The greatest weapon of all is his mind. But all thoughts of victory or defeat begin and end their journey in the heart.

The final, vigintuplet entry in the unofficial Pyrate Codex was simultaneously proven and martyred by its two aspirants who’d made it their business to challenge a chimeran demigod to a bout using naught but their natural scion gifts and athletic prowess.

To their meager credit, their strategy was sound, if rather basic. With Ellie leveraging her Canid strength and willpower, Amelia her blitzing speed and Silver, recovered from his embarrassing earlier delay, his supernatural powers to steal the bulk of Saedel’s godlike attention away so that his mortal companions could slip in and strike.

Unpracticed though their efforts were, were they pitted against most ordinary opponents their combined assault might have actually stood a chance at netting them victory.

As it was they may as well have been trying to steal light from the heart of a star.

Time and time again they tried to wrestle the White Wand from Saedel’s steel clutches. Silver leveraging his diasporic presence and Ellie rounding from above and behind to capture the brunt of the False God’s affronted powers, while Amelia bolted into any made gap from below.

But time and again the Necromancer swept them all off like dust from a monocle lens. Formidable and fearsome in their own ways though they all were, they had simply come unprepared for the False God’s sheer demagogic might.

After being hurled across the whole length of the ship for the third time in as many minutes, Amelia was starting to comprehend and appreciate the real, horrible depth of that error.

Everything ached. And not just in their bodies. And this wasn’t even them playing for keeps. This was a hound playing with its supper.

“He's too damned strong,” Ellie cursed as she fought against her rioting nerves for control over her limps.

“And fast,” Silver’s voice filtered up as though from inside an empty trunk.

He lay prostrate on his back at the bottom of a him-shaped hole two decks below them. Stunned more by the fact that he could still be stunned in his hyper material stage than by the actual physical trauma.

That said, if he’d still had bones they could have been poured out into alchemy vials for use in medicinal broths.

“He’s too powerful,” Amelia groaned, clutching her head in her hands in a feeble attempt to make the world around it stop spinning quite so fast. “We need the bloody Wand.”

Ellie looked between Amelia and the hole as if deciding whether or not to push her in. Whatever came out of her mouth was lost under a meteoric storm of flaming hail from above that tore gaping holes through the Giant’s necrotic skin and rotten entrails.

Gouts of blue and pink sparks spurted out of each wound entry. Everywhere the lightning balls touched bled orange and yellow fire.

Had the ship possessed actual engines or sails before it would have been a crippled hulk after.

As it stood, or flew as the case may be, the assailant gunners might as well have been plugging their shots into a sand mount for all the good they were doing.

Like a creature out of an occult horror novella, the Giant swallowed the recurrent punishment and kept rising.

No order given for the Giant’s crew to take cover. Even if their officer cared none would have been necessary.

Apparently one had to have been a part of the other side significantly longer than these modrons had in order to forget that being forcibly drop-fed a ball of elemental fury was on the same plane of unpleasantness as being struck by the hand of a lesser deity.

Meanwhile, Saedel himself remained still. Silent and stoic as a mountain. Batting away any shots that came at him as though they were little more than annoying insects.

It soon became clear that they were shooting at a fire-retardant golem. So Drake did the pirate thing. He changed the field to one of his own make.

Under his guiding hand the Maiden slid smartly to starboard, narrowly missing the outer wall with her wounded troller fin.

He then wheeled her sharply back to port, aiming to cut off the enemy ship’s escape or, if all else should fail, physically ram it back into the Abyss.

If this were an ordinary mission, and this an ordinary petty tyrant he sought to permanently gag, Drake would have ordered his crew et all to leave him to carry on the suicidal portion of this venture alone.

Ellie would, naturally, he knew strongly protest this and he would have no choice but to let her stay or find an alternate solution. But she wasn’t here. And this was no normal battle. Even notwithstanding its features that needn’t be repeated, if what John Silver had told him about this False God, Saedel, and his maleficent scheme was even partially true, then there was no margin for error.

The Necromancer could not be allowed to escape with the White Wand. Nothing short of the fate of the entire world hinged on that. And Drake was never one wont for dramatization when simple truth itself was penal fire enough to motivate.

His crew were with him to the death. Be it theirs or their enemy’s. This was how a pirate waged war. To the bitter end. No parley. No quarter. Only metered death.

