Color. A whirlwind. Grasping hands. It’s a dream he can’t quite remember, he can never remember when they come in strings like this. So he tries. He pushes on the strings until it comes back to him in scraps and slivers, or until the spiderweb memory breaks. True, it will reform, but not like it had been. Never like it had been before, where a gossamer thing like this is the only thing that tethers him to what he’s thinking when he dreams. They’ll come back to him eventually, but broken, fragmented things that lose their meanings after the context has been lost forever.
He breathes in. And out. Swamp water.
He opens his eyes to a mottled canopy and the distant caw of carrion birds.
The pain is manageable now, it’s never as bad as it had been those first few days where it had been nothing but healing poultices, and bandage changes, but the phantom limb remained firmly anchored to his elbow, his ghostly fingers twitch and flex. He hated it. He hates it even now, even though he’d shelled out what remained of his stash for this… shoddy excuse for a replacement that he hates to wear. It chaffs and sweats, and it’s a crude, ugly thing, but hey — if the shoe fits. If he didn’t look like a pirate before, he certainly looked like it now.
He’s still figuring out this one-arm thing. Putting his horrendously long hair up was now impossible, and the Norn had suggested cutting it, as was Norn custom for loss — he’s trying not to think about that, another thing he’s locked away for the ages. There’s a terrible loss that permeates his soul and tears out bits and pieces of him in an incomplete shadow of what he’d been not weeks before — that counts as a loss, right? A month or so’s passed — maybe not quite enough time to mourn, but he doesn’t want to give himself away just yet, especially not to Farrinsson.
The ring keeps the physical pain away, but it does nothing to stop his dreams. The swamp could be partially the reason why, but he has to keep that on the backburner. There are other things that need his attention. Like what next.
The swamp is oppressive, the necromancer fits right in and gave the Captain the magical key to the shack, a freedom to wander but the warning to never stray far is still hiding in the back of his mind, a terrible, echoing reminder that he does not belong here. A sigh and a terrible cry.
It doesn’t matter. The hook is fine.
This swamp is fine. Fiel is fine.
Everything’s fine.
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