As old Moon exhaustedly wandered towards the morning beach to the east, he ran the reeds and the tall beach grass between his fingers as he passed, wetting his aged and gray fingertips with the dew from the previous night.
That previous night.
As he lazily kicked the loosely clumped sea sand in his path, the haze of the slowly rising sun caused him to relive the tumultuous sight of the sea from his home above a few short hours earlier. The images slowly flickered into place like an old film, and he pieced the events together in his mind as his feet sank deeper into the sand.
Was this real? Or could it have been brought about by decades of keeping watch all night? He had hoped against all hope that it was a dream and that the ending was all in his beleagured mind.
As he staggered down the small hillside to the beach, the gentle lapping of the waves were the only constant that kept him from complete madness in that moment. His recklessness had certainly caused enough pain and death in the past, but there was something unsettling about this particular incident that he couldn't hide from; it was definitely something he couldn't exactly remember, yet something that he should never forget. It rattled in the back of his mind like a pebble in a shoe, and all the possible endings antagonized him as the sun started moving higher in the morning sky.
Continuing east, he became less and less aware of where he was - reminded only by the occasional natural landmark that he knew was pointing him home. He rubbed his craggy brow with his hands and noticed an unusual silhouette atop a jetty that always seemed to have pierced the sea defiantly. The silhouette on top was a strange shape - almost that of an old, over-sized wooden shoe.
He approached the jetty and the silhouette with the sand seeming to pull his feet down with each step. As he got closer, he noticed a shimmering silver and gold net entangled in the sharp rocks and next to that, a basket half-filled with dead herring - some slapping against the rocks and some trying to survive in the small collection of tide pools.
The sun line glaring in his eyes off the water forced him to squint as he cast his eyes toward the silhouette he first noticed from the beach. It was a strange sort of trundle bed fashioned into a giant wooden shoe, and his fear at this moment was unbearable as he noticed the side of the shoe had been blasted open from the force of the water against the rocks.
He circled around the side of the boat to find the bodies of three young fisherman cast from their boat recklessly onto the rocks.
Old Moon fell to his knees on the jagged rocks and ran his old gray hand along the painted letters on the side of the boat. 'WBN'.
His head fell into his hands as he remembered.
He named them Wynkin, Blynkin and Nod.