Amelia woke with a start … again.
She glanced around shakily only to wish desperately that she had kept her eyes shut. Everything she saw was either dead or dying. Rotten wood and rusted iron told the story of a vessel that had once been as true as dry land, but now it had no business being afloat. Every inch of it reeked of death.
Tendrils of a pale mire wafted in through the cavernous holes in her sides and keel as though it were suspended in a cloud, halfway between the waking world and the afterlife.
To help further drive home the ship’s cursed disposition, the lifeless cadavers of her former crew lay strewn about like discarded rags. Around each body there buzzed a veritable swarm of flies, eagerly devouring what precious little protein there was left on their sickly yellow bones.
Amelia kept her eyes squeezed shut and her hand clasped firmly over her nostrils. This had to be a bad dream. It just had to be.
But it wasn’t, and her rational sense refused to let her deny it.
She’d had many vivid nightmares in the past. Several of which took place onboard ships. All had been horrible beyond description, but this odious simulacrum broke several leagues past them like an Olympian Stallion racing a Tortoise.
As wild and vivid as her imagination could be at times she knew that even her most delirious raves couldn’t have concocted a scene so transfixingly vile.
It wasn’t the bodies on the floor that made her quake with dread and terror. After all, what had she to fear from beasts that were already long dead?
No.
What kept her eyes securely lidded was the blue spectral visages of the dead crew wandering lazily about as if they hadn’t already long ago passed on.
Had she been more lucid, she may have noted that their ranks included one of almost every mammalian species under the suns.
She might have also found this odd had she been properly salient, seeing as how the vast percentage of cloud-faring beasts were ectotherms and Avians. The former having a general predisposition for great tolerance to the elements, specifically to prolonged solar exposure and high winds, and the latter had the obviously useful ability to circumvent the need for cumbersome flight gear to traverse the spacious Abyss.
Her skull rang like the inside of a steeple bell, and her eyes were glazed as she staggered blearily to her feet.
Whether this was all in her head or not, she was of sane enough mind to know that she had to get out of here. The only problem was how. How did one escape the only cage more certain than death? More absolute than insanity?
She didn't dare light a flame amidst such ripe tinder. She felt her way carefully abaft, probing the black space ahead with her hands and toes. All the while only daring to open her eyes just enough to distinguish light from shadow.
After a timeless spell of aimlessly meandering like a drunken Serpent she found what may as well have been a golden loot chest.
Stairs.
She hobbled up the creaky, rotten boards until she came to the disintegrating access hatch. It swung open readily at her touch. Both the lock and the hinges had long since rusted away into nothing.
She poked her head out onto the deck like a frightened Fox in recent flight from a hunter reemerging cautiously from its den.
At least a dozen ghastly pale, disembodied shades of the dead drifted lazily along the length and breadth of the ship.
It hit her like a bell’s tolling hammer how much they resembled the FPA Prospects. Wandering nebulously to and fro like they knew they had someplace to be but couldn’t quite remember where or when.
To a beast they wore weapons. Swords, axes and pistols being the plurality. With the odd hook, hammer, knife or cleaver making up the greatest of the remainder.
Amelia figured it safe to assume that, whatever they had been doing during life, it most likely led to their quick and messy end.
It was then that Amelia spun her head about forty-five degrees to peer up at the raised quarter deck. There she had expected to find the ghost captain forlornly governing the helm.
What she saw instead turned her already frigid blood to ice.
She ducked back into the dark and took a second to gather her senses. Then she did a double take. And then she did a third, then went back for a fourth. Still her brain refused to accept what her eyes were telling it.
Whether this was some great, and remarkably sturdy, hallucination or not, one thing was for sure: whatever she’d been roped into was no ordinary Casper chariot.
Who or whatever it was steering this dreadful craft was no mere specter. If Amelia was forced to compress it into a single word, the first and only one that came anywhere near adequacy was Dragon. Or perhaps Chimera.
Although in either case, the term ‘near’ was meant to the same degree that the moons were nearer to Aevon than they were to the suns.
In this low visibility it appeared to be a bipedal hunk of obsidian wrapped in a suit of shimmering plate steel.
A pair of angular, raptorial legs culminating in zygodactyl sickles carried the creature’s head a good ten or twelve feet above the deck.
