This had always been the real war. The true and ultimate cause of all of this. This was not merely a fight for survival, or a test of martial or spiritual prowess. This was a war for the very future of their world.
And contrary to what a majority of its participants thought, it would not truly be waged or won with steel or sorcery.
Though that didn’t mean that none of either would be featured. That just wouldn’t fit the Pyrate setting. Though it would all be but pantomime. A front for the true war. A war fought over far more than mere kingdoms and empires.
During the octane theatre session, however, two colossal mistakes were made in as many minutes. The first of which, as should be expected, was Bon Bon's.
Never having been one to shirk a challenge, and also never one to think too hard before rushing in at full force, it was to no beast’s surprise that she did exactly that.
The first piece to charge onto the board, using her impressive speed and angelic grace, she lashed bounded up the quarter steps and lashed out at the Necromancer with her trusty staff.
Spinning its serrated carbide points before her in a balletic whirlwind, punctuated by precise stabs at the gaps and chinks in the False God’s pectoral and abdominal armor sheets created by the Skalgags.
She called this her “Blunder Cane”. As any flaw, or blunder, in an opponent’s defense would mean their swift and painful end.
To any ordinary eye she appeared to be wielding four weapons at once. But to the False God, her prodigious output amounted to no more than a dancing beat. To be brushed off as casually as rain water.
Even when she ramped up her chaotic blitzangriff to five strikes per second, not one blow so much as grazed the deceptively agile titan.
The rest of the herd, save for Crow and Hemlock, whose outward composites were as expressive as the tower stone, looked on in awe. Saedel’s defense was minimalist and effective while his own retaliatory offense was as devastating as it was utterly merciless.
Bon Bon had just enough time and presence of mind to inelegantly pirouette to one side, narrowly avoiding a savage overhand strike from Saedel's scepter that easily sliced through the deck boards like sheets of wet parchment.
Drake pushed through the whirl of conflicting thoughts and impulses that had come upon him. Electing to act on the more wrathful parts of that mixture he barked a gruff order for “Silver” to “protect Amelia” before directing Adrian to swing around the right quarter stairs and waving himself and Ellie forwards up the left with his sword.
In the interest of giving all fair and due credit, it must be acknowledged that in this arena the Pyrates fared marginally better than the Skalgags. But only in the fact that none of them got their heads stomped in or their organs tenderized.
In what seemed to be becoming the running gag for the day, the Pyrates shot and slashed and stabbed and battered with metal and muscle as best they knew how. Only to meet the full brunt of the demigod’s unrelenting strength.
A swift and inclusive swipe of his staff caught Drake in the small of the back, splaying him out momentarily like as many pounds of limp rope and hurling Bon Bon backwards with such force that she cracked the stern quarter rail upon collision. Very nearly losing herself to Drohmsviire’s yawning umbra.
Having an uncommon affinity for learning from her mistakes even by Pyratical standards, Ellie narrowly managed to escape further punishment by ducking and rolling backwards at the last instant.
Which, though far from being the most elegant move she’d ever made, gave her the special freedom while Saedel was locked up with Adrian to come up when and how she chose. Doing so inches away from cracking her head on the wheel hub and reengaging in near that same instant, with the fallen pair doing likewise in short order.
“If I teach you pancaking lot anything, it’s how to fall and how to stand up. Usually in that order.” Thus had been the teaching motto of Old Iron Hide.
Well, in actual point of fact his method had always been “do as I say, not as I do”. But that was neither here nor there.
The Pyrates repeated this Wolf pack gambit two, three, four times. Learning and adapting their tactics with each run. Molding their patterns as much around one another’s as the False God’s.
All the while the Hunter and Huntress took quiet, expert aim from afore. Firing if and when opportunity allowed. Which, under such conditions, for most normal beasts would have realistically meant hearing one or two reports every other minute. But for them, every fifth beat of a slumbering heart were punctuated by the crackling retorts of informally, but still carefully coordinated pairs of rifle shots that nearly always sounded as one mightier cannon blast. Their hits landing like tiny meteorites. At least when they weren’t either astutely dodged or purposely deflected either by reactive wards or intelligently angled plates.