Whether by miracle or sheer great stroke of fortune, his torn-cuffed molotov of a plan worked exactly as he’d designed.

The Sleeping Giant slowed its onerous ascent. Then halted altogether less than ten feet below their rails. Just outside the depressive reach of their ventral cannons.

Drake gave his first command of the day that didn’t include the sentiment of “retreat” or involve the excessive use of explosives.

“Fall lines! Attack!”

The patter of tiny bare feet, though clawed, racing over the Maiden’s deck was multiplied by ten score to equal the rumbling charge of the great Minotaurian juggernaut, Sleipnir. Though the hulking titan of old would have given five of his six mighty appendages to stand as the center jewel of this warring throng.

This pulse of galvanic flesh, the scores of small but powerful warriors surged as one mass, one flight, one mind, one heart upon the air. Down their formless wings took them. Down into the very maw of the oblivion they had so rightly feared for so long.

But now they were fearless. They were strong, and they were proud. The Skalgags would never bow supple to another master, nor cower before another monster. Never again would their lives be chartered by another. Not so long as their hearts and minds were theirs to command.

Down they swooped. Down into the hungry void. Bringing with them each a mere candle for both attack and defense. A token of their supernal life. It was enough.

Together they flew. A swarm of insolent judgement descended upon the sable barge of the Necromancer. Though they hadn’t enough stones between them to use for shot, they made do with their spangled death fiend fang daggers and jawbone clubs.

The shades of the Giant’s former crew, emboldened though they were through proximity to their craven primarch, dissipated like dry grass before the clade of firebrand fey warriors.

The Pyrates below made way for them.

From here on this was Skalgag business. This was their war to finish. Their score to settle.

As far as they saw who were of a mind to see such things, this was only right.

Their unnaturally manufactured hands, crafted solely out of aetheric materia for the sole purpose of sculpting and reshaping the nihil basin of their parent realm, reduced the Sleeping Giant’s carrion boards and blighted steel facets to elemental pulp as though they were as much wet parchment.

The Skalgags swarmed over the Sleeping Giant like vengeful termites. A fire, a sparkling third sun of rage, lorded in and over them. Its tongues licking through their arms the dark chariot of their ultimate foe.

Tearing, biting, clawing, destroying any and all they came across. Sparing only those of living flesh their wrath just so long as they didn’t stray into the crusade’s vindictive path.

The first phase of Drake’s cobbled plan was taking shape gloriously.

True to their craft, as surgical as they were thorough, the Skalgags were dismantling their enemy’s means of escape from the inside out. As well as keeping whatever retainment forces he may have held in reserve at bay. If not destroying them utterly.

But for as brave and pure as the Skalgags were in their hearts, there still belied the fact that their bodies were less than well adapted for combat. And even less so for what the oldest of tongues called the Zyrkanytkrayt.

Literally parsed into modern parlance as ‘The Wizard’s War’. Described haughtily by Misloff in his seminal work as the “I Megalýteri Óra”. The Longest Hour.

In older, wiser cultures it was known as the Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ragnarök, Kalkin, the Holocaust, the Fifth Sun, and a hundred other names all lost to history. Though all meant quintessentially the same thing. The final battle.

This would be that day for the Skalgags it seemed. For theirs was a hopeless errand, and all knew it whose eyes were truly theirs to see by.

Though many tried, and though their efforts were valiant, worthy of aspiration under normal circumstance, the False God effortlessly crushed, slashed, pulverized and atomized any and every soul who came at him as any normal beast would fan away offending fumes.

But such was their unconquerable will that where one fell there stood two or three more ready to avenge him.

Also like insects, through their sheer force of numbers, eventually, one of their proverbial stingers found its mark.

The bronze blade of a familiar war ax bit into the back of the chimeran malnumen’s neck just above the line of his armored collar.

The False God threw his assailant off with a roar whose terrible thunder was unlike anything ever heard on Aevon.

Its unnatural resonance ripped through the very aether like a sundering explosion. Drilling into the minds and hearts of all who heard it. Mother and nether child alike.

Its boom warped the nearby and shook tainted rivets from their housings. Even the unnatural material of the tower quivered as if in a fit of fright.

In the moments caught in its phantasmic wake all other efforts temporarily ceased as beast, Skalgag and ghost alike all forgot their purpose in favor of blocking their ears from that wretched noise.

