As far as preparing for contingencies went, being abducted by a Mindflayer ship had not been anything her lord father had prepared her for. Still. A kidnapping was a kidnapping, and when faced with one she typically had few choices: escape, kill, or both. This situation calls for escape. These ships did not travel often in the worlds above, and were scarcely ever heard of or seen, except in legend and history. She has little attachment to her own world, but what these creatures planned for her, she knew, were far worse than something familiar and tolerated.

She'd felt the first twisting flex of the thing inside of her head as she'd blurrily taken in her surroundings, at the way the walls pulsed and flexed like the tensing of a muscle. Red light, red walls. Red like broken capillaries. A wretched thing, this: a thing both alive and dead. Like her.

In any event, the thing had flexed in her skull and wriggled, burrowed into the flesh of her mind. There was not pain, not precisely — the brain had no nerves to feel pain. She knew this from her work. The feeling was nonetheless deeply unpleasant. She thinks right then to drive the pin holding up her hair into her eye, but the thing predicts this, and her hand freezes in midair. She stares at the uncooperative limb in a bland and cold confusion.

If fear in Akeha still existed, it was buried in a place that she could no longer touch, burned away to the ash that had long since settled over her heart. This emotion overwhelms her now, in the living body of this dead machine, for the first time in many years. The feeling settles, knifelike and cold in the very pit of her stomach.

It doesn't speak. But she feels something that would, in some sense, be thought of as comfort. She feels it flex and shudder like a new muscle in her brain, and all of a sudden, she knows where to go. The thing was not interested in her death, it seemed. Of course it wasn't — she was its host.

It wanted her to escape, and so she does.

The rest is largely a blur. She will remember the great scaled form of a dragon, an army of dragons to blot out the hellish sky, magnificent and terrible both. She will remember burning, acrid heat, the ship writhing and twisting in the shadows left in the light of flame. Then falling — she's knocked cold, tumbling through open sky. It's the creature that wakes her at last. It stirs in slow and pained movements and the alien feeling it leaves her with is enough to wake her as well. Pain came next, but pain was easily dealt with. Her immediate priority would be her head injury. She couldn't afford to be addled any further than she already was.

The air still stinks of blood and burning flesh, but beneath that she smells the ocean. Water meant a settlement at the very least, say nothing of the scattered bodies of the unfortunate fishermen around her.

Akeha begins to walk along the ruined shore unsteadily. The landscape blurs not long after she starts to move: she teeters unsteadily before righting herself. This head injury was perhaps more urgent than she'd assumed. The creature seemed to agree.

She settles on the bank with one of the dead men. Unceremoniously, she begins to rifle through his belongings. She finds what she needs a moment later: rough cloth that looked clean enough to work with and fresh water in a thin necked bottle.

Ideally this would be done in a cleaner environment, but her state of affairs required flexibility. She carefully dabs at her wound with the dampened cloth and the world lurches again. Akeha closes her eyes and breathes in. Listens to the water lick at the bank of the shore. Even the creature goes still.

When she opens her eyes, the world looks a little sharper. She flexes her fingers.

The dead man, her unwitting companion, stares up at the sky. His face is trapped in a rictus of perpetual surprise, his eyes clouded with death. Akeha would lean over to close them, but he's likely too far gone by now. Instead she focuses on her work, unhurried.

Something would need to be done about the bodies. She debates on if she will do this on her own and lets this thought project out to the creature, lets it blare as loudly as she can. She would need to begin building a wall, and this was the first step. But she is unsure. It wouldn't be the same as the other walls. This would require a remarkable amount of effort. It would require pain, either her own or the creature's. She imagines both.

So be it.

With the remaining cloth, she bandages her head.