More than once Saedel very nearly tricked one of his embattling assailants into stepping into one of their allies’ lines of fire. Nearly.
But, as slow and ponderous as Heipfynger’s eve day, the Pyrates gained the bead on their ultimate opponent. And so did the tide of battle gradually, oh so gradually, shift in their favor.
One would almost be tempted to think the False God was merely toying with them. Like a Wolf having a bit of lively sport with a hunt before it kills and feasts. But this would be a lie. For in truth, for all his posturing the False God had been named so for good reason.
He was not omniscient. Nor was he omnipotent as he himself pretended. He was powerful, yes. By any conventional standard he could lay low whole armies on a whim if he’d but spare a thought to.
But he could weaken. He could tire. And unlike a true aspect of divinity, his form and his faculties were still inextricably bridged through his corporeal frame. Although his tether was astronomically more robust than any normal creature.
He could die. And for all his touting and bluster, he knew it and was holding back for sake of whatever sliver of mortal frailty still lay within.
“Death doesn’t care about what or where or how. Its only concern is when. One oversight, one weakness, one mistake, one crack in your fortress wall and he’ll slip in like a draft and take you while you still think you’re safe.”
A shot fired from Crow’s artisan binocular rifle lanced into the yin sector of the Necromancer’s dichotic mask. Splitting the bone grotesque down to the marrow and driving an equivalently unsightly wedge into the encased mind’s infernal concentration.
This evanescent lapse in his posture granted Adrian just the portal space he needed through which to leverage his greatest talent.
They had all seen Adrian run before. But this was not running. This was lightning in a bottle, if bottles were shaped like an endangered species of teenager.
From where Amelia stood his feet all but seemed to expound onto another plane of reality. Unbound by pesky universal constants like gravity, air resistance or inertia.
Even Silver intoned an appreciative whistle.
A passing specter of wonder about how those swooning females back at the Academy would react if they were here langured in the lower districts of Amelia’s consciousness.
Owing to the prize value of their males’ pelts and the living bodies of their females on the various planal steps of the black market, Cheetahs had been skirting the bank of systematic extinction for several centuries.
But for the life of her Amelia couldn’t imagine how that could be possible if one who’d scarcely begun to tap the root of his physical potential could move like an anthropomorphic cannon slug.
He launched himself at the False God’s back at the speed of heat. His long legs closing the distance in as little as three bounds.
From her vantage concealed within Silver’s BION field behind the main mast, Amelia looked on in awe. Only, per her norm modem, not for the reason one might be given to assume.
According to her homespun education, if Anurans were cannon shot, Cheetahs were supposed to be rockets. While their maximum speed potentials were at least on par, their acceleration rates were worlds apart.
Put simply, she was the vaulter, he was supposed to be the sprinter. He should have needed time and space to reach his maximum potential. Both of which, by all measures of conventional reason, the confined space of the quarter deck simply should not have offered.
How then, she wondered, was he able to reach his terminal velocity in such a short span?
‘Magick.’
It had to be. It was the only answer she could find that seemed to make even the barest hint of sense.
Which, all else being what it was, made it the most credible and, by that same token, most sane idea she had come across since figuratively getting her Pyratical boots wet.
Just then a spattering of ghosts broke over the Maiden’s holding line and Silver’s sword again slashed into being and he rose on a current of thought saying, “be right back”.
It occurred to her as she watched him soar off that, despite all the danger they’d been through, she had never actually seen him fight.
Now she would. And she would not be disappointed.
She didn’t know what his prowess with a blade had been in life, but in the hereafter he was the reaper incarnate.
What his living allies, and even he himself, didn’t truly know was that he had two things, to vital elements, his undead counterparts lacked which gave him an edge in more than just battle.
Hope and karma.
