Neither Drake nor Ellie had arrived at the gatehouse expecting to see more than two or three of their herd-mates assembled. Most probably Tim and Crow. Both famous nocturns. Maybe Adrian if she caught him during one of his nighttime trysts.
They would likely be half-dressed, sleepy-eyed and cranky about being summoned in the middle of the night, by an unofficial Captain no less.
Instead they found their entire herd. Adrian, Crow, Tim, Bon Bon, Hemlock, the Blunder Twins and even Steve the Skull, who was somehow floating over Tim’s right shoulder. All alert and awake in their full journey gear. All readily, nay keenly, awaiting orders.
Ellie and Drake looked at each other with expressions that had multiple interpretable meanings. They couldn't help but feel a mixture of surprise and pride at Bon Bon’s efforts. Neither had seriously thought she would be willing or able to so much as coax Adrian out of bed, let alone muster the Blunder Twins.
The group was gathered in the Academy gatehouse. Except for Crow, they were all anxiously prowling around busying themselves with menial tasks, double and triple checking the fittings of their combat harnesses and cleaning their weapons.
Upon noticing their Captain’s approach, their restless fidgeting ceased and they snapped to what loosely passed for attention.
Drake greeted his herd with a flick of the fingers towards the heart, a gesture they understood which amounted to a Pyrate salute and which they returned in hearty unison.
In his best, albeit involuntary, impression of Old Iron Hide, Drake said, “I take it you all know why you're here.”
Tim answered first. With a nod at Bon Bon he said, “she said the Runt was in trouble.”
Drake gave a surreal nod. “Fraid so.” Then he elaborated while keeping Bon Bon under an inquisitorial eye.
The air froze and fractured into a field of glassy splinters as soon as the term “ghost ship” met it.
They had all heard the stories of course. Every child on Aevon had.
Stories about engine-dead ships lost to storms or pirate attacks still roaming the Abyss, seeking vengeance, closure or simply to rid parents of their naughty offspring. Others rumored that they trolled the depths of the underworld for wayward souls to add to their ranks.
None were oblivious to the surface absurdity of this claim. Although some of their skulls hosted stricter skeptical minds than others, they had all passively relegated these stories to the bin of made by and for easily-amused children, drunks and, in certain regions and customs, drunken children.
Though their rational minds scolded them, a far older, far wiser part born of wild lands, jungles, deserts and forests, each brimming with their own feral brands of nightmarish fiends, spoke to the truth in his words.
But Drake didn't tell tales. Any beast who knew him would confirm. However, this didn’t stop them from coming to their own conclusions all the same.
Adrian was the first to voice the thought he was sure was on everyone else’s mind. “I always thought ghosts couldn't leave their ships.”
This got low mutterings of concurrence from the group.
“And I vaguely remember reading somewhere that ghost ships couldn’t go near land,” Hemlock put in. “Cursed to roam the Abyss forever and yadda yadda.”
Again some confirmative nods and mutterings to the same were exchanged.
But Drake didn’t respond for some while. Indeed he didn’t seem to even notice. Somewhere between his last words and now he had slumped into a comatose trance as though his mental furnace had run inexplicably cold.
The reasons for this were, at least for the time being, his sole mental property.
Though none but Ellie knew the full extent of his occultic experience, no beast who’d spent at least a fortnight under the Pyrates’ roof could have avoided the swirling tales about the sire Drake’s darker exploits.
Drake's father, the legendary pirate captain, Sir Francis Drake, was notorious for his impressive resume. He had amassed a personal flotilla of half a dozen ships and plundered well over four hundred during his long and prosperous career in good-old-fashioned piracy. That which some in the new regime referred to in contemptuous tones as “plague-baiting”.
An ancient, thoroughly frowned-upon and as such mercifully forgotten, religious practice of hanging a dead animal, usually sacrificed livestock, from a post or tree along the road outside of town to draw away disease and ward off evil spirits.
But, if the extent of the truth was to be fully realized, most of Sir Francis’s post mortem name recognition came from his reported dealings with a triage of the secretive cults known to infest the wilds of Draconia. Namely the Ordo Pentecost, the Ordo Draconis and the Ordo Necropolis. In whose rites and passages he was believed to have been instructed in the darkest elements of the arcane.
