He swam. Striding leglessly through the stagnant, chilling water. It's sick grey colour leaving a feeling of overwhelming dread to rattle about his senses. The echo of gulls feeding and cawing at one another grew with each thrust towards dry land. Despite this, the land ahead never seemed visible, but hidden by a silky blanket of stick mist, draped over the ripples like a tablecloth.
He began to feel panic. Where was dry ground? Why so many ruins? Where are the people? He assumed that maybe the people were all dead, or even in hiding. But his either way, his only hope was to head in the direction of the gulls and seek out any life for himself. The swirling clouds loomed over the suffocating mist and paralysed waters as he pressed on, observing the structures about him with the kind of sensations that chill the spine and weaken the heart. Fear was gripping him.
His bright blue eyes were losing their sparkle. They dulled. Seemed to sag in their sockets. Never lose hope, he reminded himself. Never lose faith, he recited in his mind, like a tantra, over and over. Weights seemed to pull his eyes down as his limbs began to numb. Straining to keep his eyes open, he beat the water with his legs and pushed it behind himself with his arms, trying to rid himself of the clinging sensation of numbness that began to seep into his pores like a poison.
His eyes shot open, a flapping sensation caught him off guard as a frightened gull flapped franticly away from the water he invaded. He paused to catch his breath, taking in the sweet mist, and exhaling heavily. Then, he saw it. Land. Grey, dull and ruined. Just as the devastated temple walls and towers and pillars he had passed and driven by through the water, he realised this was his goal. The home of the Gulls. Gull sanctuary, he mused to himself. Death on wings had provided him a shelter, now to simply find the way in and find those who lived there with the gulls. To find out where he had come, and to find his way back to Zanarkand, to even find out if this was Zanarkand and it had indeed been drowned. But, that was so far fetched, he couldn't make himself believe it. Wouldn't.
The dirt against his hands felt sharp, cold and raw. Burning against his sore limbs. Grit and dust filled the atmosphere as he hoisted himself out of the water and began to pace cautiously along a stone path. Momentarily, he felt a chill and swung round to find nothing there. Paranoid and lonely, he turned back around feeling dubious about the reliability of his senses. Best to ignore my gut instincts, he shivered, and began once again to walk on, looking around himself for doors and corridors and gates and people. So far there was no sign of either or all of the above. Just the kind of silence that swallows up its' victims and regurgitates them to reinvent the suffering over and over.
Water, he quickly realised, was the essence of this old ruin. Everywhere he looked there was water, or carvings on their cracking walls or water themes and patters of ripples and waves. Below him, the water seemed to be waiting, intent on something happening as not a thing stirred in it or around it, beyond himself. It was only then he noticed. Statues of men, archways and ruined pillars were below his own feet. He came to see the path he walked led no where, as if to be a sign to take himself down into the depths and choose one of the gateways into the main structure of the huge temple.
The figures loomed, none of them with their heads held high, but almost as if to be looking away from one another in shame, as if to convey their misery at being nothing more than a pile of stone under a drowned ruin that no-one every took notice of. They had no pride. It was a sign to him to jump. To follow the shapes of people, their eyes and find a way out of the water. But first, he must be in the water. Things have to get worse before they'll get better, he prophesised in his mind.
He took one last glance at his surroundings and took a breath to cure his nerves. He leapt, arms outstretched and legs together tidily, a seraph of the water about to return. Splash.