Karma, as defined by Misloff in Chapter 12 of Misloff’s Moderated Spell Guide, ‘The Ways of the Monk and Sword’: “essentially, the vocabulary of the universe. Temporal, special, spiritual and cosmic memory embedded into semblance, just as words are impressed upon ideas to form a language.”
Everything that exists has memory. Memory is simply the retention of information. Just so, form is a composite of information, and ergo all things that have form contain information. Thus all things have karma.
This much has been well known and accounted by mystics and wise beasts for as long as it has been their power to know things and to propagate understanding.
What was less understood and never documented until beasts started prying into the conventions of the alchemical mysteries is that, like matter, karma and energy are one and the same.
And just as the mass induction of heat into matter transforms some of its mass into incorporeal radiant energy, so too does suffuse karma eventually reach critical mass. Only instead of dissolving back into the entropic void, becoming null, or nihil as the sourcebooks say, karma transplants. Transforms. Becoming alive, it transcends, becoming ideas, thought, religion, philosophy. These then beget art and science, war and hideous scandal.
And just as the mind and body are one, so too are the abstract and material aspects of karma wholly unionized like faces eternally bound in the depth of a mirror.
It has been said by the wise that all beasts die twice. Once when their heart beats its last, and again after the last time their name is remembered.
Silver’s karma was that of a lowly candle. Of a name chanted over and over again in the dark. Of a will marshaled against the veil of consuming oblivion. Of a soul writhing against the talons of the dark, screaming, “no! I must live!”
And so he had.
Now that fire was the white hot jet of a welding torch. One that burned through metal and stone with ease and which no amount of water or sand could ever hope to snuff out.
With this incorruptible will backing his blade, Silver tore through the ranks of the ghosts that sought to harm his little Daisha. He would not let them have her. He would not let her suffer as he had. As he had made her do already.
If there was meaning to be had in anything, then he prayed it be this: by whatever light may harbor in this gloomy prison sanctum, his ward would see the light of a new day and stand taller in it than her father ever had.
Of that he knew he could be proud. In that he knew he could find peace. And so that would be his cause now. His dream. His will. And he would make it so, even if he had to take on Saedel single-handed. He owed her at least that much.
Unfortunately, it was this exact moment Adrian took to showcase his age in the worst way possible.
Faith, as scathingly defined by Johan Misloff in his lone commercial flop, ‘The Maledictem of Sainthood’ and further expounded upon in his lone critical failure ‘The Dry Baptism’; to quote: “the act of walking with your eyes shut. The wholehearted acceptance of one’s own fate, whatever that happens to be, or the ultimate expression of defeat. A dipolar metric in which there can be no alternative or compromise. How appropriate for the subject. Almost poetic.”
An artist knows that a good technique is the one that works.
The skilled fighter knows that the best move is the one that nets him the greatest result for the least effort.
A wise warrior knows that battles always start and end in the mind. And the cunning hunter understands that patience is the epitome of strength. That knowing when to move and when to stand still is the mark of a master and thus represents the pinnacle of skill and virtue.
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What is often neglected by all categories, especially by the young and foolish, who believe themselves supreme without a scrap of prerequisite evidence, is that while the mind and body may run in similar packs, they are two wholly different animals. What one can digest is often poisonous to the other.
There was a reason why Acinonyx were on the losing end of the evolutionary arms spectrum.
A wiser beast would have gone for the unorthodox. Charging at a brick wall only leaves you battered, bloody and toothless, even if you break through. So saith the common mantra.
But Adrian, true to his form, supine in the belief that his natural affinity for directed chaos could not be overmatched, charged straight for the most obvious gap in Saedel’s defensive screen.
He should have been a magickian. A Pyrate’s life is no place for idle tricks. Mind games rarely avail one outside of a theater, and reality doesn’t fall for sleight of hand.
And this was an empty trick. One of Saedel’s own devising in point of fact.
The brash young athlete was about to receive a good old fashioned piratical education. Specifically, he learned that the False God’s spined tail was not just an ornamental feature.
