Chapter 32: The Sailor of Saharr
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 15-28, Month VI: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 15th to 28th day of the 6th Month
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A Different Kind of Story
While the world revolving around Maya Village continued its path of evolution and escalating consequence, far out across the great seas to the south, a different kind of story was already several years into its telling.
This one was not about any of the kingdom's conflicts or a story about criminal organizations or the contents of diplomatic letters carried by royal birds. It was about a man named Zahran Ishmar Noor, who had spent more of his life alone than most people could conceive of surviving, and two women who had crossed a dead island looking for proof that something worth finding still existed, and a boat that was the seventh attempt at a thing the man who built it had taught himself entirely from scrolls written by people who were long dead.
To understand where they were now, you had to go back to the moment Ishmar almost left without knowing there was anyone still left behind.
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The Island of Saharr
Saharr had not always been what it was before Ishmar was born into its current state. The records in the Royal Archives described a different place entirely, an island that had once supported millions, with forests that ran from the eastern cliffs to the western shore, rivers clean enough to drink from, and a kingdom at its heart with roads and cities and all the infrastructure that implied. Those records were written by people who had seen it. But in Ishmar's time he had only ever seen the result of what came after.
The catastrophe that consumed Saharr had not arrived in a single dramatic moment. It came the way that most civilizational deaths come — slowly, then faster, then all at once. The soil had given out in the interior regions first. The rains had become unreliable. Harvests failed in sequences that turned shortages into famines and famines into the kind of desperation that strips away every civilizational layer a society has built and leaves only the animal underneath. By the time Ishmar was born, the dying had already been going on for generations. The millions had become hundreds of thousands, then tens of thousands, then something far less.
His parents had been plant specialists, among the last people on the island who still understood the old agricultural techniques documented in the Archives. They had taught him what they knew, and what they knew was considerable, and what they knew was also not enough to save them. They died when he was still young, in the particular way that people die when the food runs out and there is no remedy available. Ishmar survived partly because he was young and lean and needed less, and partly because he had already begun to understand that the village he had grown up in was planning to stop thinking of him as a neighbor and start thinking of him as a food resource.
He had left before that transition had completed itself.
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What He Did With the Years
He went east, into the desolate interior, carrying the seeds he had found in the Archives and the knowledge his parents had given him and the old cultivation texts he had memorized well enough to recite. He found a cave system in the eastern hills, with an underground lake so clear and cold it seemed to glow, and he made that his base. And then he started planting.
He built irrigation channels first — ten of them, half-moon shaped, carved from the ground with crude tools and his own hands. Then a hundred. The technique was his ancestors' technique, documented in those ancient pages, and it worked the way his parents had always said it worked, which was slowly and then suddenly. The first seeds he planted died more often than they lived. The second generation did better. The third generation produced seedlings that actually took root in soil that had been considered dead for decades.
The forest grew the way all living things grow when you give them enough time and do not interfere with the process. Slowly. Imperceptibly at first. And then one day you look up and there are trees, actual trees with bark and canopy and the particular quality of air that only exists underneath living green things, and where there were trees there were birds, and where there were birds there were insects, and where there were insects there was the beginning of an ecosystem remembering what it was supposed to be.
The eastern section of Saharr, his section, grew from just a square kilometer and a half into something considerably larger. The trees now stood at thirty to fifty feet of canopy height, thin-trunked and young, but genuinely alive in a way that the rest of the island was not.
He was proud of it with the specific pride of someone who has no one to be proud in front of, which is a very heavy kind of pride to carry alone.
He also built boats. Six of them, across the years, each one an education in what happened when theoretical knowledge from scrolls met the practical reality of wood and water and a builder who had never actually seen a functioning vessel in operation. The first fell apart on contact with water. He watched it go with what he would later describe as dark amusement. The second lasted nearly an hour. The third, fourth, and fifth were incremental improvements that ultimately shared the same fundamental problem: he was getting better, but better was not yet good enough.
The sixth had been the most ambitious, a genuine sailing vessel with mast and rudder and storage, built across almost a year of labor. He had launched it with something approaching confidence. It had sailed for three days before the joints gave out and it went under within sight of the shore he had been trying to leave.
He had stood on the beach and watched it sink and said some things that he was glad no one was around to hear.
Then he went back to the Archives and started reading again.
