Iris stood in a burning village. A thick smog of dark smoke blanketed the sky, backlit by the pale blue glow of the world's smaller moon. One hand grasped the hilt of a broken sword, while the other clenched a bloodied scrap of cloth. A mage in black robes trimmed with gold stood before her, his face shrouded by an impossible shadow pierced only by the silver glow of his eyes.
"We will come for you," he said in a sickly, raspy voice.
Iris tried to lift her sword, but even with a broken blade it was too heavy to raise. The mage's form fluttered and warped, and his place was taken by an Agent of Morose -- the pale moonlight gleaming off his mask as if the clouds of smoke weren't there.
"We will come for all that you know," the agent said in the same rough voice.
Tears streamed down her cheeks -- she didn't know why. The figure shifted again, now appearing as a bloodied, snarling mermaid hidden within the same black robes.
"You can never run far enough."
Iris dropped her sword and the bloodied cloth. A bloodcurdling scream erupted from her throat, cut short by her sudden disappearance and abruptly resuming as she appeared before the once again fluttering and warping figure. Her hand shot out and a found a neck amongst the reconfiguring matter, and her fingers clenched tight with the intent to puncture as her scream still pierced through the night. The convulsing, incomprehensible figure laughed with the booming volume of a god.
She was upright before she awoke. Her whole body heaved with every breath, and a confused Littletooth looked up at her from his disturbed slumber. She was half tangled in her bedroll, which was strewn out across the floor of the cargo hold in a small clearing between several large crates. The area was littered with lanterns and glow stones, bathing her in bright, warm light. The flame of the lantern nearest to her was extinguished, and the faintest shadow of the crate she slept up against was cast across her bedroll.
Victoria slept soundly atop a crate across the clearing. She was there so Iris wouldn't be alone, and though Iris panned a wary gaze across the darkness beyond the edges of the lights, the fact that Victoria still slumbered assured her there was no dangerous presence in that darkness.
After sitting for several moments to calm herself, she shuffled a few lights around to eliminate the shadow, and moved her bedroll into the center of the clearing for good measure. Victoria stirred at the movement, and sat up to observe.
"You okay?" she asked softly.
"Yeah," Iris said dismissively, "another bad dream."
"Do you need anything?"
"I'm fine," Iris insisted, "I just need to clear my mind before I try to sleep again. I'll try to be quiet."
"Do whatever you need," Victoria said before rolling over into her blankets.
Iris picked up a lantern in either hand and blipped atop a nearby crate. She placed the lanterns around to expand the border of the light around her, and then drew her silver and marble great sword the bottomless bag. Paying particular attention to her breath and footwork, she moved slowly through the most basic of sword forms Titus had taught her. Each step was deliberately placed within the confined space of the crate, and every motion of her arms was drawn out and meticulous. The absurd weight of the sword fought against her and her muscles soon began to ache, but she welcomed the pain.
______
The Shark Titan sat alone at the war table in his cabin. The only light in the room was the lantern that lit the maps and scrolls before him. Meredith slept soundly in the bed across the room, and her faint breath joined the creaking of the ship to create a soothing ambiance that did little to calm his nerves.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
The map stretched out before him depicted the eastern coast of the continent and the great expanse of the Shining Blue. Though inland maps were still scarce and largely imprecise, those who called the Shining Blue home had long ago precisely mapped the coast, from the icelands in the north to the tropical island chains in the south. Of particular interest to him at the moment were the several blue spirals in the ocean he had personally drawn throughout the years, each one marking an appearance of Petresca the Spiral.
She was, ostensibly, his commander. As goddess of the Shining Blue, all ships within its waters ultimately bore fealty to her will, though in his youth the captain had taken a step further. He had joined the Spiral Fleet, and swore fealty to the goddess not by virtue of sailing her waters, but by blood and oath. It was this loyalty that ultimately gained him his status as a captain, and facilitated the rapid explosion of power that propelled to him into becoming one of the strongest titans in her domain. Even the Gaping Maw, for all its beauty, would not have come to be without her influence.
It was this pact with the Spiral that he now sought to break. Without something to replace her power within him, his soul would fracture with his oath, but as described in the scrolls before him, the power he needed was within his reach. Each one told the same cryptic story in varying manners and of inconsistent trustworthiness. They described the criteria of feats necessary to ascend beyond the barrier of mortality, to access the gated powers which enabled the gods.
He had read them each a thousand times -- and had Meredith read them aloud to him a hundred times more. Though the criteria for the feats were the same for all, the manifestation of those feats was unique to each individual. After decades of study, and the advice of every wise and experienced elder across the Shining Blue and all its coasts, he had determined what his quest must be. He would return each remaining great beast -- whether they had been stolen, had fled their hunters, or had simply left in search of a different home -- to the Shining Blue. This act would return the Shining Blue to its once great glory as a sea of monsters, before the great cleansing of millennia past by the Petresca herself, and bring him to the gates of power he so desperately sought.
He released a heavy sigh and placed his head in his hands. Certainty in one's quest was impossible, that was what every elder and scholar had told him in their own words. One could not truly know if the quest they undertook would satisfy the criteria for ascension until it was complete -- yet he still spent countless nights studying the same scripts in search of that certainty.
He returned his attention to the matters of which he did have hope to control -- where and when he would release the hydra into the Shining Blue. Though Petresca had expressed her blessing upon his pursuit of ascension, and even the undoing of her own work, he was no fool. The legends of her reign had scraped from history, but remnants still remained in the corners of the worlds -- and each told a similar story of her disciples who pursued godhood for themselves. She spoke of valuing free will and self-determination, of encouraging her followers to forge their own path even if it must conflict with her interests – yet all who had approached the gates of power within the Shining Blue had been cut down in the final hour by Petresca herself. The selfish god was unwilling to let any threat to her sovereignty form. He had no doubt she would attempt the same to him, and had no intention of letting her succeed.
He traced a line with his finger from a point along the southern coast, inland across the swamps of southeastern Giantrock, to a point just outside the border of the map. That would be the location of Fale Nalore, the last city at which the Gaping Maw would dock before returning to the Shining Blue. It was there that his ship would first touch the edge of Petresca's domain, where inland rivers mixed with the furthest inlets of ocean. From the moment that happened, the clock would begin to tick.
He got to work plotting, revising, and plotting again the course he would take through the swamps between Fale Nalore and the eastern coast. This would be where she sought to strike, but the spiral could only form in certain areas of the open sea -- even gods, in all their power, were still in some way beholden to the winds and the waves. In most scenarios, the Gaping Maw would reach open water well before a spiral could intercept, though there was one particular spiral marking on the map which worried him.
Only a few hundred miles from the southeastern coast, in a gulf rimmed along its western and southern edges by chains of islands said to be formed long ago by the goddess herself, was the only spiral on his map not drawn by himself. An ancient spiritualist, self-sequestered high in the mountains of one of those islands, had drawn the mark with the grimace of a long haunted man.
"Few survived to tell of it," he had said in a solemn, croaking voice, "and now only I survive to remember it. It was this spiral that tore across the lands and brought an empire to its knees. With this divine act of creation and destruction, Petresca told the world her reach extended far beyond the waves."