Stavanger Bay sunpu castle

Though he wandered across sand bar after sand bar, there was no sign that the beast knew where he was, or why. His head slouched more than it had previously; where once he had been low and subservient, now he was focusing on keeping his feet moving. He was weathered and tired. His breathing was ragged. Each breath sounded wet, as if he had been guzzling sea water and it had filled his lungs — no doubt it was the hole in his throat opening up which caused this. 

The only constant within the weapon's mind was a simple thought: Skellige. The word had long since lost its meaning to him, yet the boy clung to the syllables of it, used it as a raft while he drowned in his uncertainty and pain. There did come a sound beyond the sand and the surf — the stomping of feet — but as Tetsubo was lifting his head to bare witness to whoever approached, his eyes rolled in his head, and he abruptly came crashing to the earth atop a bed of tangled ocean weeds.

It took a moment, but he did try to get up. The connection of his body to the ground seemed to have roused something within him — maybe jostled his spirit, woke it up properly — and he regained his footing, although his throat had begun to leak with a dangerous mixture of fluids. His eyes were then half-lidded, and he stared at the sand like some sort of monument.