With a twitch of his clawed finger Saedel blasted the doomed creature who’d inflicted the blow, along with his heirloom, weapon into a patch of insubstantial black waste.

But his attack had served his intended purpose.

This cruel act inspired the warrior’s companions to take up his fateful cause. Shaking them out of their miasmic stupor. Uniting them as one frame of force again. They charged and laid into the Necromancer like feral beasts. Their momentary lapse into the corona of the nether forgotten like the weather of the past day.

Generations of hardship, spite, torment and rage all finally were given a chariot, a direction, and a cause. After so many years the forgotten race had found a new beacon to follow. And they reveled in its bastion glow.

The joy of battle was their fuel. The euphoria of a promising new dawn a faunal blaze in their crippled hearts.

Like the scions of a warrior dynasty they pitted themselves to the rite before them. Roaring like wyntyrdyrs. As terrible as gorgons, as mighty as dragons. Tearing open the False God’s armored exoskin and into the black flesh, or whatever resembled, beneath. Their carnal fury flowed rife and raw, as though the Great Wolf himself had sunk pernicious teeth into their hearts.

Thoroughly satisfied that their enemy’s attention was elsewhere, and after ensuring everything else was in proper position, Drake gave the orders to launch grapples and set free their own anchors.

With the renowned skill and practiced ease that had made the Flint Pyrate Academy students famous, Tim, Adrian and the Sailing Master each hefted one of the eighty-pound grapple launchers, dubbed the “Rude Neighbors”, into position, lined up their shots and fired.

Sparkling contrails of superheated ignition powder traced the javelin spikes’ paths as their Dimitri-pattern ballista motor wheels hurled the six foot pilon shafts through the dark gaps between the ship and the cavern walls, plunging their sword-length barbs into Drohmsviire’s anathematic rock, casting a crude but effective area denial net over the chasm through which no larger vessel than the Maiden herself could have traversed without being sawn into scrap.

At the same time, the floored anchor heads, trailing tethers of specialty Charcyron sinew, crashed their magnetic monopolar weights through the Giant’s deck, latching onto its iron superstructure with the strength of ten thousand bestial arms, the crank winches then pulling the alchemical ropes taught.

Both ships were now intrinsically bound to one another. The one could go neither up nor down without the other’s compliance. Nor could she veer port or starboard, for the Maiden’s guns were poised and ready. Her automators’ eyes trained and true. Their minds set. Their orders absolute.

“If that ship so much as twitches, blast her into orbit.”

Drake unsheathed his fangs in a wicked grin. Phase two of his plan was spinning along as well as he’d imagined. Better, if truth is to be put up plainly.

He knew the Sleeping Giant had once been a classical Boudoir-style Brigantine. In the normal order of corsair arithmetic, equating her to the Maiden on any objective scale would have been like comparing a spool of anchor cable to a skein of cotton yarn.

But this was no ordinary ship. Though her dry displacement alone eclipsed the Maiden’s by a five to one margin, she currently lacked any of the critical components for battle outside of her Captain’s singular animating will.

That was a wizard’s truest weakness.

Animancy, as defined in Misloff’s Moderated Spell Guide, Chapter 5 ‘The Will on Tap’: truth shaped by the intellect, manifested through strength of one’s will. In essence, the art of making up true stories.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

No matter how powerful the beast, no matter how vast the mind or spirit, its attention could only be divided so many ways.

Between coordinating his army still above, commanding his crew and fighting off his assailants below, the False God’s formidable, though still finite, mind was thoroughly occupied.

Though that wouldn’t last. Drake knew this.

‘Time for phase three’ he told himself.

Time to deal with this False God, was left at the portal to the known annals.

“Prepare to board!” he shouted aloud, drawing his cutlass.

Without need of further instruction, the rest of his crew set about their prepared ways.

Tim took Drake’s place at the helm.

Hemlock and the Sailing Master took sniping positions on the bow and quarterdeck.

Bon Bon, Adrian and Crow threw down their respective lines and tucked in by the gunwale, freshly loaded and restocked arms at the ready, waiting only for their Captain’s order to take the final plunge.

When it came, they all flew over the precipice like broodlings flung from a nest. Only they all put their flight feather on long ago. And notwithstanding the abnormal rank of antimony about, these air currents were well known to them.

