Content Warning: Body horror
There is no longer anything strange in this file.
It's been hundreds of years since the Siege, and still, ships come in with confused travelers to drop off on the shores of Kortha. Humans tend to envy a lifespan that seems limitless compared to theirs, as the downsides are unimaginable. What could hundreds of years in captivity feel like? What could multiple human lifetimes strung together as a fugitive feel like? What would it feel like to return to the world after that? It's not something a human is built to comprehend.
Another ship rolls into Octairia, but this one is different. Unwilling to stop, the ship crumples the pier beneath it like a series of toothpicks, splintering against the rocks. I crumple, myself, as my eyes glance over the sailors, bent and twisted.
Despite my better judgement, I walk aboard the ship, slowly glancing over the poor souls that lived here. The helmsman is shackled to the wheel's spokes, kneeling and bowed like a mantis. They are silent, and they are cold. Weak voices echo from below, not yet drowned out by the water rushing in. Peering down, I see a crack in the floorboards.
Hundreds of bodies, writhing together in one singular motion, like a heartbeat, or a swallow. Not stitched together, not cauterized or adhered, just inherently formed together after hundreds of years in the dark. Something in the dark and the damp, far away from remembrance, but so close to each other that something Wrong happened that they would be remembered by each other forever. The mass writhes again, sighs with some labyrinth of lungs into lungs into lungs and a thousand eyes turn and lock on me.