Chapter One: The Shore

From

The Dossier of Dr. Brink, Volume One, Part One

The world arrived as unfiltered sensation before thought: the rhythmic shushing of waves, the distant cry of seabirds, the grit of damp sand under my left palm, saltwater burning in my sinuses. Then light—a bruised purple-gray sky of a receding storm. Then dull pain. Then the total, terrible awareness that I was alive.

I pushed myself up from the mattress—my mattress, from the ship I had been serving aboard. My pack of personal effects was beside me, tangled in the ropes that bound the frame, and my scalpel and bone saw were at my belt, a sign that the ocean had not stripped me entirely of my dignity.

I recalled that there had been a monumental storm, likely a cyclone, appearing on the western horizon when I had retired to my quarters after a particularly taxing shift. Some colleague notified me through the door that we would be rerouting northward to avoid the inclemency. I thought nothing of it, then promptly drifted to sleep still in full uniform. That was my last conscious memory aboard the Intrepid Lens.

And then I woke up on the shore. Of the ship—of its instruments, its captain, my one hundred ten crewmates who had been aboard—there was absolutely nothing around me. No wreckage. No bodies. No broken spar, nor scrap of sail. The fabric of the sea had, by all signs or lack of signs available to me, absorbed them entirely, and left only me, face down on an unknown coast, lying on a mattress like an infant set adrift in a cradle.

I have always been, by training, trade, and temperament, a scientist. I do not fancy myself the type prone to indulge in extended bewilderment when there are data to gather. I steadily arose, coughed out a mouthful of brine, slapped myself twice upon the face, and attempted to gather my bearings.

The rising sun was breaking through the cloud cover to the east, which put the sea at my back and a continent before me. A dense, wild forest pressed in from the west. I looked both ways down the beach with my surgeon’s eye. To the north the beach stretched into nothing except seaweed and uncertainty. To the south the coastline curved toward a windswept headland of gray stone cliffs, and from somewhere at or behind those cliffs, a thin, pale plume of smoke rose against the retreating weather front.

The auspicious southern smoke was the only evidence in any direction that another person existed within my horizon; it prompted within me a stirring relief that I resolved to transmute into propulsion. I first dragged my mattress farther up the beach, to the base of a low, scrubby dune at the backshore. My pack came with it, still secured by the ropes, and I took a quick inventory of what was inside: assorted alchemical and tinkering supplies, some rudimentary nautical rations, a small crossbow I had been trained to use but had never encountered a reason to use, and my own handcrafted thumb piano. I gave it all a look of proper satisfaction—not much, but it was mine—then turned to the south and began to walk, dragging the waterlogged mattress behind me.

⁂

Thirty minutes or so into my journey, I came upon a large, sea-darkened log. It was half-buried in the sand and alive with a phenomenon I had never encountered: a cluster of pale, rubbery shelf fungi that pulsed with a soft violet light, gentle and rhythmic as a sleeping breath. A small creature sheltered beneath the log’s overhang—a crustacean, something like a crab, its carapace evidently made of cloudy, prismatic crystal that caught the bioluminescent glow and scattered it. Upon my approach, the thing clicked its little claws at me. I held my ground, and it retreated to where I could no longer see it.

I had theretofore spent years cataloging the natural chemistry of the seas around my homeland. Bioluminescence was far from unknown to me, but this fungal organism and its particular internal reactions were entirely novel. I found myself briefly captivated before moving to investigate. The spores they released upon stimulation—a gentle press of my scalpel to one of the conks—had properties I could not assess without a proper laboratory.

I collected what I could in one of my glass vials—prefilled with neutral solvent—though my angle was awkward and I contaminated the sample with several drops of seawater from the damp bark. A diluted specimen is still a specimen, I reassured myself, and noted the possibility that the spores, if properly refined, might serve as a component for luminescent inks or visibility potions. I sealed the vial containing this first local discovery of mine and packed it away with care.

I also pried loose a chunk of the damp log for its potential utility as firewood. I split it into manageable pieces with my bone saw and arranged them across the mattress to dry in the obscured but nonetheless strengthening sunlight as I continued south, inelegantly hauling the whole arrangement behind me by rope like a makeshift sledge.

My trek along the beach became harder going past the halfway point. The sand gave way to shingle, to algae-slick rocks, to the narrow shelf at the cliff base, and athleticism is not, frankly, my strongest suit. The rope snapped once. I nearly went down twice. The log-wood scattered upon the stone. I gathered it, retied what I could, and kept moving with a tenacity that I think my mothers would have recognized and likely considered charmingly overambitious.

⁂

I continued on for at least another hour, recognizably overburdened and growing increasingly weary from my stubborn decision to haul the encumbering mattress. When I finally rounded the headland and came out into a second, smaller beach—a protected cove, sheltered from the open sea by a rocky outcrop—I discovered the source of the smoke. I also saw the spears.

There were seven of them. Small, bipedal, scaled beings—reptilian, of terrestrial hue, with wide black eyes that caught the light strangely. They were Sauropsians, I would later learn, though that word was as alien to me then as they were. They were arrayed across the backshore, twenty or so meters away, blocking my access to the village of huts and drying racks that occupied the cove’s interior, and every one of them held a sharpened obsidian-tipped spear pointed with professional directness at my person.

I immediately halted upon sight of them. I dropped the towline of my mattress and partially raised my hands. My pulse quickened.

