Dig and his brother floated in the dark waters of Trisbrine, back-to-back on a raft made out of driftwood that had previously been their father’s boat. Dig was rowing steadily onwards into empty ocean, using a large wooden pot lid as an oar. As he blinked away the slight sting of salt water seeping into his eyes, he observed the tranquil nothingness surrounding him; there were only the still waters, gentle breeze, and pale grey sky brushed with wispy clouds. The water was a murky, desaturated blue—almost a slate grey. It glinted serenely in the pale sunlight, casting a soft glow onto the bottom of Dig’s face.

Dig was a lean, muscular young man; his skin had a slight tan to it, and the tips of his ears were elegantly pointed as was typical for his elven kind. His eyes were green, earthy like moss and lichen. Dark umber hair clung to his face, long and damp and faintly wavy. The young elf had on his favorite tailcoat—soft black fabric with a seam running down the length of the back until the cloth split into twin coattails, which ended just past his kneecaps. Its sleeves were cuffed and adorned with buttons, made of brass and etched with the Eventris coat of arms. On the left side, the pocket was torn from all the times Dig had shoved his fist in there to fetch his pocket watch—a watch he had unfortunately lost in the storm and subsequent wreck.

The corners of Dig’s mouth twitched as his internal clock struggled against its rust. He knew that the storm had hit them about an hour after they passed by the Eventris coast, but he couldn’t remember how long ago that had been—or how long it had taken to build the raft, nor how long they had been paddling into the nothingness. Based on the sun’s position and the time of day it had been when they left their home in Westfern—and based on the general course they had initially set out on—that would now set them…set them… Damn it, his thoughts just wouldn’t move.

“Hey—” Dig turned his head slightly to the left so that his younger brother could hear him better. “How long, do you think?”

His brother’s head was hanging low, his chin touching the top button of his brown chesterfield coat. He was a skinny young elf, with short auburn hair and a constantly dreamy, disinterested look in his baby blue eyes. His jagged bangs were always hanging down into his face like he was one of those ponies in the capitol that pulled the carts of beer. Only his right sock and shoe remained—one argyle knee sock and burnt-brown penny loafer, the penny somehow still wedged in its slot.

The boy lifted his chin, frowning slightly. There were a few streaks of red running down the right side of his face. “How…how long what?” His voice rasped dryly.

“How long do you think it’s been since the storm?” Dig asked.

“You’re the academic,” his brother mumbled. “You figure it out.”

Dig narrowed his eyes. He wanted to rebut that statement—yes, it was true he was the clever one, but he didn’t appreciate his brother’s tone. It was mocking, almost unserious; very much like their father. His brother sighed and lowered his left hand into the ocean, grabbing at the waves with his boney fingers in a bored, repetitive motion.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Dig said.

His brother’s response was instantaneous, as if he had been waiting to say it for some time: “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“Hey, now—don’t be a child.”

“I am a child.”

“You’re fifteen. Don’t be dramatic.”

His brother yelped and yanked his hand out of the ocean, splashing both himself and Dig with the icy water.

“What did I tell you?” Dig exclaimed.

“Father said that there were eels in these waters,” grumbled the boy.

Dig rolled his eyes. “If that’s the case, explain to me why you’re sticking your fingers into the water in the first place.” A bloody good example of our old man’s parenting skills, he thought. To think the boy holds my opinions in the same standing as that old fool’s—it’s deplorable. Then he added, to his brother: “You should know by now that father doesn’t know anything about what lurks in the Trisbrine—doesn’t know anything about anything, really. He’s been alive for too long—the bloody old elf is losing it, has been losing it for the past hundred years. The man was crazy long before either of us were born. He’s got an overactive imagination, yes, but any soul he once possessed has long since been swallowed up by the tedious ways of the incredulous world.”

His brother scoffed. “You don’t know. There could be eels out here.”

“Actually, I do know. These look like shark waters; I’m sure of it.”

His brother threw up his hands. “Oh sure—what makes sharks more likely?”

Dig tightened his grip on the pot lid. “I studied for six years at the Eventris Institute of Arts and Sciences, remember? Six. What’s father ever done?”

“He tells me stories.”

“All he knows is stories. He makes up tragedies in his past to reap sympathy—fabricates issues that don’t exist as some sorry attempt at making himself relevant to our modern culture.”

