Gus the Wakeful: Seafood

The afternoon after the cephalopod encounter, Zade openly mocked a mistake I made during the fight. My face burned. He laughed, and Will, our party leader, cackled and continued merrily down the beach path. Yael and Samaya said something, but my ears were full of seawater, I thought, and sounds echoed strangely. I didn't understand a word, but I didn't care.

“Fuck you, Zade,” I snapped.

He gave me an affronted look and hefted his war hammer to his shoulder, but withdrew into himself and didn't speak to me again that afternoon.

The last month on the road had taken its toll. Our gear was rusting, our food dwindling. Will surged ahead like a draft horse, leaving us to drag lines in the sand.

“We're going to go south to join them, or die trying,” he would say every day, to himself, to the gulls, to the air.

South on the Nautil Coast. Two oceans separated by a sliver of winding beach, and nothing else. Where the Sonorous Sea and the Winter Sea had their first kiss if you believed the old stories.

Samaya and Yael walked side by side, and I fell to the back while my mistake formed a molten pit of slag in my stomach. My eyes stung with sand and cephalopod mucus, and sea salt crusted my hair and scalp. Exhaustion hung on me like a cape.

Evening came and we set up camp on the beach, watching for cephalopods and crabs and other monsters that roamed Nautil. Zade volunteered to try the tentacles first by taking them out of his bag and cooking some experimental pieces. He ate one piece without fanfare, but I found myself unable to watch. The tentacles made my stomach churn.

Thirty minutes later Zade said, “I'm starving.” He ate several more, but I excused myself to sleep to avoid watching.

Only I didn't sleep that night. Bright visions swam in my head. I remembered a squid trying to suffocate me, wrapping around my face, and leaving a deposit of clear slime. Will punched it off.

“You were nearly seafood!” Will said, dragging me away from the body of the squid. Yael used a curved blade to slice a gash in the squid’s flesh, and it backed away. Only in the vision, Yael was singing, and the cephalopods recoiled like the song itself repelled them.

I saw stars and lights, faces and landscapes, and when I did drift off for a few seconds at a time my dreams resonated like gongs and rattled me awake.

Numbness lingered in the tips of my fingers the next morning, and I fumbled for a while adjusting my clothes and equipment. My vision was distorted and warped at the edges, or changed colors at odd times, but I attributed these to the long week of monster fighting, walking in the heat, and the lack of food I could keep down.

The waves glittered with morning sunshine, sea mist cooling our skin. Zade woke up without any symptoms, and determined for himself that he was too hungry to waste the tentacles, so he cooked them on the campfire for breakfast and handed them out wrapped on sticks and seasoned with pepper flakes. Yael sang and braided her hair. Will slapped the map with one gloved hand, while Samaya shook her head. They all ate the seafood, appreciating how juicy the flesh was.

The sight of the tentacles nearly caused me to vomit.

“No, you’ve got it backwards,” Zade was explaining while Yael strummed on her lute. “It’s poisonous if you eat it and die. It’s venomous if it eats you.” He handed her one of the tentacles and she took a delicate bite, but her eyebrows shot up in surprise and she nodded.

The cephalopod creatures had been large, white piles of gel with slapping arms. Their wicked hooks had a venom in them, the guidebook had said. Only when we finally found some of the creatures we saw no hooks. The guidebook also said they were safe to eat after cooking.

“But is it safe?” Yael asked delicately. “I mean, if the guidebook was wrong about the hooks, how do we know it's not wrong about them being safe to eat?”

Zade brushed this comment off without concern, and chopped up as many tentacles as he could add to his bag. We left the remains to sizzle in the sun, to drift in the ocean.

I sat with my hood up at a distance, and involved myself with no one until it was time to leave.

Will set the pace, and I immediately began flagging. Two caffeinated mana potions jangled in my bag in the morning, but both had been chugged by the end of the day, and I would have risked the mana hangover for a third. Samaya would have given me one if I had asked, but everyone was too far ahead, and I was still holding my shame in a vice grip.

On the night of the second day, I managed to slurp a bowl of soup that Yael made, but the flavors were wrong in my mind. I couldn’t enjoy it. The party sat around the fire, Will and Zade cracking jokes while Yael laughed. But then the world would shift, and they would all be made of smoke, or snakes would be coming out of their shoes, or diamonds from their voices. I trembled and wrapped myself in my cloak. Tears pricked my eyes.