It had once amazed, and now mostly amused, the youngest Drake to see how quickly and ardently such stories spread. It hadn’t yet been six years since Sir Francis disappeared and already mass migratory flocks of myths, rumors and legends patterned the talking air on ships and in taverns as abundantly as the ionized Archaizer storm clouds that plagued the Abyss.
He had once been regaled by a nomadic cleric about how his father had sold his soul to the “Night Mistress”, Iralith, in return for power over the Nythriin. A word that, loosely translated from ancient Aguileran, meant the “Black Dawn”. Or, to use a more common term, the Underworld.
It was with this ill-gotten boon, or so said orator had told, that Sir Francis earned the bulk of his worldly fortune. Cloaking his ships in impenetrable Nihil Fog and either sculpting from mind or conscripting from the infernal Void fiendish hordes to crush any who would dare offer his will any resistance.
Stories said that towards the end of his life, Francis Drake set about creating his own magickal domain to dodge his outstanding debt to the Dread Queen.
It had seemingly been fate that during this conversation they had been joined by another beast, an Oreamnos, possessed of an unusually vivid recollection of Sir Francis’s Magnum Opus.
Unusual since Drake had actually been there for most of the frightful episode and couldn’t recall having seen this beast before.
Regardless, being in no flavor of mood to turn down free entertainment, he’d listened intently to how the elder Drake had used all his powers to conjure his own island into existence out of the very Primeval Void that gave the universe its shape and substance.
That fool’s companion would go on to proclaim that, in order to protect himself and his creation from the minions of Iralith, Sir Francis stole and corrupted the spirits of those he killed and bound them to serve as his undead legions. He then laid an impregnable curse upon them and his island sanctum, shrouding them from any form of detection, magickal and physical, in a loathsome miasma that slowly sapped the life out of any who inhaled it.
Drake was one of two surviving beasts who knew the terrible truth behind most of these tales. In short, they were a kaleidoscope of truth and mystery. If inspected in just the right way under just the right light their seemingly disjointed fractals aligned to form something resemblant of cohesive reality.
But that was only if one knew precisely how and where to look.
So far as all but two beasts on Aevon need be concerned, however, the Dragon was gone along with his necronomical fortress. And for so long the Dragon’s youngest heir had been happy to let such horrors sleep in the realm of mist and fantasy.
But now the heavens had shifted. And as any Abyssal veteran knew like the pattern thudding of his own heart stamp, shifting solar patterns required a new alignment of sails.
The ghosts of his father’s ambition still prowled the Nine Depths, eternally doomed to seek out fresh batteries of souls for their kamikaze mission.
That much was widely known, if only to the same obscure degree as the theory of gravity or atoms were understood.
What Drake himself had left to tell, had yet to even tell Ellie, was that the counter force to this inclement crusade, the sole reason it had yet to spin into full apocalyptic overture, were also still very much in play.
It was these latter abominations, with their insatiable appetite for soul matter, that lent their name to that accursed castle.
Naarfynder.
These things were Drake’s family curse. His burden. His cross to bear until the site of his death. Or so had been his view.
Now that torturous secret had been thrust upon another. Now he would need to wash his hands of its sealing wax or have them forever stained with pure blood.
But as any Pyrate knew, need and rightness didn’t always wear gently upon a heart. Theirs was hardly a light burden either, and they weren’t without their thorns or splinters.
In the wake of that wisdom, as Drake’s head and his heart waged war over possession of his body, his stumped herd appealed to Ellie for direction.
Having no answer for them, she too turned to Drake. Whose continued vacuity spurred fears which compelled her to touch his arm. Which seemed to awaken something deep within the young Captain. Something dangerous that had been laid to rest some time ago and with good reason.
As if emerging from a deep, intransient, slumber, Drake eventually answered with the rhyme which his and his brother’s mentor had beaten into their brains since they were pups.
“A bygone crew and captain abstain from beasts of vital bloods’ domain. But sithyl thorn and crude stream bar not the one whose blackened heart yet beats.”
There followed an uneasy silence. Every beast shuffled blindly through their own mental labyrinths for a thread that remained frustratingly elusive.
“Eureka,” Tim said. His voice striking the relieving tones of a morning bell after a harish night. “I see. A ‘ghost ship’, as it were, has to have a tangible presence to take a living beast onboard. Therefore, whatever this mysterious trespasser is must be composed, at least in some part, of solid matter.”