The seventh boat was different from its predecessors in the way that the seventh attempt at anything is going to be different — not because the person building it had become a different kind of person, but because they had finally accumulated enough failure to understand exactly which problems needed solving and which compromises were acceptable. It was not elegant. An experienced shipwright would have looked at it and had opinions. But it was seaworthy, which none of the others had been, and it was realistic, which mattered more.
He had spent months testing it in shallow coastal waters before he trusted it with the open ocean. He capsized twice in conditions that were not particularly severe, which was humbling, and learned how to right it both times, which was the part that mattered. He read the weather patterns from the sky the way the old maritime texts described. He learned the difference between conditions that would kill him and conditions that would merely be unpleasant.
By the time he decided to leave, he was as prepared as a self-taught sailor working from century-old scrolls could possibly be. The ancient maps showed Arkanus approximately one hundred thousand nautical miles to the north-northeast. The distance was staggering. The uncertainty of this journey was unfurling before his eyes, it would either lead to him arriving there or he would drown to the bottomless pits of the ocean floor. But staying on the island guaranteed nothing except the slow dissolution of his sanity, while the ocean at least offered the possibility of something else, hope.
He had his going-away party alone, which was the only kind available. He danced by the fire and looked at the stars with the complicated mixture of pride and grief and relief that belongs to leaving something you have poured your life into, and then he went to sleep, and woke up, and prepared to push off.
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Sefiran and Seriffita
He heard them before he saw them.
His ears had calibrated to a place with no human voices over years of solitude, so thoroughly that when two women shouted from the cliffs, his first genuine reaction was to assume he was experiencing one of the auditory episodes that isolation produced in the human mind when it had been deprived of company long enough. He had experienced those before. They were not pleasant to the mind, but they helped him in some ways and they passed, just like the wind.
These voices did not come to pass. They got louder.
When he looked up.
He saw them and they were real, which his body understood before his mind was willing to commit to the conclusion. He re-anchored the boat and jumped back onto the island and moved toward the sound. His walk became a jog. His jog became a sprint. He stopped once, when the thought of something unpleasant arrived, it was the cold and clear truth that he had forgotten, it was that he did not know these people, that the last people he had known were people from his village, and his village had been planning to eat him. What if these two had come from the western reaches of Saharr where he had never been, where the madness had presumably run its full course uninterrupted?
He stood on the path between his forest and the cliffs and thought about this for a moment.
Then he decided that if being eaten was how this ended, at least someone would be here to drink from the streams he had made clean and eat the fruit he had grown and stand under the canopy of trees he had spent years coaxing into existence. Someone who would appreciate and know the eastern part of Saharr had come back to its former glory even if it wasn't fully grown yet. And that was not nothing, it was something he had nurtured with his own hands, no, it was accurate to say that he poured everything into it with his entire being.
So he kept walking.
Sefiran and her daughter Seriffita had come from the west of Saharr, from a pocket of surviving civilization that had managed to hold on through methods nobody was proud of for longer than anyone had reason to expect. Their village had finally fallen, not directly to violence but to the cold arithmetic of life — there were too few people, too little of everything, there was no compelling reason for anyone to stay once the numbers fell past the point where any collective survival was possible. They had walked east because east was the only direction remaining.
They were not expecting the green when they first reached east.
The wall of the green forest in front of them hit them like a physical thing. One moment they were crossing the bare rock and cracked earth that was their entire experience of Saharr, and the next moment there were trees, it was such a stark difference between this divide and theirs. Sefiran had heard stories from her mother's mother about what the island had once looked like, the kind of stories old people tell to explain why everything is worse now than it used to be, and she had treated them the way most people treat that kind of story: as the exaggeration that grief produces in people who need to believe the past was better.
She looked at the trees in front of her and had reconsidered her previous thinking.
Seriffita touched the nearest trunk with both hands. She pulled a leaf and pressed it against her face. She tasted it, found it bitter the way most leaves are bitter, and felt relief so profound it made no logical sense but made every other kind of sense entirely. They both cried, which was the correct response, and they cried for a while before either of them could move again.
They heard the rushing of water and found a nearby naturally occurring stream by sound before they had found it by sight. They drank from it face-down with the complete lack of dignity that real thirst produces, and then they found the deep pool where the stream widened and they both got in without a word exchanged. The water around them went grey, then darker, as it took what had accumulated on their skin and hair across months of having almost nothing to wash with. They stayed in that pool for a very long time.
