Prisoner… from the Mender’s Tomb

Dreamless sleep…
Floating aimlessly and thoughtlessly in shades of purple and gray fading to black…
Was she to enter the blackness?
Lancinating pain in her back and shoulder brought her back to consciousness.
Dry mouth…
Horrific taste…
Piara reluctantly opened her eyes. Moving her shoulder intensified the pain. She was lying on a bed of soft seaweed in a brightly illuminated chamber. The plush thick blue seaweed nestled her bare skin. Nudity exposed her shoulder wound, which was dressed with cottonweed, and her protuberant tummy, which she had managed to conceal before leaving Vydaelia and gently compress with her squid bladder suit. Subtle movement in her tummy reassured her. Gray-green sea elfish matrons hurried about the room and tended the wounds of a seriously injured sea elf, who moaned again and again. A young female sea elf stood at the foot of Piara’s bed and relayed to her colleagues, “The prisoner is awake.”
Piara was unable to move her hands and feet.
The young she-sea elf spoke in a dialect that differed from that used by Piara and other sea elf captives in Doug-less, but she understood every word. It was one of 17711 languages in which she was fluent.