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The battle raged on aboard the Crucifico. Two smaller corsair vessels latched onto the ship from the direction opposing the northerners' trireme. Like termites, the rogues crawled up both sides of the pinned galleon, even as the defenders did their best to fend them off.
The conditions seemed to be heavily stacked against the Navy now. The pirates hardly paid any attention to the dragon, knowing it was on their side—if they weren’t outright emboldened by its presence—while the knights scarce dared to take their eyes off its whip-like tail and wings. Lashed by the heavy winds, the threat of being crushed to death, and the enemy's unpredictable tactics, the soldiers fought with scattered attention and wavering hearts. Rather than fellow humans, it was like battling soulless wraiths, whose allies were the elements themselves. In truth, the pirate side took far heavier casualties, but it was difficult to keep track of the situation in the dark and storm, where all forms seemed to blend together in a disorienting hotchpotch of body parts, metal edges, and flames. Which of the many bodies on the deck were corpses, and which still active combatants, who had merely lost their balance and would soon spring up again to try and stab whoever came too close?
The campaign took a turn for the worse when Captain Fijord himself got up to the deck. That Cottish pirate was no sophisticated commander, or an aloof leader, but a brawler like his men; a pale bear of a man, well over six feet and a half tall, carrying a long-handled war axe of unusual design for a weapon. On the point of the grim tool was a jagged, harpoon-like spike, and on the reverse side of the axe head a round hook, making it deadly in multiple ways, as well as particularly hideous to look at. The villain’s bulked upper body was protected only by belts, furs, and tattoo ink, a history of violence spelled between them in letters of barely faded scars. The man’s powerful voice, oozing menace and murder, drove on the buccaneers, while pushing back the resistance at the same time.
Manipulating his great weapon with ease, Fijord lunged forward on the deck slippery with seawater and blood, a seeming stranger to fear, and began to mow down the Imperial knights and Luctretzian troops like a windmill gone berserk. A direct hit from the axe head split shields, and even being slightly grazed by it sent the opponent tumbling back, knocking down multiple knights at once on the uncertain flooring.
Soon no one dared to get close to the savage, and his constant prowl here and there about the main mast made the efforts to regroup borderline hopeless. Archers couldn’t do much on this mobile board crammed full of intertwined combatants, not without risking friendly fire. Most had thrown their compound bows aside and chose swords instead. Unable to protect the entirety of the vast main deck anymore, the defenders withdrew to the forecastle, around the main mast, and the aftcastle, to shield the parts essential to the ship's operations. But the enemy's unceasing harassment left their ranks loose and unfocused.
In time, the pirate chieftain had cleared his way to the foot of the aftcastle and stood face to face with General Phereis of the Imperial forces. Phereis had lost his helmet and sustained a light head wound, bleeding profusely from his left ear. But acting as if he knew nothing of it, he confronted Fijord, his face pale for the loss of blood, only a light spatha in hand. Being a General, he was not a young man anymore, but surely possessed twice the courage and wit of one. Sparing no words, the combatants circled one another, and no one disturbed their confrontation. The pirates knew better than to get in the way of their boss, and the General’s personal guard was occupied with protecting the stairs to the quarterdeck, pushing back the crowding rogues. Being separated from them was the General’s own mistake, and he intended to bear full responsibility for it.
Fijord raised his battleaxe and opened with a straightforward overhead blow. Phereis stepped aside, but the slippery deck sabotaged his movements. The galleon became tilted by another great wave and he wavered, forced to lean forward to keep from tumbling to the side. His opponent was better prepared. Halting the axe blow midway down, Fijord turned the spiked end at the General and stabbed at his chest. Phereis deflected the poke by hurriedly cutting sideways and down, but his guard was left open in the process. With a swift step forward, Fijord closed the gap and tackled the soldier with the axe handle, knocking the General down on his back to the deck.
Phereis rolled around and did his best to get back up, but the wet boards gave him no support and his black armor weighed heavily on his aged body. Not missing his chance, Fijord was upon him. The rogue used the hook on his weapon to catch the wavering General by the neck, and pulled his head against his out thrust knee. Taking the crushing hit, Phereis’s gaze turned vacant and all strength left him.