“He’s not always wrong—”

“Oh-ho-oh!” Dig shook his head, anger rising tight in his chest. “Don’t mock me—don’t pretend that you believe that. You know, just as well as I, that our father suffers from mad delusions. Or have you forgotten them? Do you just sweep them aside and ignore them? The man is crazy—he thinks that the mayoral election back in Westfern was rigged by an underground hobgoblin conspiracy—he thinks that the King of the Northfold is secretly two goblins and a kenku stacked on top of each other, and that cannibals are a more imminent threat to society than the increase in tabaxi immigration.” He looked at his brother over his right shoulder. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The boy was quiet for a moment, eyes fixed on the rise and fall of the waves. Then he said: “One of these days he’ll be right about something, and I’ll cherish the sweet look of surprise on your face.”

Dig almost laughed. “I wouldn’t hold your breath on that…”

His brother’s boney jaw was drawn taut, his mouth small against his face and spread flat like it was barely there at all. The center of his cheeks and the tips of his ears were starting to flush red, despite the chill of the ocean. He was staring intently at his hands. He muttered something to himself, but Dig didn’t quite catch it.

“Hey, now,” Dig continued, “don’t be so down. It’s not as if this is the end of our tale! This is the first chapter of our lives—the first adventure! The great commencement!”

His brother rolled his eyes. “Great commencement…” he repeated, breath thin and quiet.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I feel the same. Same as ever.”

Dig frowned at the blood running down the kid’s cheek. “Well, let me take a look at you anyway.” He put the pot lid in his lap and carefully twisted his body around so that he was facing his brother’s back, the raft wobbling treacherously as he did so. The kid groaned, glancing begrudgingly over his left shoulder. Dig leaned forward and pushed the kid’s wet hair away from his face and, grabbing him by the chin and temple, turned his head to left and right, eyeing the cuts on his cheeks and the dilation in his eyes.

“Look at you,” Dig smiled with triumph ringing in his voice. “Just some scrapes. You should hope that they scar, then you’ll have plenty of treasures to take home! People will see you and ask you all about your scars, and won’t you have a story to tell them!”

“Oh, well that makes it all better!” The kid sounded almost offended. “All the violent stinging from the bloody water will be worth it, then!”

Dig’s grin deepened, ignoring his brother’s sarcastic tone. “But that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? A little pain now for a story later? The pain will fade, but the adventure will stay with you until the day that you die. Don’t you want something to cherish?” Dig looked up at the white expanse overhead. He wished his brother would adopt a more optimistic attitude. “Pessimism,” Dig added, “is the plague of wonder. It eats away at the pillars of life until the floor gives out beneath you. All you have to do is decide to be optimistic.” Dig pointed up at one of the clouds, which resembled a donut. “Seems I never properly explained to you how to be optimistic. Here—look at that cloud. The key is to choose to see only the body of it—the loop, not the hole in the center.”

“The what?”

“The cloud—the donut-lookin’ one.”

The kid glanced away, eyes bored and dull. “I don’t see a donut.”

“It’s that cloud—”

“No—I see it, I just don’t think it’s a donut.”

Dig sighed. “Well, what do you wish to call it, then?”

“A kind of dwarven coin, maybe. Or Ouroboros.”

Dig hated it when his brother got all cryptic—he sounded like their father when he did that. “Ok, well,” Dig continued, “it doesn’t really matter what you call it, the point remains the same. Optimism is easy, you just need to choose it.” He sighed, twisting carefully back around so that his back faced his brother. “One day, you’ll understand.”

His brother sat in silence while Dig sat in thought, his brother looking down at the penny in his shoe while Dig looked out ahead of them. A faint shape bloomed in the far distance—a curious blob of steel blue, set against the slow-setting sun. Dig sat up straighter, knowing at once that the silhouette had to belong to an island, vast and unexplored. His heartbeat quickened; eyes glinted with infatuation. He kept on paddling towards the island and didn’t take his eyes off of it until the dark of night swallowed it up.

