The wizard’s last incantation was spat out while the noose chewed into his neck. “The spirits above, please deny their souls. Their taint will rot the waters!” It all came out as a groan and then followed by the creaking of a rope strained by a fat man’s corpse.
Snow was falling, fluttering like a swarm of lazy moths. Gele had never been so cold, and it soured his thoughts when he felt numb to the hanged mage, only worrying for his own shivers. I have seen this before, not this man, but many like him. The Wild Road, as Sawyer called it, had nestled little villages along hidden rivers and dense forests. And in hillside grottos, things shrouded in shadows lived. Too many stories of hairy men who were raised by bears, harpies reborn, and fairies riding rats into battles over pea pods. Testimonies of manhunters and marauders made the hair on Gele’s hair and chest stand up. But magicians, witches, and all the other names for the backwoods alchemists? That's what all the horrors really were. And as the bloated man hung there, Gele turned to the woman beside him. Dark circles under baggy eyes adorned her scowl. A scar on her face was fresh and foul here in the dream. Tangled hair collected brown leaves and splotches of mud, dressing more like a shrub than a sailor. He tried to find the spirit under the stranger but only saw a witch. His voice quivered, “how far from Allecros?”
“So far away, not in steps but preparation.” Sawyer turned away from Gele, looking to Wess. The man had asked the same question. And the ghost from Galu could not be heard or seen. All he could do was follow. For the past week, he had marched alongside the Admiral. Or was it years or seconds? Was this how it felt to be in the Second Sea, with everything swirling together? Did it matter?
“How much preparation until we crack open the greatest city in the world?” Wess was a skinny man dressed in heavy clothes and a scarf that hid half his pox-scarred face. As he spoke, he played with a knife, carving the air with it. “I hear every building locks its doors to outsiders, and not even the Holy Church of Mehmaton can open them. Hell, Mehmaton is a bigger city in all but mystery. I’ve seen the gilded halls where the fat men sat and preached about the God and Goddess. More treasure in the sewers of that place than all of Allecros.”
“Gold, but no wings.” Her mangled hand tapped against the sword on her belt as she spoke. Far from the Harpy, Sawyer’s scruffy black clothes hid bronze armor underneath. Runes clung to her clothes like stains, glimmering a faint red. Stolen, she barely knew the purpose of the symbols, only aware of the strength of strange mysticism. “I want Allecros. I want their secrets. That’ll be worth more than anything we can hold, anything we can stuff in a crate.” She glanced at her companions, only a couple dozen men or so. The others are getting drunk in the town nearby, Gele knew. None of them know what's to come.
“And they’ll hunt us all the way to the edge of the world,” Duncan said. The wizard’s silk clothes were stained with red, and as he moved his arms, chimes of glass bottles clinking together rang out from under his robes. “Maynard was smart to flee back to Chorllow with the Siren’s children. Allecros built all the things we see as a luxury, and how many better things do you think they kept for themselves?”
“Only one way to find out,” Sawyer flipped through a spell-book she inherited from the wizard hanging from the tree. Gele hovered over her shoulder watching. The bone amulet around Sawyer’s neck blinked and flailed as if it was trying to break free. The eye was different from Arnold’s moldy charm. Its pupil was an ember, holding onto speckles of light with little pulses but always burning. It was not looking at him, Gele realized. Its sight was locked on his brass bangles. “This may be the key, my summoner’s charm,” Sawyer said, holding it so close it nearly jumped at her bronze armor instead.
“That thing?” Duncan asked, raising an eyebrow. Nothing disgusted him more than the strange little necklace. “You know for sure what it does now?”
“No, the books I’ve read brush over it, trying to hide that they don’t know shit. Rumors of rituals, but nothing of how it was made or how to use it. But back there, in Mir’s town, one of the dead hags had used their own eye from it. But the other left in her skull didn’t have the flakes of gold nor any magic lingering inside. How do they make it? Where did the bones that surround the eye come from? They aren’t human or animal. They’re bent like metal and weaved like thread. This isn’t a puzzle I can solve alone, I’m only a thief.”
“And I’m a reject of Allecros. Stealing the answer seems to be the most straightforward path ahead,” Duncan spat.