Faster than any living serpent could have dreamed, Saedel’s cruel metal tail struck Adrian flat across the chest. Hurling the golden jock clean out of the battle arena, crashing against the main mast with enough force to finally topple the abused trunk.
Amelia grabbed Adrian and with greater effort than she knew herself capable of exerting hurled both of them to one side as the towering timber toppled aftward.
From where it landed, and how, one might be forgiven for thinking this was Saedel’s devising as well. It crashed down between the harrowing combatants, reducing the wheel hub to a moldy hedgehog pile on impact and carving a three foot trench into the raised quarter.
As unanticipated as this turn was, it was as easily mapped and compensated for by the keen Pyratical minds.
But the False God had miscalculated. He hadn’t seen the full scope of the battle. As is typical with tyrants who’ve had their pride thoroughly whipped and castrated, he had fixated so absolutely on the enemy at his gates that he’d utterly failed to detect the Bird for the forest.
The Bird in this case being of that signatory ominous variety. The kind whose uncanny intellect, color scheme and diet had them primordially intwined with death.
Him having relocated to his surnamed nest after reasoning quite sensibly that the Giant’s dearth of obscurant sails and rigging made this, his bastion spot, a unique and tactically prudent angle of attack.
When the Giant’s great tree fell, it brought their shinobi Corvian down into the fray along with it.
Thankfully, him being himself, he came away from the harrowing ordeal more embarrassed than hurt.
The same could not be said for the Dream Kidd. Having just barely escaped being turned into plains colored jelly, the blow had driven the Lion’s share of the animus from his light and limber frame. Making of him, to all practical purposes, an inert corpse.
Amelia stroked his fur around the impact site and came away with her palms slick with viscous red. A quick check of his vitals revealed him to be in a stable, albeit uncommunicative, condition.
The mast’s angle also obstructed Hemlock’s fire. Forcing her to abandon her safe position in favor of one much closer to the skirmish than she would have liked.
What was more, the momentary diversion combined with their forced relocations wasted precious seconds. Seconds that were not spent keeping the Necromancer under distracting pressure.
With an easy swipe of his staff he scattered the three off-balanced fighters. He then moved to decapitate two but was interrupted when the third unwisely made a bounding lunge over the fallen mast.
While this move momentarily stayed Mistress Death’s hand for her herd mates, left the Vixen herself completely exposed.
Fortunately for all, Crow and Hemlock hadn’t bought their reputations for accuracy with favors and social clout.
Five shots between them rang like bells against Saedel's armored chest plate and gorget.
While the plates shunted off every potentially mortal wound without so much as a scratch, the attack did break into his momentum, giving the other fighters a chance to break off and regroup.
Drake panted and surveyed the field, as it were, with some middle shelf option between frustration and despair.
This wasn’t going to plan. They needed an angle. A trick. An idea. Something to help break the push and pull stalemate. Something even a demigod with an open contract with death wouldn’t see coming.
But Saedel had many more tricks of his own.
He charged at Hemlock. That is he hurled a galvanized spear of charged plasma, most commonly known as a lightning bolt, into where the Doe been standing ten milliseconds earlier.
The concussive blast vaporized the wooden structure around her and nearly sent her toppling into oblivion.
Only the flimsiest strand of luck, in the form of her bandolier strap snagging on a jutting fang of sheered rail, spared her the indignity of barreling unannounced into her ancestors’ posthumous dining room at least five decades ahead of schedule.
Although it did not spare her shoulder a deep, nasty, and most probably septic bite.
If Tim hadn’t been within arms' reach and possessed well-above-average reaction speed, Hemlock’s short but eventful career would have come to an unpleasant end.
However, this attack priority was a miscalculation. One which would have been decidedly fatal one for any normal beast.
While the False God’s mind and weapons were busy elsewhere, Crow was already on top of him. His lethal half-moon blades in hand.
But this was not some hulking brigand. Crow was fast and strong, but if a panphysical specter could not outmatch the demigod, his hopes lay within reach of a snowflake in a bonfire.
