He padded soft along the beach. A rare chance to be alone. The surf sighed its unending music. It was a summer evening. Ryheric was eighteen, and had been sent out on what ought to be an easy night patrol.
There was a dark haired girl on the beach, visible thanks to the bright moonlight silvering the waves and wet sand alike. She was probably the same age as him. She hauled in a lobster net. The moon was high above, idyllic.
He was about to stop, turn back the other way so she did not see him. The night was too bright, and it was too late for that. She looked over at him, pausing what she was doing. What was this stranger doing out here, alone and so near to her village? It didn't seem to matter to her in that fateful immediacy. She was lovely and he was handsome, she smiled at him. Something in him sank as he found himself returning it.
He understood this was just a memory. This moment came to him sometimes when other memories were riddled with black. This one was like a life raft. An oasis. That calm midnight beach, the girl, a stranger to him, offering him that smile for no reason. It was a solace to him, for everything that had happened after, and what that same beach had looked like by morning. One part of the memory, pure and beautiful, was gripped hard to erase the rest.
It was no use, though. There was that flat ground, red, slippery. A flash of light shining off it like a mirror. The morning sun? No, it was lightning. the images were confused now. The ground was not that beach anymore, but the deck of a ship at night in a storm. Dark eyes bored into his as his right shoulder bled freely, the ship groaned and tossed and he knew he would sink down with his opponent's still warm corpse to bleed out and drown.
The crash overhead of thunder by the Starmere Lake caused Son of Mouse to snort and bolt. Ryheric jerked awake, in another cold sweat with Tarsorel's snarl trailing off at the edge of dreams.
"Rabid dogs like you need to be put down."
He exhaled a sharp breath through his teeth, trying to shake it all off. Less successful this time.
Fortunately the Breeland storm was coming over, Cwennie had gone to find cosier shelter for herself, and there was no one there to see the lapse as his hands shook and he drank from his waterskin. His grey gaze shifted upwards as he drank and the first rain drops of the storm came down upon him.
