The sun had been an enemy for two weeks, now, and she was sick with a fear and dread. She bleached in the light of the sweltering afternoon sun and turned her face away from the crystals of light where its rays danced across the fluttering crests of the waves.
There was blue as far as her eyes could see. .. Near a fortnight, now, she had been cast helplessly to the bowels of the sea .. stranded atop a floating raft with ne'er but lonely horizon in site. The nights were chill and relentless, and it cast her body with an influenza of starvation. She partook of the sea-water though rebelled within her stomach if only to attempt her survival. Throat had been burned into waste by bile, and ribs were sunken inwards against gasping lungs.
Flesh was but a peeling, red mass of abnormality. More than once, she had seen islands in the distance -- had sobbed tears of utter joy through the beads and braids of her black hair -- but they had, alas, been but illusions in her mind. The sickness did not behoove her.
By what grace of what god did she deserve such a fate? Even *her* tanned flesh was withering in the long, burning days of the tropic ocean, and she had never before thought it possible. In the shadow of her makeshift sail -- a thing made from her own tattered leather dress -- she huddled, staring her time away at the troughs of the lapping seas. Their froth was a repulsive thing, and to know that there were carrion far below that waited for her rotting carcass to fall was furthermore disturbing.
The winds had been unkind. Truly, they had been *ruthless* .. and it was one of these, right then, that caught her wild, obsidian hair within a gust and licked the white-black feather out from behind her ear, where it had been tucked in a fashion of her people. The woman gasped, thrusting her arms out to catch the flutteirng feather as it eluded her. Forearms and breasts splashed helplessly against the water where she was leaning over raft's edge, and the tiny boat -- a thing twined of sinews, and slatted with fragile logs -- kicked its rear up in the air with protest.
It nearly overturned. She swallowed sudden terror as she watched the feather dance briskly off against the furthest waves.
She was a proud wife. She had borne a multitude of children. Yet, despite this, she was but only a woman, and beneath the screaming eye of the sun, stranded amidst what felt like a lifetime of identicals seas, she grappled a handful of the glass beads tied in her hair, and howled out to the sky.
The winds were ferocious and cruel. If only they would sweep her into death.