The individual at the center of the formation—shorter than the others by perhaps a handful of centimeters, but radiating, by my assessment, the quality of leadership, their scales a richer tone, their posture a deliberate stillness—studied me intently with their dark eyes. I studied them back. We were approximately the same height.

We stood like that for a very long time. The waves lapped behind me. The smoke from the village drifted overhead. No one moved. Eventually I offered the quiet, nervous greeting of “Hello, I am a doctor,” in my society’s predominant trade language. I received no reply beyond subtle squinting and the slightest shifting of spear posture.

I thought: I likely share no common language with these beings. I am wearing what may appear to be weapons. I am a stranger who has walked out of the sea. This is a very tense situation.

Then I thought: I am hungry, and so are they, probably, given the look of those drying racks.

What I proceeded to do next was the product of deep exhaustion, genuine hunger, and the practical certainty that if I had intended violence, I would not have stopped twenty meters away and raised my empty hands. I unceremoniously descended onto the mattress—not lowering myself with any grace, simply sitting, the way a person may sit when their legs have finally finished maintaining the façade of boundless capability. Some of the spear-carriers flinched. No command was given by the leader. The spears stayed level. But no order came to advance, either.

I reached slowly, very slowly, into my pack—all movement announced in advance by pace and deliberate intention—and retrieved a ration of hard biscuit. I broke off a piece and began to eat it, casually, with the resolved patience of someone who has confidently determined that patience is the only sensible medicine left to administer.

They watched me while I ate. Their central fire crackled, and the fish smell drifted over me, and I chewed my biscuit and did not watch them directly and let them watch me without the pressure of being observed by an invader. Five minutes passed, or perhaps ten. The spears had not really moved, but the beings holding them had shifted, almost imperceptibly, from forward weight to back—threat posture becoming waiting posture.

⁂

After a quarter of an hour by my best estimation—the cloud cover made it difficult to read the sun, and I had no other clock beyond my internal sense—the leader detached themself from the formation. They moved the way I had observed figures of genuine authority move when they had determined that a situation did not constitute an emergency: without rushing, without signaling anything, simply walking. The others took their cues from this and allowed their spears to drift toward rest.

The leader stopped perhaps five meters from me and continued to observe me. I finally shifted my gaze properly toward them, and I broke the remainder of my biscuit in two and extended both halves on my open palms. One of the oldest sentences available, spoken in the only language I was certain we shared: I have something simple and helpful, and I am choosing to share it with you.

The lead being’s spear lowered to their side. They just kept observing as my heart continued to race and I continued to stifle any outward sign of that. I held my hands open and still, neither withdrawing the offer nor pressing it. We stayed that way—the individual standing, myself sitting on a waterlogged mattress in a wholly unfamiliar land—while the others exchanged clicking and yipping sounds, and the spears came down by degrees, until they were all at their sides. The whole process took the better part of ten minutes. I have performed emergency surgeries that felt shorter.

Once more the leader stepped forward, alone, which I thought was an act of considerable courage. They came close enough to take the biscuit from my palm, which they did, then sniffed it, then took a careful bite. Something changed in their face. Not pleasure, necessarily—their face was built for particular expressions I was not yet accustomed to reading—but a shift in quality, perhaps a reassessment. They looked up at me and spoke a word in their language, guttural and surprisingly soft. They held up the other half of the biscuit with their clawed hand, then pointed to me, then to themself. Whether it was a question, a declaration of transaction, or something else, I was unsure.

I pointed to my own chest. “Doctor Brink,” I announced in Opentongue, the trade language I had attempted previously. No comprehension, no response. Then, because I am a creature of thoroughness even in circumstances where thoroughness may be plainly unnecessary, I said it again in my native dialect of Gnomic, and then a third time in Fabrican, on the hypothesis that some metaphysical emphasis might carry meaning where the lexemes themselves could not.

Fabrican is a difficult language, and it came out wrong. Heavier than I intended—a low, grinding sequence of syllables, more weather than words—and every spear on the backshore came up five centimeters at once. The leader hissed through their teeth, a sound with no ambiguity in it whatsoever. I had, presumably, said something that sounded uncomfortably like a threat. “Brink,” I said again in Opentongue, just that, and left it there.

The leader studied me for a moment longer. Then, with the deliberate care of someone attempting a sound their throat had simply not evolved for, they pointed a claw at my chest and tried. The first attempt was a collision: consonants clashing before the vowel could form, the result something entirely its own, but with an interesting resonance to it. They paused, then tried again—slower, more committed—and produced something more familiar.

My reconstruction in text is B’rink. The initial b was a sort of pop, followed by a glottal stop. The r was rolled into a growl. The central vowel came out compressed, approximate, something of a brief whine. The terminal cluster nk was remarkably similar to the clicks that their entourage had used during communication earlier. In totality it was a Gnomic name processed through the machinery of a reptilian larynx and arriving changed but comfortably recognizable. My pulse finally approached something less terrified and more typical.

The being, now visibly less tense as well, held the result for a moment, apparently assessing it. Then they pointed at my chest once more, and said it again, quietly, with what I can only describe as satisfaction: “B’rink.” The matter was settled. That would be my name in whatever system of phonemic accounting this individual kept. They then pressed one scaly hand against their own sternum and said a word that sounded to me like Scur.

Just like that—after nearly an hour of introductions—we were introduced.