Brother Markus stood boldly near the outer ledge of the northern promontory upon which the Church overlooked the sea. He gestured grandly at the lashing storm, as much for the benefit of his students’ morale as for its teaching value.
“Observe the fury of the storm!” he announced to his students, who could barely make out his words over the howling tempest. “As you see, the Wind does not always Whisper. Some times it ROARS.”
As was often the case, Markus’ lesson crossed from lecture to sermon and back again-
“What we witness here today is the sea’s great engine of creation and destruction-- the gales of autumn are the children born of the endless dance between the Whispering Wind and the Eternal Wellspring! They batter the land with their power, and yet still they bring life. They-
“Professor?” one of the students interrupted furtively, raising her hand.
“I-- what?-- Miss Vyrlich?” Markus replied, his rhythm broken by the young student’s query.
“Professor,” Mathilda Vyrlich repeated, pointing down to the beach below. “What is that?”
The priest turned to look where Mathilda was pointing. He squinted against the gloom. It looked as if something had washed up on the beach. Some thing... Some one. Someone!
Markus turned back and made for the rocky steps that led down to the beach.
“Mathilda, fetch your parents, and Constable Dreng if you can find him!” he shouted as he hurried past his students. Almost as if an afterthought, he announced loudly over his shoulder “Class dismissed!”
* * * * * * * * * * *
The woman was alive.
Markus had pulled her far away from the pounding surf immediately upon reaching the beach. At first, she had not been breathing. Without thinking, he pressed down on her chest several times and breathed into her mouth. Within moments, the woman spasmed and began coughing out the seawater that had gone into her lungs.
She groaned raggedly, and looked up uncomprehendingly at the priest.
“The Wyvern,” she murmured, struggling to speak. “The shoals. Didn’t see the island. Taking on water...”
The woman lapsed into unconsciousness, and said no more. Markus uttered a brief spell of mending over the woman, healing some of the minor wounds she had suffered in what sounded like a shipwreck.
In a manner of minutes, Magda and Mathilda, her oldest daughter, had arrived on the scene. Dreng and Anton Vyrlich arrived with a makeshift stretcher shortly thereafter.
Who is she?” Magda asked, wrapping a heavy blanket around the sailor.
“Not a local,” Markus replied, also helping. He noted the woman’s telltale grey-green skin and small tusks. “A half-orc sailor from a ship called the Wyvern, which she named to me before she collapsed. It may have crashed against the shoals somewhere in the bay.”
As Mamadou and Anton gently moved the woman onto the stretcher, Magda look out across the thrashing waters. The storms had been particularly violent this year. They had also come unseasonably early. Too early. The ship and its crew would have had no idea what they were sailing into.
The men had lifted the sailor up off the ground and gone off to the Church of the Whispering Wind, where Markus and his students would tend to her. Magda gestured for Mathilda to follow along.
As they left, the aging wizard looked out one last time beyond the short promontory at the southern end of the village to at the wine-dark deep that lay beyond.
“I think we may need to petition Lord Kell to build a lighthouse...”