“Then, for now, this amulet will simply bring fear to my enemies, whoever they’ll be. A false tool can still have use when tied to our real weapons. We have guns, cannons, and hundreds of men, but nothing in terms of knowledge.” Sawyer’s voice soured, clutching the necklace in a squeezing grip that nearly crushed it. “That’s why we’re not going yet. Don’t you agree, Gele?”
Gele saw Arnie’s pistol pressed against his skull when the Admiral glared at him. Admiral? The Navy bestows the title of Admiral, you chose that name yourself. You never earned it.
“And where did you learn that?”
I am not you, he told himself as he clenched his teeth. “The pirates . . . they . . .”
They killed Mysk, they came to bring the Second Sea down on the earth. The charm, Arnold, this is your fault. When Sawyer heard his thoughts, dread seized her. “How close are our minds? When our souls are linked, so is all our knowledge. And still, look at how little we know.”
We cannot stop the obliteration of everything, of my home, Vall, and all the things I wish I had time to see. “Sawyer . . .”
“She’s not here. The ghost and I are forty-six years apart.”
Gele stepped back and watched the snowy forest melt and the memory erode away. Wess, Duncan, and all of her crew vanished in clouds of frosty rain. In place of the trees, pillars of stone rose from the dirt. Cracked windows and ash-drenched walls made up the towers. And atop the spires, whales and sharks lay skewered. And at his feet were the bloated remains of drowned men and women. Their houses still spat water out, dribbling down from the shattered windows and broken doors. Somewhere, a child was crying. Was he in Wilkin’s Port or somewhere else in Allecrea? Maybe this was the ruins the harpies lived in—Sawyer did say she had been there before. He looked to his right, and she was there, the Admiral. Her skin fell off in wet patches and she walked ahead without him. The bone underneath was an aquamarine hue. Her rotten body did not go far before her legs snapped and crumbled. Barnacles took her flesh from her. Even the soul of Sawyer Jean was eaten, the woman he really knew. That and the amulet around the corpse’s putrid neck. Gele took it and carried on alone.
Creeping through the streets, Gele trudged through the ankle-deep water. How many souls would join this pool, as life was ripped from them in frantic and futile breaths? The Second Sea, what would it be like to drown in its green waters? Once it was falling from the sky, but that was a long time again. Now all that loomed over him were shadows. A night so black Gele thought it was ink instead of darkness. The amulet was his only light, a faint glint, always blinking, giving no solace at all. On its chain, the eye jumped and spun, trying to get at his bracelets. Copper was the first metal humans ever used. It, alongside its daughters bronze and brass, are connected to our souls the same way blood and bones are. A shared history between us and the earth. His mother’s voice echoed in his head, and then it echoed off the tower and from the sky as if he had yelled it aloud.
And in this abyss, the earth could still hear.
The flooded streets fell away brick by brick until there was only water underneath his feet. Every step was a dive, taking him deeper. Except, he was floating now, walking on the side of the towers and upside down on crumbled monuments. Every time he looked down the city would rearrange itself by the time he looked back up. He was swimming in a neck-deep pool now, in a river that spiraled around and around. The water was more like mist, and Gele was more like water than man. It took him straight into the onyx-black sky.
“Sawyer!” Gele shouted though he had no voice. His cry boomed from every surface. It burst from the skull of whales and leviathans. Dead sharks blurted the pirate’s name with crooked smiles. And in the graveyard of beasts, the skeleton of an Anima said nothing. It was made of only bones, with a thick green slime protruding from the cracks in the layers upon layers of flat skeletal plates. She’s there, Gele knew. But the water—the dream—would not take him. Struggling, Gele tried to swim. I can’t breathe, he realized, but I am not drowning. He tried to reach the Anima, just as he had before. The amulet pulled on him, dragging him as he flailed his arms. It strangled him as it guided him to the bony fish. It was taking him to where she died, where the amulet must have been lost. No, Sawyer wore everything she had when she died, and the amulet was absent. Arnold’s necklace was different too, gray and rotten, so where did this eye go?
