The Complete

He awoke to the sound of the sea, and the mournful call of carrion birds. Water, frigid and cruel, washed up beneath him, shocking him awake. He gasped, or tried to, but some liquid had settled in his lungs. The gasp turned quickly to a violent fit of coughing and he rolled over, his body spasming as it attempted to eject the foreign matter. He was vaguely aware of a sharp, irritated caw! as he vomited the seawater out in hard contractions. As he finished, left dry-heaving several times, he opened his eyes. A bleak desolation awaited him. He lay upon a cold, rocky beach, the seawater coming in on gray waves, like liquid stone. A few feet from him, a giant black bird rested. It peered at him with shiny dark eyes, head tilted. It cawed at him and hopped from one skinny foot to the next. It had a scar on its large black beak. Seawater beaded on shiny feathers. As he tried to wave it off, he realized just how weak he was. His body felt ancient and withered. A muffled sound escaped his throat and he swatted at the bird once more, coughing. It let out another irritated caw and hopped back two paces, but otherwise remained. The man slowly sat up. Even this act was torturous in how much it seemed to require from him. Breathing slowly and heavily, he sat on a rocky beach beneath a dull slate sky next to a huge bird that was probably waiting for him to die, and he wondered. “Where am I?” he asked softly. His voice sounded strange to him. He surveyed the area around him. Long, lonely stretches of rocky shoreline to his left and his right. More birds, and other, more uncertain shapes farther away, lurked. Ahead of him, the vast yawning eternity of the sea. Which sea? He could not recall. Behind him… He twisted around, and several things popped in his back, along his spine, relieving tension. Behind him was dirt and trees, a dense forest swaying in the winds coming in off the sea. A cold wind gusted across him, and he shivered. That brought on a great deal of pain. The pain was faint, numbed by the cold and by… He returned his attention to the front and looked down at himself. He was naked. Not a scrap of clothing on him at all. All he wore was a melange of bruises and scratches and cuts. They ached and hurt and stung, and he could tell his suffering ran deeper than that, his muscles and bones hurting, but it was all faraway for now. Another wave crashed upon the shore, this one more violent than the last, and hit him, snapping him out of his dazed state. He needed warmth, shelter, a fire. Or he would die. The man rose slowly, his legs unsteady, his whole body as uncertain as his mind, but he only lost his balance once before standing. He looked over at the crow, which lingered, staring at him with obvious curiosity. Another thought occurred to him, one that erupted inside of him and brought on an intense panic. It was so powerful he spoke it, too, aloud. “Who am I?” Another wave crashed at his feet more intensely than the last, and in the far distance, thunder cracked the sky, threatening rain. But he could not move, not until he had answered that question. Hugging himself, rubbing his arms, he thought furiously. Images came to him, emotions attached to most of them, but it was all so confused and jumbled. A bewildering proliferation of memories assaulted him as he sorted frantically through, trying to find something familiar, something that meant anything to him. And then he had it, a single, short word. A name. Jak. That was his name, he was sure of it. Jak let out a sigh of relief, but the feeling was short lived. Lightning split across the stone gray clouds, and almost immediately more thunder cracked and boomed. His heart lurched to match it and he looked as the crow took to flight with another call. He watched the huge thing gain altitude and disappear off to his right, heading deeper inland. It seemed like as good a direction to go as any, so Jak began to follow the bird, though he quickly lost sight of it. He walked away from the rocky beach, the stones painful on his bare feet, and came to a strip of land that was mostly dirt that ran parallel to the shoreline. Jak walked. He thought. He tried to remember, rubbing his arms and looking around as stronger winds gusted off the sea and battered the nearby forest. Already, the memories were slipping away. Becoming more clouded, more convoluted. Something was wrong, he knew that much. A bad thing had happened. Even apart from the obvious situation he now found himself in, that notion persisted. He clung to that, tried to use it as a beacon in the mists of amnesia. There were things he could recall. Impressions, if not specifics. Jak recalled fighting. Lots of fighting. Even as he thought of combat, saw images of broken bodies and sprays of blood, his hand ached for some kind of weapon. He felt naked without one, but another thought promised him that he could defend himself, even unarmed, if that particular desperation fell onto him. Still though, he began tracking the dirt and grass around him for some sort of armament. All the stones and sticks he saw were insufficient. Another thought came to him, one that was as clear to him as his name had been: he was an outcast of his people. That brought an unexpected jolt of several different emotions, all screaming to him at once. Terror. Rage. Guilt… But a certainty that he was right. A conviction that he was right. That one stopped him and Jak stared down at his muddy feet, shivering in the wind, for a moment ignoring all other things. He hunted fervently for the context. Why was he so certain that he was right to do what he had done...whatever that was? He was an exile of his people, this specific piece of knowledge was available to him, but lacking context, it felt almost meaningless. Why? Whatever he had done to gain their ire, to be punished, to be made into a pariah, he felt strangely certain that it was the right thing to do. Not only that, but it was the only thing to do. Somewhere too close for comfort, something growled. That was a sound that forced itself through everything else, and Jak jerked his head to the right. Another person he could probably fight with his bare hands, if it came down to it, but a wolf or one of the big cats or the giant lizards? No, he would be beyond saving then. Shelter. He needed shelter. Rain was coming, and he was already cold from laying on the shore. Jak looked up and tried to take a measure of the light from the sky, but it was difficult. The clouds covered the skies from horizon to horizon. The ones above him were stone gray, but he saw some farther off, some that seemed to be drawing closer quickly, that were the dark gray of flint. Those were the ones swollen with a heavy rain, and they were eager to unleash themselves on the land. He knew he should be inside, or beneath something before then, given his nude state. Ahead, the land seemed to dip, while the shoreline rose. Jak began moving forward with greater intent. There was a depression in the land, a trench with a wall of trees to the right and a wall of earth and rock to the left. There might be a cave, or even an overhang in that wall of earth. Some part of his mind whispered to him that there would be risk of flooding this close to the shore, but it was a risk he would have to take. As he strode towards the trench, finding the pain in his battered body becoming more acute as his blood flowed more freely, something else came to him. A sharp memory, this one felt recent, though hazy. He remembered… A figure, standing over him, against that same stone-gray sky.