed the whole world over, looking for markets for their furs, preserved fish and bottled fats and oils.

He could just see, through slitted eyes, the outline of a bald head. The sunlight behind the head rendered most of what he could see into a smooth topped silhouette, but if pressed, he thought it was a bearded Ghorma man with a bristled curly beard, over a broad chest and set of shoulders. But he was still reeling from the punishment his body had taken at the hands of whoever had attacked him.

Moment by moment, details of his surroundings slowly hove into focus. The air which had so recently been tearing stips from the lining of his throat, now calmly moved in and out of his grateful lungs as his breathing steadied. Myrl ran his hands slowly over his body, looking for what had to be the worst of his injuries. Torn flesh. Slashes, and tears. He had been surprised at the complete lack of broken fingers and as he explored, he was amazed to find that while he was soaked to the skin in salt water, his body was only touched by the memories of the pains he had thought to have been subjected to.

Moving his completely unbroken neck, Myrl could see that he now lay beside a small blacksmith’s work area in the middle of a seaside shipyard. It was still midmorning.

The man standing over him had a broad nose, a wide mustache waxed into two great curving points, and a collection of the green and red tattoos of an older, very experienced and well traveled Ghorma man. His head was either naturally bald, or just shaven so finely that his blueish pate shone and glinted in the morning sun. The man had taken the knife from Myrl, and placed it in his small anvil before turning back to Myrl and offering a broad and heavily calloused hand.

Myrl reached up to the man, and was brought up to a standing position more quickly than he anticipated, his head swimming with the swift movement.

There was an awkward moment of Myrl staring, forgetting something, before he began to tip to his right.

…Ah, yes, dingus…no right foot… right… he thought, as he briefly scrabbled at the edge of the small anvil with one hand and the Ghorma man’s shoulder with his other. The man laughed, and reached out, holding the young king up with unmovable hands placed to either side of Myrl’s ribs. Myrl exhaled as air rushed from his lungs. The man’s grip was close to viselike.

With an exclamation of surprise, the man reached down past Myrl to the sand and brought up his remaining crutch. Handing it to him, the man said, “You popped out of nowhere, and rolled around for a bit looking like you were in pain.”

And now the man grabbed Myrl’s face in both of his large hands, bringing him face to face with the concerned looking smith.

“Are you well enough now?” He now thrust Myrl out to arms’ length, and looked him up and down. “You look okay now. But you also look wet. Did you have another crutch? You didn’t pop to here from wherever you were with a second that I saw, but you don’t look too steady on just the one.” He looked Myrl up and down again, and his broad brows beetled over his narrowing eyes.

And now he turned to his left, and shouted at some men who had stopped planing long, narrow planks of wood to watch whatever was going on between Myrl and the smith who had lifted him out of the sand. “You boys! Check the drift, see if another crutch is bobbing in the surf!”

“Thank you…” and Myrl paused, not knowing how to address the burly Ghorma. “I’ll be fine in a moment. I just need to catch my breath.”

Ignoring his king, the man turned now to a few men tending a very long steam box, set up to bend the thin planks to useful shapes. “Gil, Scathar, grab a team and hitch the small wagon. We need to get this man back to the palace.” The three men stared at Myrl, and his benefactor, before the heavy armed man shouted “OY! OY! OY! Go!” sending the three scrambling up the dunes toward a selection of small cabins.

You look too fancy to be here, sire.” He said, now turning to Myrl with a wink. “A Talent. And well very dressed. One legged, at that. HA! Never met a king before!”

Myrl was still trying to balance himself as the man turned back to him with a small leather wrapped bundle, twisting and tying twine about the leather.

“This is for you. Uhm, sire.” The man whispered that last. “We’ll get you back up where you belong in no time at all.”

From where he leaned on the stand that held an assortment of hammers and tongs, Myrl could see a small wagon trundling down the beaten path between the dunes.

In his hands, he could feel the shape of his small belt knife through the thin leather into which it had been wrapped.