“Just wait,” he muttered, “a little nap and I’ll get right back up…”
The soldier fell on his back. In no hurry, Fijord lifted his axe once more and dropped it on the General’s shieldless head, while the guard desperately wrestled with the raiders, too late to come to their commander’s aid.
“Haa!” Fijord let out a savoring sigh, extracting his weapon, while the surrounding cutthroats wildly cheered at his victory. The pirate turned his eyes astern and up, to the helm, where the other officers stood. From somewhere behind them, he saw the heated flashes of light spring up to the sky. Now there were foes worthy of being conquered, a treasure unlike any he had seen before!
Intoxicated by the ease of success, the barbarian rushed to the aftcastle stairs, bashed down Phereis’s guard with manic, unstoppable zeal—not particularly being careful with his own either—and climbed up past the mounds of bodies to the quarterdeck, the smell of final victory thick in his nostrils. He barely saw the few knights in his opposition there. Most of them were gathered to protect Aurlemeyr further back, or scuffling with the enemies by the bulwarks; the ship’s captain and the other officers were left good as defenseless. The pirate fixed his gaze at Miragrave, who stood by the wheel, and found her a course far too appetizing to postpone any further. The Marshal spared the invading corsair but a quick look, making no effort to reach for her sword, and then returned her attention to the overall view. She had no time for mindless duels, or the fate of a singular ship, but cared only for the course of the battle as a whole.
To tackle problems of lesser scale, she had subordinate officers.
Admiral Wittingam now stepped up between the commander and Captain Fijord, whipping out his cutlass.
“Out of my way, boy!” Fijord shouted at him, swinging his axe in a wide arc, like attempting to cleave the sky apart from the sea.
Wittingam took a quick step back to bring himself out of the weapon's range, as it passed by his coat buttons with a forceful hum. Fijord continued to spin the heavy weapon around while stepping on. He brought the axe high above his head and swung down with all his might. Retreating no more, Wittingam stepped in and turned sideways on his heels, allowing the axe to land in front of him. The steely half-moon edge sank deep into the quarterdeck with a blunt sound, and the Admiral reached far forward past it, slicing across the pirate’s chest with the tip of his sword.
“ARRHHH…!” Fijord gritted his teeth and groaned, a deep red line drawn from shoulder to shoulder across his unguarded breast. The straps cut, his fur cloak fell off his back.
Adrenaline surging in him, the rogue tore the axe off the deck—a feat which should’ve taken four average men to do, looking at how deep it had been buried—and attempted to strike again. But Wittingam wasn’t about to stand there and wait for him. Immediately as Fijord lifted his arms, blood spilling from the line in his chest, the Admiral stepped casually to the side and cut outward at the man's left flank, severing the muscles below the lowest rib.
“Guohh—!” the barbarian groaned, reflexively dropping his arms.
Evading the rushed cut by taking another step sideways, Wittingam turned his wrist and lightly flicked at Fijord’s brow, drawing a short line on the forehead, deep enough to reach bone. Blood spilled over the pirate’s left eye, blinding him to the opponent’s side and painting half his face in vivid crimson.
Overpowering the pain through sheer rage, Fijord tore his axe up from the deck, resolved to blow the young officer’s head clean off his shoulders, even should it be his last act in this life. But all he managed to remove was the tricorne on Wittingam’s head. Ducking low, the Admiral dived in under the blow and slashed the back of the pirate’s knee. Crippled like this, the giant man’s frame was forced to bend, and he had no more the means to pursue his foe. Swiftly fixing his posture, Wittingam spun the cutlass around to reverse his grip, before stabbing the blade through the villain’s voluminous bicep. He twisted the sword to force the axe from the viking's hold. The heavy weapon fell on the deck with a clang and the officer extracted his blade with a whistling sound.
As much as Fijord loathed the idea of admitting defeat while his heart still beat, he was left with very little choice. Profusely bleeding in many a place, his dominant arm and leg incapacitated, he sank down on his knees, and could only sullenly glare at the Admiral, who kicked the crude axe away and went to pick up his hat.
“Pardon me, Mr Fijord,” Wittingam said to him, not even a little out of breath, as he fitted the tricorne back on his brow, “but I have trained most my years to hunt a cuttlefish slightly worse than you are. Sadly, you are not him, but you make for an excellent precedent all the same.”
“Just fucking finish me,” the pirate grunted, spitting blood.
