Deliverance

It wasn’t until the following morning that I saw the extent of the destruction, one aggravated by the soft tipped waves that never ceased in their quest for certain annihilation, erasing all that once was.

Boxes, brittle with the seas vengeance, lay strewn over the course of a full pasang. Two broken bodies, half a mast, a small pouch of copper tarsks, torn sacks of what might have once held grain and a crate of wine, intact. Deliverance.

The cards which had once sought such sweet solace in the pouch at my side were gone. If they were calling to me, such songs were now falling on deaf ears. I knew even if I was lucky enough to find some of them that I would never again hold the entirety of ancient murmurs. The timeworn whispers of my past were gone forever, and for the first time in my life we were parted, in all likelihood, never to be joined again.

I sat in the sand, facing the ocean, my knees drawn up with a circle of arms draped around my legs. For ahns I stayed there, staring out over the crested waves of the sea, until finally my eyes could take no more and I slept. It was not the sleep of exhaustion, but a repose of spirit, an indication that all was not as it seemed, a fact that was never more true then when I awoke. The Two of Cups card had been washed upward over the sand to settle near my right foot. Wet, worn and a little more faded then what I remembered, but I knew if one could find me, that soon we would all be together again.