The days are long, the sea is a beautiful crystal blue, and the fishing is good. The houses and huts are modest, but comfortable, the nets are strong, the animals are playful, the trees are plentiful, as is their fruit, and the people are dead.
Their blood covers the sand, their corpses float away with the tide or decompose by the beach, their intestines are picked at by gulls, the flies cover them like blankets.
Not all are dead, but the one that lives is not the one that had lived. He is tucked away in a shack at the pier, he is holding a gift from his uncle, he is cradling it as he speaks to himself, but it speaks back.
Then the ships come. The trade ships going to America, the trade ships going to that old New World. They see the carnage, they see the flies, they see the gulls, and they find the boy. He is still cradling that mask, but he doesn't speak at all now. He only whimpers at their questions, cries at their touch, and shuts his eyes tight as they drag him into the light, out onto the docks, and into their ship.
The captain was a nice enough man. Kind, generous, fair. He was not a very able captain, though, The crew did as they pleased. They drank, they hollered, they played, they fought. Few noticed the boy, always shut away in his room. Few, but not none. One had a preference for young blondes. It seems boy or girl, it didn't matter, or maybe it did, who can say? The man was lonely, the boy doesn't speak, kept his eyes shut tight, cries at his touch.
The journey was long. Long and lonely. Though not lonely enough, perhaps.
The third night is the last night. The man comes into the boy's room, he hears him talking for the first time, to himself it seems. His voice is coarse, it drips with the pain of a parched throat, raspy and yet somehow still full of his short life's anguish. The man hesitates, the boy does not. the hollow mask accepts his face, settling over it. The wood bends, warps to wrap around the boy's skull. He screams and the man come forward, trying to pry it from his face, afraid the boy is under attack from the demon possessed mask. He is not. The boy's body changes, he grows until he towers over the lonely sailor, the uniform of an ancient rite adorns his new body, the accompanying blade adorns his back.
There is screaming from the boy's room, then there is screaming from the hall, then there is screaming on deck, then there is no more sound at all. The boy locks himself in a maintenance closet. He holds his uncle's gift. He talks to himself. It talks back.
"What just happened? What am I? What are you?"
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