Tusk reached out his hand.
His red eye's sunken, pitch in the black, dark in the shadows. All as he...
Snap!
A woman's neck between his crimson fingers...
A woman of yellow eyes and long white hair, her face beautiful and thin as she cried in streams of maroon.
Tusk screamed, "Eth..."
---
"Ethera!"
He woke up in an old wooden bed, his body wrapped in bloody bandages like a mummy. His arms, legs, shoulders, and chest were tightly encased in white ribbons of pain.
He reached out, his hands and legs shaking in agony.
"Ether..."
Rattle-Rattle...
Across the small fifteen-foot thatched house, the sounds of pots and pans rattled in the kitchen.
Two people stood over an open furnace flame, cooking something that smelled delightful to Tusk.
He turned his stiff bandaged head to see me and Ceauli cooking together. Our arms shoulder to shoulder as I turned my head to see Tusk's awake red eyes glaring back at me. A single tear of blood dripping down his bandaged cheek as he sat up to the morning bays sunshine.
"He's awake," I announced while tapping Ceauli on the shoulder.
She turned around and said in a relaxed repeated tone, "he is awake..."
Tusk looked right at us. His usual straight face sunken in pain as the coursing arrow cuts and deep gashes along his chest, stomach, and legs ached. Meanwhile, Ceauli and I were cooking mushroom stew over a blaze heated stovetop that vented out into the chimney roof above.
"What are you two doing?" asked Tusk, his bareback leaning forward in a tiring stretch, since he spent two whole days asleep.
Ceauli spoke up, "what does it look like we're doing? We're cooking, duh!"
"Cooking?"
He fell back on his rough pillow and felt his unmovable arms and legs shake in a horrid dream of the past. He then turned back to us and quietly stared.
"It smells good-"
Slam!
Before he could finish his sentence, the door to the small thatched house that we were staying in slammed open.
In the brightly lit doorway stood an old wrinkled man, his body curved forward in a hunch as he held onto an old wooden cane. Next to him stood a guard who carried on his waist a short iron sword, and wore leather-strapped armor along with a singular small iron helmet.
The guard stepped in first and walked up to the bedside of Tusk unannounced. Behind him stepped the old man, his cane tapping across the wooden floor, limping forward, he stopped behind the guard and watched over Tusk's sleepy face. He then leaned in ready to ask the wandering swordsman some questions.
"I am Chief Jilmu of the Fishing Village of Morigan. I would like to ask, who you are and where you have come from, traveling swordsman?" The Chief turned and pointed to me and Ceauli, "the other day I asked your friends here, but they don't seem to know anything about you, so your own cooperation would be very much-"
Tusk interrupted, "I don't come from anywhere. I am a nobody, so leave me alone..."
Chief Jilmu stepped to the side and pointed at Tusk's arms and legs.
"I'd like to let you know that this town is in much danger because of you. You killed our Guardian Deity. And I know it was through self-defense but even you yourself know that that isn't fully true. I know that you are no simple man. For no simple man could take down such a strong Master Archer..." He looked at Tusk's left leg and left arm, "and no simple man would go through so much pain to do so... So who are you? And who was that woman you killed on that hill?"
Tusk turned to me and Ceauli with a sigh, "huhhhgggg..." He then turned back to the old man, looked him straight in the eyes, and said, "you're better off not knowing anything old man."
The guard next to the Chief suddenly got angry from Tusk's nonchalant response and raised his sword, but Chief Jilmu stopped him with his cane.
"It is fine Corowind, lower your weapon... He doesn't need to answer us now... He went through a tough fight. He needs his rest."
The old man turned away from Tusk's bed and limped over to the old thatched door he came from. He opened it halfway before turning back around with one last question for Tusk.
"But one more thing... Since you make yourself known to us as only a vagrant wandering swordsman of no background or history, I would like to know one last thing from you. Just one last thing..." The old man, with his wrinkled face and cunning smile, looked straight at Tusk, "you spoke in your sleep of a woman and her name... Who is this Ethera?"
Tusk snapped!
"What did you just say?!"
"Ethera?"
Tusk in a pit of mindless rage reached out of bed faster than the eye could see, grabbed the guard's sword from his own hands, and knocked him to the ground unconscious with one strike. Tusk then ran up the old man and pointed the guard's blade at his throat.
"Forget that name immediately!" he threatened with the tip of the iron blade inching ever so closer to the wrinkled flaps of the Chief's double chin.
Chief Jimlu stood on the creaked wooden floor between the doorway and the bedside. He looked at Tusk's body, his face, his new friends. He was bewildered at the sight of it. The pure rage and anger in this vagrant's eyes. It was nothing he had ever seen before. In his eighty years on this desolate planet, not one face matched this man's anger, none looked like how he gritted in anger in that moment. No one so distraught, no one so pure in madness, no one so controlled by their own revenge that the mere inflection of a name would bring their brittle beaten bones to go so far.
Tusk stood up on his two shaking legs. His bandaged bleeding limbs rattling with every step he took. But he took every step without looking back, without thinking twice. He towered over Chief Jilmu, the sword in his shaking hands inching forward. He was ready to take the strike, to kill, to-
"Wait!"
I stepped between them. My hands pushing against Tusk's chest as I backed up against the old man. I looked up at Tusk as he kept walking forward, mindless, uncontrollable, rage-filled. I could see it in his red eyes. From just one word he was prepared to kill an old man without hesitation. He was going to do something so bad, something so far gone, that he could never go back...
Or was he already too far...
Ceauli stepped up, she spoke to Tusk with a hint of self-reflectiveness in her own anger.
"Tusk, go back to bed! He's the one who saved you, he has a family, a daughter, grandchildren! Are you really going to kill him over just a stupid name?!"
Tusk turned his head toward Ceauli. He looked in her selfish, soft, plain eyes.
"Did you hear that name too?" he asked.
"I... I... I did...!" she replied, nervous from Tusk's hard pressence.
He turned his head toward me and looked down at my conflicted face. My hands pushing against his bleeding chest as he continued to press forward.
"What about you Hoefen?"
"I did too..."
"Tch!" he snapped his mouth and turned away. "Fine, but don't bring it up again."
He dropped the guard's sword to the ground and flopped back on his creaked old rusted bed.
"Wake me up in two days. Then we set out to the Kings Outpost," he commanded while falling asleep.
I turned to Cheif Jimlu who looked up at Tusk in fear.
"It's fine," I said patting him on the shoulder, "he's... He's got some problems. But he just needs to sleep on them a bit. We'll try again in two days."
The old man looked at me, his wrinkled face curling with every word spoken.
"Sunny boy, you shouldn't have hope in that man. He is a lost soul. Tormented far worse than you could ever imagine."
"Imagine? What do you..."
I didn't know what to say back to the old man. I just let him walk out the door, my arms, legs, and body frozen in the center of this room... This room... Ceauli the same as me... Then a few moments later the guard woke up, picked up his iron sword, and followed the old man out the door.
I watched as they walked down the street. The old man with that cane, with that limp. Why did he want to know about the girl Tusk spoke of in his sleep? And why was he so mean to him? And why was Ceauli so angry at him too?
Why...?
And why does everyone hate the Shorebringers? And why does everyone have so much hate...
Hate...
No... No no no, I'm thinking about this all wrong...
It's...
Why...
Why don't I act like them, like Ceauli? Why don't I get angry and yell at him, why don't I yell at her when I'm mad with her forward advances, why... I know I'm mad, but... Do I ever get mad...? Do I...
I...
I'm so confused... I need to talk to Ceauli about this...