The first pair of boots touched down on the ship within seconds of having left the first. However, what they found was disturbingly less exciting than what had been expected.

Aside from what looked like a pile of albino Ants crawling over a heaving pile of melted metal and tar, all signs of life had almost completely erased themselves from the battle slate.

“Almost” because the Giant still housed three living occupants. The presence of the boarding party had not gone unnoticed by two of the three. One in particular caught Drake’s ear.

“Drake!” came the call that made his heart at once beat like a volley turret and also stop dead in its pace.

From within, their reunion lasted an infinitesimal increment of the shortest possible timeframe allotted in the ledger of causal reality.

But to those observing from without, it seemed to stretch even longer than their actual separation.

When at last they became two bodies again, all the agony of the night’s endurance run came flooding back into Drake like a river bursting through a shivering reservoir cap. Its force rang out on each and every one of his bones like a strike from a power hammer.

He sucked in a breath as though to call for reinforcements from the air itself. But there was no reprise there waiting. The Lalitha Stone was in another’s hand. Without its sustaining fire his limbs forgot their strength. The power of his hand to even maintain its grasp on his sword hilt fled, as a prey beast flies in sight of a predator.

His eyes and head sagged and his whole frame drooped as though his personal gravity had been dialed up tenfold, threatening to collapse in a heap right there on the deck.

But he was not alone. Not abandoned. A hand, one warm in spirit though ice in flesh, clutched his failing fingers and held them so tightly he felt the sinews stretch. But he didn’t care. A new fire awoke inside him. One actually old, in fact, but newly just forgotten. Misplaced. Undernourished. But now alive and hungry. Oh so very, very hungry.

It reached out a tender spectral limb to its sister dipole. Warm light stretched down the length of his arm, raising it to brush a finger over her elektron cheek.

“Do you remember,” he said in a husky tone as though he’d just arose from a deep sleep, “what I told you that first morning?”

Ellie smiled the kind of smile only a beast so truly in love that her heart no longer fully belonged to her could. “You said we were like a magick coin. Two heads, one body …”

The bit of her heart that was still her own tried to broach an escape, resulting in a fit of uncontrollable bout of intermittent giggly bubbles in between her words.

“But not enough … not enough tail between us … to be worth a mention.”

They all laughed, though more for the spirit of the moment than amusement at the actual joke.

When Drake was back to his rights, in blatant disregard of “proper” Pyrate “etiquette” Ellie pulled him in and kissed him.

Official Pyrate Code, Section 3, Article 7, Paragraph 2: A legally recognized Pyrate Captain or Designated Senior Officer shall maintain an even, professional demeaner at all times when in any professional company.

On this day, for this merry moment, they all collectively forgot that they were Pyrates.

When, on its own due occasion, passion ceded the crown back to sense and reason, Drake undid the second bandolier he’d been wearing and handed it to Ellie.

Obeying one of her premonitions, she had packed away her spare at the last minute, complete with weapon haft, row of interchangeable heads, a spare pistol and Null pouch. Only telling Drake of it the first morning after their departure, although refusing to say why.

Perhaps this was to make sure he’d remember. With her he honestly wouldn’t have been surprised.

“I would have brought flowers,” he said, reclaiming his normal composure along with his cutlass. “But I figured you'd like these better.”

Adrian tapped Amelia on the shoulder. “I see you’ve taken up arms too ,” he said, indicating her dangling short sword.

She shrugged and admitted in earnestness, “it’s not really my style. But it serves.” She forced herself to maintain eye contact and thanked Iradyl that she wasn’t a mammal.

“I hate to interrupt,” Hemlock interrupted, shoving a thumb back towards the heaving quarterdeck. “But that big guy still looks really mad and he’s quickly running out of things to hit.”

It was then that Silver made himself known. Having managed to reconstitute himself enough to make his getting involved in a fight of any practical benefit, he now had his own two fennings to throw in.

“Sorry I'm late miss,” he said, addressing Amelia. “Apparently the underworld has been having some problems with gate crashers recently and won’t let me back in.”

Drake turned to the intruder, weapons inserted into hand, but he kept his manner and tone professional. “Nice timing.”

“Morning, Captain.” The old ghost smiled and greeted the one he addressed respectfully with a tip of his badly blemished tricorn. But there was a strange but unmistakable sardonic glimmer about the way he’d turned out the word Captain. “I see our hosts are keeping you all very well entertained.”