Cold moonlight filtered weakly through the gauzy film of clouds spread thin against the heavens, leaving everything submerged in a thick layer of pitch black. There was the mellow sloshing of the water against the raft; the humming of wind, like a lullaby—one that Dig had been longing for all his life. Dig pulled in a deep breath of fresh air and sighed it out, the gentle breeze running its cool fingers through his slicked-back hair. His arms felt heavy in their sockets as he dragged the pot lid through the water over, and over, and over, and over again; muscles stretched thin under his skin, strikingly defined and slinking all the way down from his biceps to his knuckles like giant tapeworms. A sharp heat buzzed inside his shoulder blades and down the small of his back, giving his clammy skin a false sense of warmth. While he rowed, he did his best to ignore the hollow feeling twisting about in the pit of his stomach, yawing and biting at him with growing hunger. Two starving brothers, lost at sea, he thought, rowing towards a vast, undiscovered island. A good tale. Repeatable.

The silence was broken by the soft grumbling of his brother’s stomach. The kid shifted in his seat. “Father was right,” he said, his voice barely audible over the lapping of the water.

Once more, Dig held back a laugh. “Excuse me?”

“He told us not to go.”

“And?”

“And I’m wet, tired, and”—his stomach rumbled again—“and starving. Aren’t you starving?”

Dig felt his own stomach writhe again. “There are worse things than hunger,” he said. “Stagnation is a worse fate. Father never understood that.”

“I think he was right.”

The repetition of that opinion cut Dig like the lash of a whip, and the previous inclination towards laughter turned to loathing on the tip of his tongue. “Father believed that we were incapable of leaving his perverted, overprotective nest,” Dig hissed. “Chose to believe that.”

Dig’s grip on the pot lid was tight again—white-knuckled this time. “Everything that he’s done for us—everything he did to you—he’s done it out of the selfish desire to keep us locked up like trophies, showing us off as if we’re proof that he’s somehow a good father. But everything I’ve done? Every trial of his that I’ve endured, every lecture I’ve tolerated? All of that—all of it—I did for y—”

His brother screamed, recoiling backwards so violently that he cracked his head against Dig’s back. A dull, throbbing pain rung in Dig’s shoulder blades and he flinched forward, causing him to slam the pot lid into his kneecap. He whirled his head around, craning his neck over his shoulder to see what the kid was going on about—“What?” he shouted. “What is it?”—but the kid just kept pointing out at the sea, his breathing shallow and his hand shaking. Dig’s olive eyes scanned the waterline past the tip of his brother’s thin finger…

There.

Just barely catching the dim flecks of moonlight, gliding elegantly towards them through the inky water, was the fin of a shark. It was massive; based on the shape of the fin’s point, Dig knew it had to be a great white.

Dig turned back around, shaking his head. “It’s only a shark,” he said. He resumed rowing towards the island. “It’s not even that close to us.”

“What if it catches up to us?”

“Do you see how lazily it’s swimming? It’ll lose interest in an hour or two. If, for some reason, it chooses to pursue us, then I’ll just take care of it.”

The kid hiked his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his shins. “You’re gonna get yourself killed.” He was shivering.

“No I won’t, don’t be absurd”—Dig patted his left jacket pocket. “I still have my penknife.”

It was given to him the night before graduation by Professor J. V. Acacius, the preeminent mind in philosophy and ethics at the Institute—a man who reaped respect and awe from both his peers and underlings, a man who knew the value of both psychological and physical exploration. A man who was, in Dig’s humble opinion, the sort of man who should have fathered him.

“You’ll be the death of you someday,” his brother continued. “I’m sure of that. Dad seems to think you’re done for.”

Once again, Dig’s grip on the oar tightened. “For the love of—would you stop bringing him up?” he shouted. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks—that man’s world is miniscule. His mind can’t even fathom the amount of glorious things out in this place.”

“What—in the middle of the ocean, cold and starved?” His brother picked at the leather of his shoe. “And what glorious things? Stuff that wants to eat you?”

“Home was no better than this.” Dig’s faced darkened. “Home was suffocating. Father would tell us to shut up and eat our fill—to become slaves to monotony rather than to explore new appetites. He should be ashamed of that.”

“That’s better than dying.”

“There are worse things than dying.” Dig sighed. How could he put it so that his brother’s young mind would comprehend it? That place that their father called a home was sick with intellectual famine. As long as he could remember, Dig had been starving for experience—forced into a fast by his father. This was for their greater good, this journey they were on. Dig knew it to be a pilgrimage that would shape the both of them, that would satiate the hunger until the next adventure came. I need him to see, he thought. He needs to see that I’m in the right.

