At first, he thinks he’s back on the Island.
He is not wholly wrong. It is an island, similar in many ways, from the warmth of the water to the softness of the white, sugar-fine sand where his fingers curl into it. But unlike the last time, his arrival to this place is not some smooth transition from sea to sea, like stepping through a rift in time and space. He coughs raggedly, a little water coming out, and blinks open his salt-crusted eyes. Rocks rise sculpturally along the edges of the cove, and the crystalline water laps over him in shallow waves as he sits up.
Never in his life has he been washed up on a beach this way. Never in his life has the sea treated him so harshly. He cannot remember falling in, though he must have. The storm must have been terrible, to have driven him so far off course, and tumbled him out of his sealskin, and flung him upon this unfamiliar shore. For it is immediately clear that, despite the similarities, this is a new sea, a new beach. New air, even, smokey and green. He coughs again, reaches up to massage his throat. If he were to try to speak, he knows his voice would feel and sound like gravel. A sunburn is just starting over the bare planes of his chest, in spite of the deep tan that ordinarily protects him. How long had he been laying here? How had he possibly survived?
Without water, it won't be much longer.
Graeling staggers to his feet, soggy linen encumbering the movement of his legs. As he turns toward the island, he cannot help but notice another difference: this place is deserted. There are no throngs of languorous fairies strewn across the beach, no grass-thatched stands offering refreshment. Nothing but the trill of unfamiliar birds…
He sees her, then, emerging from the wall of green beyond the rocks.
She looks like she belongs here, in her bikini top and colorful sarong. She looks self-assured, purposeful, striding out of the tree-cover and taking in her surroundings in a practiced manner. She looks like an angel, and relief floods through Graeling. Surely, if anyone can help him, it is her. It may be the sun-poisoning giving him this illusion of certainty, but he clings to it like a lifeline, and takes a few strides toward her, the sun gilding an outline of him as it slowly sinks over the sea.
He croaks something that could be “help” or “hello,” and then collapses face-first in the sand.
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