XXI.

Unknown Waters of the Frontier Bay

Vagari stared at the boat’s compass with a frustrated glare. It spun about lazily, pointing in no real direction at all. The fact it was broken didn’t come as a surprise, nor was it what aggravated him. What he found most frustrating was the fact that the compass in his head seemed to match. Vagari shifted his gaze to the skyline ahead, rubbing his eyes as the thin line of what he desperately hoped to be land grew upon the horizon. Somehow they must have been pulled out further than he had initially thought possible, he reasoned to himself at the wheel, be it by some rogue current, or perhaps a windstorm they had, by some fel luck, slept through. It seemed now that they had been drawn enough distance that it had taken the better part of a day at top speed just to recover sight of shore. Hours had passed since their encounter with the titan, at least eight before BP stopped counting, and all they could see was the line; bold to the eye but blurred beyond recognition. “What do you see up there?” Vagari called out to BP up in her roost. “What’s the shore looking like?”

“Don’t know,” she croaked in reply. “Just looks… distant to me! We need to get closer.”

“That’s the plan, alright,” Vagari announced with a sigh, eying the straining engine over his shoulder. “That’s the plan…”

The pontoon’s electric engine had once again began singing its song of woe, and this time no amount of percussive maintenance could silence it. Whatever the problem was, their encounter with the sunken angel had only made it worse, and neither of them dared turn the engine off out of fear they’d never get it started again. Vagari tapped insistently at the compass, growling louder with each ineffective tap of his nail. It bobbed uncertainly between north-west and south-east – an annoyingly large margin for error. Something had to be interfering with it and him somehow, he concluded with an irritated hiss that quickly turned into a curse as the low battery light flickered on. “Oh come on, you piece of crap!” Vagari snapped, shaking the wheel angrily. “What do you want from me?! I’ve already spent a fortune on you! What else can I give?! Blood?!”

BP whistled loudly above as she overly focused on the boldness ahead of them while making herself smaller. Vagari groaned before plopping down on the deck. The sun was still high, so he didn’t think the batteries would die before they reached shore – wherever that might be. Once there they would beach the boat, Vagari decided; let the solar cells recharge without fear the damned thing might drift off. Both the idea of stretching his legs or taking a nap seemed equally more appealing than being stuck behind the wheel as he was. “Maybe I should find BP a crate or something so she can drive the boat for a while,” Vagari thought idlily with an amused smile across his pale features. “Might need two just to see over the dash.”

It was then BP called out, words that did little good in sapping the exhaustion from him. “It’s breaking up! The line, it’s breaking up!” She shouted down from her roost. “I… I don’t think that’s land, Vagari! It looks like boats… Maybe it’s a port?” Vagari hissed and lurched to his feet before leaning back over the wheel to get a better look. If they had looped around back to Eastend it would be bittersweet luck. They’d be back where they started, but they wouldn’t be lost, and he could strangle the bastard who sold the boat to them. Small victories, Vagari reminded himself. He squinted and surely enough, she was right – the line had since become a dotted one. As she had speculated, it did indeed appear to be ships, and a whole lot of them.

Vagari turned on the boat’s barely functioning wheel lock, and slowed the boat to a crawl, allowing him to leave his station behind, abet briefly. He made his way to the railing just as BP shuffled down the ladder onto deck. “Was I right?” She asked. “Is it a port? Do you think we’re back in Eastend?” BP snorted. “Or maybe we made it to that mystical city?”