Its face, assuming it had one, was totally obscured by a helmet and mask. Half incandescently pale like the Erandic moon face. The other half as vacuously black as starless space. Through a hole in the moon side a single yellow eye glared unblinking into the nocturn gloom afore.
A pair of massive curled horns protruded from the back and wrapped around the side of its helmet, framing a crown of billowing blue and violet flames.
Its long tail was composed of interlocking metal blades, culminating in a viciously acute spike that snapped back and forth like a serpent’s needled tongue sampling the air.
Liquid bolts of roiling sapphire energy licked and patterned the entire nightmarish body from devilish head to fiendish talon.
After about thirty more glances to confirm she was not hallucinating, Amelia decided to go on the assumption that this was all real.
Which meant she had a real problem.
According to tales told by those that no wise beast would ever have paid any attention to, anyone who had ever set foot on a ghost ship, willingly or otherwise, had never been seen or heard from again.
But she didn't have time to dwell on this. The creature had apparently noticed her and had signaled to several of the dead crew to fetch her from her not-so-reclusive hiding place.
Amelia held fast. The way one would when facing down an advancing mortal predator.
From her limited knowledge stores on the paranormal, which was just ever so slightly less than the average psychic, while their aptitude for magick, namely sirenic enchanting, was self-evident, they could not physically harm or even touch a living body.
She was dead wrong.
The pair wrenched her from the hatchway as though she were a leaf of parchment. They hauled her up to the quarterdeck with the kind of easy strength afforded by proximally powered muscles and brought her to kneel before the towering armored monster.
At first she avoided giving it attention.
Instead, she focused on the spectral helmsbeast. Watching as he wound, spun, twisted and jerked the wheel about as though fighting a nonexistent torrential maelstrom. Though after a few moments this became unbearable as the logical disconcert between his actions and the apparent trajectory of the vessel was quickly expounded to painful existential orders by the propounding lack of environmental topography of any kind.
By contrast, the definitive horror of the horned creature seemed an enthralling lighthouse in the sprawling etheric void.
What once might have been a small tree presided over its left side. Albeit a tree grown from a nest of golden twine and encased in black shale bark. Of no such specimen was any biologist, botanist or artist on Aevon familiar.
Its right hand clasped a staff of elder make. That is, composed of Elder wood. As evidenced by the distinctive molten copper granular ripples and veins of hardened deep red sap that patterned the entire length and quarter of the weapon.
Its crown top, which stood at least as far from the deck as the earliest live adult tree, trio of uncannily lifelike constrictor serpents had been exquisitely carved from the root leg of an Amurzan Black Piewye tree. Between their clamp jaws was clutched a flawless ellipsoid opal that pulsed unnaturally regularly like a metronomic heart.
Its conjoining end was curved into a bulbous Scorpio hook not wholly dissimilar to the scissoring spines culminating its master’s own tail.
Then, in a voice hard enough to shame diamonds and cold enough to flash freeze acid, the creature addressed her, “who are you?”
She imagined if a thundercloud could speak, it would have sounded soft by comparison. She marshaled her entire resolve garrison to the front she had to answer the question calmly.
Unfortunately, what came out sounded more like an intoxicated bellows being violated by a waterwheel.
“Ah … A … Am … Amelia”.
The monster did not stir. It made a sound like boulders evacuating a mountain but otherwise remained as stoic as a sentient mountain. After a few minutes of terrible silence Amelia dared to hazard a question.
“Wha …” she started, then caught herself and began again. “Who are you?” This time managing to inject a morsel of self-assertion into the words. Albeit in an amount proportional to a pepper sprinkle at a buffet.
To her equal surprise and chagrin, the creature responded immediately as though it had known her question before she had.
Its answer was a single word delivered like a fallen comet. “Saedel.”
She knew that name from somewhere. But her brain was still far too addled by fear and magickal aftershock from her trance to remember more than simply having the memory.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Saedel waved his free hand, and the two ghostly crew-members, who each still held an impossibly steel grasp on Amelia's shoulders, backed off and straightaway set about their usual business of aimless floating.
Amelia considered whether she should try to stand, but Saedel answered that question for her as well.
“Stand up,” he commanded.
