My apologies to anyone still reading this story … this delay is exactly the reason it's only the second WIP I've ever posted and it will be a few more years before I attempt to post like this again. In the meantime, here are the last couple of paragraphs (slightly edited) so you don't have to go figure out where Chapter 10 ended and to jump start a very short Chapter 11.
Preoccupied with thoughts of the map and the box, Aragorn absent-mindedly circumvented what looked like it might once have been one of their barrels of food. Fifty yards on, the broken bits of fractured, splintered wood, registered; he stopped, swaying backwards almost as if jerked by an unseen hand.
Dread opened a yawning pit in his stomach and crawled up his throat. A backwash of bitter, salt-water bile rose in his gorge, reflexively inciting a gagging urge to vomit. He fought it down and turned slowly, scarcely able to force his feet into motion. He had no wish to verify what his mind had registered, but neither could he choose ignorance and hope over the reality awaiting his perusal …
Nausea swam up the strangely charged current flowing from his stomach to his brain as the diminishing distance afforded further particulars. It required no elven eye sight even in the rain to see the jagged holes in the scattered planks, obviously torn from their fastenings. Some yet bore the remains of rivet and rove and he trod carefully in his bare feet as he picked his way through the strewn wrack and ruin.
The map cylinder slipped unnoticed from under his arm as he bent to turn over bits of wood festooned with broken barnacles nestled in the furry greenish-black growth he had seen sailors scrubbing from the underside of the great ships in the harbor back in Lindon. Aragorn dropped to his knees, his fingers seeking definition as he turned a much battered and splintered round of wood, finding the fragment of a carven symbol he knew had graced the tall spear of the main mast. Borlath had told him, off-handedly, in the eastern culture it was the eye of luck and every ship bore its image somewhere on its timber.
His fingers slid off the slippery wood as all the implications came together in a rush of comprehension.
Dead. They were all dead.
Had they gone north, then? Around the island? Or had the currents bordering the island carried the wreck of the ship to this far side?
His foster-father's warnings of danger stalking his footsteps, of menace striking without warning, of imperiling surrounding shadows, all coalesced in the form of a malevolent storm that had snatched away the lives of thirty-seven men.
Thirty-seven lives lost due to his impetuous desire to seek his roots.
Guilt was not an over familiar emotion; it had never been used as a tool for molding character in Imladris. But it swamped him now, replacing the dread of discovery with crushing culpability.
Ever throughout his formative years had it been borne upon his young mind that responsibility for one's actions was of paramount importance; every choice had a consequence and one did not slough off the responsibilities resulting from those choices.
The voice of his tutor joined the others in his head, Erestor reminding him that the ship's captain had made choices too, as had the crew that sailed with him.
It did not quiet the clamoring voices of the dead, all shouting in their strange guttural, only half understood language.
Aragorn bowed his head into his hands, the rain mingling with a flood of tears he could not have controlled if he had wanted too. He was neither tough, nor toughened yet, and the tender heart swelled so with grief he thought it would burst. In the moment, he welcomed the thought; his own death would have been easier to bear.
Elven time flowed over and around him, so the counting of it ceased to exist.
The rain slowed and stopped.
The cloud cover began to thin.
The sun came out.
His shirt began to dry.
Harwan found him slumped amidst the wreckage of the ship, as spent and limp as the drying seaweed on which he sat. Aragorn did not even notice the sailor until he was hauled unceremoniously to his feet.
A few short, sharp foreign words were snapped in his face. The younger man roused himself enough to presume - since his coat and boots were also being flourished between them - that Harwan had been worried he had gone visiting those First Age ruins of which he was so enamored.
"Come," Harwan barked, jerking an unresisting arm toward the denuded forest on this side of the island. "We go."
"Harwan." Aragorn pulled away, sweeping his gaze pointedly over the planks and pieces of ship railing decorating the white sandy beach.
The sailor ignored them, though his own eyes, as he met Aragorn's pained look, were full of grief as well. "Death comes," he said unequivocally. "We go."
Aragorn took his boots and coat, bent to retrieve the map cylinder and cast a last glance at the now bright and sunny beach littered with sea wrack, then turned to trudge across the sand in Harwan's wake.
TBC