“Something is wrong,” I croaked.

The party laughed. I couldn’t tell if they were laughing at me as they ate the last of the cephalopod tentacles.

Samaya put her hand on my shoulder, and I flinched like a deer. “What was that, Gus?”

Will laughed, and said something that turned into the crack of an earthquake.

“Something is-” I coughed up umami-tasting phlegm. “Something is wrong. I can’t sleep.”

“Oh Gus,” she said, moving to look at my eyes. “You should have said something. Would you like me to cast a slumber spell on you?”

I nodded feebly. I lay down on the spot without a word, and Samaya smiled sympathetically. She cast the spell with a wave, and dust swirled around my eyes and ears. I slept an hour, maybe two.

I woke up in a cold sweat.

I lay looking at the smouldering starry night sky, frozen in sleepless rigor mortis. As the night wore on I watched shadows come to life and eat one another. The ocean howled like a wolf, and a woman with dreamy teeth gave me a basket of rat skulls.

Samaya woke up first. She found me trembling, bloodshot, sitting on my bed roll, staring at the sky.

“Good morning, Gus,” she whispered blearily. Then louder as she took in my state, “Are you okay?”

It sounded normal. But then it changed, and she repeated herself, growling in her throat menacingly like a dog. Then she repeated herself again, and my vision twisted, and I put my shaking palms over my eyes. She screamed at me. She was screaming at me. She screamed and screamed and screamed and-

I was the one screaming.

Zade and Yael woke up and grabbed my shoulders. Their touch caused me to perceive burns on my flesh where their hands gripped me, and I shouted in anger and pain.

Samaya put two hands on either side of my head and cast a healing spell.

No effect. She burned spell slots on two healing spells; one to heal and sedate, another on a costly brain-healing spell. Nothing. Zade later laughed and clapped a hand on my shoulder to say that the sedation had made me scream, “less like a legion of demons and more like a drunk.”

Finally, Samaya performed a bloodletting spell that cleansed the cephalopod poison in a river of blood from my eyes and nose. The poison had spread over the two days it had been in my body, and a great quantity of my blood had to be purged into the sand. Samaya had to burn her last spell slot just to replenish my blood supply.

I collapsed after the purging and fell asleep. When I woke it was mid-afternoon, we hadn’t moved camp locations, and I had been tucked into some extra blankets in my sleeping roll.

Everyone sat around with worried expressions.

“I thought it was fine,” Samaya said. “We ate them, by gods.”

“They weren’t poisonous,” Zade said. “They were venomous. Remember my hands the night I chopped the raw tentacles, Samaya? You asked me why my hands were so red.”

Samaya’s brows shot up. “You're right. I didn't think it looked like sunburn.”

“They had a thin mucus that melted in the fire. Gus got a dose of that in the face. In the fucking eyes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told someone, but it was like all of you were out to get me at the same time. And I believed it. It felt so real.” I remembered the woman with the teeth, and looked around for any sign of them before feeling foolish. “It felt so real,” I repeated.

“You have nothing to apologize for. I’m sorry,” Samaya said, tearfully. “I should have cleansed you the moment you got out of the water.”

“No, I’m sorry, Gus,” Will said. His holy symbol glowed on his gloved palm. “I’ve been pushing us too hard. This wouldn’t have happened if I had been thinking of the party.”

“Well, I’m not sorry,” Zade said. “I couldn't figure out why you had a stick so far up your ass.”

I tried to laugh, but everything hurt.

Yael pulled a bottle from her personal bags, and we took turns sipping sake until I could take it no longer. I fell asleep again.

I recovered in the days following, but sleep was never the same. Some nights I would snap awake far too early and never be able to sleep again, and some nights I would simply lie there awake and hope sleep would come, but it never would. I didn’t bring it up often, but Samaya would stop me every few days and privately offer to cast a magical slumber over me, which I always accepted. The other nights it became standard for me to keep watch, and on the nights when sleep wouldn’t come I would sometimes claim that I had lost track of time and stay awake longer. Zade made a show of acting offended that not everyone was doing their fair share when I did things like that, and encouraged me to wake him at the right time, but I knew he understood.

On our final day along the coast of Nautil we encountered a second squad of cephalopods splashing out of the surf to hunt. The party gave me concerned side glances, but I flashed both of my knives and turned invisible.

The tentacle kabobs that night dripped with seasonings and butter, but I ate crackers instead.