The Pyrates all looked to Drake, who gave what could almost pass for a cavalier shrug to those who didn’t know him well.

Adrian looked between the shimmering newcomer and his Captain as though waiting for instructions. When he didn’t get any, he asked of no beast in particular, “wait, this one’s with you?”

If his hope had been that if he left enough bait and slack in his tone some beast would take it, he was right.

Drake answered calmly and simply, “yes”. At which every beast’s jaw save Amelia’s popped off a hinge.

“And ... he's … a ghost.”

“Yep.”

Adrian cocked his head. “Sooo, what? Do I need to say his name five times in a row or …?”

“Don’t be silly,” Ellie scolded. “That’s an old wives’ tale.”

Her eyes flittered over to Drake at the word wife. He didn’t notice.

“Besides, he’s already bloody here ya barny twit,” Steve reminded them.

“I’m also not deaf, lad,” the old pirate concorded with a glint that in any other eye would herald an imminent murder. But for a pirate of the old grain it was equivalent to saying, “let’s drink and make up an occasion for it if we can’t find one in our pockets”.

Steve did a midair summersault and nearly laughed himself into the Maiden’s hanging keel. Amelia groaned into her palm while her comrades traded unspoken thoughts. Silver may have been the most erudite pirate she’d ever met or heard of, but he still wore the trappings of his old life like a military ribbon bar.

Not a weapon stirred. Thank the gods. But if thoughts were sounds the air would have been thick with the rattles of keys and cage bars.

Adrian shrank back like a struck cub. The sight equivalent to watching a flower wither under a cruelly magnified solar iris. “Whoa there old timer,” he said, feigning dispassion but his voice pitching up an octave along the way to dispel any misgiving. “Didn't mean anything odd by it. Just trying to make sure we’re all up to speed is all.”

“Speaking of speed …” Ellie said, speaking to Adrian while holding her eyes on Saedel.

The False God by then had clawed and smashed through all but a few vestigial scraps of his dogpile, and would soon switch his baleful ire to the main event.

Drake kept his eyes locked on his Quartermaster as though worried she might up and vanish on him a second time.

In truth, it was the opposite idea that concerned him.

She had a mad glint in her eye which reminded him clearly of the second reason he had made her his second-in-command.

“See the white stick that guy’s holding,” she said, pairing the brackish vernacular of a Pyrate with the sharp tone and cadence of an Imperial officer. “We need it. Think you can arrange that if we give him something else to look at?”

At this Adrian perked up. His fear and trepidation a departed memory. Towing and stashing sails was fine work and kept him reasonably fit, but in the run was where his heart truly lived. It was said the reason why his kind were the color of the suns was that a Cheetah once chased the stars into the Celestial Couple’s bed chamber, hence forcing them to rise for the morning. That same legend concluded they’d all been chasing each other around the heavens ever since. A thought which never failed to get a chuckle out of the Dream Kidd.

He started bouncing from foot to foot, as per his way. Ostensibly he did this to warm up his leg muscles, but in truth it served to partially exorcise his own impatience.

“Just say the word missus big boss ma'am,” he said with a jubilant salute like a child trying to imitate his soldier father.

“If it's speed you need, then I'm your Kidd.”

“Alright lads,” Drake said in a low but still commanding voice. “Here's the deal: that stick is the White Wand. Yes, the White Wand. That thing is called Saedel. The False God. Not sure why. But he’s a powerful necromancer and he’s as mean as he is ugly.”

The rest nodded. Even Bon Bon.

“Crow, get Hem down here and take sniping positions at the fore. Take out anything that tries to stop us. Ghosts or … ” he trailed off.

The Skalgag crusade had become a feeding frenzy. Could they be trusted now to discern friend from foe? They couldn’t take the risk.

Crow nodded and sailed off.

Pointing next to Ellie and Bon Bon, Drake ordered, “you two, help me keep Saedel on his back foot… er, claw.”

More nods.

“Got it.”

“Righty.”

Drake turned to Steve. “You’re our scuttle rat.” He flicked a wave towards the returning hunter pair. “Tell them up there whatever those two need to keep shooting they’re to have. Pronto.”

Steve made an acrobatic salute. “By your order sir,” he said in sincere earnestness and took off.

“And as for you,” Drake said, turning now to regard Silver fully for what he vaguely realized was the first time. “Watch over our Runt will you. This’ll be her first battle.”

