Salt Water Prompt

“The cure for anything is salt water….sweat, tears or the sea.”
~ Isak Dinesen, pseudonym of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke

Did you come to a resolution by the sea? Did a character reach a crossroads of sweat and tears?  Link up your 300 salty words (oooh!), but only if you’ve responded to the prompt. And don’t forget to spend some time with your fellow writers.

Here's my offering after contemplating this quote.

She had the first tears from a newborn child.  It was the first thing she needed.  Truthfully, she’d gotten lucky.  She was at her nephew’s birth a week ago.

Now all she needed was the sweat from an honest man’s labor and three drops of water from Mother Ocean.  It wasn’t that simple, though.  She didn’t know any honest men, not honest enough to stake her daughter’s life on it.  She also didn’t know where Mother Ocean was.

Her daughter was one of the unlucky ones.  The priests claimed she was blessed because she had been chosen by the Gods.  Only the priests believed that.  She knew the truth.  The priests chose her daughter.  It was the priests’ profane rituals, not the Gods, that caused the Sickness.

Too many children had already been chosen by the priests for their twisted rites.  The children lingered, some of them for years, before succumbing to the Sickness.  They never looked sick before they died, but she could tell there was something wrong with their minds.  The longer they lingered, the worse it got.

She knew she couldn’t lose her daughter that way, not after losing her brother and sister to the Sickness.  That was why she’d bargained with the Crone.  It was dangerous to leave the compounds but she had to go.  The journey would be grueling and lonely without her daughter.  The Crone promised to take care of her daughter and, despite the whispers, she trusted the Crone.  The Crone said the tears, the sweat and the water from Mother Ocean were the key to curing her daughter.  The Crone warned her that she must find them and return before the next full moon or it would be too late, her daughter could not be cured.  That gave her two weeks.