Dig sighed again, not knowing which thought to voice. In the end, he chose to articulate none of them. All he said was: “Put your head on my shoulder. Try to get some sleep.”

“Fine.” His brother pressed his back against Dig’s, nestling the back of his head in the nook of Dig’s neck and left shoulder.

All through the night, Dig continued to row, until eventually the rowing became so monotonous that, though his arms remembered to do the motions, his mind forgot that he was doing it. He started to drift into favored memories, into recollections of first year at the Institute, then his graduation ceremony. He recalled the first time he had ever taken his brother sailing—how they had slipped out in the early hours, when the moon was still out, and had stolen themselves down to the docks. His brother had only been eleven years old—much shorter, back then, and brighter in spirit. Dig remembered climbing onto their father’s boat and pulling his brother up after him, shushing him all the while because the kid talked too much—this was before their father had driven all the excitement out of the boy. Dig then taught the kid how to read the stars, how to tie knots. His brother had loved him back then.

Dig was stirred from his daze by the arrival of morning, which spread its glittering guts gradually across the sable sky. Dig blinked—his eyes crusty and raw, unsure of when he’d last blinked. The first thing he saw was the island ahead of him; they were so near it now that he could make out the jungle in the middle and the shells on the white beach. The palm trees all around the island were tall and odd, with thin trunks that curved like they were moving out of the way of something big and unseen. There were dozens of them, protruding from the hills and valleys like broken fingers groping for the skin of clouds across the sky.

Dig glanced behind him; he just needed to be sure that he’d been right about the shark. A satisfied smile spread across his face as his eyes were met with only the ocean. But as he turned back around, a sleek, silvery fin brushed past the front of the raft. Dig froze, his paddle inches away from the water. The shark began to circle in a wide berth around the raft, slowly, meticulously. Dig slipped his hand into the left pocket of his coat and pulled out his penknife, trying to move the rest of his body as little as possible. He held the blade in his left hand, wielding the pot lid in his right like a shield. Gingerly, with his left elbow, he nudged his brother in the ribs. Immediately the kid’s eyes shot open and he sat up straight.

“What?” he shouted, looking about wildly. “What happened?”

“Shhh!” Dig elbowed him again.

“Well, wh—” The kid stopped short and froze, not even breathing. He stared at the shark fin as it carried on with its patrol.

“Stay calm,” Dig said, voice low. “I have this under control.”

“Are you insane—?”

“Be quiet and don’t move.”

The shark crossed in front of the raft again. From what Dig could make out from the water, the thing was about the size of a horse—a stallion. He kept his eyes on it as it circled, waiting for it to get close enough for him to reach it.

Closer…

Closer…

The shark passed by the front, fin mere inches away from edge of the raft. Dig jabbed his knife forward, plunging the blade into the center of the fin. The cartilage was thick and raw, like crude rubber, and the knife went all the way in—right up to the gilded handle. It didn’t even bleed. The water splashed violently as the shark thrashed its tail. Dig held tight to the knife as the shark attempted to swim away, forcing the blade to tear horizontally along the fin until it slid out the back side. The shark vanished under the frothing waves. Dig’s eyes flicked across every nearby inch of the water’s surface until he spotted the fin reemerge on his left. It started heading towards them. As it neared, the shark stuck its wide, grey face out of the water and opened its toothy maw. The thing had eyes of black beady marble—solid orbs with no life in them at all, and they stared directly at Dig as if taunting him. His father had eyes like that. He tightened his grip on the pot lid.

With its immense, meaty jaws, the shark bit down on the edge of the raft. Dig reeled back to avoid getting bit; he slammed into his brother, who tumbled backwards into water. Dig heard the splash, but he didn’t turn to look. His eyes were locked onto the shark; the thing appeared stuck, its teeth wedged into the wood. Dig lifted the pot lid above his head and brought it down on the shark’s nose as hard as he physically could. The thing tried to wriggle way, but it only managed to tangle itself up in the loose ends of rope that held the raft together.

