Ship. Beach. Rowing, Vikings! The boat, moored in the shallow water rocked uneasily in the receding tide. <– makes no sense, boats can’t be uneasy. as the sun rose on the horizon, sending ‘god beams’ across the landscape in the morning mist, thurr sat on a rock on the beach. staring out to sea. The land didn’t move right, and he was anxious to return to the boats. They had been sailing for weeks, and had only stopped at the uncharted island a day or so before in order to restock on supplies — the fruit trees visible near the shore heavy with a spring harvest (wrod for trees/fruit instead?), seemingly untouched by humans nearby… reword… they’re just pristine. Thurr had never read or heard a telling of the Odyssey, but if he had, he would have likened his current predicatment to the Lotus Eaters. The rest of his crew, and his captain were all inland, blissfully rolling from sleep to wakefulness and back again, listlessly (ooh, let’s use more nautical terminology like this for thurr’s metaphors) passing away the hours. Thurr was equally ignorant of biology and neuroscience as he was Odesseus’ adventures, however^H, and didn’t understand that the reason he was alone now was a faulty nerve in his olfactory system, which rendered him immune to the neurotoxin emitted by the island’s fruit trees. He watched as his fellow raiders became less and less interested in setting sail by the hour after setting in, and he was unable to understand why.

Worse, he wasn’t sure if he was relieved to be exempted from the effects, or jealous of his compatriots newfound satisfaction. He knew his heart yearned to return to the boats, to set off again on their journey, and to know again the thrill of discovery, and perhaps conquest; on the other hand, the …Thurr hardly had a word for it… happiness? on his fellow sailors faces, and in their new conversations, he somehow felt drawn to that as well. He didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to even wrestle with these concepts mentally, he just knew that he felt pulled in two directions.

Thurr sighed, the warmth of the sun, now full-on on his bare shoulders, brought some measure of comfort, though no solutions. the lapping of the waves on the beach, while a gentle reminder of the life he was nervous he’d never successfully return to, no comfort.

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