When I was a child, my grandfather asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, to which I replied, “a horse.” He didn’t bother asking me why I wanted to be a horse or what I would do once I became one, here merely said, “Good luck with that, Charles.”

Looking back on it now, I can see that he was being sardonic. But at the time, his response gave me the impression that with enough effort and just a bit of luck, some day I could become a horse. Needless to say, I never did become a horse. Instead, I became something much less impressive: a hearth son, the purposeless and wafting younger brother of a provincial lord, doomed to do little more than disappoint his family and the world at large.

It didn’t seem such a bad life when I was alive. No one expected anything of me, and that’s exactly what they got: nothing. But that didn’t mean I did nothing with my life. Quite the contrary, I traveled extensively, sampled practically every different type of cuisine known to man, and learned to curse in seven different languages. Do you think my brother William, the Lord of Yarbruck has done any of that? I’ll tell you the answer: no. In fact, the man eats the same bloody thing every night of the week and barely curses in his own tongue.

Now you might wonder why I’m telling you all this, and the truth is, I’m not entirely sure. But I’ve got a pretty good feeling it’s going to tie into things at some point.

See, when you’re lying dead in the bottom of a river, things start to get dull pretty quickly. So naturally, you start to take a good hard look at your life, remembering the sort of person you were and the sort of things you did for fun. For me, this involved a lot of dice games, a lot of drinking, and a lot of throwing things you weren't supposed to throw from places you weren't supposed to throw them from.

But sooner or later you get bored of remembering all the good stuff, and that’s when all the bad stuff comes floating up to the surface: all the money you borrowed from friends and “forgot” to pay back, all the nasty names you called your brother when he turned his back, all the fights you started under the guise of being drunk when really you just wanted to watch someone get walloped.

Eventually, you give up. You realize that none of it matters anymore, because despite every bad decision you try to justify, despite every minor achievement you try to convince yourself you should be proud of, despite everything you did in your too-short life, you’ve ended up here, in the bottom of a brown, murky, excrement-filled river flowing through the heart of Rippshaw. And as you lie there and watch in disgust as bits of filth float all around you, you find yourself thinking, Hey, at least I’m not the grossest thing in here.

After a while, your mind goes quiet, and you just start to watch. You watch the shapes pass over you. Here a boat, there a boot, now and then a fish, though god knows how anything breathing survives in this water.

All in all, it’s not so bad. You never get hungry or tired or aching, and no one ever comes asking for the fiver they lent you back. It’s a simple existence, but not unlike the one I was living before: hanging around with the odd bits, waiting for something interesting to happen.

But then one day, something interesting did happen. It rained. And it didn’t just rain, it poured. Sheets of the stuff came down. It was a right downpour and then some. I could hear it, thundering against the surface of the river. And it wasn’t long, as the river swelled and the water continued to rise, before the current picked up, and everything, including yours truly, slowly began to drift.

Oh yes, I was going places.

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If you think traveling by riverboat is a lark, I highly encourage you to stuff your pockets and hop in the river the next it rains, because that might be the most fun I’ve ever had. I bobbed and bounced and tumbled and turned. I coasted and careened for what must have been miles. But eventually, the rain died down, and the current began to slow, and so my journey came to an end.

Or so it seemed.

I wasn’t certain at that point where I was. I didn’t think I was in Rippshaw any longer, if only because I could actually make out the blue of the sky. Wherever I was must have suffered a great deal less from smoke and smog and other sorts of nasty stuff.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, I thought to myself as the river returned to its usual lazy wend. But little did I know that the fun was just beginning.

Now, I don’t know what my pockets had been stuffed with to make me sink the way I had when that spur-galled, sheep-biting scut chucked me into the river. But clearly, at least some of whatever had drug me down to the bottom had freed itself in the course of my travels, such that I found myself slowly but steadily beginning to rise closer to the surface.

My first thought upon this realization was, Oh goodie! Now I’ll be able to see better what’s going on up there! But my second thought was, Oh no, what if it’s not as interesting up there as it is down here?

But no matter, there was nothing I could do to stop my inevitable rise to the surface, and eventually, I found myself floating face-up among the reeds. At least I’m pretty well sheltered here, I thought to myself as a gull flew overhead, waiting until it was right over top of me to empty itself and prove me wrong.

But it’s not as though I was in any real danger. After all, who would go poking around in the reeds, looking for whatever gnarly nonsense might’ve been washed ashore with the rain?

It was just as the seagull circled back around and I found myself beginning to wonder whether he wasn’t looking rather peckish that I heard something. Voices—and they were nearby.

“Oi, what about that one there?” said a man in a rather loutish Westwick accent. Good gods, I thought to myself, do people really talk like that? Westwick accents should really be illegal.

“Let’s have us a look,” a second voice answered, this one low and raspy and somewhat less offensive.

There was a pause filled only by the sound of gently splashing water, as though someone were wading, or perhaps paddling, through the river.

“Might do,” the second voice said, though the man was clearly unimpressed.

“What do you mean, ‘might do?’” the first voice asked with a note of defensiveness.

“Looks like rubbish,” the low, raspy voice replied. I could imagine the man wrinkling his nose and shrugging his shabby shoulders.

“‘Course he looks like rubbish,” the first voice said, “he’s a corpse. What do you reckon he should look like, fine China?”

Then, there was a long silence.

This might be the point at which you would expect me to realize, Hey, I’m a corpse! They must talking about me. But it is with no small sense of shame that I must confess that at no point did I suspect that the gentlemen in question might be talking about me. Instead, my thoughts were more along the lines of, A corpse? Well, that’s disgusting. I think I’d momentarily forgotten that I was a dead body caught in the reeds. I guess I just thought of myself as good old Charlie, the guy who hangs out at the bottom of the river.

But my days as such, as I was soon to find out, were about to come to an end, and a far less appealing scenario awaited me.

I watched the sky above me begin to spin.

“Alright,” the second voice said. “Good enough. Let’s bring him in.”

And then, everything began to move. It was as though the clouds were drifting backward, the whole sky taking up a current of its own and flowing in the opposite direction of the river. What’s going on? I wondered. What in god’s name is happening? And that’s when I realized that it wasn’t the sky that was moving, it was me. I was being pulled, towed somewhere.

No! I wanted to say. Don’t take me out of the river! I like it here. I get to lie around and watch people teeter over the edge of the walls all day—drunks and dodgers and children whose mothers have to yank them back by the collar. Don’t take me out and put me in the ground, I beg you!

But of course I couldn’t say anything. So instead I just lay there, watching the sky pass overhead, and prayed that that blasted seagull wouldn’t come back.