“No,” the officer answered him, nodding at few available guards to shackle the rogue. “This ship is not one of your pirate tribunals. You will come to Efastopol with us, where you will stand trial before the people you’ve robbed, and face the lawful consequences of your lifestyle. Take him away.”
Miragrave watched the conclusion from the side and then turned to look over her shoulder at the knight a few steps behind.
“The Admiral’s performance calls for a supplementary effect,” she said. “Colonel Tabrant, you are in charge of the troops after Phereis. Signal the archers that they are now permitted to use the Yodith arrows.”
“Yes, ma’am!” the knight saluted.
The effect of these brief events was immediate and profound. Seeing their chief captured—alive and not martyred—the fighting spirit of the remaining pirates evaporated quite as fast as it had been raised. They looked around and saw that a lot fewer of them were left than they had imagined. Was it not their survival they had been fighting for? Yet each passing moment only took them closer to the opposite end. The heartbreaking impression that the show was over seeped into their hearts, draining their hands of strength, killing all motivation to go on.
The grappling hooks were cut away, the damaged pirate crafts left to drift, to be sunk with ballistae. The rogues who yet continued to resist found no success matching the previous ease. The Imperial archers took advantage of the quieted pace to eliminate the stragglers with the cursed arrows of instant death and the deck was reclaimed in full.
The option of retreat removed, their comrades turning to ash in explosions of unnatural green fire, even the most stubborn of the raiders had to face the facts.
They were headed for a miserable end and nothing but.
Those left with sanity in them hurried to discard their weapons and raised their hands, allowing the soldiers to apprehend them.
In a short while, all sounds of fighting had ceased, and a most somber silence took over to the ship, interrupted only by the subdued, melancholic rattling of chains, the crestfallen invaders taken below to the holding cells, of which many had been readied for the trip.
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Erynmir followed the turn of events from the sky in deep confusion.
Suddenly, she felt terribly alone and lost. Why was she fighting and hurting alone? Who was a friend? Who was an enemy? Where was the Tempest? Where was the Captain? She sought her floating home with her gaze and soon found it, by the side of the red galleon in the distance. With her sharp eyes, she saw the Prince and Yuliana well through the smoke, and Greystrode. And, sensing the faint pulse of magic between them, cold fear unlike anything the young dragon had ever known gripped her immortal heart.
“Salás naeee—!” she shrieked.
Every passing instant was precious. Stalled by the fire from the ship below, Erynmir quickly gathered as much power she could muster and inhaled.
One didn’t need gift for the arcane to sense that there was something unusual about that breath. The sea wind was sucked into the dragon’s maw, and the skies grew rapidly yet darker.
“That doesn’t look good,” Waramoti remarked, looking up.
“Everybody grab onto something!” Miragrave screamed.
Uleison raised his staff, trying to cast a barrier, but shortly realized it futile. His power was drawn from him as soon as he could summon it, as if there was a sinkhole in the sky. He tossed his staff away and grabbed onto the quarterdeck balustrade.
An air-rending boom followed. Erynmir bent her neck down and spat out a formless explosion of magic that despair and rage took well past her usual capacity. With one sudden blast, she punched a deep crater into the sea below her, at least eight fathoms deep and well over fifty wide.
The Crucifico tilted hard forward as water fell under her bow, simultaneously thrown back by the escaping wave. Bearing the heaviest brunt of the shockwave, the foremast bent deep forward, as though made of rubber. But it had not the flexibility of rubber and, reaching its limit, snapped with a rending crash. What few sails were attached were ripped to tatters together with their bindings, and the unlucky sailors on the mast were cast far away into the sea.
Soon, the seas came rushing back to fill the concavity. Meeting in the middle, the watery floor surged up, fast reversing the galleon's tilt, its mass not even worth an eggshell before the untold tons of ocean carrying it. The bow bounced up like a startled pony, and only those with a firm hold could avoid plummeting blindly aftward.
One among the less fortunate was Aurlemeyr. No one was left nearby to support her at this point and she had nothing to hold onto either in the middle of the deck. As the ship surged forward, she lost her balance and went rolling towards the helm. Barely had she managed to still her slide with her metallic fingers when the direction was turned. No might could keep her from going flying back past the mizzen-mast, onto the poop deck, where only the raised taffrail prevented her from being cast into the sea.
