Salvation

The salty air tore its way through her hair, tossed it brusquely in the wind. The prow of the boat cleaved the frothy waves below. She thought the weather would have warmed more as they drew closer to the island, but the cold was still biting. They must be near it now, though. They had to be. 

She pulled out her telescope, scanning the flat horizon for any spec of land in the distance. Nothing. Then a sound behind her: a voice calling out. She whipped around to see a deckhand, gesturing excitedly towards the sky. She didn’t see it at first, but then—against the grey clouds, an arced shape—a gull, coasting on the wind. Her heart skipped. 

*****

It wasn’t an inherent love of the sea that led her to sailing; rather a desperation to escape the squalor of the mainland, the rickety shantytowns sprawling offshore. The filth of it. The unbearable noise, the rank heat of other bodies pressing upon her. Here, she was unburdened. She could breathe, take in a lungful of air without the stench of the city. Free.

She had first run from her ancestral home, escaping that heavy house that creaked and moaned under the weight of so many generations. She took a job with the monarchy, eventually being assigned by the high king as a navigator. Her orders were to plant flags, claim other countries as the king's own, and steal their resources. Pirating, as sanctioned by the government. It was while she was at a portside saloon, drinking to bury the guilt of working for an increasingly greedy and paranoid monarch, that she first heard the whispers about something. Something buried deep in the heart of the jungle on one of the most remote islands in existence. Something that had the potential to change everything. 

*****

The island now came into view. She couldn’t stop staring at it as they approached, examining the trees through the telescope, though she would be seeing them up close in a matter of an hours. She collapsed the instrument back down. The anchor was dropped, a rowboat lowered onto the gentle waves. She felt the warmth, now, as she climbed down the ship’s ladder and jumped into the small wooden boat. As the gentle rhythm of oars lapping through water filled the air, she looked again to the thick, impenetrable jungle jutting up from the white sand. Then, suddenly—some movement in the trees. Eyes. Hair. A few timid human faces peeked out. Inhabitants of the island. 

As she and her crewmemebers pulled themselves onto the sand, they were greeted with the trepidation of a few locals. There had been others like her who had reached this place before, she was sure now. Her crew's arrival didn't seem like a sight entirely unfamiliar to these people, though they were still wary of the unannounced visitors. Other navigators, she thought, must have been similarly obsessed. They also had that rabid desperation for this elixir to exist, a hunger that gnawed and grew with time. They had come here and never returned. Of course not—why would they? But she was going to be different. She would resist the temptation to use it on herself. She needed to share it with the rest of the world first. 

*****

As her crew tried communicating with a few locals, a small figure streaked by on the beach. It was a sight so unfamiliar she wasn't sure she had seen it at all. But then she turned to where it had ran and she saw it: A child. She stared in awe as the small thing clung to the legs of a woman. Perhaps its mother. A chill ran through her—the sublime immensity of standing at the edge of a new world. Children. How long had it been since she had seen them? How many decades since the ordinance against new life? And the rest of the natives, they had a spectrum of age wider than any she had ever seen. An old, wrinkled woman sat on driftwood on the beach. More children. Young people. These people were lively, their motions swift and purposeful. It couldn't be further from the listlessness shuffling, swaying and loitering of the mainland. Here, they had room to walk, to be alone. To have children. 

She was snapped from her reverie by her first mate, who informed her that he was able to communicate with one of the locals. He said this man could guide them to the spot in the forest. She looked at the man, his face tanned and creased by the sun. Wrinkles around formed around his eyes as he smiled. He seemed trustworthy. 

*****

Their new local guide bushwhacked in the path in front of them as they stepped their way through the dense greenery. Thin vines coiled around smooth trees, snaking their way upward towards the canopy. The ground was soft, browned leaves decaying into the detritus of the forest floor. Nutrients for this thriving ecosystem. She suddenly wondered about those navigators that had come before. Were their bodies here, still, in some form, on the island? The trilling, alien cries of exotic birds echoed in the moist air above—fitting guardians for something so strange, most mainland citizens would barely comprehend it. But these people on this island lived among it. These happy people. The guide suddenly called out from up ahead. They must be getting close now.

She felt her heart beating faster, thudding through her body. What was that, fear? Excitement? It was thrilling to feel such an evolutionary leftover. Those feelings had atrophied over time, shriveling like an underused appendage. Their absence gave way to the dull suffering that penetrated every waking moment, every century that ticked by, so constant it became background noise. Like everything else. 

It was all going to change now. More light began to filter through the trees as they approached a clearing in the forest. Then, she saw it: A massive tree rising from the center of a deep pond, leaking at the edges into small streams that meandered through the jungle. The island’s source of water. This is why these people were different. They drink this water every day of their life, until… until it ends. 

For this was the elixir she was searching for. The elixir to end the curse of immortality. 

The elixir of death.