“Neither, I don’t think,” Vagari replied, annoyed that with all his body’s advantageous mutations he still had to squint. All the same, the closer they got, the clearer it was getting to him, and he wasn’t liking what he was seeing. “It isn’t a port,” he announced grimly. “It’s a graveyard.” Before them, growing more defined by the second, were the rusting bones of countless ships. Immense corporate tankers, military carriers, yachts and other civilian vessels, they all seemed to be bound together by some force or another – pulled in and trapped. For a moment, all Vagari could do was stare in astonishment and dread, knowing that they had found all the missing ships, every last one of them. Once the awe died down, realization set in, and he quickly made his way back to the wheelhouse. “Hold on! We need to turn around,” he shouted as he madly spun the wheel, “or we’ll be trapped! Trapped just like…” A fiery red eye burned brightly in his thoughts. Its cyclopean master had seemingly been bound up dredging along the ancient depths, as good as dead to the world. But that wasn’t the truth of it, Vagari realized. It wasn’t stuck at all. It was being held there, pulled back against by something at the center of it all. And even with all its impressive might, it was only able to distance itself, but not pull free.

Vagari spun the wheel until it stuck firm, and then pushed the throttle lever forward causing the pontoon to leap in the water, front end pointing nearly skyward. Their escape was short lived. A mere moment after it lurched forward, the batteries died and the engine with them. “No-no-no-NO!” Vagari howled as he pulled and pushed everything on the dash before placing a clenched fist into it. “Dammit! Not now, you piece of shit! Fucking trash-heap! Motherfucking – gah!” He hissed and sped back to the railing once more, looking over the side. Despite their change in direction, despite their leap forward, they were still being pulled in. Vagari cursed again through clenched teeth. The draw wasn’t aggressive, but slow and firm, almost natural with the waves – but it was there. It would pull them in, crashing them up against the corpses of its other victims, and… And then what?

“What now?” BP asked as if having read his thoughts.

“What now indeed,” Vagari thought sourly. “Give me raiders, give me aberrants, mutants, Dr. Xu! Anything but the unknown!” Vagari steeled himself with a deep breath, reminding himself that panicking wouldn’t help anyone. Like in most instances, it seemed, once again things were beyond his control. “Okay then… FINE,” he said sharply, still clenching his teeth. He unstuck them with an exhale and then said, “What now? Now we see who’s home.”

“Who’s home?” BP echoed with knit brows as she stared off towards the necropolis of ships closing in. “I don’t feel anything, but I’ll keep reaching out.”

“You might not be able to, depending on what it is,” he said in reply. “Xu’s husks are one thing, and lesser lifeforms too, but there are things that can resist psychic intrusions. Other psychics, if they have any knack for it, can build up walls in their minds – traps even. So you must remember to tread lightly. Then there’s… things more alien; things from the darker corners of reality.”

“Demons you mean?” BP asked, her thoughts drifting to her own parentage. “Do you think that’s why I have these powers? Her? Whatever she is… What Xu used to make me?”

Vagari turned his obsidian eyes to her and then knelt down with a sigh – all the anger true and gone from his body. He placed a comforting hand on her head. “We aren’t our parents, BP,” he told her calmly. “It took me a long time to realize that – so trust me when I say it’s a fear not worth the thought. The sins of the father have no real weight on our shoulders. You aren’t what Dr. Xu made you, but what you make you. You and no one else, for better or for worse. Remember that.”

“I’ll try,” BP offered truthfully, “but it’s hard sometimes.”

“Don’t I know it,” Vagari said with a smile. “And that’s okay, because, come what may, I’ll be here to remind you whenever you need reminding. But, as for your first question…” he said with a pause, continuing as he stood to return his gaze to the immediate future and the encounter no doubt within. “Demons and other things like them… Well, there’s more darkness in the void than beasts biblical; things truly deserving of being called monsters. The thing that draws us in? It could be any number of things, and that’s what frustrates me so much. It's an unknown, and before we know it, it might already be too late.”

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“Come what may, you said,” BP uttered solemnly. She wasn’t afraid – or at very least she didn’t let it overcast her courage. “For me, the world is so full of unknowns. I face a new one around every corner! It’s inevitable – fate even! There’s no choice but to face the future, right? So, come what may, we’ll face it together. And us together? I’m not afraid! Demons, crazy mutants, whatever spooky things from whatever spooky shadows… After what we’ve faced? They should be afraid. Because, we don’t have to face them. They have to face us! And together? Pssh – they don’t stand a chance.” Vagari laughed and smiled broadly. They shared a glance and there, for the moment, he also shared her courage. “True,” he said assuredly, “there’s literally no going back now, is there? Come what may it is then. Lets go meet the neighbors.”

