The first sensation I felt, as my senses began in sequence to resolve the world around me, was a cool breeze across my face, crisp and refreshing in an altogether most pleasant manner for one who was moments ago trapped amidst an inferno. Upon opening my eyes, however, I was confronted with a bemusing sight: the black and gently-rippling surface of the ocean rushing past me at considerable speed and distance. After my attempts to blink this bizarre figment from existence proved fruitless, I came to realise my situation. I was sailing through the air, after having been flung from the Selkie by that tremendous blast.

Craning to look back, through eyes watering from the wind I could see a spot of orange light on the horizon where the ship still burned. At this moment I recalled the existence of my courageous friend, yet despite a brief and frantic search from my high vantage I could glimpse not a hair of him. Ahead of me, out of the sea fog, there steadily crystallised a large shape, which my addled mind immediately classified as an enormous aquatic porcupine of some sort, in accordance with its broad flat back and many bristles. Of course, what I was hurtling rapidly towards was nothing more bizarre than a tree-lined beach. This fact became rather suddenly and imminently relevant to me as I realised my altitude had waned considerably over the course of my busy airborne schedule, and was indeed all but spent. Thus, having arrived at the terminus of my arc, I collided promptly with the upper mass of a palm tree, and elected with a groan to embark upon a well-earned nap.

I awoke in a lush green grotto of leaves dappled with the gentle light of the rising sun. Their soft susurration as they filtered the morning breeze harmonised most pleasantly with the faint rushing of the sea, which I could hear breaking against some distant rocks, to create amidst the tree's fronds an atmosphere of utmost sylvan serenity. For a generous moment I simply relaxed, my eyes closed, and enjoyed the peace of my surroundings spare of any thought of ships and sailors. Although the prior night's events soon bubbled eagerly back to the surface of my consciousness, I nonetheless appreciated this serendipitous opportunity to rest.

Yet from far below I began to hear a strange chittering sound, and upon my peering from my perch a sight greeted me for which I was thoroughly not prepared. Clustered in a rough circle were perhaps a half-dozen muddy-brown creatures, each at least six feet long, with long snaking bodies and cardioid heads. To my horror, the pack were scrabbling at the base of my tree with an array of sizeable claws, and when they opened their wide mouths each displayed rather formidable sets of incisors and canines. Drawing upon my knowledge from a cold autumn in the Year of the Swan spent categorising animal species within the flagstone depths of the ducal archives, I surmised that the gang of braying animals below me were almost certainly carnivorous. As though they had shared in my epiphany and discovered within themselves a new enthusiasm for tearing small helpless creatures to shreds, the beasts began one by one to throw their weight against the trunk of my tree.

Caught in a situation which was rapidly becoming untenable, I was forced to think quickly. I scanned my leafy environs for a means of escape, and they offered to me only a collection of large bristly fruit, entirely alien to my knowledge, which hung in a cluster around the top of the tree's trunk. With little better to do, I managed to pry one of these fruit from its fibrous moorings, and hurled it clumsily downwards at the pack. It impacted neatly upon one of their heads with a squelch. The effect was almost immediate: directly as the fruit landed, the entire group of beasts swarmed for a moment before lolloping away into the undergrowth. Just, however, as I allowed myself a modest inward celebration for my ingenuity, the reason for their departure made itself apparent to me. Rising from below there came an overpoweringly noxious odour, sickly-sweet and pungent in extremes, which felt as though it permeated not only my sense of smell but those of sight and taste, a fume so repellent that it was though I could almost hear it. Faced with spending the remainder of my life in this tree and clueless as to when the smell might dissipate, I decided that my best course of action would be to follow the beasts' example and vacate the area for more hospitable climes.

I scrambled down the trunk of my tree and, after making some ground from the noisome cloud at its base, scanned the surroundings for any further fauna. Presented with a reassuring lack of wild animals, I headed out along the languid curve of the beach, with intent to locate anything - or indeed anyone - washed up from the Selkie's shattered remains. Though I sought to stifle it, a small and secret hope burned within me that around the next corner might emerge the stout figure of a certain troll, wearing a knowing smile and ready to bear me with characteristic enthusiasm from this hostile place. Alas, this particular mirage failed to manifest upon my paltry strip of desert. Gradually progressing around its circumference, I saw no sign that this island had ever been so much as glanced upon by civilisation. I contemplated for a time the thought that I may be the first person ever to set foot on its shores - a notion which revealed itself, rounding the base of a sheer headland, to be a fleeting companion.

From wave-worn roots spanning the bay's lapping shallows, rose up a tangled limestone fractal, a mass of decaying doorways and slit windows choked by geometric relief and surging green vine alike. Sculpted into a squat trapezoid, the structure sulked in angular defiance of the surrounding landscape's flowing forms, though stubbornly hewn into crumbling compliance by the hammers of time and the cloying blanket of plant life which lay upon it. The ruin before me was, in short, unlike any edifice I had ever before laid eyes upon, and attempting to intake its full spectacle saw me stood motionless on the sand for some seconds. As I traced my vision down toward its base I was met with an unexpected sight: a trail of shallow footprints remained impressed upon the wet sand, marking a path from the beach opposite me toward a set of the strange structure's steps.

Overcoming my apprehension, I crossed the short strip of sand to the foot of the building, and scaled with slight difficulty the slick black staircase at the base of which the footsteps terminated. Among the countless orifices within the vast stone face ahead, one at ground level presented itself as an apparent entrance, being roughly seven feet in height and half as wide. Across its threshold lay nothing but foreboding darkness. Fortunately we beastfolk, as the eastern tongue names us, are oft possessed of keen senses, and even my own considerable short-sightedness thankfully does not hinder an acute night vision. Thus, ominous though it seemed from the outside, upon traversing the doorway what quickly manifested was nothing so menacing as a simple stone passage. Shallow alcoves lined its walls, host to various dim-coloured flora, and from the far end, which twisted gently out of sight, wafted a slight stale breeze. I began to pad my way down it.

Shortly, the dim and winding passage bloomed out into a large domed chamber. Upon its walls I could glimpse hints of vine-cloaked frescoes which seemed to girdle its full width, and in its centre a wide stepped platform thrust upward from the floor. From above was cast a shaft of stark white light through an aperture in the ceiling, which lit from behind a stone table of some sort upon the platform, carved all over with a precise script and strangled by flowering creepers. None of these features were, however, subject to more than the briefest of glances as the room's centrepiece immediately captured my attention. Lying on the table, arms crossed, was an enormous figure. A gust of powerful curiosity propelled me forwards to the dais, but the harsh lighting yet mired the figure's features in shadow; I crept closer. I was not three feet away, when without warning, amidst that pitch-dark face a glowing amber eye snapped open. Fear froze me solid.

"...Perry?"

Relief subsumed me like a sudden ocean swell.

"Murin!"

As the troll sat groggily upright I saw, beneath the vines he had crushed, a set of grooves within the table's face, stained by rivulets of an unmistakeable rust-red.

"What upon the face of Tellus compelled you to take a nap on a sacrificial altar?" I implored.

"Huh? Oh..." he mused, "It did seem a funny place for a bed."