Epilogue
Three weeks prior.
Ridley furiously treaded the water threatening to pull him under, as he struggled to stay afloat long enough to watch as the huge raptor flew away carrying the last of the women — Delia — with it. He needed to see what direction it went in. Because he’d not abandon them. He refused to even consider it. He’d fought against every obstacle fate had thrown in his path, and managed to free them all. But he’d not been able to rescue them. Though they were free, he’d inadvertently sent them into the claws of despair, literally.
Screaming his rage to a storm-tossed ocean as flashes of lightning and thunder crashed overhead, he forced his water-splashed eyes to focus on the vague shape that he knew was the last he’d see of Delia for a while. “I’ll find you, Delia! I’ll find all of you! I promise. Fight to stay alive!”
Then he felt an overwhelming wave of despair, knowing how unlikely it was that he’d find them alive. “Even if nothing is left of you but bones, I’ll bring you back to your families. I won’t leave you here,” he vowed.
A loud creak rang out far above his head.
He looked up in time to see the mast of the ship break apart and begin its plunge toward him in the rough, choppy waters.
Gulping one last lungful of air, he dove, swimming as strongly as he could, using every muscle in his body to get as deep under the water as he could before the mast landed on him, surely killing him.
He swam below the ship itself, his lungs burning, screaming for relief as he hovered there, waiting for the mast to enter the water.
But then, as he lay there, praying for the seconds to rush by, the ship’s hull above him, began to turn.
Already on its side, water had filled the hold and the water’s weight was causing the body of the ship to become unbalanced, the waves beginning to take it under.
Kicking his feet as hard as he could, he pushed off the ship’s bottom just as the motion of the ship flushed his body out from beneath it.
He broke the water’s surface on the opposite side of the ship, further away from the cliff covered shoreline he’d seen the monstrous birds carrying the women toward in the distance.
As the ship began to go under, the waters became even more treacherous, slamming him against the rocks that had first wrecked the ship.
The last thing he thought was that if he died, there’d be no one to tell the story of what happened here.
No one to come back and search for the women.
No one to remember them.
Then he slipped under the water.
His body bobbed to and fro for several minutes, then suddenly, he was lifted up out of the water, his shirt hopelessly tangled in the torn wood of what used to be the mast of the ship as it bobbed free of the ship that had momentarily trapped it under water beneath the now water-filled ship.
Unconscious, his legs dangling lifelessly in the storm churned waters of a remote sea, his face remained above the waterline, his shirt his lifeline, as fate took him further and further away from what would have been a sure death, toward a life that would be spent in search of women that he had no relation to, but owed every debt to.
A life that, if he survived to live it, would be driven by the guilt he bore of his inability to save the women that had no one to turn to but him.
The End
Thank you so much for reading Valka, my contribution to Dark Orcs of Helfallow.