Beneath the swell of tide all things are changed.

On the border of sea and shore rages a timeless conflict; a conflict, like all in nature, that is no true battle but merely a circuitous dance, a necessity of existence, the clashing of the elements stirring life from its dormancy into full bloom, shaping unremarkable shoreline into polished pebble and smooth crystalline glass. I have been that conflict; with my twin Runes I have known the swirl and crash of waves from the inside, have been each of a million grains of sand scattered upon the shores of my world; been dragged under currents and, to a lesser degree, been the currents that consumed them. But from a mortal perspective, I have never experienced it. My home is not close to the ocean, and campaigns rarely afford the opportunity for sightseeing. But recently, I have found myself with a little unexpected time, and so I travelled, last weekend, to see and experience the conflict not as one of its forces, but as a human caught in the clash.

It was an exhilarating experience; for long moments afterwards I could barely form coherent thoughts. I was scared and elated, breathtaken, overcome by joy and by the uniquely mortal experience, irrational as it is from my perspective, of fear for one’s bodily safety. We humans are made such, ingrained with such instincts, and I at my young age have not yet had time to burn them entirely from my system, especially since I can still feel pain, be wounded, even be killed though I will not truly die; even knowing that I can never be truly taken from this physical existence, there is nothing the less awesome– to use that word in its classical sense– about confronting a wall of water taller than you yourself and allowing it to take you, standing firm as it towers over you and pulls you into its embrace, within which it is the master and you are but a grain of sand tossed upon its foam. Thousands upon thousands of such waves formed all the pebbles of that beach, smooth as the ocean surface itself, stone soft like liquid against fingertips. I only needed to feel one upon my human body to connect the two halves of the experience instantly, to have all my nerves attuned to the flux and flow of the tide, to feel, long after I had retreated from the shoreline, the tide working within myself; I felt a gravity pull on me as strong as that which held me to the ground, my every cell caught in the eternal rhythm of the waves. Long after the waves had stopped hitting me, I closed my eyes, and I could still feel myself pulled and tossed by the tide. I knew when the ocean rose upon the shore, and when it had retreated; all the earth seemed to move beneath me, pulled into its grasp, released again.

Where two elements meet and conflict, there is a great energy born. I take that energy for granted, sometimes, perhaps, for my ability to wield it. But there I was not master over ocean and earth, but mastered by it; experiencing that energy from the perspective of the influenced, rather than the influencer. It is a vastly different thing, and in its own way, a rewarding experience.