Side Story 4.3: Ishmar's Boat
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The Last Survivor's Dream
Elsewhere in the world, far removed from the Beast Dominion Wars consuming Lonelywoods Forest and the political machinations surrounding Maya Village, a solitary figure worked with methodical determination on a project that represented his only remaining hope for salvation.
Ishmar stood before his latest creation, a vessel that could generously be called a boat or more accurately described as an oversized raft with delusions of seaworthiness. It was his seventh attempt at watercraft construction, and like the six failures that preceded it, this iteration represented the absolute limit of what an amateur builder working alone with salvaged materials could accomplish.
The ancient library had provided theoretical knowledge. Scrolls preserved for centuries in the stone chambers beneath what had once been the kingdom's greatest seat of learning contained detailed schematics for various vessel types. Ship designs developed over generations of maritime expertise, refined through trial and error by craftsmen who had devoted their entire lives to understanding how wood and water interacted.
But there was a vast chasm between theoretical knowledge recorded on ancient parchment and practical skill developed through years of apprenticeship under master shipwrights. Ishmar possessed the former but utterly lacked the latter, and that deficiency showed in every crude joint and improvised connection that held his vessel together.
"What do I know about boat building?" he muttered to himself, a habit of vocalization that had become more pronounced as years of solitude eroded the social conventions that governed normal human behavior. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."
It was true. Before the catastrophe that had destroyed the sole remaining civilization he knew and left him as apparently its sole survivor, Ishmar had been training himself through his parents instructions and later on through reading scrolls since he was small. He wanted to become a plant specialist since that is what his parents specialized in. His studies lay in the plants themselves and in understanding how to grow them in this climate and optimizing yields. He was a genius and could look at the fields and assess its productivity potential with professional competence well at least in the context of what they had in the time he was born. He could diagnose plant diseases from subtle visual cues and recommend interventions that would save what little harvests they had.
But ships? Ships were alien territory, a specialized craft that required knowledge he had never possessed and could not easily acquire through self-study alone.
Yet circumstances had forced him to become many things he had never intended to be. The years following the passing of his parents in the apocalypse that had wrought their island and that consumed his world had transformed him through desperate necessity into something that barely resembled the young botanist/horticulturist genius who had somehow survived when millions perished.
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The Education of Desperation
The island that had once supported millions of people now hosted a single living human. Ishmar had searched extensively, covering distances that represented weeks of travel on foot, hoping desperately to find other survivors who had somehow escaped the madness that had claimed the land of human life.
He had found nothing. Empty cities, towns and villages whose buildings still stood but whose inhabitants had simply vanished. Whatever barren agricultural fields that remained had now returned to wilderness with no one to tend them. Roads that led nowhere because there was no one left to use them. The silence was absolute and crushing, broken only by wind and rain and the slow patient work of nature reclaiming territory that humans had briefly occupied.
The island was not small. At the height of its civilization, it had supported millions of inhabitants, which meant it possessed sufficient land area and resources to sustain that population. Ishmar estimated it might take years to explore every corner thoroughly, but the areas he had covered represented substantial territory, and the complete absence of survivors suggested a grim conclusion.
He was alone. Possibly the last human being alive in this entire region of the world. The thought was simultaneously terrifying and oddly liberating. There was no one to judge his failures, no one to witness his struggles, no one to care whether he lived or died except himself.
But isolation also meant that survival required self-sufficiency at levels that would have been impossible in a functioning society. Every skill, every capability, every piece of knowledge necessary for continued existence had to be developed personally or extracted from the ancient library that had become his most valuable resource.
The library had survived the apocalypse that had destroyed the civilization around it, its stone construction and enchanted preservation spells protecting the accumulated knowledge of generations. Ishmar had spent months, perhaps years, exploring its collections systematically. He read agricultural texts that expanded his existing knowledge. He studied ecological treatises that explained how natural systems functioned and could be manipulated. He absorbed engineering principles that governed construction and mechanical systems.
And eventually, inevitably, he reached the maritime section and began studying ship design with the desperate focus of someone who recognized that mastering this knowledge represented his only chance of escape from an island that had become his prison.
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Years of Failure
The first boat had been laughably inadequate, a collection of logs lashed together with vine rope that fell apart within minutes of being placed in water. Ishmar had watched it disintegrate with a mixture of frustration and dark amusement. At least he had learned what didn't work.
The second attempt incorporated lessons from the first failure. Better joinery, more careful selection of wood, attention to buoyancy distribution. It had lasted nearly an hour before structural weaknesses caused catastrophic failure that nearly drowned him when he was testing it in shallow coastal waters.
The third, fourth, and fifth boats represented incremental improvements but ultimately shared the same fundamental flaw: Ishmar was trying to build vessels that required skills he did not possess using tools he had to craft himself from materials salvaged from ruins. Each failure taught him something, but the curve of improvement was agonizingly slow.