Silver smiled and placed a knowing hand on Amelia’s stiffened shoulder. “With my life,” he said openly. Then to her ear he privately added, “or thereabouts”.

Lastly, Drake turned to Adrian. “Once his guard’s down, get the Wand and give it to Amelia. Don’t ask me why. We’ll sort that out later.”

Adrian nodded. Then he winked at Amelia. “Good to see you’re still kicking by the way.”

Amelia smiled and waggled her head like a patted puppy.

Silver broke into the conversation again to execute on the point he was going to bring up before. “With respect Captain, might I suggest that our best option is to simply take the Wand and leave?”

Drake locked eyes with Silver and shook his head. “Naarfynder is a weapon too. We’ve seen how easily he can conjure a legion. Now imagine what that would be like in the hands of every high bidder on Aevon.”

Silver swallowed his reply and slowly nodded. “Eka mahana yud’dah. Antima yud’dha.”

The language was Orxytocin. Like the psychological chemical with which it is conversationally mistaken, the words implanted their meaning into each and every psyche despite him not actually saying them in the strictest material sense.

“A Great War,” he’d called it. “A Final War.”

“Antihyuma yaga,” Amelia threw in in her Amurzan home dialect. She may not have had Silver’s aetheric stamp on her tongue, but her meaning could not have been more evident if she’d stated it in plain Adamic.

“The day the world ends.”

“Besides,” Drake continued, this time for the company at large. “If we run away now, the Skalgags will have lost everything, sacrificed everything they could have had for nothing. I won’t let that be on my hands.”

He looked around. Catching and holding each eye in their turn as though issuing a martial challenge.

“What say you?”

His eye was hard enough to cut stone. His tone was that of a High Court Marshal delivering a sentence verdict.

Half a dozen heads made grunts or snorts, the sorts of sounds most animals recognize as the acceptance of a thrown gauntlet.

This was the noble Captain Drake rarely seen outside of his more private circles. A younger Ellie had even once referred to him as her “Strident Knight”.

She’d had the fortuitous wisdom enough even then to keep it locked away in her tallest mental tower.

Their optical foreplay lasted long enough that Steve felt it prudent to interject. “Sorry to butt in lads and lasses, but mayhap you’ll want to get your thumbs outta yer eyes about now.”

He directed their attentions up towards the ledge that had once been the Skalgag homestead.

“Oh no …” Ellie, Amelia and Adrian all whispered in tune with Silver’s inadvertently projected thought bubble.

“Oh scrag me with a rake,” Drake cursed.

Under normal circumstances such a crass outburst would have earned him a fierce cuffing look from Ellie and a stern lecture after back in their quarters about the import of Captain’s maintaining professional portrait character in front of their crews.

This time her own remark was so caustic it almost made the rest forget what was coming.

Almost.

Falling through the bejeweled fields of the Zenith spire, a nebula of lapis daemons with cursed oblivion burning in them like electric veins.

Tim didn’t need to give orders to open fire. The Blunder Twins were rightly notorious for never needing an excuse for some explosive enterprising. Now, it seemed, they would have all the sport they could stomach and then some.

Less than three seconds after Drake first thought about reacting the Maiden’s entire dorsal arsenal ignited. Lighting up the black sky with volley after volley of directed lethal sunbursts.

From where the rest stood it was like being on the delivery end of a meteor shower. Jets of purple and gold superheated gas that set alight anything even remotely flammable that got caught near their flight paths.

Several of the approaching specters deliberately dropped out of the air in attempts to avoid the oncoming hail. Meanwhile, some of their comrades burst into plumes of volcanic vapor and vanished. Still others tried escaping through the tower walls. Only to be bounced back by the ensconced crystals’ collective ordo field.

The downside to this retreat was that it didn’t work. They could no longer see their enemy or where they were going. As a result, when they predictably re-emerged either too early or too late, they were easy prey for the Maiden’s dozen RoylT Co. Racket 71 model volley and Torturu Ind. Artemis III pattern rake turrets.

Before long the horde regained its bearings and was pressing ahead as if nothing had happened. Being exoterically compelled as they were to carry out their infernal master’s commands. Even if it meant literally staring down the barrels of a hundred burning exorcisms.

Still the soulless throng persisted.