“And solid matter can be tracked,” Steve finished with a light bob as in a shrug of nonexistent shoulders. “Right, anybody got a long range ship detector on them?”
Drake made a contrarian snort, which landed on their huddle like a primed mortar bomb.
“Well, yes and no. You're right, Tim, in that the ship itself should be physical. That’s good news for us. Plus it means she has to make port at some point.”
A + B = … Q?
Everyone stared at Drake as though he himself had dematerialized. Though all were smart enough to spot a continuity break when one smacked them upside the head, the actual fault in his phony logic was obvious to none but himself and Tim. But his counter consisted only of a slight twerk of the lower jaw muscles, whose meaning was only apparent to those who knew him well, the list of whom started and stopped with Steve.
Thus, being caught between Tim’s implacable stoicism and Steve’s nonexistent expressional portfolio, the subcutaneous motion and the cool, platonic judgement it represented would remain suspended in dark limbo for all eternity.
“The bad news,” Drake went on unfettered, “is that she doesn't require a typical landing stage. That means it could, in theory, just as easily make port inside the saarding Core!”
Every civilized beast on Aevon understood, as well as they understood any science, that the roughly spherical orb they called their planet consisted of five roughly-distinct layers.
The uppermost of these, the Crust, was the most well documented on account of it being the physical domain of all known sentient and non-sentient life.
Consisting of between two and five hundred distinct Islands and Continents depending on the Era, the “Life Zone” rode on, and was dispersed by, a veritable cushion of isotopic fluids and ionic gasses known on most maps as the Abyss.
Many beasts not overly burdened by education believed that the Core lay directly beneath and was what had spawned and now spun the Abyss.
They were, of course, wrong. The actual Abyssal bed was a layer dubbed by the sectors of thinkers whose career object was to discover and name such things as the Harvest Lands.
Although, again, in the interest of scientific correctness, a better, albeit less catchy, name might have been the Spots Of Particular Interest, as, while the layer itself was planetwide, the only bits anyone really cared about were a few key vat locations which in total amounted to less than two percent of its area.
But what these “sunspots” lacked in scope they made up for a thousand fold in import. For what it wrought was a large percentage of Aevon’s most lucrative mineral resources, including raw Magnolsis, aka “Sundust”, and the single known source of the namesake mollusk seeds used to make nexiis.
For those unfortunate beasts resigned to passing their meager lives away in its infernal depths, it was a nightmarish workspace filled with brimstone and fire, fit only for the most loathsome of society’s underbelly.
The air, if that word even applied, consisted of acidic fog and roiling plasma flares that were known to literally vaporize beasts, even within their protective steel harvest bells.
It was as good a reason as any, some saw, for certain irredeemable societal elements to be sent into the Pits to live out their days as little more than squishy machine parts. Hauling, refining and smelting the raw materials into their functional iterations to later be sold at legitimate markets across the scarred and fractured globe.
“Killing two birds with one stone,” the Tail Islands Don, Alistair Machiovolo, had once infamously remarked.
The furthest layer down had creatively been labelled the Dumping Grounds for reasons that should negate need for explanation.
Recently, as in within the last two centuries, it was where all the refuse from society both sentient and otherwise was discarded and forgotten.
Finally, at the center of it all was the Core. This ball of super-heated, radioactive material was so hot and so dense, that the energy fields it produced were held, in academia, to be responsible for the planet’s strange propensity for gravitational antivism.
It was also thought by some strange mystic sectors that Aevon’s twin moons, Savion and Erandis, played some sort of role in evening the stability. Although three to one in the same and closely orbiting spheres believed that the initial theorist on that front had been high on “lupoids” at the time.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Whatever the case, the one fact not up for dispute was that so far no philosophic, academic, psychedelic, arcane or paralegal group had come to any meaningful consensus on the matter. And any beast who claimed otherwise was either a fool, a moron, or a charlatan. Esse repetita.
“I’ve already done the math,” Tim reported, producing seemingly out of nowhere a palm-sized black tablet and a brass stylus.
“Assuming the radius of Crow's spotter horizon to be roughly twelve leagues under ideal conditions, assuming the number of registered vessels globally to be roughly one hundred and ten thousand, factor in an additional thirty percent for antique, trade and illicit vessels, and given the collective solid Crust mass to be one point twenty-two times ten to the eighth parayards square, which give it an approximate total perimeter of …”
He scribbled furiously on his pocket easel as he spoke. More muttered actually, as he went on. Evidently his definition of “already done” needed some fine adjustment.