In a move too fast for any but Silver to see, Saedel rounded a kick on Crow. Catching the mortal Wolf midair by the neck, then spinning and slamming him down through the decrepit deck. An attack that should, by all mortal rights, have left him a piteous heap of broken carrion. But which, owing to whatever supreme hands held down his adamantine animus, left him merely stunned in a molded crater.
Before the others had even had a chance to register the outcome, a blinding slash from his saw chord of a tail dealt a similar dose of hateful retribution onto Bon Bon.
Were it not for the unusually generous hand of fate, or to be quite frank, her own hand and arm, acting on random impulse to raise her staff and catch the sharp end of the blow, there would have been far more of her to go around.
Saedel paused to savor his victory. In that moment he let out a hollow laugh. A sound that anyone who hadn't been a direct witness would have proclaimed to be a semiactive Continental vent, terrestrially known as a volcano, getting ready to unleash its own godly flavors of hell.
The False God then raised his clawed hand. A crackling astral bolt the colors of a woodland blaze appeared. Dry greens and glossy reds battled furiously for eminence within the narrow, pulsating confines. Arcing javelin streaks of blue and gold flashed between warring segments and prickly errant spines staged coups at irregular segments. Each one waging a thousand tiny internal battles of its own.
The chaos weapon’s glow dwarfed the burgeoning light of Myltier filtering through the storm raging just out of sight above.
Filling out the shadow below while throwing the Maiden’s sternum into stark silhouette. Making her appear almost ghostly, hung precariously between the conflicting dawns.
The False God gazed up through the dappling beams at something he alone could see.
“At last,” the Necromancer gnarred. A many forked tongue of fire snaking out from under the curled beak.
He looked back down at his hopeless prey. If he had a face under that mask, they could not imagine the depths of the malice that must have lurked there.
“Pathetic,” the False God proclaimed under the menace of a conjured thunder spear. “You vermin were hardly worth my notice.”
His crown of fire had gone the shades of a main sequence star, and glowed with the intensity of a super nova.
The herd all squeezed their eyes shut and prepared to feel the icy cloak of the Neverveil envelope them.
“Now … die.”
“Not in this life grumpy.”
The voice was meek, feminine. But resounded as if aired from a war horn.
Saedel looked askance and saw in the far corner of their arena a small, unassuming figure smattered in black standing at easy attention. Mottled blue and orange shone through the encrusting filth.
Between her hands was the …
NO! Impossible!
The Necromancer’s hand flew to his belt. But in that terrible moment he learned the truth to late. He had been outplayed.
The False God threw back his head and howled. In a blind fury he threw himself at her, bringing his electric spear down with speed and power akin to a natural aureoleic hammer.
She didn’t know what possessed her to do it. Maybe it was Silver borrowing a host. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Irrespective of why, Amelia touched the White Wand to her lips and in a voice that wasn’t actually a voice yet still carried her will, with words that weren’t really words yet still wore their weight in karma, she breathed into the instrument a single absolute statement.
“Stop.”
The False God stopped. Midair. Hanging as if suspended by invisible chains.
The sound, if that word was even in any way adequate to describe it produced when her breath passed through the alien mechanism, brought everything and everyone in the spire to a complete and utter halt.
The Maiden’s guns fell silent. Their shots frozen in midflight.
The rage of the battle above instantly ceased. Their temporal karma seized. Bound.
All their fear, all their pain, all their rage silenced in an instant. Every shouted order, triumphant call and dying cry frozen in a single macabre tapestry of incompressible space.
The orchestra was ready, the instruments tuned, the theatre set and still. All she needed to begin the performance was the right music.
Amelia tipped the Wand’s jeweled end up in what arcanist circles since time immemorial knew as the “conductor’s salute” and spake.
“The Mother’s Lullaby.”
“The Song of Songs.”
“The Corpus Regis.”
Like all things new and yet ancient, there were names aplenty for the practice of Scholomancy. As defined by Albert Misloff, sire of Johan Misloff of popular renown: “the art of unification. The meat and bones of chaos and the progenitor of Alchemy’s defining philosophic maxim; as above, so below.”
