The woman in the Shark Titan’s hand hung limp from his grasp around her neck, though she did not struggle to breathe. The elven soldiers stood uneasy at the sight, anxiously gripping their weapons but heeding their commander’s request for parley. Theomon, the male elf titan, forced his posture into a facsimile of casualness as he loosened the pale brown shirt collar that extended out from his golden chest plate.
“Please release her,” Theomon spoke softly but with tension in his voice.
The captain looked at the woman for a moment, her spear still half-buried in his gut, then he looked back to Theomon, “no.”
Theomon visibly tensed but held back the wavering in his voice, “how can we parley while you hold one of ours captive?”
He spoke in a tongue so old it had no name, the singular language that once dominated the lands of the Giantrock region. The captain in turn spoke in this same language, though he stumbled over vowels and spat out the words like a poisoned wine.
“You are pitiful,” the Shark Titan seemed disappointed, “I heard the titans of Fale Nalore were weak, but I at least thought you’d fight.”
“Oh, we will—” the woman spoke, and the captain tightened his grip.
“Serella, please,” Theomon pleaded, “let me handle this.”
Even as the captain’s grasp constricted her throat, the woman sneered at her ally.
“I am bored,” the captain said flatly, “what do you offer?”
“We will cease all hostilities in exchange for the same, and offer you use of our dock until tomorrow’s sunrise.”
Laughter burst from the captain’s lungs, scattering what few birds had returned to their branches after the cannon fire ceased. The wind was picking up, and Theomon’s diligently held expression had begun to crack.
“What more do you demand?” he asked, revealing a hint of anger in his voice.
The captain cocked his head to the side as he inspected the man with a bemused smile, “provisions for a week’s travel, materials to repair my ship, and three nights at your dock — and in return, we don’t take it the hard way.”
The elven soldiers exchanged murmurs and glances at the demands, while the few pirates who spoke the old language cheered from the Gaping Maw. Freshly fallen leaves were drifting through the air, dancing and twirling around the titans on the now aggressive winds. The captain had failed to notice the subtly twirling fingers of Serella.
“You may as well request a chest of gold!” Theomon scoffed.
The captain thought for a moment, “sure, throw that in too.”
The first leaves touched the captain’s face, slicing through scales and drawing fine lines of blood. The winds doubled in strength and a flurry of leaves assaulted him, cutting through his coat and drawing trickles of blood across his body. He snapped his head around to crunch the woman’s skull, but her feet met his ribs at the same time as a spear skewered his wrist. His gnashing jaws found only air as she torqued the spear and forced open his grip, dropping to the ground and deftly dancing around him in a crouch as she withdrew a sliver of metal from a sheath on her waist that rapidly expanded into another spear.
“Take the tower!” the captain barked to his crew even as the leaves still shredded his flesh.
Cannons boomed and the battle resumed. Pirates leapt and swung off the ship, diving into a disorganized mess of a battle with no clear fronts. Guns rang off as swords clashed and spells were cast, and the first deaths came in seconds. The pirates and elves alike gave a wide birth to the battling titans near the middle of the dock, where gold glowing spears now hung in the air above a roaring cyclone of leaves that all but obscured the fight within.
From a tiny porthole in the crew’s quarters of the Gaping Maw, Iris peered out at the battle. She winced at the sight of a beheading, and quickly stepped back from the porthole. The ceiling rumbled as cannons on the next deck up were wheeled back to be reloaded.
“I need my rocks,” Autumn said as she charged up to Iris, holding out a hand as if Iris could dump them all into her palm.
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“Are you going out there?” Iris almost gasped.
“Of course I am,” she seemed taken aback by the question, “that’s our crew.”
“I don’t know—” Iris hesitated, “doesn’t it seem like the elves are defending themselves?”
Autumn scoffed, “they shot at us!”
“Yeah,” Iris said with a grimace, “we’re pirates.”
The two were silent for a moment while Autumn appeared to think about it. Before she responded, Titus approached them with a quick pace and heavy boots. He was wearing his armor, so finely polished that it gleamed even in the dull glow of lanterns.
“I don’t feel right about this,” he acknowledged without prompting, despite his apparent readiness.
“C’mon, you’re on her side?” Autumn asked, “I’ve been listening to you go on about yearning for battle every day for weeks.”
“Not this kind of battle,” he said grimly, “we’re invaders.”
“We’re pirates!” Autumn said in an almost pleading manner, “this is what we signed up for!”