The newly anointed Skalgag chief, the lone surviving son of Schlagalmuck, Sklagloomo, with a force of the dozen finest warriors he could find at his back, took in the sight of impending doom with the same cool countenance as his predecessor, but a mind utterly bereft of the stubborn complacency with arbitrary traditions that had led to him becoming an orphan and only child.

With a ringing clarity akin to Silver’s transcendental vocals and power that seemed to stretch out from his very soul, he gave a simple command to his troops in gruff Adamic.

“Skalgags! Fly!”

His command of the common tongue was noticeably less elegant than that of his predecessor. But it sufficed.

And though it was primarily meant for the Pyrates’ benefit, all at once, every fey fighter not otherwise engaged dipped into their quintessential pool and began chanting something that sounded to the Pyrates’ ears like a sort of tragic nursery rhyme. Albeit minus any attempt at actual rhyming.

Their ears began to glow the same electric shade as their crystals. On pounds of alien magick they propelled themselves up to meet their immortal foes.

Amelia looked at Silver.

Silver looked back. Their expressions were mirrors, though the minds beholden were inverse.

“Did you know they could do that?” she asked.

Silver gave her no answer. Only two points for thought.

An absent shrug for one. Then he stared longingly up at the processing battle and said under what counted for breath, “you always did love your little tricks didn’t you Franky.”

Then, in the regency of his most secure and private domain, he added, ‘pity’.

Amelia mimicked her elder in body, and in mind soon also concurred. Their dubious origins notwithstanding, there was no denying that the Skalgags were the raw diamonds of Naarfynder. Rough but durable, whose imminent extinction was all but guaranteed.

In that moment, though only for that moment, a few millimeters of the forge scale shell that had encrusted her heart flaked off. Setting free her guilt and despair and grief in a blinding well of tears. A seismic shiver of lament chased heralds of doubt and pain through all her physical, mental and existential steppes.

It was a tacit testament to how far she’d come on her Pyratical pilgrimage that only a few renegade traces of this pandaemonic strife broke over her surface countenance.

Not that she needed worry. All the surrounding minds were too embroiled in their own localized chaotic upturnings to so much as pretend to be concerned with anyone else’s.

The cruel irony of this imperious fate, as well as his own hypocritical role in it, was also not lost on Drake. And in his own way he too rightly mourned their doom, privately, within the confines of his soul’s sanctum chamber.

This still left him with the much more daunting problem of having to face down an enraged demigod with only half his crew, their stodgily crafted arcanotech melee weapons and a few shared handfuls of Nulls as backup.

‘Well, it could be worse.’

Sure, and the gods might take pity on them and send an army of archofae like in the old ballads. But he wasn’t exactly holding his breath on their account.

No. The fact was that without the Skalgag clan’s collective mass to bolster their diversion, their chances of slipping past the Necromancer’s faultless guard dropped into the single digits.

Even as the young Captain’s mind raced to concoct an alternate strategy, Saedel had already dispatched the last of his attackers.

‘Saarding A,’ Drake’s sailor mind thundered.

This was not part of the plan.

Spheres of radiant crystal malice now blazed under the lids of Saedel’s formerly black eye sockets and his crowning fire had ascended the spectrum from the golden armistice region to the antichretic lilac and sapphire gate of total war.

The Giant’s master was awake. And he was mad. Very mad.

“Pathetic worms,” the monster growled, aiming his daemonic staff at them as though it were a loaded cannon. “Did you really think my own spawn stood a chance against their omnipotent father?”

An emotional and rational shockwave broke over the more knowledgeable Pyrates’ esoteric walls as a terrible truth, decades in its conception and gestation, was finally on the docket to be born.

Blocks of formerly trivial facts, snared by once seemingly disparate implications were suddenly ramrodded together along revolutory fault lines in a rolling thunder pang of narrative labor.

All of them knew better than to let any of this show of course. And all but one of them were experienced enough in the spiritual ways of their craft to put that stratagem to work.

Hemlock snorted and spat out a sniping commentary, “I can see the family resemblance,” through her teeth. But otherwise all was silent.

It has been said, and many a tribal ballad or war story has been spun about the point, that the world dares not encroach on a warrior’s mind during battle.

The raging tempest above faded from thought as the Pyrates’ perceptual horizon collapsed around a singular line of purpose.

The War for the White Wand was now well and truly on.