Amelia did.
Saedel aimed his scepter over the prow and said, “look there.”
She did. And she was met by a sight that scared her more than any ghost or monster of fact or fiction ever could.
Looming ominously before them was a thin bony crack of an island, thickly shrouded from below by an undulating layer of sickly smog.
As the ship swept its lonely way closer, in minutes the black craig bulged into a full-blown landscape. It flashed through Amelia’s mind that they must have been pressing against the sound barrier. And yet there was no air turbulence. Indeed, not even the clouds around them seemed perturbed by their prodigious motion.
Which meant either they weren’t moving at all or something far stranger than a mere bedtime story was afoot here.
This precipitous line of thinking was intercepted by another one brimming with the most noxious poison known to any philosopher or sorcerer. Hope.
Her father's ship, The Royal Rover, had reportedly been sunk by Eviscean Raiders about an hour off the nadirwest coast of Draconia. Taking all thirty-six hands with her straight to the bottom of the Abyss.
Both in the hold and on its deck, she estimated at least three dozen souls trapped onboard this vessel. Could this, what she was standing on, possibly be the Rover’s incorporeal aspect?
If so, then she might just have a sliver of hope. She knew it was a faint hope. A glint in the dark of a black Cat that wasn’t even there, staring directly into the storm of rational evidence decrying “HERETIC!” like some unbalanced roadside cultist.
But still she clung to it anyway like Gretel to a promising bread crumb.
As they neared the desolate plight, Amelia was wrenched from her contemplation by a stupendous realization. They were bound straight into the rocks!
She turned to the helmsbeast and cried, “turn back you idiot! We're going to crash!”
He ignored her in the absolutely aloof way only a disembodied specter can.
Forgetting sanity, in her ardent panic she appealed to Saedel. But he stayed as implacable as the oncoming stone.
Desperation took hold and in a moment of unthinking terror Amelia lunged to wrest control of the wheel. Only to be captured by the crook of Saedel’s staff and shunted easily to the deck so hard the decrepit timbers bulged and cracked.
Amelia shut her eyes and braced for the ship’s inevitable impact against the black wall looming off their bow.
Being exhausted of practical options, Amelia clenched her every muscle against the expected shock of sudden death. In accordance with their routed danger protocols all of her senses sharpened and her perceptions slowed to a Snail’s crawl.
Her eyes locked themselves behind impervious blast shields while her ears waited for the sharp snapping of timbers and her nerves bristled in expectant dread of the first brief shocks of pain she knew would herald her invariable demise.
But it didn’t come.
Her only sensations were abrupt changes in air temperature and motion. Carefully, as a skittish prey animal fully anticipating the waiting teeth of a predator, Amelia pried open one eye.
This was not, despite what her intuition first suggested, the afterlife. Although that would have been the far easier solution.
It took her about three times longer than she would have comfortably admitted to realize that they had in fact passed through the solid cliff wall. Emerging, just as she plucked up the courage to investigate, into an impenetrably black space, whose frost-bitten air marked it as a cave. One far too deep to have ever been warmed by the suns.
“Right … ghost ship. Idiot” Amelia scolded herself. But that still didn’t explain her momentary exemption from basic physics. Or Saedel’s for that matter.
Of all the beings on this ship, as far as she could tell both he and she were, and had never not been, as solid as anything could be.
The only conceivable explanation was that he must have had some exceptionally powerful magicks at his disposal to have such mastery over both the mundane and metaphysical planes.
Even after her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could hardly see anything past her own nose.
Not that there was very much of anything here to see.
As far as caves went it was woefully banal. Not that Amelia was in a place to know.
But for an evil lair too it left as much to want as to the imagination. And that, ironically, was a topic Amelia was far better versed in than geology.
Its only distinguishing feature was the lack of the distinctive fermenting odor of thriving fungal colonies. Meaning that not even organisms which most beasts readily tread upon could make a life here.
After what seemed like an eternity spent in complete blindness, Amelia could pick out a vertical silver seam tearing in the black curtain up ahead. One which grew exponentially in size and intensity over the course of a single minute into a sky-high wall of caustic radiance.
Amelia’s eyes slammed shut and even some of the ghosts shielded theirs with translucent hands. Though for the dead this was obviously the product of long spun habit from their bygone lives rather than actual necessity in the hereafter.
