Jocelyn awoke with a start.
He was lying on his back in the shallows of a beach as the gentle tides lapped up and down around him. The wet sand beneath his body was smooth and fine to the touch, with few rocks or shells digging into his skin. The tropical sun was nearing its zenith in the sky; bright hot rays shone down upon his face, warming the bronzed skin of his face, drying up the small beads of ocean water still clinging to his brow. Just laying there for the moment he could hear the soft cry of seagulls as they lazily floated overhead.
All around his motionless figure, up and down the beach for hundreds of feet, lay flotsam and jetsam from a wrecked schooner. The small ship had been part of a convoy of three ships, carrying as part of its cargo several crates packed with magical artifacts recently excavated from the ruins of some long-forgotten civilization. They had been making good time for Serendipity when rough seas and a heavy storm separated the three ships, with this smallest one struggling against the mighty elements.
The crash of waves had nearly capsized the little two-masted ship, and had eventually driven it up against a formation of rocks just off the coast of one of these unnamed isles, savagely tearing the ship in two. These two sections of the ship now also lay on the beach, the bow covered in ragged seaweed and resting gently on the sandbar a hundred feet from him, the stern section upside down and further down the beach. Its cargo had become dislodged in the water and was likely strewn all about the island by now. The rest of the ship's five crewmen were nowhere in sight, presumably lost at sea.
But he could see none of it.
Slowly and with a low groan of pain the young man opened his eyes to nothing. He blinked his eyes several times to combat the sting of prolonged exposure to salt water, but aside from the feeling of irritation in his irises nothing more came from those orbs, amber irises glazed over with a milky opaqueness. Raising a hand to gingerly touch his blind eyes, the sudden sickening realization dawned over him.
He sat up from the water with almost alarming speed. As he did he let out a long gasp and immediately clutched at his right arm, which hung limply at his side. All he could feel was the searing pain shooting up and down it and into his shoulder. He smelled the faint smell of blood and immediately realized that it was broken. But that pain was not even on the forefront of his mind, as he desperately turned his head blindly, heart racing as he thought: where was his Cloth?! Without it, he was completely helpless in his disability.
Somewhere to his left and down the beach he sensed something. In the blackness of his vision a shimmering appeared, so very faint and far away. It was almost like looking at a wisp of white smoke in a dark room, but it brought about Jocelyn both a sense of relief and a renewed sense of urgent desperation. He had an ability to sense magic nearby, and an ability to recognize patterns of magic much like how a seamstress might admire the intricate needlework of a noble's silk scarf.
He'd worn that Cloth over his eyes for over twenty years now, and he would know the intricate and unique pattern of woven magical threads anywhere. The blindfold had ironically allowed him to "see" the material world, recognize the outlines of objects around him. With it, he could live a passable life. Without it, he was just dead weight.
Struggling to his feet, he started dragging himself across the beach toward the source of that 'light'. He took all of five steps before his feet tripped over the shattered mast of his ship where it lay on the beach, and crashed to the sand with a clumsy thud. On impact, the agony shot up his right arm again and he let out a pained scream.
Lying there in the sand, he breathed heavily and fought to regain his composure. He gritted his teeth together, willing the pain to go away, before calling out hoarsely into the wilderness of the isle:
"Hello? Is anybody there? Help..."