"Yes," Ellyn said, a question teetering in her voice. What was he getting at? It was clear whoever it was had been murdered already. Ellyn wondered if she had missed something and searched through what they had seen.
She pictured that scene all too quickly. It was with dreadful certainty that she knew it would be in her nightmares for years to come. People shouldn't easily get over seeing a dead body.
"It's more likely that the body has an illusion on it." She wished such things didn't work on her so that she would know for sure, but wishes weren't going to help her in this situation, so she brushed it off and continued. "If it had been you from a different dimension, would that have hurt you in some way?" Ellyn wasn't an expert with dimensional science, but she thought he would have been fine.
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He stewed for a bit on her yes, trying to come up with another answer, but there was really just one. A dead body didn't need to be tied up. Why tie it up? Why bother? There had to be a reason, and there was really just one obvious reason."Well... means they probably wanted the body to be there when they came back. For necromancy, or for parts or whatever." He'd lived on the island a long time, and he knew there were flesh eaters wandering around. He was - well, he was going to have to report it to the police. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to find the body again, or even if the tree would still be there, but he could at least report what he'd seen.
"I don't know. I just - it helped to know it wasn't actually me. Even if it didn't really change anything, I felt like I was losing my mind, like someone had killed me and tossed me back in time. Like I was looking into my future." But it wasn't him, and he was going to cling to that fact like a life preserver.
Ellyn had assumed the body was strung up to drain the blood. It was what people did when they slaughtered pigs; it made for a cleaner cutting later on. She told him this opinion and added to it with a, "but it makes sense that they tied it there in the hopes it would be here when whoever came back." She tried to think why it had looked like him. "Maybe whoever killed that person only thought it was you? Or maybe it's a warning?"
She stole a glance at his face, her own solemn. "I'm so sorry, Ophion." It was all one could say in a situation like this. Then it occurred to her, through her worry for him, that he had looked at the things torso. "What's different about you from that guy? I saw you look at the body's torso, and you relaxed afterward."
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It was definitely a possibility that he had been strung up to remove the blood. Maybe they were both true. It was hard for him to tell, and he chewed on his lip as they continued to walk, considering every possibility.There were, quite frankly, too many damn possibilities. He was all but lost in thought, and obviously having to try and focus on her when she spoke. "Maybe it was enchanted to look like whoever stumbled upon it in the first place... but no, it'd have been you, and it wouldn't have been different if it was that kind of magic..." He trailed off, before glancing at her again.
"Oh." He paused, then decided it would be faster to just show her. He reached down, pulling up the side of his shirt to reveal the side of his torso.
Running down his side was an inch wide strip of bright blue snake scales, which vanished into the top of his pants. It was extremely obvious once his skin was exposed, and there could be no question that the body had been missing them. "These."
Ellyn's eyes widened when she saw the scales. She hadn't gotten a good look at his eyes, but they reminded her of them, anyway. Maybe she should have been creeped out, but she thought he looked beautiful. She reached out to run her finger along the scales, gently, as not to startle him.
"Those are....wow. How -- What are you? You used your tongue to smell earlier. Are you some kind of snake? I haven't seen something like you before." Which wasn't saying a lot, Ellyn hadn't been on the island that terribly long.
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He wasn't expecting her to touch them, and his first instinct was to pull his shirt down. He resisted the urge, keeping it where it was until her hand had withdrawn, and only then tucking it back down."Half Naga. My mother's a full one, so I got some scales, the tongue thing, and a deep hatred for winter. It's not the sort of thing that most people see, so I figured..." Well, what he'd figured was obvious enough. He'd wanted to be sure, to know if it was him, or just someone who looked like him. Someone who looked like him was an odd coincidence, but someone who had the same scales as him? That was way too much coincidence.
"We should pick up the pace. The tsunami can't be too far off." Maybe thirty minutes? He'd long ago lost track of time.
"Right," Ellyn said. Her fingers were still tingling from the smooth feeling of his scales. It reminded her of the days she used to play with garden snakes, only his were more beautiful.
She was tired, so tired. The longer their silence stretched on, the more apparent it became to her. When she had the distractions -- first the missing boy, then the body, and then Ophion and her talking -- it was easy to miss the intensifying throbbing in her legs and feet, but now she felt every little fluctuation of that pain. It made every minute seem like an hour. Her adrenaline had run out, which wasn't helping either. She wondered how close they were, but feared the answer. This work was getting worse the more they went uphill.
"Do you tutor?" she asked when the silence became too much and all she could hear was the thrumming of her heart in her ears.
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Ophion was happy with the silence. It was what he needed - time to think. Time to process what he'd seen, to try and make sense of it. Even if no actual sense was forthcoming, it helped him to at least try and think on it. It was just question after question. Was he even going to be able to find his way back once a wave had washed over the island?Her question distracted him, and he glanced over. "Sometimes. It's not really my main thing, but I do when someone needs history tutoring mostly." He didn't tutor much for other subjects. They weren't really his area of expertise, after all.
"We should try and get an idea of how much longer we have - I don't suppose you have any kind of 'see the ocean' powers?" He didn't really think so, but it couldn't hurt to ask just in case she did.
Ellyn smiled humorlessly at him. "Afraid not. My power won't help us much here. I only have a mental shield. But," here she looked over her shoulder, then up their path, "we can't be far off now, the incline is getting pretty steep." God how Ellyn hoped that was true. Part of it felt like wish fulfillment on her part.
"I mean, you're fun to walk with and everything, Ophion, but my feet are killing me. Also, the whole 'giant-wave-coming-for-us' thing is a real mood killer." One glance. That was all it took to see how disturbed he still was about the body. Ellyn was disturbed too, but she wanted him to feel better.
She felt all too powerless in this situation. She couldn't get them to safe ground faster, and she couldn't cheer Ophion up or comfort him. She couldn't even tell how close the wave was, or why they had found that body, or even why it looked like him. All of that was true, and yet, she couldn't stop trying.
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If Ion hadn't been listening so carefully for anything, he might have missed it - a dull noise he couldn't have possibly identified if he hadn't been warned in advance.The wave was coming. All his fear over the body turned to absolute dread at the realization. It was real. It was really coming, barrelling towards them, and they had maybe a minute before it hit. Even as far inland as they were, he knew at least some of the wave would reach them.
"We need to - to hide behind a tree." A part of his brain became absolutely convinced that hiding behind a tree would save them, even if it really wasn't going to do shit. The best it would do was keep the debris from slamming into them, and he reached out, trying to grab her wrist to haul her behind a particularly thick trunk.
There was no hiding the fear on his face.