After a minute wrestling with whatever the mathematical equivalent of an existential crisis was, Tim jerked abruptly to attention and looked about him as though only now noticing where he was.
“That puts our odds of finding and identifying any particular ship at roughly three hundred and eighty-eight thousand three hundred and thirty-seven to one against,” he said on the back of a deep excising breath.
He looked over them. “And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that no beast apart from Bon Bon seems to know what the Sleeping Giant looks like …”
To a beast they rolled their eyes.
Even Steve, having no eyeballs that could roll, rolled his entire body in admirable imitation.
This was not just their reaction to Tim's overly cerebral response. Though it did play a role. They'd experienced him long enough to become well acclimated to his flagrant candor.
In truth it was more a defensive reflex. Tim, the “living Antikythera”, was very rarely wrong about such things. Less than two tenths of one percent of the time, by his own calculations.
Thankfully, Drake was never one to let a minor thing like mathematical fortifications dampen his momentum. But he would be the first to admit it did little use if they were running around in circles.
Though he knew better than any of them where that ship was bound, and indeed who this Captain Silver was, he didn’t know how to follow.
His father had been many things in his final days and weeks. Paranoid didn’t begin to do it justice. It had been as if … as if he’d somehow known that his proverbial sand glass was down to its final few grains.
As such he had instructed his most loyal savant, the powerful, venerable and rightly both revered and feared Tortoise “Allseer”, Nikodontus, to activate what his sons had heard him call “Project Sanctum”.
Though his second son had never learned the full working details on any of his father’s “Projects”, he knew from what few tidbits he’d been able to pry out of Old Nik that the miasma barrier that guarded Naarfynder was far more insidious than a simple fog cover.
It was a Nevermore field. That had been what Nik had called it. A Nihil Eye, as the alchemists knew it. In simple terms it expunged its protectorate object from the normal dimensions of travel. Which made it so that only beasts, and in this case vessels, which didn’t wholly belong to the mortal plane could find it without express permission.
Presently Drake did as was his way when deep contemplation was required. He paced the entire Adamic alphabet out on the floor.
After a seemingly indefinite solitude wrapped in his thoughts, his head snapped back, his eyes and nostrils flared and his ears pricked up. All the trademark signs of a hunting Dog who has caught a fresh whiff of his prey were on display.
The rest, who had by then become as thoroughly engrossed in thoughts of their own, snapped instantly to alert. They all knew that look. It being such a universal sign of keen intent. Even if Ellie alone was in a privileged place to know it specifically meant that Drake had a plan. Or at least something he could legally pass off as one.
He turned his Captain’s glare on Bon Bon and asked as if inquiring after some navigational figures, “was Tom onboard?”
Bon Bon didn’t answer. She just stared miserably at her feet. Adrian put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him, and he smiled at her knowingly.
One of Adrian's many fine qualities was his kind and radiant heart. He could light the darkest cave with his whistle or melt the coldest frost with his smile.
“I don't … I don’t know. We … Tom and I …” she choked on a sob.
Adrian’s hand held fast to her shoulder. Its gifting strength the only thing keeping her from breaking down and start bawling again and he knew it. She pressed on in a hoarse rasp, “Tom … I … I never knew …”
“Yes?” Drake prodded with clearly straining patience.
Ellie restrained him with a hand. She knew that Bon Bon’s every instinct fought against letting this secret out, and it was tearing at her more than any weapon of steel or magick.
Ellie walked over and took the slender lass into her arms. Bon Bon’s muscles, hidden beneath her fanciful garb, were like whipcords, tightened by her repressed emotions. Her words came out in a blinding staccato blast, like an exhaust pipe being unburdened of its years of accumulated filth.
“He was always a … a …” she wailed, stumbling over the eternal hurdle at the end. Her voice then dropping off as if she’d stumbled and dropped it down a well. “When I said he was my lover … I … it was a lie.”
“And when you said you'd known him since childhood?” Ellie asked, giving Drake the eye that any husband alive would know meant ‘keep silent or there will be consequences’. True to the staple, but also to his right as Captain, he held his tongue as well as her gaze with a very poignant air of.