The sixth boat had been the most ambitious, a proper sailing vessel with mast and rudder and storage compartments for supplies. He had spent nearly a year constructing it, following ancient designs with religious devotion to detail. When he finally launched it, the vessel had actually functioned for almost three days before accumulated water damage from poorly sealed joints caused it to founder and sink within sight of the island he had been trying to escape.
That failure had nearly broken him. He had stood on the beach watching his year of work disappear beneath the waves and seriously considered whether continued survival was worth the effort. What was the point of struggling alone on a dead island with no hope of ever rejoining human civilization?
But after a period of despair that he later could not accurately measure because time had become fluid and meaningless, Ishmar had returned to the library and resumed studying. Not because he had recovered hope, but because the alternative to trying was surrendering to entropy and madness.
The seventh boat represented everything he had learned from six failures. It was not elegant or particularly sophisticated by the standards described in the ancient texts. But it was, he believed, actually seaworthy. More importantly, it was realistic for someone with his limited capabilities to navigate.
The design was conservative, prioritizing stability and durability over speed or cargo capacity. It was essentially an enlarged raft with enclosed storage areas, a simple mast that could be raised or lowered as conditions required, and a rudder that provided basic steering capability. An experienced shipwright would have sneered at its crude construction. But an experienced shipwright was not available, and this vessel represented the absolute best that Ishmar could achieve working alone.
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Testing and Preparations
Ishmar did not immediately attempt to sail into the open ocean. The scrolls had emphasized the importance of testing vessels in controlled conditions before risking them in deep water, and he had learned through painful experience to respect that wisdom.
He spent months conducting trial runs in shallow coastal waters, learning how his boat handled in different conditions. He practiced raising and lowering the mast, discovered how wind direction affected speed and stability, learned to read weather patterns that indicated when sailing was safe versus foolhardy. He capsized twice during these trials, but in shallow water where he could right the vessel and recover from mistakes without drowning or losing his craft entirely.
The education was humbling and occasionally terrifying, but gradually Ishmar developed competence that approached adequacy. He would never be a skilled sailor in any conventional sense. But he could probably keep the boat afloat in moderate seas and navigate toward a distant destination if such a destination existed.
And that was the fundamental uncertainty that haunted all his preparations. The ancient library contained maps that showed the island's position relative to a mainland continent, but those maps were centuries old at minimum. Political boundaries would have shifted. Kingdoms marked on ancient parchment might no longer exist. Coastal cities that the maps indicated might have been destroyed or abandoned or simply never existed in the first place if the cartographers had been mistaken.
But the maps agreed on one crucial point: approximately one hundred thousand nautical miles to the north-northeast lay a massive landmass identified as the Arkanus continent. That distance was staggering, representing months of sailing under optimal conditions and possibly years if weather or navigation proved challenging. Many things could go wrong across such vast distance. Storms could destroy the boat. Supplies could run out. He could become hopelessly lost.
But staying on the island guaranteed slow death through isolation and eventual madness. At least attempting the journey offered possibility, however remote, of finding other living humans and rejoining civilization in some form.
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The Transformation
The years of work had changed Ishmar in ways that went far beyond acquiring new skills. The catastrophe that had struck the island had spanned centuries already and by the time he was born and was alive millions had already died everyday. Then he became a young man barely into his twenties, a young man whose identity was still forming and whose understanding of the world was shaped by comfortable assumptions about society's rise from its fall.
Now he was approaching his thirties, or perhaps had already passed that milestone because tracking time precisely had become difficult. His body had been hardened by physical labor that never ended. His hands were calloused from tools and rope. His skin was weathered from constant sun exposure during boat construction on exposed beaches. His hair and beard had grown long because maintaining grooming standards seemed pointless when no one else existed to see him.
But the physical changes were superficial compared to the psychological transformation. The young man who had been scorned by friends and fellow villagers and had escaped before he became another meal of theirs. Daydreamed about an island that was green, as it was in the past, that child no longer existed. That person had been replaced by someone harder, more focused, and infinitely more lonely. He had achieved his goal of a green island but now there was no one to share it with.
Ishmar had become, through desperate necessity and years of self-education, a polymath whose skills spanned multiple disciplines. He understood ecology at levels that would have impressed professional scholars, having spent years observing how natural systems recovered when human influence was removed. He could farm with expert competence, having maintained gardens that kept him fed through seasons and years. He had developed engineering capabilities through projects that required understanding structural principles and mechanical advantage. He could build structures that remained standing despite his lack of formal training. And he had achieved basic competence in maritime skills that most people never needed to develop.
He was a jack of all trades, master of none, driven by curiosity and survival instinct to acquire whatever knowledge circumstances demanded.