Dig smiled. I’ve got him now, he thought. He forced his knife into the top of the shark’s head, making an incision from the middle of the skull all the way down to the space between the shark’s eyes. The creature’s tough, rough skin fought against the little blade to the point where Dig had to drop the pot lid and use both of his hands to tug the knife across. Then he yanked the knife out of the fissure and watched the shark twitch and gush black blood until, finally, it fell still. Dig’s hands dripped with inky ichor as he stared at the shark’s vacant eyes. Its teeth were still embedded in the wood, its fins still entangled with old rope—the creature was like a new edition to the raft’s crew, drifting with them on the grey waves.

Dig’s smile broadened. He wiped his penknife on his left pant leg, then closed it and slipped it into his trouser pocket. He turned his attention to the waves, scanning them for his brother. His mind was addled slightly with the thrill of success—he had never killed anything before, and he found the process quite stimulating—but after a moment or two of quiet, with nothing but the sloshing waves around him, panic started to take root in his chest.

Then a hand shot out of the ocean on his right—Dig grabbed it at once and pulled his brother onto the raft.

The kid sat for a moment, panting and sputtering. His eyes fixated on the blood on Dig’s hands, then drifted over to the lifeless shark still clamped onto the raft. “I guess you did it,” the kid said between coughs of saltwater.

Dig patted him on the back. “Told you I would.”

While the kid lay down on the raft to catch his breath, Dig lowered himself into the sea. He grabbed the end of one of the raft ropes and wrapped it around his torso, tying it off with a trusty halfling-style knot. He began to swim towards the island, towing the raft and the shark behind him. With each sidestroke, the blood rinsed off his hands.

However there, was a persisting grey tint on the edge of his palms below his pinkies, and the area around his fingernails.

The waves got larger and more tumultuous as Dig neared the beach, arching higher and higher with more and more intensity, until finally he and everything he carried was swept up by the whirling surf and spat out onto the powdery white sand. Dig struggled to his knees, intermittently laughing and coughing up seawater. He stared at the beast; his stomach rumbled. Lots of meat on that shark…

Dig untied himself from the raft and beast, then helped his brother to his feet. His mind was seized on the thought of food. Until he had smelled the meaty, fishy odor of the shark, he hadn’t quite realized exactly how hungry he was. And his brother wasn’t as strong-willed as he was and had been complaining about hunger for some time now. Yes, that seemed to settle it—they’d need to cook the shark.

Dig got behind the beast, put his left shoulder against its belly, and began to roll it over—enlisting his brother to push alongside him; the boy protested, sighing and whimpering about how exhausted he was, but once Dig put the idea of dinner in his head, the boy got to work. Side by side, they began to roll the shark up the beach.

“We’re going to need a fire—a massive fire,” Dig said between grunts, “and a valley of some sort to light it in, otherwise, when the sun goes down, our fire is going to be snuffed out by the night wind before our meal is even remotely cooked.”

“Where are we going to find that?”

“In”—Dig forced more of his weight into the shark to get it over a rock in the sand—“the jungle, most likely…” He adjusted his grip, now pushing the shark with the flat of his back. “Not likely to find shelter on the beach.”

“No—no way—!”

“I thought you said you were famished.”

“I am but”—his brother, too, began to push with his back—“we can’t go in there! You’ll get killed—just like I said!”

They reached the edge of the jungle’s tree line and stopped pushing. Dig’s brother sat down beside the shark, leaning his back against the thing’s sand-covered side, panting.

Dig pulled off his soaking wet coat, first wiggling his left arm free of the slimy hole and then the right. He dropped the limp mass of fabric down in the sand next to his brother without bothering to turn the sleeves right-side-out. His white cotton dress shirt was nearly transparent with water and the clamp on the right side of his tan suspenders had come undone. He fixed his suspenders and gave them a slight snap with his thumbs, then turned to the jungle in front of him.

“There should be some sort of basin near the middle of the island, I should think,” he said, voice certain.

His brother sighed and let his back rest against the shark. “I give up,” he said. “I’ve tried to get you to see reason, but you’re too forgone into father’s clutches. So go, go forth and be eaten by a puma or something, I don’t know—whatever lurks in there.”

Dig turned to him, not able to comprehend what the kid had just said. All he managed to sputter out was: “W-what?”

“This is the great commencement, right?” his brother mocked. “So go! Commence! Being eaten will serve you right.”