“I have no idea when … or how he … he … died. I don’t know why he was even on that saarding ship. All I know is …”
Even with Adrian’s curative engine aura driving her mental turbines, the cavernous wound in her heart had turned to a gaping maw through which gushed her entire life’s emotional reservoir. And drawn into that tidal outrush was the part of her spirit which gave strength to her muscles and imposed normal upright posture on her bones.
She crumpled. Even with Adrian’s borrowed strength, her anger and grief burst forth in uncontrollable spasms. She buried her face in her hands, no longer able to bear to look her friends in the eye.
“I love him,” was all she managed to choke. “I love him …”
She repeated it over and over until her throat mutinied. But she still continued to mouth the words in between her racking convulsions.
Who exactly she was intent on convincing was unclear. Be it herself or the others. But whatever was the case, Adrian and Ellie worked in concerted physical, and unconsciously in auric, tandem to soothe her emotional tempest.
Drama was nothing new for them where Bon Bon was concerned. But this was a different species of dragon altogether. For once there was nothing petty or coy about or in it. Gone were the hyperbolic exaggerations and the ditsy façade.
Every hoarse note, every transparent expression, every pitifully pronounced dot and agonizingly strained chord came from a sanctum long buried beneath mountains of shame and pain. Its horded truths as jealously and vigilantly guarded as the Imperial Treasury Vaults.
It was not so much what she revealed, but how. Her raw, unshielded emotions managed to even wring a soft touch of sympathy from Crow. Tantamount to tapping Heavy Water from an anvil.
That said, Drake was the Headmaster’s third hand and eye for a reason. He remained unmoved. A damning silver glint from Bon Bon’s inadvertently exposed inner cloak had caught his eye.
He’d known for a while, as had the Headmaster naturally, that Bon Bon had been secretly dabbling with some fringe form of magick for some months now. As subtlety had never been the Vixen’s strongest suit, he and Ellie had observed her on several occasions doing her nightly séance practice sessions.
With his powers of perfect hindsight he could plainly see the error in letting such things merely slide past him undisturbed and uninvestigated.
But at the time it had seemed perfectly reasonable. Or at least rational. Seeing as how nothing had mysteriously caught fire or exploded, and given the absolute dearth of unexplained disappearances, mysterious actions by inanimate objects, delusional outbreaks, or any other traditional hallmarks of supernatural meddling he’d figured it best to not make problems where none existed.
He should have known better. He did know better! He, of all beasts, understood the dangers of playing with fire. Both in the proverbial and literal sense. He remembered how his brother had got his first scars. And still he’d done nothing.
Contrary to what he told himself, he’d had no greater mission on those nights. Not in the lofty sense of the “greater good” typically pawned off by churches and public charities at any rate.
No. He’d been with Ellie. And though he couldn’t say in good faith that he regretted a nanosecond of their time his reason could not let go the fact that he had been blinded. Willfully blinded. He’d let his carnal, immature impulses get the better of his duty and judgement for years and now he was staring down their loaded consequential bores.
He … THEY could no longer afford the luxury of ignorance.
Pyrates’ Second Rule, courtesy of Professor Shanter: “blowing out your candle doesn’t slay the monster under your bed.”
Now, with his understanding of the full gravity of what she had been up to and what needed to be done, he would not make the same mistake twice.
He waited until Bon Bon had sufficiently emptied her emotional well, then he brought Ellie’s attention to the partially revealed evidence.
Both Ellie and Bon Bon glanced down and then back up at him in near perfect unison. Their faces bore identical expressions of incomprehension and horror. Bon Bon moved to cover up her secret, but Drake would not be so easily dissuaded.
He was about to press upon her the fact that Amelia's life hung in the balance. But Ellie, in her way, sensed his incoming beratement and cut it off the vine with a sidelong glance.
Leaning silently over Bon Bon in the manner of a doctor inspecting a bandaged wound, she tenderly pulled back the corner of her violet cloak, revealing the claimant silver ritual vial.
Adrian stared at it in a state of bewitched wonderment. He didn’t know yet what it was or what significance it held to the present situation. But the aura it exuded was like nothing he’d ever experienced.
It was like a song, or a memory of a song, calling him, telling him to go … somewhere. To do something. He just didn’t know where or why.
Drake shook his head as if to shed weighty rain. At which point he realized that he’d been drooling. If nothing else, that was as clear a sign as any of how great the trouble was. Thankfully nobody else had noticed.