The ship continued to rock for a while longer, but the ride grew gradually steadier in the absence of further shocks, and the ocean was restored to rest. Miragrave had managed to maintain hold of the helm railing and now hurriedly turned astern to confirm the state of their primary weapon.
“Aury! Are you all right!?”
Fortunately, the bearer of the Gilded Bow possessed a body a great deal more durable than her fragile looks suggested. Groaning, Aurlemeyr climbed over the taffrail back to the ship, silently lamenting the few new bruises.
“I must say, I detest this mode of travel—”
Her complaints were interrupted. The ship and the weather had one more surprise left in them. As the stormy wind suddenly turned, the spanker boom jibbed. The loose spar of Arcadian spruce swung over from larboard to starboard, smiting the unlucky Imperial on the way with the effectiveness of a 30-foot baseball bat. Aurlmeyr was swept clean off her feet and sent flying far overboard.
“Aury!” Miragrave yelled after her by instinct, although she right away saw the futility of it. The champion was soon well outside the range of words, a sad splash between the waves.
Moreover, by her own admission, she didn’t know how to swim.
“Damn it,” Miragrave grunted and looked around, searching for help. “A relic overboard!”
But even had she promised a medal for the recovery, there was no one around to heed her. The quarterdeck had gone quiet. Captain Belfraum had tumbled down the aftcastle stairs during the blast and was out of sight. Wittingam and Tabrant had gone below to escort the prisoners. Uleison lay unmoving by the bulwark. He had to have hit his head. The other troops looked little better, either unconscious, too injured for heroics, or dead.
The situation was the same on the main deck. Everyone not incapacitated themselves was busy chaining the pirates, aiding the wounded, or trying to retrieve the others who had been blown off the deck in the turmoil. The sailors had their hands full trying to fix the sails and rigging, and removing the broken mast, before the imbalance would capsize the ship.
In short, there was no one available to rescue Aurlemeyr.
The young sailor holding the steering wheel was still alive and intact, by the looks of him. But as per the naval custom, the one with the trick at the helm was not to leave his post, even should it kill him. Abandoning the ship uncontrolled in such a weather would mean the death of them all.
Miragrave didn’t know how to steer a galleon, but she did know how to swim, making it clear which one should go.
“Damn it!” she groaned again, turning to the youth at the helm, and started to unbutton her coat. “Sailor, what is your name?”
“M-me?” he asked. “Bell, ma’am. Samuel Bell, Private First Class.”
“Private Bell,” she told him, “you now have command of the fleet.”
“Excuse me!?”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Sparing no more instructions, Miragrave turned and hurried to the starboard side, pulling her coat off, and her sword as well she removed and tossed aside. She stepped onto the railing, confirmed the landing safe, and dived head-first into the sea.
Few things were as terrifying to mortals as the ocean and its fathomless depths.
Those dimensions couldn’t be well recreated by mere imagination; they had to be seen to be known. That boundless, crushing sense of emptiness was surely matched by nothing above the surface, save only the void of the outer space. In the eyes of one small, fleshly observer, both seemed equally absurd in scale. But whereas the cosmos was patterned by stars and planets and associated wonders, giving it a firm, consoling sense of being lit and populated, there were no such comforts in the watery abysses.
The dark of the sea was disturbed only by the aimlessly floating, tiny components of living forms, which the monstrous pressures had extracted from them, as well as the ruin that was cast from above, which served only to further showcase the inhospitable nature of the element.
Still, the seeming, mistaken emptiness was not the worst of it.
The terror that nothingness instilled had to be inferior to the terror of what could be, evoked by the strange, unknown forms of life that might still dwell in those untold vertical distances, where no land dweller had access and which were better left undisturbed. If such things truly existed, what else would a being accustomed to the wealth of air be for them but a particularly easy meal?
Miragrave was not immune to the primal terror of those depths; yet, as someone who had lived with horror for most of her adult life, she was not crippled by it either. With steady arm motions and kicks, she took herself deeper and deeper away from the safety of the surface, towards the shapeless void below, seeking with her blurred gaze the figure of the Imperial champion.
A regular person should have been buoyant enough to remain in reach, even without particular talent at swimming. But in Aurlemeyr’s case, the weapon that had replaced her arm served as an inseparable anchor, dragging her down to her death with heartless magnetism. There was no way for her to discard the Celestial Relic, even if she wanted to; only death could part her from it, and death was never easy for the holder of such a tool. Valuing its owner as an essential component, the ancient machine did everything in its power to preserve her, even against the will of the person herself.