“No—not that—” Dig rubbed his temple. “I’m not the one ‘in father’s clutches.’”

“Sure you are.”

“That’s absurd.”

His brother glared. “You claim that all dad cares about is stories—that fiction are all he knows. But you’re worse than he is! You’re so caught up in your fantasies that you can’t even see that we’re going to die out here!”

“We’re not going to—”

“Stop pretending that you know things!” his brother shouted. “You don’t care about any of that stuff, really—about knowledge or intellect or me or anything.” He tapped his cheek, the one with the cut on it. “All you care about are scars.”

Dig tilted his head to the side. “No, I care about you.”

“Why?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

His brother rolled his eyes. “Be serious, for a moment—be grounded in reality for just one damn second. Tell me: if we had a different father—one that you actually cared about at all—would you—”

“I’ve bled for you,” Dig said quietly, jaw tense. “Don’t you know how that old man has bled me like a stuck pig? I’ve protected you—I’ve saved you from his fate—”

“If you’ve ever bled at all,” his brother interrupted listlessly, “it was for you. It was for…” he waved his hands carelessly in the air, “the weave of it all—for your obsession with a ‘good narrative.’”

“You had said that you were hungry,” Dig said slowly, trying to wrap his head around his brother’s unwarranted contempt. “I’ve killed a shark for you. I’m trying to cook it so you can eat it. Is all that not enough? What’s the matter with you?”

His brother closed his eyes, lip quivering now. “You’re what’s wrong with me.”

Dig shook his head. “You’re a selfish little brat sometimes, did you know that?”

The kid shrugged again. Sniffled. Dig stared. His father’s grasp on the boy had been stronger than he’d realized. Or maybe it was just the hunger. He turned away from the kid; if he fed the boy, then he’d come around—he’d see, at last, that Dig had been right all along.

Saying nothing more to his kid brother, Dig disappeared into the jungle. It was tangled and thick, twisted with trees and vines and roots, and plants with leaves wider than his shark. Vines twirled down from endlessly tall boughs, the treetop canopy conjoining together into one matted wig of leafy hair. The ground was stitched together with small, gnarled roots that hugged the earth like little spines. The incoherent chittering of tree-dwelling creatures fell silent as Dig passed through the thick of everything.

Just as night was settling into the sky, Dig saw a faint orange glow in the distance. Upon approaching it he saw it belonged to a campfire, which was set in between two shallow cliffsides of packed dirt and mossy rock that were just shorter than Dig was tall. A figure sat by the fire—a woman in a ratty purple sea-captain’s coat. She was sitting with her back towards Dig, legs crossed, honey-colored hair woven into a long braid that hung flat against her spine.

Dig stood at the top of the ravine, staring down at the woman. “May I join you?”

The woman’s head snapped around instantly and her dark, wild eyes met his. Her face was fairly tanned and freckled, with finely carved cheekbones and chapped red lips. She stared at him for a moment with a blank expression, then smiled. “Aye,” she said, “fire’s just been made. I’m just waitin’ on my men— the two of ‘em are out in the woods hunting, should be back soon with some game. But come—come sit!” She patted the patch of soil next to her. “Not often are there survivors ‘ere. Always nice ta have new faces.”

Dig climbed down and sat next to her, stomach growling at the smell of fire despite nothing being cooked on it. The dry warmth of the fire was to Dig’s skin the breath of life. He gazed into the flames, mesmerized, the thoughts of his brother slipping to the back of his mind. He hadn’t realized the extent of his own hunger until now.

“Where ya from?” asked the woman.

“Westfern, just outside Evantris. How about yourself?”

She sighed. “We set out from Yssoriel. Ever been?”

Dig shook his head.

“Wouldn’t recommend it,” the woman continued. “It’s all shipyards and elven gypsy camps—truly the bread-heel of the Northfold.” 

Dig could feel the woman staring at him. “Bad turn of luck?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“Bad luck—shipwrecked, aren’t ya?”

“It’s an adventure,” Dig glanced over at the woman, partially shaken from his trance. “And I don’t believe in luck.”

She leaned closer to him, her eyes dancing over every feature of his face. “No?”

“No. It exists, sure, but I don’t rely on it—nor do I despise it. It’s relative, and therefore not to be worried about. Luck can do what it pleases.”