The question haunted Gele up until he peered into the Anima’s mouth. He had been there before. His heart raced. It was like crawling into the gun barrel pressed against his head. The glossed-over eyes—over a hundred in all—were the same gaze as the captain. He was there when she did the ritual when she became a chimera. She birthed a monster, just as much as she made herself one.
“I could have made it farther, I could have made it,” he heard the spirit say. “I don’t want to die alone.”
Inside the rows of flat crushing teeth, Sawyer lay trapped. The jaws had twisted, turning to barbed wire that ensnared her neck. But, even then, she was already doomed. Deep blue scales replaced her skin, shining like dull sapphires. Webbing grew between her fingers, her legs fused into one long tail. Two wings spread out, snapped and broken, like curtains of torn cloth. If they were not marred, they could have surely reached the sky, but not now. Here they were useless bits of skin and desecrated bone. Inside the Anima’s mouth, the wings were lodged in between the teeth, trapping her. The molars would crush her if she dared to take flight. Gele could not save her twice.
But the amulet tried, snapping its chain and flying into the Anima’s gullet like a frenzied bat, screeching as it disappeared in the throat. Gele stepped back stunned, but it was too late.
Then the Second Sea crashed down upon the earth.
First Gele saw the Siren, a creature of thin tendrils and a body of green slime. It splattered against the side of a ruined tower. Another came, torn apart by the floating rivers and streams of mist. A legion of them fell like rain, barely any surviving the plummet. Sea serpents came next, with a deluge of fish behind them. A whale flattened the Anima, and the waves of blood blew Gele away. Coughing up red, Gele looked up to see mermaids falling next, all of them screaming in a gargled tongue. “The Merrow! The Merrow!” Their tails were thrice the size of their bodies, outsizing the sharks. Their arms were long and slender, with claws instead of fingers. Their hair was made of twilight purple and sunset orange, streaming behind them as they crashed into the concrete abyss. All of them were crying, so much fear in the rattled voices. They are running, Gele realized, the Sirens, the raining fish. It was not Vall who brought the serpent down onto the trees, it was something else.
It greeted him with a song, a whine that shook the earth.
But Gele could not see it yet, for the tides of red rain were far from done. The piles of dead fish and monsters buried the city, building towers twice as tall. A single mass, Gele struggled to climb it, slipping as more fell on top of him. The red had taken him, drowning him with every step. His hair was so caked it fell over his eyes, and it was so drenched that Gele could barely shift it aside. He pulled on my hair, I may have killed him if he did not pull on my hair. His scarf was tight around his neck, and his skirt was adorned with a belt of eels. Gele had an oarfish for a cape and a crown of seahorses. To help him walk, he had a mermaid’s coral spear tipped with a squid’s beak. He imagined it would be what Nab would wear if the world really did become flooded. It will. He knew.
And to signal the arrival of the end, ten white fingers broke through the dark velvet sky, tearing it open and giving Gele a glimpse of a world he would never enter—a world so far not even the souls of all mankind together could reach it. And the song only grew louder, ripping the ground and lifting the earth to its palms. Gele watched as he floated, hearing only the rattling of the amulet as it bounced and blinked . . . wherever it was.
“What the hell was that noise?” A far-off whisper asked.
“Allecros’s doom,” a gravelly raspy grumble seemed satisfied with the nightmare. “No bother to us yet.”
Gele opened his eyes, the taste of spit streaming from his lips, and the drink fed to him came back out. “Sawyer!” He coughed and spat. “Sawyer!”
“Captain,” a tall lanky pirate pointed. Coan was slung over his shoulder writhing. What did they do to her? Why was everyone else dead?
“I know. I saw what he did,” Arnold snapped. “Just get the bitch back to the ship. We lost too much. That one is a native. Her visions will tell us far more than Sawyer’s anchor.”
The pirate gave a look as if he did not understand what the captain meant. “Aye,” he muttered, “but what about . . .”
Arnold scoffed, kicking one of the dead pirates. “They are in the Second Sea now, and that song . . . it came far too early. The Salt Wench and the summoner’s eye, they make . . . it’s Chorllow, the Siren lives in her soul, the Barbarian Queen too.” His hands tensed as he gripped the brass sword. Only three of the invaders still stood. Everyone from Vall had died or fled. What happened? Gele stared at the captain, vision spinning slowly. “Grab him!” He shouted to a tired boy with a bundle of brass rods on his back. The command seethed with ripe fury. “Drop those fucking things and pick him up!”