It took another hour before the pontoon collided with the nearest ship – a large white cargo vessel, stained yellow from its years in the acrid water. Like two magnets their hulls stuck firm together, forbidding them to push away. Whatever held the crafts together didn’t seem to affect them in any noticeable way however. No small blessing, Vagari thought, rather disliking the idea of starving stuck fast to their crap-heap of a ship. “Well,” Vagari announced with a huff, “no staying here. Even if the batteries charge soon, we’ve no way to free ourselves without confronting our captor. Grab your stuff and what rations you can comfortably carry, in the case there’s no getting back here.”

“Already there,” BP claimed proudly, patting the large bag on her back. “And I think I have some rope in here too. Let me find it…”

“No need, my friend,” Vagari said with a laugh. “The boat isn’t going anywhere and I can get us up there a whole lot faster.”

“Yeah, I guess,” BP said flatly with a cringe, her stomach churning at the mere suggestion of flight, “if that’s what you want to do…”

Vagari offered a sympathetic shrug before setting off to ready himself for their departure. Removing his cloak, he tossed it into the wheelhouse seat. At his side now hung a satchel, just the right size to secure the mysterious tome within. After adjusting the strap, he unfurled his wings and offered a hand to BP, saying, “This flight won’t be half as traumatizing as our last, I promise.” BP eyed him sidelong, doubt written plainly across her face, but, all the same, she took his hand. Hoisting her up into his arms, they took flight. The trip was a bit awkward with the added weight and they landed in a less than graceful manner, but it was definitely an improvement over their last joint flight, if only due to the lack of BP screaming.

They landed upon the deck with a stagger, and no sooner were his feet upon the ground, BP wriggled free from his grasp, stating firmly, “I’m never going to get used to that! Never!”

“I used to say the same thing,” Vagari replied idly, taking in his surroundings, “about a lot of things.” The cargo ship’s deck wasn’t at all what he expected. Instead of crates and storage units, the deck was home to several ramshackle houses, all made of scrap metal and rotten wood. At one point it had been a town of sorts, quite a popular place from the look of it, but now all it housed were ghosts. “People used to live here,” Vagari said as he started forward. “A lot of people.”

“But where did they go?” BP asked quietly before pausing to reach out with her mind. Sensing nothing, she shook her head solemnly. “There’s nothing here… nothing at all.”

“Judging by the wear and tear, whatever happened here happened a long time ago,” Vagari added with a sigh. “Let’s keep going. We’ll take a look around.”

As they wandered inward, the pair began to find worrisome signs, the signs of a struggle. They were small and far between, but ever present: a broken wall, shattered dishes, a trail of dried blood. Each house suffered similar series of tragedies. From their investigation, Vagari began piecing together the grim story of what happened there. After getting stuck they tried to make the best of it, bedded down for the night, planned on living their lives; they were stuck but they were stuck together. That was when it struck them, when they thought they were safe. Whatever it was, it tore them from that perceived safety, from their beds, their kitchens, from their families. The structural damage was mended in places, suggesting that the assaults came at various stages of time, time enough to get complacent, comfortable. Then, in the end, it came for them all at once. A quick flick of his inner tongue told him the blood was all the same age.

Vagari spat the taste out of his mouth and sighed. The crime scene was painting an awful portrait of their captor. It was a predator that enjoyed toying with it’s victims, stalking them one by one at first before eventually coming in for the slaughter. “Stay close,” Vagari cautioned BP as he knelt down at the violent opened of one of the shacks. “The creature that did this took them by surprise. We won’t be such easy prey.”

“Vagari, look…” BP whispered, sticking as close to his side as she could in the doorway. She pointed across the room, to a small pile of toys and blankets – all stained with blood. There were children aboard, Vagari realized with a pang of sorrow. Of course there were children aboard, it was a home after all before it became a slaughterhouse. It had left them without parents, the picture told, and they had tried to survive for a time. They had hid in their fort of cotton and fond memories, behind stuffed toys that had always kept the monsters at bay before – until they didn’t.

