Silverlight Terrace There is no sorry to be sorry for

"Next drudge, forward."

Her voice carries over a frothing, angry sea. From the shore-break, the water wounds. Invisible icy daggers pierce through the protection of saltworn skin. He recognizes the words -- simple sentences and structures spoken in their challenging tongue. They come to him in slow motion, both so near and far away, and there's a terrible trepidation in his breath.

He is afraid. 
 
There is jeering at his back. Hesitating, he looks toward those that gathered on the shore. He looks for Akantha among them, searching desperately for the woman in the faces of these women who shared her name but none of her mercy, and then he remembers. "I won't let you drown," she says -- but she is not here to stop it, not this.

A body is caught in the rolling current. He recognizes him. A drudge like me, he thinks. 

***

When Whip woke, the ghost of Themiscyra lingered in the silence. Unheard. Unseen. He carried it with him, even after all these years. Some wounds never seemed to close. He thought of the girl and what he'd done almost reflexively before pushing it from his mind. Freedom had a price paid in blood.

He needed to move. To walk. A distraction.

Pulling himself from a natural outcropping of earth and stone, Whip set down toward the steppe in the dark with only the light of the moon to guide his path.