Her point was punctuated by the latest burst of booming cannons, briefly halting their exchange. In the pause, Iris could feel the disagreement growing, and worried that Autumn might charge off into battle before they could change her mind.
“We should ask Eli what to do,” Iris said quickly when the cannons paused.
They both looked at her, and for a moment Autumn seemed ready to argue. After a tense moment, however, she softened slightly.
“Fine, go ask him — but I want my rocks now.”
Iris turned the bottomless bag upside down in front of Autumn and shook it, dumping a pile of heavy marble chunks onto the floor, “I’ll be back soon, don’t go anywhere.”
Iris blipped straight upwards, appearing on the gun deck and main deck for only brief flashes as her blips carried her up into the sails. From there, she conjured her broom from the palm of her hand and held it tight as she trickled mana into it to propel it upwards, dragging her along with it. When she was close enough, she blipped into the crow’s nest where she found Eli and Victoria already arguing.
“We’ve come so far, we can’t just throw it away!” Eli shouted.
“We’re not throwing it away, we’re cutting our losses!”
Eli sighed and leaned against the central pillar with both hands.
“Look, I don’t like it either,” Victoria continued, “the situation sucks, we don’t have to argue about that part.”
“Catch me up,” Iris said, announcing herself to the two distracted adventurers. They both looked up at her, but only Eli seemed surprised to see her.
“Vic thinks we should leave the ship,” Eli said.
“If we defect now, maybe the elves will take us in,” Victoria insisted.
“That’s a big decision,” Iris pointed out, “downstairs, we’re still arguing about who the bad guys are.”
Eli pushed off the pillar and pointed a finger at Victoria as he spoke to Iris, “she’s been sitting on that plan for a while, ready to spring it on us if something like this happened.”
“Not just in case,” Victoria corrected, “I’ve been preparing for when this would inevitably happen. You’re acting like we didn’t literally join a crew of pirates, did you think they wouldn’t pillage?”
“We don’t know if they’re going to pillage,” Eli countered, “the soldiers attacked us, maybe they’re just defending the ship.”
Victoria responded with only a critical look. After a fierce moment of eye contact, Eli sighed.
“We need this ship,” he said quietly, “it’s our ticket off the continent.”
“No, you need it to have been the right decision,” Victoria said flatly, “going along with the plan, helping us get on this ship in the first place, you need it to have been the right call so you can protect your pride as a leader. Fine, it was the right call, but that doesn’t mean its right to see it all the way through.”
“And if we don’t? If instead we strand ourselves in a swamp with a bunch of elves that are more likely to imprison us than help? Where does that get us?”
“Look at them, Eli,” Victoria pointed out the window of the crow’s nest, her expression desperate and full of sadness, “I can see their auras, I can see their emotions. The elves are scared and desperate, they’re recoiling at the bloodshed while the pirates are reveling in it — feasting on it. That battlefield is filled half way with joy, Eli. They’re going to cut and shoot their way through those soldiers, and then cut and shoot their way through the whole damn tower, and they’ll be laughing and cheering the whole time. This is only the first time it’s happened since we joined because it’s only the first chance they’ve had. They live for this, and as long as we’re a part of this crew they’ll expect us to take part.”
Until that point, Iris hadn’t been truly sure how she felt. Dala’s warning about the tyrant shark echoed in the back of her mind, despite her best efforts to forget everything the woman had ever said to her. Joining the battle was objectively out of the question, the thought of it twisted her stomach, but there was enough plausible deniability about who exactly the aggressors were that she thought maybe she could still cling on to her hopeful ideas about the nature of the Gaping Maw. Victoria’s words about the crew tipped the scales beyond balance, however.
“This was always kind of a powder keg,” Iris admitted somberly, “I’ve been enjoying the adventure of it all, pretending this crew is like the pirate crews from the storybooks — but the real world isn’t like the books.”
Eli looked mad, but it was clear the target of the anger was his own conflicted feelings. He looked to Victoria with an intense but not unfriendly expression, “you’ve seen the captain's maps, right?”
“I pass through his chambers when its empty and catch glances, but I never linger.”
“How many more cities between us and the Shining Blue?”
Victoria looked away as she thought for a moment, “none. There’s Farwater on the coast to the north, but we won’t pass near it.”
“I can make a plan with that," he nodded, "we sit this battle out and lay low until we have a chance to talk as a party. Fair?"
Iris nodded immediately, though Victoria hesitated. Finally, after several seconds, she gave a slight nod and Iris blipped away to inform the others.