@godwillow might have time to unpack all of that...
Gradually, the grass gives way to sand beneath his feet. There’s a slight dip where the wind and water has eroded away the dirt that leads to the beach proper, and as Kayn steps down, feels the granules crunch and give way beneath his sandals, he wonders why Zed has never sent him this way before. The disciple who was supposed to investigate fell horribly ill and, pressed for time as the de facto leader of the Order while Zed is away, Kayn went himself. After all, who else can he trust to get the job done quicker and better than anyone else?
He doesn’t like to be this near water, especially not the vast quantity that separates Ionia’s islands from the mainland, but he has honed his body and mind to endure it. In only a decade, Kayn has gone from trembling when the healers would wash his sunburned face to swimming, head under water, sometimes, if he absolutely must. He has spent too many years standing shivering, paralysed in pools and rivers, to let it consume him now. But still, as he steps closer to the river and the ground gets wetter, the sea seems so much louder somehow, the waves bigger, as if with each step he shrunk a little further.
And then Kayn steps in a particularly wet patch of mud, and stops. Of course, he’s walked through mud before, countless times in the rainy seasons, but there’s something about this mud. The consistency of it. The way the sand and silt mix with the water that saturates the land. Kayn slowly pulls his foot out, tries to take a step back, figure out the creeping sensation up his spine, but his legs aren’t working right and his foot sinks back down and suddenly Kayn knows this mud.
“No.” Dark eyes reel up to the cliffs above, so deceptively green and brown and grey in the broad daylight, but Kayn knows that shape. Memorised it as he lay in this mud. It’s morbid fascination that calculates the angle, drags his eyes down again to a spot only a hundred paces from him where he must have lay for days and nights until Zed found him. He has to say the hateful name aloud. Every time he does it’s like he’s swallowing it, making it a part of him so that it cannot kill him. “Epool.” But it’s rotten. It’s crawling inside him. Again, Kayn tries to step back. He sees sky for a moment, remembers a blow from a lifetime ago, and then the mud catches his elbows, the seat of his pants, his carefully braided hair, and embraces him like an old friend. “No.” He says again as the mud tries to swallow him whole. “No.” A bird cries over his head and Kayn blinks, instinctively, so it won’t peck out his eyes. The sea is so loud now, and it’s going to cover him like an icy blanket.
“Master—” But Zed isn’t here. There is only Kayn, the birds that will eat him when he dies, and the mud that will take whats’s left of him. “Zed—” His fingers weave into his hair, palms to his ears, trying to squeeze the crashing of the waves from them. “Help me!”