The rowboat scraped against the shoreline as the rain pelted them from above. A dead, mammoth-sized octopus lay soaking in the shallows, its body crushed from the impact. Sawyer stepped over it as she was the first to make landfall. We’ll have a feast with a sampling of every species to ever grace the water by the night’s end, she thought. During their return to Vall, hordes of sea creatures swam in great rings around the Sea of Shrouds, crowding the reefs. Starfish crawled along the bottom whilst manta rays ruled the surface. Winged fish leaped onto the ship, and Sawyer swore she heard something yell a warning in the mermaid's tongue.
“We must go to the House, straight on from here. I know a route that takes us there quickly, but be on guard.” Nimereen lead them from the beach. The journey from the ship had been fraught, but it rested the group enough for them all to break into a unified sprint once their feet pressed down on the sand. Gele translated the message to Kipper, who marveled at the purple trees and the fish raining down from above. And as a spectator, Sawyer followed at the tail end.
Coiling the wind around her fingers, she surveyed the jungle. Under no circumstances should Arnold see Sawyer first. The gales would be her eyes. I know your tricks now, wizard. To the Salt Wench, one more mage slain was merely a tally mark at the end of a lengthy list. When the score was settled and the dawn had come, what would separate him from the others?
The return to the House was swift as Nimereen raced through the woods with the others not so far behind. Gele stumbled a few times, but Coan was there to help him before Sawyer could. Sawyer blinked and saw herself fifty years ago, only she was no longer leading, blazing a trail into danger. For a moment, she looked back and begged for Duncan, Wess, Maynard, and a hundred other faces. She could see the bronze-nosed Maynard lumbering up front, cautious to take the lead, to be a shield more than a man. Duncan was always quiet during marches, thinking about a host of different things. At night, he would share a few of his thoughts with her, and then they would crawl under the covers. But that all stopped once she grew wings. The wizard had no taste for both sex and magic in the same breath. He looked at her as a strange wicked thing thereafter. Sawyer wondered why he was so quiet then. What did he think of after his lover became a chimera? And why did he still follow her to Allecros?
Why did any of them follow her to Allecros? Four ships full of men who could have lived better lives. They loved her, she knew. Duncan once suggested they live out their days on Chorllow, whaling instead of plundering. He claimed there was more money and less danger than magic and swords. The wizard was right. Maynard saw her as a sister ever since she joined under Pilke’s flag. When I die, if I’m granted a place in the Second Sea, I’ll spend the rest of eternity apologizing to him. She was the only one she told of her fears, he got to see the girl who joined the Navy, not the pirate who was formed after. And she gave up her brother for a treasure she could never have. Maynard did the valiant thing when I could not. The cabin boy, who knew a mop and bucket better than a sword, his name was Arnold. The boy saw far worse than the Siren whilst enlisted in her crew. And look what has become of him now. Maynard took him away, he was a good man, he would not have let Arnold become like this. He would not have let him grow up to be like her.
And then Wess. If a blacksmith melted down all the good men in Allecrea, the product would have only half the loyalty Wess did. He was at Sawyer’s side when she first became a captain to when the Harpy sank. Like Duncan, he was always thinking, but there was admiration in his eyes. The first mate never faltered and never disappointed. And when the frigate’s deck crumbled, the last thing he asked was “did I do a good job?”
If he was not eaten by the Anima before her, she would have traded her life for his. “A better job than me,” she muttered now. Would any of them have been better suited for this moment half a century later? Sawyer tapped on the empty scabbard on her belt and watched Gele push through the thicket. His eyes were stagnant pools, where only in sparse moments the awe and contempt bubble together. I trust him, and he trusts me. We share so much, and we know all the things that are never said. But I made him a chimera, I made him a pirate, I made him fight. She grimaced, glowering at the ground. I took his scarf and gave him scales instead. I was the one who let Arnond onto my ship as a cabin boy. Even if he never accused her, the guilt clung to her like a cape. And for Gele, I will do better.
A great lizard with flippers instead of legs lay flattened on the ashfield, its neck bent and snapped, and the head flung across the barren. Kipper halted when he saw it. And Coan ran even faster. The jungle peeled back and the rain grew heavy as they trudged through the deep gray mud. The House loomed over the land, drenched in the shadow of rainclouds, the largest tombstone for humanity’s greatest grave. The shell was painted with the guts of fallen creatures. And the small river was host to a little pile of dead fish. One bloated fish had eggs spilling from its body, trickling down into the water. And splattered against the walls of the house, the body of a Siren lay broken and dead.