Her notes sank, wound and carved through the eldritch barriers. Cutting, scraping, digging and breaking through to the raw sinew fibers of the cosmos.
Exoteric and esoteric existence became one. Reality was no longer the law. Her will, her truth, was all that counted here.
When the Wand called, all things paid heed. Atoms aligned, molecules assembled, matter moved and energy convalesced in accordance with her singular driving purpose.
An elemental symphony of microcosmic magnificence unfolded beneath her wieldy fingers.
The very air itself became her wind and brass sections. Flying flutes, stroming bassoons, torrential trumpets and slurning trombones all spread their aetheric wings for her operatic backdrop.
Now for the main section.
Water. Water gathered on every flat surface per her order. Thrumming on mass to mete a thunderous bass ensemble.
Boulders drummed. Fire strummed strings. Ions and crystals clashed symbols.
Light and shadows flickered and danced to the indescribable rhythm of her layered ethereal harmonies.
She was the center of all things. All of creation flowed into and out through her mind’s eye. Every step of the journey filtering more through the lenses of emotion and will. And from her emberal fountain emerged a gossamer form of magick as old as being itself.
The fundamental currents of nature, corporeal and non, material and aethereal, flowed and ebbed according to her supernal design.
This was the act of sublime storytelling at its most primal. Its most pure and volatile. For the first time in over twenty millennia, the voices of the Gods rang through the mortal plane.
In that little sector of time and space, Amelia was the whole universe. Everything she perceived was her plaything. The Divine Couple themselves spoke to and through her via Lalitha’s spectacular light. And their words regarding this profound necropolis were far from kind or merciful.
At several points the karmic deluge threatened to consume her mortal faculties as she sought to bring its incalculable might to heel.
Her crescendos brought forth wailing maelstroms, and her decrescendos produced crashing thunderclaps. Stone and metal became her servants. They forged weapons of adamantine strength out of her pure force of will and executed her vengeance upon her hapless foe.
Saedel tore through the onrush but was struck by a new force of nature. Dazzling blue bolts of liquid energy ripped gaping wounds in the sky as they tore through the False God’s mystic defenses.
These holes snapped shut with such explosive ferocity that they sundered the resonance fields of all the specters unfortunate enough to get caught in their blast radii.
Her finale brought the glittering spire heavens crashing down around and on top of the monster and his diabolical horde.
Crystal stars and karmic shades alike crashed and exploded. Their fields clashing and collapsing in violent exoteric conflagrations.
Galactonic fireworks erupted from each amaterial body, raining down Drohmsviire’s cavernous maw in a Ragnarök tumult of second death and numinous carnage.
In the same breath, from the black pit below there spewed a deluge of true Abyssal fire. Which threatened to swallow both ships and their crews.
It was then that the ghost army, advancing from high above, inexplicably found themselves released from their evil bonds.
They then did what any self-respecting undead beast would do after being released from a prospective eternity of involuntary servitude.
They turned as one force, one mind, one heart and descended upon their infernal former master. Clamoring over and even tearing straight through one another to get the first strike in on their hated taskmaster.
Through this all Amelia played on. Oblivious to the seismic cataclysm her deus opus was gestating.
And all the while the False God cried bloody curses in the vein of, “stop! I command you! Obey me or suffer! Obey!”
No one heard. Or if they did they showed no sign of abating their stake on punitive karma.
Those who could not reach Saedel directly took to tearing apart anything else they could get their hands on just to slake their bloodthirst.
Unfortunately for the Pyrates, that included most of the ship not already bludgeoned to wreckage by the Skalgags.
A popular supposition amongst those most readily knowledgeable about which underside taverns serve the best drops for the fewest fennings, that the only way to permanently destroy a ghost ship was to reacquaint her captain with the underworld.