“But–”
Arnold’s pale wrinkled face was a fuming red. Inside his strange haunted eyes, something burned. Lurching forward, he reached out for Gele, reaching for his hair again. How much had he torn out already? Clenching his teeth, Gele readied himself to bite his fingers off. Try, and your hand will be like Niall’s and the Salt Wench’s! The moment never came. Something else had struck first. Gele did not see it. He only heard the growl from the old pirate.“Stolen Niall,” came out with the vicious snarl. A knife had been lodged into his shoulder, leaving his hand hanging limp at his side.
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Gele turned his head towards the battlefield. The short skirmish had left a legion of open graves. How long was he in the dream? What could he have done? He looked upon those he ate meals with, those he spoke to. Mysk and Mapsokas were butchered. Coan was a captive. If he blinked, he could see Emned and her family, Nab and King Peal, his mother. Scared, he kept his eyes open, too frightened to think of Galu—too frightened to think of the Second Sea and what would come. And among the dead, a single silhouette emerged, gasping for air. Niall stood on trembling legs, leaning on a musket for support. His bandages were soaked and ruined. The splint for his arm was torn away. All he had was a half-hollow glare, his last eye holding back pure agony as he stood against Arnold. Shifting his weight, he pointed the gun at the captain. Every breath was exhausted, a series of frantic yelps.
“Your eyes are shit, you seem to miss what’s in front of you.” He grimaced.
“On a living island, dying men’s souls blend in like embers in a wildfire. Especially souls as small and feeble as yours.” Arnold snarled, voice resonating like rolling thunder. He yanked the knife from his shoulder and did not flinch nor groan. With the red knife, he pointed it straight at the traitor.
“Don’t move,” Niall coughed. “Or I’ll blow your black heart straight out your back.”
“And–” The captain’s retort was cut short by another blade, this one made of bone. A tall spear ripped through the brush. The barbed point lashed out, striking the captain from behind. Nimereen rushed out, thrusting his weapon at the pirates. Their muskets were empty, and they had no time to reload. All he had to fear was steel. Arnie fought back with the knife Niall gifted him. A stone flew from behind the fisherman, striking the invader on the head. And a woodcutter came running with an ax in hand. Behind him was a weaver who scooped up a dead pirate’s sword and came charging at the invaders.
“Run!” The pirate who carried Coan broke into a sprint. And behind him scurried the young man carrying the brass rods. All that was left was Arnold. A dozen of Vall’s soldiers surrounded him, armed with spears and axes. And with only one good arm, Arnie dropped the knife and took his brass sword. And with his head hung low, he was forced to follow his men back. But all Gele saw was Coan. The wide eyes of her mask shrank smaller and smaller as they took her away.
Half of the soldiers pursued, vanishing into the night. And the rest gazed upon what had happened. There were twenty-six dead. And just as their painted bodies matched the splendor of the House’s painted walls, the dead merged together in a patchwork quilt of scarlet-drenched skin. The invaders and the defenders, there was a sickening solidarity among the dead. What remained were masks and muskets. No, as Gele was lifted to his feet by Nimereen, he clenched his teeth. This could have been prevented. It must have been. Mysk lay on his wooden box. And Gele sank to his knees. “I can never tell him about Galu, about everything.”
“They’re part of the island. Soon they’ll be in the temple, and you can tell them everything. Their souls are here.” Nimereen said through his own whimpers. The fisherman helped him back up. “The funerals, we’ll have to bury them soon, but not until the invaders are gone.”
“And when Coan is home,” Gele said. I can’t leave Vall, not when there is something I can do. His fingers clutched his scarf. And his attention turned to the sleeping spirit. He could not see her dreams, her nightmares, whatever it was. But Arnie could, with the Siren’s gift. “I am the only one who knows how their boats work, how they fight. I know where they keep their prisoners and what they will do to her.” He lied, looking at the soldiers of Vall as they began to carry their dead friends home.