Snapping back to Captain mode, he clicked his fingers for attention then motioned for Adrian to back away and for Ellie to take the vial.
After offering a final consolatory squeeze on Bon Bon’s trembling shoulders, Adrian obeyed.
Ellie then held the Fox at arms’ length and, on the end of a compassionate smile, intoned in a low resonance, similar to how a gold brick might sound if given the power of speech, “you know I have to”.
Bon Bon's muscles tensed so hard that all her joints cracked. But for the same reasons as she had always done, she capitulated. Albeit this time absent any theatrical mood swings or pouting.
She simply splayed out her arms and spat out the words “just take it” as though they were venom sucked from a wound.
Under Bon Bon's loathsome glare Ellie took the small silver tube. Which she held reluctantly in her fist. She couldn’t put her finger on what, but something about it made her skin crawl. The metal felt somehow unnaturally cold.
She handed it off to Drake and he examined it as though searching for a maker’s mark. He then looked at Bon Bon and said, “you know exactly what you were doing with this.”
This was not a question.
The response was a flickering gesture, which could have meant anything. “I just wanted him to be happy,” she replied, her voice cracking on the final word.
Drake had had enough. His patience had been shaved clear to the bone at the very start. He waved the confiscated prison tube aloft as if it were a piece of damning criminal evidence.
“Would you be happy being jammed into this thing?”
He may have phrased it as a question, but his tone and manner exposed his real intent. Bon Bon just stared dejectedly at the floor without responding.
Drake handed the vial to Tim, who slipped it into his trusty bandolier satchel. Then he turned, and while sparing only a momentary glance in Bon Bon’s general direction, he addressed the herd at large as if for the first time.
“As … misguided as Bon Bon’s actions tonight may have been, they might prove to be Amelia’s salvation.”
He wasn’t sure what brought about his sudden bout of charity. But in the interest of preserving momentum, he didn’t wonder too long or hard about it.
“While she failed to fully capture Tom's spirit, she may have done enough to build a fragile bridge between him and her capture vessel. If so, and if Tim can figure some way to transpose that link onto a compass pulsar, there may just be hope that we can find our missing Runt before she becomes a permanent part of their troop.”
Everyone, with the hardly unusual exception of Crow, who remained as stony as the FPA walls, beamed with the kind of exploratory zeal Pyrates and pirates alike were known and regarded for at nursery bedtimes.
This would be the first real action they had seen since they’d helped ground a Conshortan Brigantine trying to sneak through the Great Border Wall last year.
But to say they weren't all a little bit scared too was to insinuate their complete and total lack of skill or sense.
Admittedly, Conshorta was a school in the sense that a rock was a pillow. It was attended by the elite who had been brought into the world on a satin cloth. But as Old Iron Hide had effectively taught them all, “to underestimate any opponent, no matter how slack jawed, is to all but ram your own sword through your belly”.
Every Pyrate would, sooner or later, become well acquainted with their chief rivals. If not through frequent, and often brazen, antics, then their myriad attempts to sabotage the Academy by launching “surprise” raids on key fortress locations along their nadiral boundary.
Most of which ended in flame and disaster while offering little more than scheduled target practice for the Pyrates.
The “University” may have predated Flint’s legacy by several centuries, and the fact of its having the general blessing and tacit backing of the world’s correlated governments may have offered it a sheen of legitimacy to the legally illiterate masses, its “students” near-universally substituted real skill or tractable expertise for sheer blockheadedness, political meandering and nepotism.
Everyone on Aevon knew that Conshorta was all about strutting and talking the talk then just as often as not cowering behind the Empire or Crown’s naval skirts when things got too heated.
As far as Flint’s champion heirs were concerned Conshorta represented everything the FPA was built to oppose.
But these enemies were no baroque barnacles yet to evolve past the playground. Necrophagial constructs of any sort were dangerous. As any one of their thousands of folk and fairytale references would attest. But ones that could still think, move and fight represented an epoch-defining threat. The kind of danger that, if unchallenged, could reshape or destroy the world as they knew it.
As if tracking a phantom ship wasn’t tricky enough, doing battle with her already deceased crew was its own proprietary metric of impossible.
If their presupposition about the ship itself being tangible was true, he reckoned it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that the ghost crew might also be corporeal enough, if not to be harmed, then at least be warded off or defended against somehow.