Suddenly Vagari felt BP’s grip tighten at his side. Her naturally bulbous eyes were wider than ever as her breath seemed to catch in her throat. “BP?” Vagari asked softly, thinking perhaps the scene struck her particularly close. “Are you okay?”

“I… I feel it,” she answered in whisper between stuttered gasps. BP stared deeper into the wreck, beyond the ruined home, beyond the walls of rust, into the very core of the necropolis, hidden away by shattered masts and corroded solar sails. “It’s faint, but there… stirring at the center of it all. It doesn’t want to be noticed, but I… I can feel it like a drumming in my mind – a heartbeat.” Vagari had never seen her so taken aback before – not against Xu, not against the demon before, not even against the Amalgamation. He put a comforting hand upon her shoulder. “Can you tell what it is, BP?” Vagari asked, following her gaze. “What does it feel like?”

“It feels like nothing else,” she uttered with a quiver. “It’s like nothing else I’ve felt before, Vagari. Like, it feels… wrong, like… Like an intrusion, like I shouldn’t be here… No – no, not that – it’s like I’m on the edge of some impossibly tall building and I’m teetering. Vagari, I’m falling!”

“Let it go,” Vagari exclaimed, taking her shoulders firmly. “BP! BP, it’s okay! It’s okay. Just let it go.”

BP struggled to distance her mind from the feeling, managing to just barely pull herself up from the abyss – to where, she didn’t want to know. She quickly pulled away and promptly retched upon the deck. Vagari patted her back gently. “There we go,” he said, not really sure what to say until she was well and truly back with him. “You okay?”

“Y-yeah,” BP croaked, her avian voice barely a rumble from her throat. “Fwoo – that was nasty… Jeez, ha-ha, you really weren’t kidding about walls and traps, were you?” BP laughed, a staggered laugh accompanied by a frail smile, but her eyes told Vagari how harrowing the experience had been for her. He remembered that look, he remembered seeing it mirrored back at him; the feeling of helplessness, of the terror of one’s own mind being overpowered. A flash of memory overcame him and Vagari could see it as clear as day, that moment, as if it were happening to him all over again. She stood there, the demon, the haunting ‘Her’ of his own nightmares, towering above him, slick with the flesh of his friends. Her great horns formed an inverted omega upon her brow that dug trenches into the heavens above, basking them in the celestial light the poured through. With each breath the world shook, and then shattered with two words, “I AM…”

At her command he was unmade, broken down, dissolving like salt in water. And at her whim, he was remade in her infernal design – the abomination he was today. Val stared down at monstrous hands, at long clawed fingers fit for spiders legs, as the two-hundred-year-old scent of deconstructed flesh filled his nostrils. Val couldn’t look away, not now and not then; he couldn’t pull himself away from those burning ruby eyes. “Why… why didn’t you just run?” he asked himself in thought, pleaded. “Why didn’t you just run away?”

A small gnarled hand pulled him back to the present, back to the edge from over. “Vagari?” BP prodded kindly, worry saturating her voice. “I’m okay, really… It just scared me, is all. Are you okay?” BP’s corvid voice was a much-needed comfort, one that banished those piercing red eyes back unto the shadows of yesteryear. Val blinked and joined them – leaving only Vagari, the wanderer, the man who chose to make a better future and not a worse one, behind in his stead. Vagari wrung his hands and forced a smile. “I’m fine,” he lied. “I… just got lost in thought – trying to think ahead. Let’s carry on to the next ship, shall we? I don’t think there’s much else to see here.”

“Okay,” BP agreed. She was less than convinced, but wholly unsure how to press the issue, so she didn’t. Instead the corners of her toothy maw tugged down in a frown and she gave him a curt nod. “Once more, dear friend?”

“Once more,” Vagari replied, now with a genuine smile as he unfurled his wings.