“Let me come with you,” Nimereen said. “Please. My father, my people, everyone we just lost. They’re watching me now, and I cannot be the man who hid with his hands tied.” He slammed his spear down in the dirt. “If it was not for him, the man you brought back, I would have been useless. I would have been dead. He cut my bindings, he saved me. It all goes in a circle, helping and hurting people, so let me help Coan, and let me help you.”
Gele nodded. “You can row the boat and wait for me to bring her off the ship. I can do the rest.” He lied again. I cannot let him see the end of a gun, it has to be me. His eyes glanced at the gunshot wounds that gutted the corpses of people he called friends. Stop it, he told himself. All around his thoughts swirled. He felt like he was going to vomit. The smell was revolting, a mix of gunpowder and blood. Gele would see them again through a wall of amber and a thin coat of ice, but that gave him no comfort. If he knew what the captain could see, what he could do, could he have stopped this? Coan’s voice rang in his head, louder than his own thoughts. All she spoke about was Vall’s end, the extinction of a people. How many would need to survive for a people to persist? And what if it was too late?
Kneeling, Gele pried a broadsword from a dead pirate’s fingers. A dance is not enough. I could be caught in the Beckoning for a hundred years and it would not be enough. Gele of Melaopel did nothing. I am no warrior, and look at what that has wrought. He looted the pirate’s belt and pulled off his coat. It was stained a brown-red, but it would keep him warm if the seabreeze grew too wild. Cleaning the sword, he slid it into the belt alongside a dagger he found.
“No,” Niall ground his teeth together as he watched. “Those were–”
He stopped when he met Gele’s eyes.
“He was a good man,” Niall shook his head. “We once talked about . . . his brothers, and who we each left behind. Doesn’t matter much. We’re on opposite sides. Or, we were.”
“I’m sorry,” Gele muttered. “It’s hard to . . .”
“You’re going after her, aren’t you? That woman they took.” Niall’s tone already told him it was futile. “Still a lot more men on the ship. He took thirteen of us here, three going back . . . should be thirty-one of them left. You can’t take all of them alone.” His voice strained as he spoke. Every word came out with a wince. “Wait, by the water. He has yet to place down the rods, he needs to find where the treasure is, so he can prepare the rods and wire. Some will stay to watch the ship, but that’s your best chance of bringing her back.” Niall dropped the musket and leaned against a tree. His legs shook, and he could not stand anymore. “The gun was empty, I wasn’t going to shoot him. I don’t know if I would. But I owe the people who saved me, you included. I owed the captain too, but he took an eye and some fingers for that debt. No . . . it’s not about debts. I want to help you. I will help you save this island. Nothing to lose, nothing to regret, the folly of the traitor, all I have is the opportunity to do something right. Captain be damned, I’m my own man.”
“Thank you,” Gele said. Handing Niall a stick, he led him to an open patch of soil. “Tell me everything about the ship. Draw it for me.”
It was hard to follow that demand with only one good hand, but the pirate did his best. “They’ll keep her in the brig, it's in the cargo hold. But that’s under where the crew sleeps.” As he spoke, Niall took deep breaths, the pain visibly flooding back to his face. But with mighty grit, he powered through. “So you’ll have to sneak past everyone to get in there, no other way. And once you reach her, no doubt he’ll have Kipper watch over her. He’s the first mate and quick to argue with the captain. Better to keep him away from the crew, especially with a dozen of us . . . a dozen of them are dead.”
“What about the captain?”
“His quarters are on the deck of the ship, but he has strange things in there. Magics I have nightmares about. Not even Kipper goes in there,” he said haggardly. Even behind the rags and bandages, his body recoiled at the thought.
“Okay,” Gele helped the man to his feet. “Thank you. But we need to get you to a healer.”
“One of them stopped me when I was trying to walk out with the others when they heard the gunshots. I yelled at her. Can you help me say I’m sorry to her when this is all done?”
“Only if you rest.” Gele looked upon the traitor’s bandages and how soiled by dirt and blood they were. “You need to be careful.”
