Separately and collectively, you've all fallen into the hands of pirate slavers. Most of you remember it this way: You were walking in the countryside near your homes, strolling home from the tavern after a night's drinking, walking down to the river to fetch some water, or gone to visit some lass or lad in a neighboring village.
And, suddenly, you heard a thrashing in the underbrush around you, and before you could turn you felt a whale of a blow to the back of your head, and everything went black.
When you awoke, you were in the dark, tiny, stinking hold of the pirate galley, shackled by your wrists to the sturdy beams of the slave bunks, bunks stacked like cordwood. There were about 40 other captured folk of the archipelago there.
You were sick from the blow to your head and from the tossing of the ship, from the revolting gruel the slaver pirates occasionally fed you, and from the knowledge that you were bound for one of the western slave ports, never again to see your own home. Mockingly, the keys to your shackles were hung from a hook right by the hatch to the deck, only 5 or 6 feet from the lot of you. They might as well be miles away.
A few days after you woke up, the ship was hit by a squall, which turned, after half a day of tossing and rolling, into a full-fledged storm which blasted spray and curses into the hold every time the hatch above was opened. Your jailer, a man named Hafkris—maybe a half-ore, it was hard to tell under all that grime and walrus ugliness—brought about half the shackled slaves abovedecks to man the oars vacated by sailors washed overboard. The storm continued on another day, and Hafkris took another one-fourth of the slave cargo abovedecks. He looked worried.
That was yesterday.
You haven't seen any of the pirates or the slaves since then, and you haven't been fed. Early today, the shouting and cracking whips indicating that rowers were being kept in line finally faded away to nothing.
Right now, as you're waiting for some sign of life from abovedecks, there's an enormous crash — a grating, grinding noise and horrible shuddering of the ship around you as it runs aground. Abovedecks, there's the sound of snapping spars and an incredible crash on the deck which you know must be the mast coming down.
You're all thrown toward the bow, but are still held fast by your shackles and suffer more bruises to your wrists.
The bow of the galley is shattered by the impact, and as the galley grinds to a halt, the bow is torn away entirely, letting in a ferocious blast of numbingly-cold air and rain; the port side of the galley is laid open by a huge boulder that the galley has smashed against.
A moment later, there's once again only the sound of wind and pounding surf. Out the open bow, you can see a section of rainpounded beach; you seem to have run aground where a cliff face meets a cove beach.