him, he began to suspect something more than just mere luck. The sea, too, had rejected him and spat him onto the shore, painfully alive. If gods did exist, and if their circles were wide enough to touch him, they took a cruel pride in keeping him alive.
Now that is irony.
The former humans, he was certain, would have agreed. And if he had learned anything from them and their excuses, it was that their gods rarely seemed content to allow a victim of their ironies merely to wallow in their misery. They preferred to leave reminders, ‘omens’ to rub their jagged victories into wounds that had routinely failed to prove fatal.
And, as his own personal omen crested out of the waves to turn a golden scowl upon him, he was growing more faithful by the moment.
Like a black worm wriggling under liquid skin, the Akaneed continued to whirl, twist and writhe beneath the sun-coloured waves. It emerged every so often to turn its single, furious eye upon him, narrowing the yellow sphere to a golden slit that burned through the waves.
Just as it had burned all throughout the morning when the sea denied him, he thought. Just as it had continued to burn throughout the afternoon he squatted upon the sand, watching it as it watched him.
He wasn’t quite sure why either of them hadn’t moved on yet. For himself, he suspected whatever divine entity had turned him away from death thought to inspire some contemplation in watching the sea.
Humans often thought sitting and staring to be a religiously productive use of their time. And they die like flies, he thought. Maybe I’ll get lucky and starve to death.
That seemed as good a plan as any.
The Akaneed’s motives, he could only guess at. Surely, he reasoned, colossal sea snakes couldn’t subsist purely on angry glowers and snarls from the deep. Perhaps, then, it was simply a battle of wills: his will to die and the snake’s will to eat him.
Though those two seem more complementary than conflicting …
By that reasoning, it would be easy to walk fifteen paces into the surf until the sea touched his neck. It would be easy to close his eyes, take three deep breaths as he felt the water shift beneath him. It would be easy to feel the creature’s titanic jaws clamp around him, feel the needles merciful on his flesh and watch his blood seep out on blossoming clouds as the beast carried his corpse to an afterlife beneath the waves.
The Akaneed’s eye emerged, casting a curious glare in his direction, as though it sensed this train of thought and thoroughly approved.
‘No,’ he assured it. ‘If I do that, then you’ll have an easy meal and I’ll have an easy death. Neither of us will have worked for it and neither of us will be happy.’
It shot Gariath another look, conveying its agreement in the twitch of its blue eyelid. Then, in the flash of its stare before it disappeared beneath the waves, it seemed to suggest that it could wait.
Gariath lay upon his back and closed his eyes. The gnawing in his belly was growing sharper, but not swiftly enough. Sitting still, never moving, he reasoned he had about three days before he died of thirst and his husk drifted out on the tide. The Akaneed was willing to earn its meal and he was willing to settle for this bitter comfort.
That being the case, he reasoned he might as well be comfortable.
The sounds of the shore would be a fitting elegy: nothing but the murmur of waves and the skittering legs of beach vermin to commemorate the loss of the last of the Rhega. Fitting, perhaps, that he should go out in such a way, shoulders heavy with death and finally bowed by the weight of his own mortality, with only the beady, glistening eyes of crabs to watch the noblest of people disappear and leave this world to its weakling pink-skinned diseases.
The Akaneed hummed in the distance, its reverberating keen rumbling up onto the shore and scattering the skittering things. The waves drew in a sharp inhale, retreating back to the open sea and holding its frothy breath as it went calm and placid. Sound died, sea died and Gariath resolved to die with it.
In the silence, the sound was deafening.
He recognised immediately feet crunching upon the sand. The pace was slow, casual, utterly without care or concern for the dragonman trying to die.
An old enemy, perhaps, one of the