Niall nodded and went with the others as the members of the House brought the bodies back. They even took the pirates to burn them atop a pyre. One of the gatekeepers, Zassamuur, cried when she heard what happened. And the old woman, Mashur, bid Gele and Nimereen good luck as they made their plans.
“We’ll be leaving the temple alone though. And the storms, they’ll only get worse,” Nimereen said when everyone had returned to the House.
“The soldiers of Vall, those who are left, are already preparing,” Gele said, though his hope had waned to nothing more than a sliver. “We can strike them from the woods this time. Use the muskets to shoot the captain, kill him, and take them all by surprise.” I won’t kill, he told himself, but that was a lie too. What was Arnold’s life worth compared to the Second Sea falling and ending everything? And what was his life worth?
“I can’t go if I know that I will be leaving my people vulnerable,” Nimereen held his tall spear close. “Can you get a boat ready?”
“I have one stashed in the bog. Will that do?” Gele asked.
“If it can cross the deep ocean, it may be better than what I have,” the fisherman said as he ran home, just before Gele could warn him that his canoe may not be fit for the storm they just survived.
And then, after everything, he was left alone again. He rubbed his forehead where the pistol had been. To Gele, it lingered there, resting against his skull. It hovered over him like the Second Sea, and when he blinked he saw the nightmare he had just escaped from—both the one delivered by the captain and by his drink. And Sawyer, she had not been freed just yet. She lay there, rolling and murmuring in a daze. With just the two of them left on the wet murky battlefield, Gele scooped her into his arms. She was a weightless thing, like the lanterns Galu would send up to the Second Sea. Her face was dotted with old scars as the light glistening off her seawater skin faded to a dull glimmer. There was an ugliness to all the cuts and marks but an allure to them as well. A pang of guilt hit Gele when he thought of her in such a way. His fingers felt the wings through her coat as he carried her. Did that matter anymore? It did, he assured himself, but a gun against his head and a chimera at his side, what haunted him more?
Everything weighed him down, stacking into a burden Gele found hard to withstand. Galu was a simple life. The Beckoning was a simple trial, do not stop. Here, it felt like a crumbling house falling atop of him, over and over, with unmatched nausea keeping him down. He needed her, Gele admitted. The world under the Second Sea was too perilous without a guide. A creeping question swirled in his head. Could he follow her, a mass murderer, to Allecros? If he were born forty-six years ago, would he have remained as a member of her crew until the end and gone peacefully to Hell? Would he now?
“Gele . . .” A groggy voice whispered. The spirit looked at him with half-opened eyes. “Gele!” Realizing what he was doing, Sawyer pushed herself away, floating through the air until she landed on her feet. “What are you . . .” She looked around. “It’s over? What happened?”
“The pirates and Vall’s soldiers nearly wiped each other out, only a few remained on each side. Arnold survived, and he took Coan with them. He force-fed me a drink, I don’t know what. I saw a vision, and you were asleep up until now. We would be dead if not for Niall, Nimereen, and the House. Please, can you help me once again? I’m going to bring Coan back.”
“I . . .” Sawyer leaned against a tree and sat down. Gele could see her face and she dug through his memories. Her eyes were wide and her hands trembled just slightly. “I see,” she finally said.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “If I would have drank anymore, I don’t know what may have happened. With that potion, I saw a flooded city, monsters falling from the Second Sea, and then something else. Something massive, singing a song as it brought the earth to ruin. No, that song was real. The pirates heard it too. Did you . . . did you hear it?”
“No,” her voice shivered as much as she did. “I was in the Anima again. I did not know until today that I was in its jaws for forty-six years. I thought it was longer, I knew it had to be longer. I . . . it nearly happened again.”
“What?” Gele was afraid to pry deeper, just as scared as her.
“I nearly lost myself, as I did time and time again in the Anima’s mouth. Sometimes, my mind cracked open. All the fear and loneliness, the tides of oblivion just barely reaching me made me go insane. I would wallow in my own madness for years at a time and slowly rebuild myself, over and over. And I nearly lost my mind again!” Her fists flew through a tree, and she kept swinging and shouting. “Forty-six years? That’s barely a lifetime! What if it was a hundred, a thousand? What would have happened to me then? When would I stop being Sawyer Jean and just a monster in a woman’s soul? I can feel it, how fragile I really am. Our souls are not one! I am a parasite living off you to survive, Gele! And I used to think Hell was where everything went to vanish. No, I guess I am too far from that forgiveness.
