That might not be such an unusual thing for most people, but for Jetei it was decidedly discomfiting. For at least half his life he’d gone to sleep every night comforted by the rocking of the ship under his back, and now the lack of it was enough to drag him out of the dark depths of unconsciousness despite the objection of his pounding head.
He cracked open one eye, slitting it against the light that snuck in through a small crevice in the window shutters and seemed to sear right into his brain. He could smell salt air and hear seagulls wheeling overhead, so he couldn’t be too far inland, but the black-scaled pirate couldn’t remember for the life of him how he’d gotten from ship to shore, or even what might have precipitated such a move. Had he gotten so blindingly, monumentally drunk the night before that he’d forgotten he was on shore leave? Was that even possible for him? His tolerance for everything from cheap wine to terrible grog was infamous.
As Jetei puzzled through his current circumstances, he gradually became aware of more details. For starters, it wasn’t just his head that was throbbing. Everything seemed to hurt, as though he’d decided to go a few rounds with the Siren’s Roegadyn bosun and then climb the rigging a few times for good measure. He lay still, taking an internal inventory, and that was when he became aware that although he’d risked opening both eyes by that point, only the right seemed to actually be registering anything.
A creeping, icy dread began to coil through the Au Ra’s gut as he reached up towards his left eye. Clawed fingertips first encountered the soft fabric of bandages wrapped heavily around that side of his head, and Jetei felt his gorge rise as he touched his eye and felt... nothing. The familiar firmness of an eyeball was simply no longer there, and what was left was a sickening hollow that made his fingers recoil on instinct.
As though that were the trigger, everything came rushing back in a wave that did nothing to help Jetei’s nausea. After two years of first struggling to recover in the wake of the Calamity, and then to resist acquiescing to the Galadion Accord, Captain Greave had finally, as he’d put it, accepted the inevitable. The explosion of violence had been almost immediate and not unexpected. Some of the men -- Jetei included -- had sided with the captain, agreeing with his reasoning that the lives of the crew wasn’t worth fighting an unwinnable fight, but most had rebelled viciously against the idea of throwing away their pride as pirates. They would live or die as wolves of the sea, and anyone who didn’t agree... Well, wolves always needed prey.
What had happened after was murky and confusing -- half-formed memories that darted away from Jetei’s attempts to grasp them like fish in shallow water. He remembered the smells and sounds of battle: blood and acrid smoke, the clash of weapons, the shouts of the fighters and the screams of the dying. He thought he remembered seeing Captain Greave fall, and then... what? The flash of a blade, wielded by a man he’d once called friend, followed by... nothing.
Jetei groaned, pressing the heel of his palm against his one remaining eye as he he struggled to remember what happened after, but it was useless, an utter blank. All he knew was that Llymlaen had apparently taken some kind of pity on him and, half-blinded or not, he was alive, and that... that was something. That was a start.
