Once again, Beren felt very much like a mortal walking beside an eldritch being from time immemorial. He wondered if he would ever get used to the feeling, as she walked in her ethereal beauty while dark shapes both large and small lingered outside of his vision, he very much doubted it. 

Though that was not to say the sea was pitch black. It was a soft, hazy blue that swallowed all beasts and objected twenty paces away. If there had not been a slope, he would have thought them lost forever, or at least he might have been tempted to use another 'divine favor.' As it were, he was just happy she was on his side, even if she was bound to it. Perhaps he could try extending an olive branch to her at some point, but then he realized how odd that was to think about trying to find a rapport with a malicious deity of abyssal darkness. 

As he thought, he continued to walk with her, and the fact the sand beneath their feet was somehow dry escaped his notice until his boot bumped into something solid. He stopped, and glanced down to find an ivory white protrusion from the sand. What's more, there was something else. Beren noticed a deep, metallic surface that drew the eyes. He stopped and knelt down, batting the sand away. His heart began to race faster as he did so, and had Calliope not stopped in curiosity, he would have been engulfed by the sea for his carelessness. Yet he was enthralled almost, by his studious nature and the supernatural attraction of this object. Breathlessly, he realized the protrusion was a rib cage, and a huge one at that! Beren was a muscled man with a noticeably prominent chest when he stripped off his robes, but this man, this thing must have been broader by a foot and eight feet tall. 

Beren glanced at Calliope for an answer, but she simply watched with an intensity to her dark eyes, though he felt he saw a glimmer of...something. Anticipation? He looked back down at the metal, and took it in his strong hand. With his considerable strength, he broke the ancient cord, and beheld a brass chest-plate; a pectoral. It was plain, in a way, but depth of the color and the way the soft light danced upon it was mesmerizing. 

"How is it not rusted?" He asked, admiring it. 

"There are many arcane crafts in this world, Beren Draiglwyf Mac'Riglas," The sorceress said elusively. Jocasta (I think that was her name...) thrust her head up in a curt gesture, signifying they should go. Beren pocketed the thing, and the two of them moved away from the ancient corpse, the bones swallowed by the sea as they began to climb the coastline. Another minute, and the pair stepped out of the surf and broke the surface. 

Upon the beach, a shepard tended his flock. Two dozen sheep milled about, idly chewing the tufts of grass upon the high hill overlooking the coastline. One moment, the man had been looking at empty shoreline, save a party of soldiers a mile in the distance. Next he turned to look, an immaculately dressed, imperious woman and a stranger in an odd garb were walked away from the water, as if they had just taken a dip. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. 

The island of Ubtar had always been strange.