But the Bow could not overpower the ocean. The pressure at the depths of the Numénn would grind both the relic and its bearer to dust. This barrier of water was also by heavenly design; so that mortals would remember their limits and not abuse the god-given gift to seek realms beyond their own.
Perhaps letting Aurlemeyr go now would have been a form of kindness.
It could well be her only chance at finding release.
For how many centuries had she borne the weapon and the grim duty that came with it? No one knew. Even the person herself had already forgotten. And for how many centuries more would she have to continue along that same path, unless given an inescapable end? The Bow was a weapon made for mankind's sake, yet it belonged to no man. Maybe the time had come to give it up for good?
Right as she thought about turning back, Miragrave spied a faint glimmer of gold ahead. She doubled her efforts and dived towards that glint, even as her body began to protest for the lack of oxygen. She fought the pain and reached deeper, catching the girl with the golden arm by her hood.
Aurlemeyr wasn’t moving, her eyes were closed. Skin and hair pale as moonlight, clothes dark as the shadows of the seabed...It was quite possible she was already beyond help, but there was no time to make sure.
Taking the heavy mechanical limb over her shoulders, Miragrave began to kick upward, gradually releasing the air in her lungs. Even as light as she was by comparison, the ascent was slow. The urge to inhale was becoming overpowering. Beginning from the edges of her vision, everything was starting to grow dark, save for tiny stars she saw fade in and out. But even when nearly blinded, she still had her will and kept kicking on.
The last few feet seemed to take forever. Miragrave was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t died already and been left suspended in a bizarre twilight limbo. Then, the sea surface was finally broken. She got her head above the water, able to breathe real air again, devouring it in hungry lungfuls and coughing and hurting. As soon as her strength and clarity of mind returned, she made sure Aurlemeyr had her face in the clear, though the warrior made no visible effort to respire. Then she looked around.
In such weather, they were both going to perish unless they got back on the ship.
Westward, the Crucifico was drifting already a solid hundred yards away and getting further, turning deeper west. But closer was Fijord’s derelict trireme, laying on its side, broken and deserted, its mast and sail plunged underwater. Holding Aurlemeyr by the chin, Miragrave swam on her back towards the wreck, and climbed onto the curving side boards.
Getting them steady, she opened the champion’s collar and felt her neck, looking for any signs of life. And soon discovered there was no need to perform first aid. All of a sudden, Aurlmeyr jolted, rolled to her side, and began to cough her lungs empty of water, and vomited more of the same element, still alive, clearly enough. As tempting as she had found the thought of playing dead and letting the Marshal perform mouth-to-mouth on her, the Bow possessed its own resuscitating mechanisms, and left her little choice but to resume breathing.
Miragrave sighed and sat back, staring after the royal galleon, spitting and wiping the wet strands of hair off her face. Aurlemeyr sat up next to her, looking like a toy doll out of battery.
“...You abandoned the battle to save me?” she asked the Marshal. “Though I couldn’t kill the dragon? Though I failed my orders?”
“Show me a soldier who has never failed,” Miragrave glumly replied. “If that were enough to earn the death penalty, there wouldn’t be an army. No. I should think that no reason to abandon a comrade.”
As natural and obvious as the woman made it sound, Aurlemeyr felt the Marshal wasn’t being quite sincere. Many sailors had fallen overboard during the battle, and Miragrave had spared none a second thought, or so much as a look.
Casualties were unavoidable. Rationally, no individual life should have been worth deserting her post, when the conclusion of the entire campaign depended on her.
“...I’m surprised,” Aurlemeyr said, leaning on her knees, staring over the waves into the distance. “I thought you only had eyes for the elves.”
“And who tells such lies?” Miragrave grumpily replied. “Give me their names—I’ll see they stand watch and watch till the end of the week!”
Now, if ever, would have been a good opportunity for the dragon to come and finish the job. Yet, there could be seen no sign of it. The storm clouds above turned without a winged shadow to obstruct them. The beast had left elsewhere, shifting the focus of the battle, and paving the way for the final act.
The role of humans in this war had concluded.
The turn of the monsters had come.