The storm raged around him, each wave was like a fist of an angry god upon the deck of the ship.  Wang knew as the storm tossed him that he would never be going home again.  Home…

He thought of his wife, his child, and it seemed like someone else's life.  Someone who was not getting pelted with rain so hard it left welts upon his skin.  Some other life, where there was sunshine and peace.  Not in this hell where Wang found himself.

The deck pitched hard to the side, turning the world over, supplies spilling over the edge and into the black maw of the ocean that boiled around him.  He pitched to the side, but grabbed onto the ropes that whipped about like snakes.  Somewhere lightning cracked and the thunder roared though his chest like a cannon.

In thick sheets the rain continued to pour and the waves continued to batter the little craft, never in its wildest dreams intended for an ocean like this.  It was a fishing boat, meant to stay in sight of the coast.  But the coast was long gone now. 

The storm had come out of nowhere.  Blue skies had darkened in minutes, and before Wang could even draw in his sail it was upon him.  The wind had howled and caught his tiny ship, pulling it away from shore as he fought desperately to go the opposite direction, but it was as if an evil god was pulling him out to sea, and the harder he fought the harder it pulled him.

He had been fighting for hours.  The boat was tossed from wave to wave, and each moment blended into the next, and still the storm raged.  His mind had long since accepted his fate.  The ocean would claim him.  His family, his life, had ended hours ago.  This was the end, from the moment the black clouds gathered above him, he knew he was lost, but some part of him would not rest.

His body somehow kept working.  Whatever force was pulling on the boat was now pulling him as well, as surely as the tides.   The dark energy of the storm kept pushing his body.  His limbs ached.  His hands had long since gone raw pulling on ice slicked ropes.  His body twisted in the wind, not fairing much better than his boat. It had given all it had to give, yet somehow something kept it going.  His mind had died, but his limbs worked on, refusing to give up to the abyss that yawned before him. As the ropes cracked about his head like a whip he held on, the rough surface digging into his hands, the black waves pitching him to the side and nearly over into the freezing waters. But he held on.  And then he began to laugh.

It was a bitter cry from the hoarse throat of a dead man.  His lungs rasped with the laughter, hours ago they overtaxed themselves and the laugh came out as a twisted wheeze, but came it did, and once it began, Wang was powerless to stop it.

It spilled out of him, echoing off the waves, pealing though the thunder as the storm continued its relentless assault.  The gods pummeled his craft and he laughed in their faces. 

Was this the best that they could do? 

They bellowed down at him and he tossed his head back and laughed.

Some small part of him realized that the laughter was madness.  That his mind had gone, lost into the swirling waves and wind.  But he did not care, his waking mind shook with laughter, and he howled back at the wind.  Finally the waves raised him up, and pull as he might he could not right the ship.  He knew that the wave would crest with his tiny craft at the top and dash him down into the blackness from which there was no escape.  His laughter had finally pushed the gods over the edge.  No more would they toy with his existence.  Finally they would crush him under their boot and he would be no more.  He would finally find the peace of nothingness.

But the wave did not crest.  It did not crush him into the oblivion that is all his soul now yearned for.  The boat was tossed, but landed on a beach, a dark forlorn ice covered beach.  For a moment his shattered mind thought that the storm had brought him home.  But as he stumbled out onto the rocky coast, he felt something dark calling to him.  As soon as his boat left the water he could feel it.  Much stronger than he had out there upon the waves.  The gods who had summoned the storm that stranded him on this desolate strip of land, were calling to him.  He was not home, and they were not done with him.  He had many miles to go yet…

Belongs to Category: AllEvents