When her eyes had restored her normal vision she had to physically catch her dropping jaw with her hand.
The space they had entered was so vast, she couldn't even see the top of it, assuming it had one. Precariously sitting on the loosely spun web of wooden gantries attached to either side wall, were thousands of slipshod wood and brick constructions.
Most of the structures piled between five and twenty stories. Many others, most of which were carved directly into the rock faces, reached as high as a hundred floors. And they all looked as though they’d been casually spit out by the god of scrapyards and log piles.
An aurous spectacle of gold and purple light beams lancing from their every slit, window and loophole were the only indicators of intelligent effort being present in their construction.
It was like some beast had asked a child who’d been raised in a cave and was just barely competent in the Adamic language to draw for them a city based on nothing but a garbled description by a drunken hysteric.
Were it not for the sake of taxonomic accuracy, Amelia wouldn’t have considered calling these slipshod simulacrums of civilization houses.
Why any beast would consider building a home inside of a vacuous cavern in the belly of a foreboding island, accessible only to the dead and assorted varieties of magickal monsters, was a question answerable only by the inhabitants. Assuming there were any. Which, under the circumstances, seemed the sort of logical leap that would make the springiest Anuran look like an uncoordinated tadpole.
But they were the very least of this space’s speculative attractions.
Millions, nay tens of millions, of fist-sized blue crystals were ensconced into the colossal walls around the window holes, mirrored these rays of light. Sparkling like the heavens, they cast the entire subterranean pit in a haunting iridescent sheen.
Whether these were natural or artificial was impossible to tell.
Not that it really mattered. For the moment she was just happy to be able to see anything outside of the depths of her own skull. A luxury that would presently become soured.
There was no physical movement or sense that alerted her to the presence at her back. Not a particle of air or drift of scent. But a familiar tickle in the base of her skull spun her about faster than her neocortices could process.
When her reason had caught up as far as the ‘why’ of the matter she fully expected to find Saedel or some other unsightly monstrosity looming over her.
But when the cognitive bridge was fully reformed, she saw that not only was she wrong, but for once may have been in a positive way.
Behind her stood not a monster in the strictest sense. But the recognizable, albeit incorporeal relic, form of a beast who looked down on her solely because he stood on an invisible platform a few finger widths over the deck.
He was an Anuran. Or rather had been at one time. Specifically another Dart Frog of the poisonous variety like herself.
Although his livings colors and patterns had been lost in the etheric transfer, his translucent veil of flesh shimmered the soft sky-silver blue of packed ice.
Though he was taller than Amelia by a head, she took comfort in the fact that he was at least far less imposing and monstrous than Saedel.
He wore a dark brown coat with a bloodied white shirt underneath. His trousers were a dark muddy brown to match his boot, of which there was only one. His left leg looked to have been amputated at the hip and replaced by a staunch wooden dowel. He was leaning on a wooden cane, whose head was carved to look like a feathered Corian. In his off-hand he brandished an old Tempest-Series Bombash pepperbox revolver.
“Strange,” Amelia thought, eyeing his empty sword belt. “This pirate doesn't carry a sword.”
A new pattern of thoughts that included questions like ‘why is that so strange?’ and ‘how do I know he’s a pirate?’ was already being cartographed by Amelia’s mental substrates when the ghost’s hazy pistol bore appeared at the tip of her nose, slamming her forcibly back into the present.
With a twitch of his head the pirate, which he was in fact, attached to it indicated the hatchway she'd emerged from and said in a hoarse, gravitational whisper that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a gravel pale, “Captain’s orders. Gotta follow the Captain’s orders.”
Amelia was about to ask what he expected to do with an ethereal gun but thought better of it. This ship and its crew had both proved solid enough. Good sense dictated she assume that their weapons were solid, too. Silently consigning herself to an unforeseeable fate, she obediently returned to the hold with the ghost pressing the incorporeal gun to her back.
Having completed his mechanical task, the specter wordlessly left, closing the hatch behind him, sealing it with what Amelia guessed was a magickal enchantment. She had heard tell that spirits possessed a high affinity for magick due to their ethereal state.
