Flotsam

A continuation of my Christmas story

As I mentioned previously, my knight and I booked passage on a ship bound for the continent. There we would unite with King Arthur's army and join in the march to Rome.

We crossed the Severn Sea without incident but once we began to round the tip of Cornwall we ran into a terrible storm. The sky grew dark and rain fell upon us like sheets of water. The waves tossed us around and the wind blew us off course. For days without end the storm pushed us westward, ever further from our destination.

One day we noticed a peculiar nature of the storm. The sky grew an ominous shade of purplish black and the clouds swirled in a circular pattern that suggested a tunnel. One of the sailors remarked that it looked like a portal to the Otherworld. At the time, I did not realize how prescient he was. Anyway, into the maw of this tunnel our ship sailed. Shortly thereafter we experienced an incredibly rough patch. The surging waves battered our poor little ship. The planks began to give way, we started to take on water, and our vessel was pummeled until it broke apart. I don't exactly remember what happened next. I recall being swept overboard and grasping a piece of flotsam. And thus, I became flotsam myself.

The next thing I remember is waking up upon a beach. The whinny of a horse roused me into consciousness. I looked up a saw a noble lady upon a horse. She asked me where I came from but I could only croak out a plea for help before I slumped into insensibility.

I awoke again to find myself in a castle, being tended to by servants. I learned that it was many days later. I asked where I was; the servants responded that I was in the Scadian Empire. I had never heard of it before. It would take some time but ultimately I would learn that Scadia is in a world unknown to the scholars of my home. Interestingly, it is inhabited from peoples from a variety of different lands - you can find yourself rubbing shoulders with Northmen, Rus, Romans, Cathayans, etc. And it appears that the inhabitants come from different times as well! I once served a Viking lord that claimed to be born nearly 500 years after I was! It seems that my shipmate had an inkling about what was happening. For time is fluid in the Otherworld. It seems that I arrived, if not in the Otherworld itself, then in a world similar to it. Speculation is pointless at this point, however.Wherever it may be, it is in this new world that I arrived and where I now make my life.

OOC Notes

• The noble lady represents the young woman, a former co-worker, who introduced me to the SCA. Alas, I cannot remember her name.
• I always found gatherings of the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA or the Scadian Empire in my narrative) to be rather unusual. They claim to be recreating history but at events you can run across such divergent personas as a Roman legionnaire alongside a Viking berserker. Of course, this is utterly a-historical. I find it makes more sense to drop any pretense of a historical background and adopt a fantastical one instead. I envision the various LARP groups as being in another dimension; one where people from our medieval world have been swept up and deposited. This concept is the inspiration for my shipwreck story.
• The Otherworld is a mythical (and mystical) realm in Celtic mythology. It has been described as the land of the dead or the home of the Faerie folk (elves). It seems sensible that a medieval Briton traveling to another dimension would describe it as the Otherworld.