As Gwen lifted her leg with her arms, attempting to keep the broken bone aligned, she felt the profound wrongness intensify suddenly. Parts of her body began to feel as though they were connected incorrectly. Her lower jaw pulsed with strange pressure, as did the skin over her shoulder blades. When she breathed, the air felt dirty, like a room filled with old cigarette smoke. For the first time in a long time, she felt no hunger.

No hunger.

[i]Famine[/i], she thought to herself, feeling the fleeting passing of a memory. Hunger. She couldn't forget that.

She had been fleeing hunger. Where she was from, there was no food.

Where did the hunger go?

She twisted her torso around and saw a pile of drift within reach. She grabbed the longest piece of wood she could and some weed, hoping to fashion a splint for her broken bone. As she did, she heard a weak voice nearby.

[i]H-hello?[/i]

Gwen's eyes snapped to the source of the voice instantaneously. One of the nearby bodies was calling to her. He looked half dead, a fair-colored man whose pallid look mirrored hers. Another living corpse on this black beach.

Something activated in her. A sense of duty. She was starting to remember.

"Hey!" she called back to the pale man, as he seemed to attempt to stand. He spoke Skenian - which was helpful. "Are you hurt?"

[i]Tell him to run,[/i] she reasoned. She would only slow him down. She looked around at the other shapes moving around on the beach, their dazed, shambling gaits reminiscent of the walking dead. She looked once more to the giant purplish sliver in the sky, and the shade of the gigantic floating sphere it was attached to, and then her eyes fell to the cliffsides below, and the row of bodies hung up on stakes prominently displayed atop them.

[i]Shit.[/i]

There was civilization here, all right. Nothing said civilization like organized displays of capital punishment.

And notably - the bodies looked huge. Abnormally tall, with limbs too long. They made for effective displays, arms splayed outward, nailed to posts.

She turned back to the weak voiced man nearby. Without thinking, she put weight on her broken leg - and that pernicious sense of wrongness came over her once again.

The bone held strong. 

She shifted more of her weight onto the leg to confirm it - her leg was no longer broken.

[i]You're dead. This is Death.[/i]

She couldn't feel pain, or hunger, and now her body was healing horrific fractures.

No other explanation made sense. 

[i]Then what about him?[/i]

She cautiously stood, the black sand squelching with wetness beneath her boots. Her boots, her uniform. She remembered.

[i]Admiral.[/i]

"Do you need help?" she asked as she approached the other man. As she did, she saw a familiar sight in the distance, further along the beach - a morning tide market.

Tide markets appeared every day at the low tides, during the several hours just after the water recedes. Vod traders from the depths would ride the tide deep into land-dweller territory and await the recession of the water in order to set up impromptu markets, hoping to separate those land-dwellers from valuables. In particular, the vod liked non-corrosive metals; and for the price, there were few limits on what you could find at a tide market.

Exotic fish from lands no one has ever heard of, or even the deepest dark of the sea. Lost treasures from sunken ships. Weapons. Slaves. Drugs. Sex. 

And in the tide market, the laws of the sea applied. This was universal - vod only obeyed their own laws. 

Gwen didn't like tide markets. She found the vod merchants to be aggressive. But, to their credit, she had never seen a vod crucify someone and then display their body on a cliffside.

"There's a tide market over there," Gwen told the stranger as she reached his side. "Can you walk?"