The problem still was how.
Tim, of all beasts, answered that question with an unusual amount of enthusiasm. “I think I might have a few tricks that most weaponsmiths don’t. But I’ll need as many nexels as we can find.”
Drake gestured a command which Tim comprehended immediately. He marched off purposefully with Steve in imminent pursuit.
Instantly thereafter, with a flick of the snout in the direction of the armory, Drake ordered Hemlock and Bon Bon off to gather munitions for Tim to modify.
Crow was to secure their supplies and provisions.
All three nodded assent to their tasks and took off.
Turning last to Adrian and the Blunder Twins, Drake knew he didn't need to give them specific orders. Their missions and the stakes thereof were as straightforward as they came. And as well were waiting on him, for they first required a ship before they could get to work.
In an uncharacteristic bout of inspiration, he adopted a dramatic persona that would have done the greatest Felinistic playwrights proud, “arm yourselves well lads! And wisely! For tonight the very gods themselves shall envy us our deeds!”
Their shared charismatic whoops and cheers, followed by their scampering feet and carrying raucous laughter as they went to presumably go wake the harbor master gave Drake pause for simultaneous adoration and admonition.
‘That’ll either make him way friendlier or more trigger happy’ he thought.
He stood there marveling at their impressive capacity to simply revel in the moment. Completely forgetting that they were all embarking on what was essentially a suicide mission if Tim’s weapon mods didn’t pan out.
Then Ellie materialized behind him unexpectedly, breaking him out of his reverie. She squeezed his waist and nestled her chin on his broad shoulder.
“You know, I think you’d make a great actor if this whole Pyrate thing doesn’t work out,” she said as she gave his trim middle a loving squeeze.
He smiled and gave her nose a fond tweak. She then lifted her muzzle right up next to his ear to suggestively whisper “my Captain” before planting a kiss on his own nose and dash away.
He watched appreciatively as she jogged to catch up with Hemlock and Bon Bon. He’d have been lying if he’d said it didn’t occur to him to call this whole mission off and just run away with her to some desert island where they could live happy, multiply and grow old together.
But the moment quickly passed. Flavorless reality sank back in and it was back to the jolly old business.
Once alone, he turned his thoughts to how he was going to convince the harbor master to let them take a ship in the middle of the night to go search for their missing Runt by trailing a ship that reportedly sank to an island that didn’t, strictly speaking, exist.
If it came right down to it, he might just have to steal a ship and have words about it with Avlon later. Assuming they lived that long.
As much as it tore at his honorable sensibilities to betray the Headmaster’s trust in such a way, he knew it would scar his heart far more to leave an innocent life to the winds just because all the saarding paperwork wasn’t in order.
Besides, wasn’t that the Pyrate’s way? Stealing ships? One might just look at this as one of Old Iron Hide’s instances of “learning on the job”.
His rationalizing was interrupted by a tap on his shoulder.
Hardened reflexes older than his species snapped Drake around, dropped him into a fighting crouch and brought a hand to his sword in a single clean move.
It took a few seconds for the logical assessment board in his brain to register the new scene. And once it had a further few were required for inquiry as to how to file the information.
The Goat who had been the cause of his undue alarm stood there with hands clasped behind him and wearing a strange masque of monkish calm. One which left the eyes, figuratively sodden with melancholy, exposed.
He was clearly waiting for something. What, Drake was a loss to guess.
Preferring knowledge to ignorance he asked the stranger his business.
The Oreamnos answered in a lackadaisical drawl as though he’d had this same conversation many times before and was now reading it off a prompt in his head.
“Name’s Jacob. Your Sailing Master. Ready for orders Captain.”
For the third time in as many days, images from the past years careened through Drake's mind like shot from a blunderbuss. Knocked into a furtive daze by the sensory quagmire, he blearily told Jacob to “go help Crow gather supplies. Then write up an inventory list and give it to Ellie. She should be out by the student docks by the time you’re finished.”
Jacob nodded curtly and went on his way. Leaving Drake in a fuming stew.
How could he be so blind? What kind of saarding sorcery was at work here? He’d get to the bottom of this …
But the memories were gone again. Evaporated into the ether of thought like snowflakes on a hot stove.
Feeling just slightly dazed, Drake spun about and continued on his lonely trek as if nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary had just occurred.