I remember arriving in a city called Ovespuerte. There were more buildings than I ever saw in my entire life, with more people walking in its cramped streets and looking from their windowsills. It was here when I found my new home, the Temple of Ovespuerte, which sits atop a cliff within the city, looking over the calm waves rocking the ships moored at the docks. That was the first time I saw the great lake they call “the sea.” The temple was no less grand, as priests and acolytes were milling within the carved stone colonnades, and the crowds of people gathered in the open-air temple, smelling the scent of incense blown by the salty wind. In this temple, I spent errands as an acolyte for the man who rescued me: Sacre, now the Rector of the temple. He rescued many acolytes like me in one form or another, who assisted the priests in the temple in their sermons, rituals, and ceremonies. Throughout the years, I gained the trust of Sacre and the others, but I never knew why he had rescued me in the first place. Soon, I obtained the right to call myself a lay priest, the lowest rank of the clergy. Those whom Sacre had favored, people he rescued from various situations, had been transferred to other cities within the kingdom. I was now alone, the only one in the temple under scrutiny by the other priests, who were suspicious of me from the day I arrived. I kept silent as they often tasked me with cleaning the latrines and stables, as they left me to copy an older copy of the Divine Decree by hand, straining my wrists day by day. In the days that I have been assigned to lead the sermons of the temple to the paying attendants, who were mostly less-than-literate commoners, I spoke about the virtuous nature of our Count, the liege of the city of Ovespuerte, and how we were lucky to live in his authoritative aegis with hollow words from my empty tongue. I taught the silent masses the nine Divine Decrees without practicing them myself. Every word was without passion, for the childhood zealotry vigorously instilled within me was beaten out of me from my past punishment. I held contempt for the gods who abandoned me, yet I worked as a priest to make money to live daily and be useful to Sacre. Today, Rector Sacre had called me. We descended a set of stairs I had never seen, along with two guards with spears. The candles within the alcoves that illuminated the downward staircase seemed to grow more ominous; their orange motes of flame dimmed themselves into a red color. When the door opened, a noisome and metallic smell filled my nose and made me gag. The temple guards behind me pushed me, and Sacre pulled my wrist toward a bare stone slab in the middle of the circular basement, surrounded by indecipherable glyphs painted with dried blood. The guards held me down, and I saw the hanging skeletons wearing stained priestly robes. I realized they were the twenty other people that Sacre had helped, people with circumstances like mine. “Why?” I croaked, staring at his uncaring eyes. “I need sinners for this ritual.” Ritual? He had read the holy text of the Divine Decree. There are no sanctioned rituals for human sacrifices in that book, so what he was doing is blasphemous. The dried blood from the ritual circle seemed to hydrate itself, and the basement convulsed like a beating heart. In the end, I was someone to be used after all. Before his ceremonial knife plunged deep into my chest, a burst of strength swelled within me, and I broke myself free from the guards. I held Sacre’s blade and thrust it deep within him. I tackled the other guard, grabbed his spear, and knocked the other one out. Everything became a blur when I made my escape from the temple. I hid from alley to alley behind the dusty and damp walls of Ovespuerte’s buildings. The guards of the port roamed the streets in search of me. I found myself in the docks, where many ships are moored. My eyes drifted to one of the piles of wooden barrels and boxes on the docks, and I soon spotted a neglected open crate with its cover next to it that I could use to hide and escape. Between it and me is the ambling crowd of people like me and foreign humanoid races from the other continents I heard about. In a river of scales, fur, and skin, I blended in the crowd, avoiding the notice of the patrol near me. Once near the crate, I hid in it, waiting for someone to lift it to the ship. I patiently waited in the darkness until I felt someone lift the crate. The box shook unsteadily with my weight, and I felt whoever lifted it struggling to lift it, swaying unsteadily. Finally, the crate was set down somewhere on the ship. I’m free, at last. Yet, how I gained the strength to escape from the grasp of my captors remains unknown to me. My destination remains unknown, and I fear being caught as a stowaway. Yet, if fate allows, I can start anew. I realized that I had fallen asleep from the gentle rocking of the waves, yet I heard ominous footsteps getting louder and louder. Someone lifted the box and threw it, making me roll along the wooden floor of the ship until I hit a wall of crates. Looking down at me are two tall bipedal canid figures wearing green kilts. They may stand on two feet and can use tools, but that’s where their similarity to humans ended. I realized I’m a stowaway to a Beastkin ship, at the mercy of the savages of the southern continent I’d only heard about in sailor’s stories. The canid Beastkin barked at each other with their stout snouts, their voices irritable to my ears. Yet they stayed their hand and growled at me, jabbing their paws at my chest in my daze. It seems like they are asking me questions in their guttural canine language. Before I could curse them, their tiny eyes rolled, and they decided to tie me up, hoisting me over their shoulders. Now, I am bound tightly on the ship’s mast that held its fluttering triangular sail, observing the dog-people barking at each other. The one with the decorated locks seems to be the captain of this ship, for he stood taller and ordered the rest of the bestial crew. “Release me! I’m a priest of the Divine Decree!” I hoped they would think that I was a priest of Ovespuerte and, realizing their mistake, they would release me. Yet they momentarily stopped and stared at me, pointing their snouts in my direction, but they were soon back to bickering with each other, pointing at the sea and making incomprehensible gestures at me. One of them walked closer to me and pointed their knife at me. Are they debating whether or not I would be sacrificed to one of their heathen sea gods or become bait to the looming leviathans that lurk within the depths if ever one of them arose? If they are civil enough not to slit my throat, they should know that I can be a temporary deckhand until we find land. The clouds soon gathered in the sky, darkening as more covered the blue expanse above. The winds picked up speed, and the waves stirred, with the ebb and flow of the waves growing more violent. The first rain showers soon wet my skin and dampened my once-pure white robes, growing more intense that they dampened the loud barks of the Beastkin. The canine crew of the ship scrambled to maneuver their sail and held tight to the railings of the ship. When the ship pierced the towering crest of a wave, I saw horrid, sleek, scaly, and slimy shapes rising from the waves in frenzied droves surrounding the ship, shapes that I had only seen in the oceans depicted on the corners of weathered maps. The ship groaned as it crashed into a tidal trough. Yet, emerging from the colossal waves is a leviathan creature, a serpentine crustacean with a hundred vestigial limbs and a struggling fanged whale bleeding on its beak. It crashed on the ship’s prow, reducing a portion of the vessel in splinters and broken planks. It took no time for the rest of the ship to sink, and soon, every orifice in my body drowned in the salty waters.

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