“I saw that too, the banquet of all the souls I took from the Second Sea. My crew during our final voyage to Allecros and all the people I used to build my broken wings. The gills, the scales, the feathers, each made of human souls and the ground-up bones of Deneve and Sonia. I sat with them for a while, while you saw the end of the world. I remember I talked about you to the Barbarian Queen, I wished that you were with me. How many people did the Salt Wench kill, and how many did she forget? You have my memories, can you tell me? Because I have no clue, I am lost in how long I’ve stayed alive.” She punched the tree again. Misty tears streamed from her face like hot steam. Her anger turned to the skies, to the Second Sea. “How many would have lived if I was a miscarriage, killed in an alleyway as a girl, hung by the Navy? A thousand? More than that? I killed the Siren, and I raised a chimera from its corpse. I plundered and stole, you know I did! I made Arnold as much as I made an army of other victims. And Vall, whatever the hell you are, I know you hear me too! I killed Mysk and all the others! The blood you’re drinking, I paid that price for you!” Falling onto her knees, she slammed the ground. “You hate me? Banish me to hell. Do it. The spirits, whatever the hell you are, you know me more than I know myself. Forty-six years? What the fuck was I doing in there for so long? Could you have just let me die? Torture me then if you like. At least I don’t have to worry about fucking it all up again. Why did he come here? Why did Arnie come here? Is it fate or just shit luck? Why did the Anima catch my soul in his teeth? Was there a reason for any of this?”
Look how alone we are, Gele thought as he embraced his friend. “I’ve seen the souls pouring out of people's mouths as you drank from them. It could have been me in that copper circle as much as anyone else.” Gele knelt down in front of her. “Whether this was meant to happen, whether there is a reason for it, I don’t care. Coan was taken, and her brother was murdered. People who had trusted me were slaughtered. I will not run away from that, not like I did from Galu. I will rescue Coan, and I will help save Vall. So come with me, Sawyer. Whatever reason for your survival, if there is one, keep it at the back of your thoughts. I need your help. That comes first. You know Arnie, pirates, and the magic. You are all I have when it comes to knowledge of the enemies across the ocean. You want answers? You want solace? We have to find it. We have to keep going, venture out as far as we can go. We’ll find your reasons when we make it to the Second Sea ourselves.” Gele pulled the dagger from his belt. “Whatever is out there, it will make us tools. It will erase us, use us, change us, and drag us across Hell to the edge of annihilation and back. It will if we do not go and learn how to stop it. I am no warrior, but you are. All I have is my dance and everything I have seen thus far. I will not stop, Sawyer, so come with me until the end. The spirits, fate, and whatever lies beyond mankind’s reach in the Second Sea make us small and weak. But I will not run away again.” He took the knife and cut at his hair, letting the long locks fall to his feet. Gele chopped at it until only a tattered mess remained, short and uneven. No one will grab me, force a drink down my throat, and make her suffer again. He looked at himself from her eyes.
Sawyer sat stunned, “I liked it more before,” she smiled. “Now you look like I used to when I was a little girl, cutting her own hair with a pocket knife.”
“It’ll grow back,” he said. Then I can dance in peace, maybe even fall back into the Beckoning for a time. But when he saw himself, it was hard to recognize him. If he went back, would his mother say something? Would Emned joke? Would Nab see him as a warrior who braved trials far more frightening than what he fled from? Would it matter?
“Don’t worry about that. You said it yourself, Coan is in danger.” Sawyer stood up, the wings under her coat twitching. “I’ll go. I’ll try to set things right if I even can. Thank you, Gele. It seems Sawyer Jean is not done yet. Let’s take their ship when this is done, and find the truth about our fates.”
With only a shared nod and a hug, the two set off towards the bog, where the boat was waiting. The spirit marched ahead, wind wrapping around her. And while clutching his scarf, Gele’s fingers tapped against the sword on his belt.