After several days of wandering through this forest they began to understand that this wasn't entirely built by nature alone, there were traces of humanity everywhere they went. Then they found something that left them speechless. They found a human being in this forest, and for the better part of it they continued to watch the man for days before they approached, which was cautious and correct. He worked on his boat, ate from his forest, hunted with a competence that suggested he had long practiced it to be able to gain such skill, and talked to himself in the comfortable ongoing way of someone who had done it for years and no longer thought of it as unusual. His temperament read as non-threatening. They concluded, after sufficient observation, that he was probably not the kind that cannibalizes its own species.
On the last night before he departed, he danced by himself next to a fire and looked at the stars, and they watched him do it, and somewhere along that time they began to watch him, they had fallen asleep, which they had not intended.
When they woke the next morning he was already gone, they looked for him all over the place and when Seriffita saw the boat from the cliff first she had ran towards that direction and Sefiran followed without asking why, because when your daughter starts running you should also run.
They shouted again and again. Finally after a while he heard them and he looked up and saw them from the cliff.
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The First Meeting
When he touched their faces to confirm that they were indeed real it was not one of the dramatic gestures. It was something akin to a diagnostic. He had experienced enough episodes where his mind had constructed imaginary people from his longing of companions and the shadows that danced in the darkness of his nights, and because of that he needed that direct confirmation through multiple senses, it was simply the appropriate protocol for him who could be said to have gone insane.
They were warm to the touch, their faces were softer than his, and most importantly they were real and they were in front of him.
He sat down in the dirt of the island he had spent most of his life restoring and cried with the complete investment of someone releasing something that had been held under pressure for far longer than the human body was designed to sustain. He bawled his eyes in tears, his whining screams of cry came from a mixture of emotions that ran its course, they ran the way these things do when they are allowed to, and when it was finally finished and he found his composure once more he looked at them properly.
It was a mother and daughter duo. He could only describe them as thin in the way that hunger over time produces, but alive in the particular way of people who have survived things that should have killed them. But when he saw their eyes they were as clear as the water of the forest's streams and that is all that mattered.
"Who are you?" His voice came out rougher than he expected, scraped raw from the disuse of anything resembling genuine conversation.
They told him who they are. He asked where they had come from. The west, they said. And then he asked what year it was.
"The year is 6854, sir." Answered Seriffita.
He sat with this shocking revelation in disbelief.
"That is not possible," he said. "I left my home in the year 6800. And now you are telling me fifty-four years have already passed?"
They confirmed this.
He looked at his hands. He had looked at his hands thousands of times and they had always simply been his hands. Now he looked at them and saw what was actually in them: an old man's hands, the skin carrying decades in its texture, the joints thickened by years of labor that had accumulated without him noticing because there had been no one to notice it alongside him. He was somewhere between sixty and seventy-five years old, and he had spent the majority of those years alone on a dying island restoring what everyone else had given up on, and he had genuinely believed perhaps ten years had passed.
Time, it turned out, required witnesses to pass at the correct rate.
"Your floating vehicle," Seriffita said, after the silence had lasted as long as it needed to. "We watched you build it for most of a month. What were you planning to do with it?"
"I… am leaving this cursed island," he said. "I am to sail north-northeast. And find a continent called Arkanus and find people over there." He paused, his weary eyes wandered back to the forest he had created. "I believed I was the last person on this island. It seems I was considerably wrong about that."
The mother and daughter considered what to do? Should they follow this strange man or should they stay here and rot on the island, their eyes met and have decided their course of action. They were going to take a leap of faith.
"Can we come with you?"
Ishmar looked at them and then he looked at the boat. He had built it for one person, but it was honest enough construction that it would probably be able to carry three if nobody was particular about comfort, and none of them were in a position to be.
"Yes," he said.
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The Sailing
That had been several years ago. By the sixth month of Year 6857, the boat that had become Ishmar's seventh attempt at creating without any actual visual guide was still floating, which was its primary achievement and one he was willing to acknowledge as genuinely impressive given everything it had been through, in their long journey.
The journey north-northeast toward Arkanus was exactly as enormous as the ancient maps had suggested it would be.
For their basic needs like food and water they did it by fishing in the ocean. They also collected rainwater during storms into every water vessel they had on board, Ishmar had created a design that could filter water, something he had taken inspiration from the scrolls and he had already actively used in the island before.
