Editing Endless Isles: Tales from the Fringe (section)

==Second Unnamed Writing, Posted due to Wordfilters==

The morning air found itself filled with the hearty tones of a man swearing at his coracle. Some men Reached for fame, and found it. Some Reached for profit, and returned to the Core Isles wealthier than the most miserly trade baron. Some Reached just because they couldn't stop running; from man, law or the voices in his head.

At this moment, in this place, Barnes would have Reached for a bottle of rum and an oar that he hadn’t been forced to beat a terminally curious sea turtle to death for. 

Old Barnes, they’d called him. The indignity! Not that it wasn’t true; he’d taken the oath long before even the more seasoned Deathless had learnt how to walk the first time. He knew the stories the ones who knew him told; the ones about how he’d sailed at the side of Young Torreau, how he’d been around when the Crusade was founded. Not that he’d confirmed or denied any of it; it was nice to have a bit of a reputation. Of course, they also said that he was just a madman with a bad case of sunburn. This time though, just a bit of a reputation hadn’t been enough. Accursed brigands, stealing his ship and leaving him on this rock with nothing but a machete, his pack, and a bundle of regrets. 

Still, he’d had worse. It had only been a couple of days before he’d managed to swim out to a couple of islands over and make a coracle out of the jetsam. Another three days had proved adequate to bait a turtle into his makeshift nets. There was good eating on one of those, even if the beast’s death throes had cost him a good chunk of boat. Still, turtle was truly the cow of the sea, and it’s shell now reinforced the coracle to a nice degree. Barnes reflected that, all things considered, there were worse places to be stranded than in the middle of nowhere with all the food he could catch and all the alcohol he could distil. He chuckled to himself. Maybe it was time to settle down and become a Gazer.

No, not yet. It was time to get going again. He reached into his backpack (Old Faithful, he called it,) and retrieved his two most treasured possessions; his compass, and a battered old telescope case. He settled by the campfire and finished off the turtle meat whilst he went through a checklist so old he didn’t even think about it any more.

Step one; find your bearings. The machete thudded against a coconut tree several feet off, dislodging lunch – no iron near the compass for the best reading.  The old compass creaked softly to itself as the needle found its bearing. Good; he’d expected that.

Step two; work out where you’re going. He opened the telescope tube, struggling with the rubber seal he’d worked into the opening, and pulled out a rolled sheet of vellum. He laid it out on the beach, weighing down the edges with stones. If his treacherous ex-companions had known he had this, their fortunes would have been made! There weren’t many mapmakers in the Core who hadn’t copied Old Barnes’ map down at one time or another. The ink still stood out against the parchment as bold as he did when he’d first set quill to it. 

He’d just come from the core heading North along the Le Grant trench and past the Teal Islands. That meant that the nearest blank patch was... North by North East. The working copy of the map didn’t have patches of unknown filled with krakens and mermaids – Barnes needed that space to quill in what he found there. He rolled away the map with practiced care, before testing the wind.

Step three; make sure you know when the weather is going to break. South Westerly wind, moderate. Not bad going, but slightly damp air suggesting a storm brewing over the course of the next week. He should have found shelter by then; these tiny rocks were no good to him anyway. Curse those pirates! No use cursing his luck any more though. At least, not whilst stationary. He made sure his lunch was secured on the coracle, gulped down the last of the turtle and set the compass on the small space where his legs weren’t hunched. He pushed off into the emerald sea, under the turquoise sky.

Some men Reached for fame, and they found it. Other men Reached for wealth, and accumulated it in vast sums. Yet others Reached to run away. Old Barnes Reached because that was the only way he’d have a chance of finding the ship he’d fallen off all those years ago... that cursed Torreau, never looking back. No wonder he was lost, without a navigator on board.

Silence descended on the small islands once again. 

Half an hour later, the cursing broke it as Barnes came back to retrieve his machete.

''The Walrus''