The woman’s gaze fell intently on Dig’s neck. “Is tha’ right…” Her voice trailed off.

“Luck is just events that happen,” Dig continued, “events that you chose to fall in line with. Therefore it’s outweighed by choice. It’s better to rely on choice than the infinite possibilities of luck, don’t you think?”

“Oh—absolutely. My men and I, we’re survivors—we chose to be survivors.” She gazed into Dig’s eyes and smiled. “Choice is everything.”

Dig smiled back. In the mix of fire and moonlight, the woman’s face was eerily beautiful. More importantly than that, she understood—she understood him.

The cracking of twigs behind Dig tore his attention away from the woman. He looked back up to the top of the ravine, where he had been standing earlier. With the firelight burning in his eyes, along with the smoke and ash and black of night, he couldn’t see who was standing there. He looked slightly to the side of where he thought the noise had come from and then, just barely, he could make out the faint outlines of two lanky figures.

“Any luck?” asked the woman, peering up at the invisible men.

“Not much left in this bloody jungle,” said the shadow on the left.

“But we did get a li’l somethin’—enough for dinner.” said the one on the right. “Thing’s skinny, though—not much meat on the bones.” There was a dull thud as the shadows seemed to set something down in the dirt behind them. “My knife ain’t clean, neither,” the right shadow continued. “Can I borrow yours, Captain?”

The woman looked to Dig. “Stranger a’ Westfern,” she said smoothly, “I’m afraid I’ve let m’own knife get rusty.” Her eyes seemed to flicker like the firelight all around. “But ye seem a clever type, th’ kind ta carry a means of protection wit ye.”

Dig met her eyes and smiled, fishing his faithful penknife out of his trouser pocket. He held it up to the shadow man.

The shadow reached down—hesitantly, at first—and took the knife. “Quite the pretty li’l thing,” he said.

As the man pulled his arm back out of the firelight, Dig noted the quality of the man’s coat. Though it looked damp and caked with sand, it seemed to be in much better condition than the captain’s coat—well made, good quality. Slowly, Dig rose to his feet and peered over the top of the ravine, staring at the heels of the men’s boots. There was the faint click of the knife being flicked open, the rustling of leaves, the muted sound of the knife slicing along something soft and fleshy. As Dig’s eyes adjusted to the moonlight, his eyes were able to focus on the shadow’s coat. It was hard to tell the color of it, but it was certainly a dark fabric and there was a seam running down the full length of the back until the bottom separated into two coattails. The sleeves were cuffed and adorned with ornate buttons. The pocket on the left side was torn.

It was his jacket.

Dig put his hands on the edge of the grass and pushed himself out of the ditch. He walked hesitantly towards the two men, arms hanging lifelessly at his sides, trying to get a glimpse of the animal they were carving. First thing he saw was the feet—one bare, the pale skin almost glowing in the moonlight, and the other one wrapped in argyle and enclosed within a sandy penny loafer; the light of the moon glinted off the penny still lodged in its slot. Mechanically, Dig’s eyes moved away from the shoes and up the length of the body, right up to the gut, where one of the men was dragging Dig’s penknife from the belly button up to the sternum.

The woman appeared at Dig’s side as he watched the men dissect his brother. She hooked her arm around his and pressed her head against his shoulder. “Never seen one quite so young ‘ere,” she said. Dig didn’t reply.

She looked up at him, dark eyes glittering and sultry. “It’s a shame, I s’ppose—a young’n like tha’. But we chose,” she continued. “We chose survival.”

Dig stared at his brother’s pallid face, trying to see the whole boy and not the cavern in his center. His stomach convulsed and his mind was overcome by a sea of numb. He wished that his eyes would burn out of his skull, or that the earth would swallow him up. He wished that he were dead—no, not dead, worse than that. He wished he were home. The fire crackled behind him, the smoky embers twirling up to the dark, clouded sky.

Dig’s stomach rumbled.

***

This author will also be featured in the Fantastical Summer anthology!

Lucy Grecu

Lucy is currently a second-year apprentice at The Company. She grew up in Los Angeles, California, and spent nearly every summer doing musical theater camp. Lucy spends her time drawing fictional characters, reading novels very slowly, and getting her friends to watch every movie she considers a classic. You can find her at LucyGrecu.com, where she blogs about the mundane curiosities of life!