But all that acquired knowledge was all for naught. His youth had been consumed by solitary struggle on an island that offered nothing except continued existence. He had never experienced romance or friendship or the countless small joys that made human life rich and meaningful. He had only survival, day after day, alone with his thoughts and his projects and his slowly eroding hope that escape might be possible.
The doubts swirled constantly now, whispers in his mind that questioned whether any of this effort served purpose. Even if he successfully reached the mainland, what then? Would he find thriving civilization or another dead landscape? Would he be welcomed or killed as foreign threat? Would the journey itself claim his life before he ever saw land?
He did not know. Could not know. But his body continued working despite his mind's uncertainties, moving through construction tasks with practiced efficiency, preparing supplies for a voyage that might prove his final act in a life that had already been marked by more loss than most people experienced.
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Departure Preparations
As his boat neared completion and his skill at handling it approached adequacy, Ishmar began the final preparations for departure. The list of necessary supplies was daunting, representing months of gathering and preserving resources.
Food sufficient for potentially six months at sea. Dried fish and preserved fruits from his carefully maintained gardens. Grain stores that could be rationed to extend survival even if fishing proved unsuccessful. Water barrels enough to sustain him between rainfalls, because he could collect fresh water during storms but needed reserves for periods of drought.
Navigation tools assembled from salvaged materials and careful craftsmanship. A compass that he had painstakingly constructed using lodestone found in the island's mineral deposits. Sextant components salvaged from the ruins and assembled through trial and error. Charts copied from the ancient library's maps, knowing they might be outdated but having no better alternative.
Clothing and shelter sufficient to protect against sun exposure during tropical days and cold during storms. Fishing equipment that could supplement his food stores if managed correctly. Medical supplies scavenged from ruins and preserved as carefully as his limited knowledge allowed.
And perhaps most importantly, copies of texts from the ancient library, preserved knowledge that represented the only tangible link to the civilization only he had known that had perished. If he successfully reached the mainland and found living people, these texts might be his only offering of value, proof that his lost kingdom had achieved things worth remembering even though its people had been erased.
The preparations consumed months, each item carefully considered and tested because any oversight could prove fatal once he was beyond sight of land with no possibility of return. He was preparing for a journey that represented humanity's experience with seafaring distilled to its most fundamental elements: one person, one boat, one vast ocean, and the hope that somewhere beyond the horizon lay salvation.
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The Final Night Before his Departure
On what he decided would be his last night on the island, Ishmar stood on the beach watching the sunset paint the sky in colors that seemed impossibly beautiful considering the loneliness that had become his constant companion. The boat was loaded and ready. The weather patterns suggested favorable conditions for departure. Everything that could be prepared had been prepared.
Tomorrow, he would sail into the unknown, pursuing a destination that might not exist, seeking people who might not survive, betting everything on the possibility that somewhere in the world, there are other human civilizations.
He thought about the millions who had died, vanished so completely that he still did not understand why such a curse to their people had occurred, although deep down he already knew the answer. He began to think about the childhood he never experienced, consumed by catastrophe before he could appreciate its fleeting nature. He thought about the young man he might have become in different circumstances, with normal concerns and ordinary dreams.
But mostly he thought about tomorrow, about casting off from the only land he had known for years and committing himself to the vast indifference of the ocean. Fear was present, certainly, a cold weight in his stomach that he could not ignore or rationalize away. But it was accompanied by something else, something that might have been hope or might have been simple desperation dressed in hope's clothing.
He could not stay. The island was beautiful in its own way, and the work he had done to restore its ecosystems was satisfying on some abstract level. But it was also a tomb, a monument to millions of dead whose memory would vanish completely if he did not survive to bear witness to their existence.
So he would sail. And he would probably die, drowned or starved or lost forever in waters that cared nothing for human ambition. But at least he would die trying to escape rather than slowly surrendering to entropy and madness.
Ishmar returned to his shelter one final time, sleeping fitfully in a bed he had built years ago, knowing that tomorrow would transform everything. Either he would begin the journey toward rejoining humanity, or he would begin the journey toward joining all those who had died before him.
Both possibilities terrified him. But paralyzed inaction terrified him more.
When dawn broke over the island, Ishmar would sail. And the universe would determine whether his story ended in the depths of an uncaring ocean or continued on shores where other humans might still draw breath.
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One hundred thousand nautical miles to the south-southeast, Maya Village fought for its survival against the Beast Dominion Wars, unaware that far to the south, a lone sailor prepared to cross an ocean in search of civilization that might no longer exist.
The world was vast and strange, and human stories played out in isolation across its enormous expanse, each person struggling with their own impossible challenges, each surviving a defiance of odds that suggested extinction should have claimed them all.
But humans endured. And sometimes, across distance and time, those separate stories would intersect in ways that no one could predict.
Ishmar's journey was just beginning. Maya Village's trial by fire continued. And somewhere in the incomprehensible complexity of the world, threads of fate wove patterns that would eventually connect them all.