For their other needs like repairs and even food supplies, they stopped by at every island that they could find along the way, and they resupplied their cargo hold of things that could fit into their storage compartment, it was also the time where Ishmar inspected the state of the boat and made sure to make the necessary repairs with spare wooden planks on board while also restocking it for onboard repairs.
They only stopped by these islands for as long as they had stuff they could repair and resupply their boat 8.
They also took breaks in these islands to recalibrate themselves from the constant rocking of it. Though the ocean was indifferent to them in the specific way of things that are not hostile to anything, but was simply far larger than any human concern could encompass, and that indifference was manageable as long as it remained in its indifference.
But there were always exceptions to these rules. And it came in the form of the storms if it was the one thing that had not remained indifferent to them. These storms were the kind of storms that the maritime scrolls described in the written passages that began with phrases like "if you are unfortunate enough to encounter such storms then all you could do is pray to your gods."
But even if these raging storms were mighty it was still not enough to kill them, as faith had willed it, they had survived the oceans constant rampage, all three of them did, which after every ordeal they survived none of them had a fully satisfying explanation for how they survived such an encounter.
Seriffita in particular emerged from one of such storms with the expression of someone who had seen something very clearly at the depths of the storm, it was something that was enormous and she was still in the process of deciding what it was that she saw. She had already developed a pattern of surviving things that should not have been survivable, be it in the Island of Saharr or here in the mighty depths of the ocean, and even in the harshest onslaught of the storms where the waters eclipsed them in intense waves, and even if their current direction was very much unknown to them, she and the rest had survived it for years now since the start of their journey.
If one were to describe the storms, they are very fitting of what Ishmar had told them, based on the manuscripts he had read from the voyages that their old civilization had undertaken.
Once they got into the deep trenches of the ocean in the southern or northern waters depending on where you came from, before they had made significant northward progress, they have witnessed a shadow that moved beneath the surface of the ocean, it was something with such a great mass that it could create intense waves every time it moves beneath the surface of the water, and any attempt to describe it into any category of living things that Ishmar's encyclopedic reading of the old kingdom's record of the Official Bestiary couldn't prepare them for any of this.
They all could only watch in a fearful stunned silence and they had the stillness of an unmovable rock. As this massive creature passed underneath them. After such an encounter by some unspoken agreement they have decided to sail in a different direction for several days. Of course it wasn't as if it was the only behemoth they have encountered so far; there were many others of such scale that they have witnessed in this journey. But encountering it even for the hundredth time didn't make it anymore easier than their first encounter with another such creature.
They talked, across the years of their journey, in the way that people talk when there is nothing else to do and plenty of time to do it.
Ishmar told them about the various knowledge he had acquired from the Old Archives and the seeds he had kept with him and the irrigation channels he had created as the first prototypes of the budding forest before the forest grew into what it was now and of the six boats that had failed as he had attempted to create a design that was based on what he learned from the scrolls he had read before eventually arriving with this final seventh design.
He also told them what the records said of Saharr as to what it had once been, which made Sefiran cry in the way she had cried when she first saw the eastern forest — it was the combination of grief and relief arriving at the same time with no clean way to separate them. Seriffita asked questions with the pointed accuracy of someone whose isolation had not dulled her thinking but had given it unusual angles of approach.
Sefiran asked him once whether he was afraid of what they would find, if Arkanus turned out to be nothing like the maps described, or nothing at all.
He thought about it. "I spent fifty-four years restoring an island that no one else thought could be restored," he said, "and then I spent several more years building a boat that most shipwrights would say an amateur should not have been able to build. I am not sure fear is the word I would use for what I am. I think the word might be committed."
She seemed to find this acceptable.
The direction of travel was north-northeast, as the ancient maps had specified. Somewhere ahead, at a distance that was decreasing every day by whatever increment their progress allowed, the continent of Arkanus waited for their arrival — a vast and complicated continent, full of people with ambitions and who had no current knowledge of Saharr and had no reason to expect a boat crewed by a very a botanist and two survivors from the island's western reaches to appear on their horizon.
But they would soon appear on the continent, and whether they would survive here and make their mark or they would die here is a story for another time. Be it slowly or inexorably just like how his forest had appeared, one root at a time, until one day when you looked up and it was simply there.