In all the stories that didn’t either end in tragedy or where the gods didn’t directly intervene, this was typically done either by the protagonist inciting mutiny or else tricking the often brazen or quite literally braindead chief specter into stepping back over the veil himself.
Whether he was a demigod, a mythical monster or something else unheard of, it made no difference. Even Saedel proved no match for the scathing wrath of ten thousand Abyssal denizens.
Amelia only faintly felt the ship lurch beneath her as thousands upon thousands of undead hands pushed the Giant further and further downward into the eternally greedy clutches of the Abyss.
She barely registered the resolute voice of Sklagloomo barking commands to his remaining cohort above the chaos. His final order ringing in her skull as though he’d shouted it directly into her ear.
“Skalgags! Fly down! Help friends! Go!”
Only much later would she realize he’d been speaking in his native tongue.
The ten or so Skalgags resting above lit up their ears once more with renewed purpose and vigor. With the speed and grace of a falling brick pile, they swooped down to pluck up the wounded FPA survivors and carried them to the relative safety of the Maiden’s waiting deck.
If Drake thought he had the strength of the Skalgags before, he had his imaginings blown clean into high orbit.
After three Skalgags delivered Drake and Ellie to safety, that left only Amelia and Silver on the rapidly sinking Giant.
A trio of Skalgags flew down to retrieve her, but Silver waved them all off, saying, “sorry fellas. This little one’s mine.”
Amelia maintained her transcendental solo while he swept her up in his arms, the cumbersome satchel and its reliquary contents never for one single moment hindering his selective form.
On their upward journey she wound down her enchantment’s final movement. Finally trailing off on a windswept note that stung of a cheery hello and an all too familiar and sudden goodbye.
Drake watched as Silver set Amelia down. Then he nearly “jumped up to the crow’s nest” in his exhilaration.
“Helmsbeast!” he called with barely restrained triumph, “get us the saard out of here!”
The Sailing Master gave the thumbs up and heartly shouted back, “you got it Captain!”
In an orchestrated ballet of magick and technology, the Iron Maiden climbed back up through the smoldering innards of the black tower. Spreading her golden wings wide to the warm kiss of the suns.
As soon as they’d cleared the open upper rim of the Drohmsviire, Tim opened their clam burners to full and laid out a straight course for “anywhere”.
The White Wand’s song trailed off as Amelia drifted into what would be a days-long recuperative slumber.
Or a “healing trance” as their newly retrieved resident nurse told. “I’ve seen Amurzan shamans use it in regions where they don’t have ready access to medicine,” she’d explained.
“Though I can’t say I recall ever seeing a beast use it on themselves before. But I guess the gods and their toys work in mysterious ways.”
Once all was well and mostly settled, as much as things could be, out of seemingly nowhere Drake confronted the Sailing Master during the latter’s run through his routine nominal system checks.
The Goat saluted but Drake waved it off. “I just realized something beast,” the Captain said with all the swing and gravity of the gallows. “I still don’t know just what the saard your name is.”
The Goat paused. He studied his old friend’s features for a moment as if trying to decide just what to make of his question. For he knew it was in fact a ribbingly phrased question.
Jacob Rackham, who’d spent his whole life being ignored and passed over for no inherent fault of his own, answered with the first word to pop into his mind.
“Jim.”
Without stopping to think about what he’d just said he stretched out a hand as if for the first time. He’d learned long ago the value of expectancy and roleplaying. So he played his part. The part they all expected their new crewmember to play.
“Jim Hawkins.”
Drake accepted the offered hand and shook it.
“I admit, I’m still not sure how you came to be aboard, Jim, but I think I speak for all when I say we’re glad to have you along.”
He jabbed a thumb back towards the fading black needle. “Nice flying by the way.”
Jim smiled. For reasons known only to his ancestors, he felt his own personal sunrise might just be dawning.
Drake chanced one long last look back, deliberately ignoring the specter hanging just short of his peripheral view for now.
The last any living beast would see of the Sleeping Giant, its damnable crew or its captain was an imperceptibly small grain plunging into absolute darkness.