Alone with her own thoughts, she waited a terrible few minutes then tried the hatch. Not really expecting it to give, but for no more than to soothe her own sense of completion. At least she could go to her grave, or nearest equivalent, saying she didn’t just lay down and do nothing.
Sure enough, the panel was welded fast by some aphysical method. There might as well have never been a door there at all.
Resigned to this fate for the time, she made the coziest corner her home and there sat hugging her knees to her chest, letting the full weight of her situation wash over her.
All the adventures she was bound to have but never would. The prospective bright career and rewarding path of Pyracy she’d started on now withering on the vine. All the friends she might have made, all the enemies she might have conquered. All the things she might have learned and experienced. All of it once so exciting and vital, if terrifying, now cold and hard and bitter.
Like the pathetic prey animal she’d sworn never to be again she cradled her last vestigial happy memories as they lay before her dead and rotting.
She didn’t know or have the capacity to care about just how long she dwelled there in the dark. Too frightened to move, too miserable even to form cohesive laments.
The only thought, which wasn’t even as much a thought as a feeling, a raw, passionate chord playing her frail heart strings over and over again was just how completely and utterly she had failed. Not just herself, her personal mission, but also her family. Her father, her mother, her sisters. Those she’d sought to avenge. The one who she knew would sit up late for weeks by the fire wondering what had become of her now only child.
No one would ever know what had become of her. And all because she had been so WEAK and so STUPID! She should have stopped Bon Bon from playing that song! She should have told Avlon the moment that damned spirit had appeared! She should have … done SOMETHING!
Instead here she was. Alone, afraid, utterly helpless, vulnerable, all but given for dead. All of the plagues she’d set out to rid herself of she had brought down on herself at once and now she was being crushed beneath their tremendous weight and was powerless to do ANYTHING about it.
She wanted to be angry. She wanted to rage, to scream, to FIGHT! She wished upon all the heavenly names for the power to burn this saarding hulk to saarding oblivion!
Even if it meant her death, even if it literally consumed her body and soul, she wanted to rampage against the wicked forces which had conspired against her.
But the heavens were deaf to her prayers. And all as well, for she had no room in her for such feelings. Her heart had swollen like an overripe melon. Its grotesque mass starved, suffocated and crushed any opposition her brain could compose.
It occurred to her at one point to just throw herself through one of the ship’s gaping wounds. To surrender to the hot and swift mercy of the Abyss. But she discarded that notion on the rational premise that Saedel could simply conjure her spirit back from beyond. Then she’d be eternally bound to this pit.
Truly a fate worse than death.
‘Funny how words only seem to mean anything when they apply to you.’
Was that a memory of a quote or was she growing a poetic side now?
Ah well. What did it matter? The sentiment was true enough wherever it came from.
A fate worse than death. A phrase she’d read so many times she’d come to regard it as cliché, but now felt as real as her own skipping heart.
Closing her eyes brought only further despair. In her mind she pictured Ellie, Drake and the herd all coming to rescue her. They staged a daring attack, boarding the ship and banishing the ghosts back to the Abyss.
But it was only a lamp wick hope. The kind that smolders pitifully amidst the dark, oppressive tides of reality and gives only hot, empty smoke for comfort.
They couldn’t track a ghost ship. Even if they knew to look for one.
Nevertheless, hope was a light, however faint. And by light she could see. And if she could see, she could act. So she clung to her fantasy despite how its placebo flame burned her heart.
The fact was she was on her own. No beast outside the FPA would even know she was missing until this time next year. If ever. And no beast there, save for her godfather, had the motive to help. And while Avlon was a beast of many, many, many talents, she doubted he had a spirit tracker up one of those multifariously layered sleeves of his.
This was a Pyrate’s life all the way through. To stare into the Abyss and face whatever stared or crawled out without shame or fear.
And she WAS a Pyrate, damn it all! That’s why she was here!
First Rule of Pyracy: there’s no better friend than the one behind your eyes.
As her father had always said, “you have hands and a brain. That’s worth more than all the riches in any vault.”
Alright. Great. But how was she going to plan her way out of a ghost ship inside of a bottomless cave inside of a black island inside a cursed fog vale?
Well, she supposed, as good a first step as any would be to quit shivering in this damned corner …