Indistinguishable amongst the field of chum, this lone creature only received Sawyer’s glance. Without suckling on the souls of mankind, the Siren was only a ribbony jellyfish. But even then, she remembered the thing under Chorllow all too well. That fat egg growing something new inside of it latched itself to all of Sawyer’s wayward questions. A pang of sisterly connection enveloped her every time. The slain Siren was part of her rituals, now part of her. And back then, the visitor from the Second Sea was trying to turn itself into a chimera too. From Gele’s vision, Sawyer stepped into that ethereal graveyard. After the two of them rose from the Sea of Shrouds, the memory became blurry and now built from scattered thoughts. But the image of the Siren’s sigil on the tombstones proved what she had always assumed. Sonia and now the Siren, both chimeras growing human legs. The thing above them now, would it try for the same prize? Arnold knew.
“Go,” Gele said, knowing her plan.
“Not yet. I’m not keen on leav–”
“We don’t have a choice, Sawyer.” His thoughts slashed through Sawyer’s words. “Find Arnold now, then I’ll catch up as part of Vall’s army, then we kill him together.” No doubt dwelled in his declaration. “I’m going straight for him, but you have to light the way.”
“Of course, Gele. But are you–”
“I’ll be fine,” he glanced at her. The interruption only brought more concern. The strain of the statement rang out with the fragility of a thousand interlaid lies. But Gele was right, they had no choice.
“I trust you,” Sawyer admitted, letting her partner go. She knew she did not have to say it, shared knowledge and all, but Gele needed to hear it. And furthermore, Sawyer needed the sentiment echoed back to her.
What she wanted never came. The spirit watched Gele go up until the two gatekeepers shut the doors to the House. He only gave the Salt Wench a silent nod with a forced smile. And then Sawyer was left alone, trying to ignore how much it stung. Her last friend seemed to be the sea monster’s corpse, and it had nothing to say. Is this what it was like, to meet an old friend’s younger sibling? A short, snorting laugh slipped out of her. Only on the brink, resting on the kindlings of despair, would something so stupid cross her mind. She remembered what one of her men said right before he took the plunge into the sea. “Who will feed the cat now?” That damn cat would be waiting for her in Hell, alongside everything else the Anima swallowed.
“All because of me,” Sawyer whispered as she knelt down to inspect the dead Siren. Thin tentacles lay strewn about like loose threads. Its body was more like an empty pillowcase, soaked in slime. The creature was certainly dead. At least, Sawyer thought.
Sprouting from the desecrated earth like a blooming flower, a hand reached up for Sawyer, glistening a deep vibrant orange. It phased right through the Siren as if the monster was never there. Sawyer stepped back, “not again,” she scoffed. If the sun had risen from the soil, a sheen of bright orange swept across the ashfield. Arms reached for the Second Sea, and fingers waved to her. All the souls of Vall. The breeze brushed against Sawyer’s cheek. It was theirs again. No choice in the matter at all. I’m at the mercy of my own sins. “Go on, show me the end of the world if it will help,” she knelt down and grasped one of the hands, “I’m no stranger to this flavor of dread. This is just another day at sea, where you can’t see the harbor due to all the fog. As Gele said, I need to light the way.”
And with the island’s total strength, as the roots of the jungle intertwined into muscle, Sawyer was dragged below the ground into the tomb. And then the sensation of a legion of souls melded into one latched onto Sawyer, absorbing her into the single mass of many. Comfort came before the chaos, waxing and waning like tides. A feeling akin to the horrors of the Anima came over her. For forty-six years isolation tugged on her sanity, forcing her to rebuild herself from feral degradation again and again. Confinement nearly warped her mind into an animal, a truly fitting fate for a chimera. But she endured, piecing together memories and holding onto ambitions. The Salt Wench lived, crimes and all.
The spirits of Vall, however, offered a sensation similar but leagues apart in potency. Pulled from that abyss, the togetherness soothed Sawyer’s soul to the next extreme. Everything around her embraced her, evaporating the loneliness and inviting her to melt into an imaginary paste where perceptions interlinked and ascended. And from there existed a realness, a wall crumbling inside her that would have never opened otherwise.
Her soul unraveled like twine, tangled in new ways and layered inside a mesh of a planet of strings. And then every strand was ripped from its origin, frayed bit by bit until it was nothing. And with a crackle, Sawyer was born again as raindrops, wet soil, and lightning. Hiss! A cat snarled and burned ground sizzled. A brass rod went through Sawyer’s back. Holding hands with so many others, new arms kept grabbing to pull her deeper into the unity. I don’t have arms anymore, only wings. Another brass rod pierced her. Yet, it felt no different to worms or groundwater. Sawyer could feel it coursing through her, roots bending into her. An owl snatched a bat from the air. A maelstrom loomed over the island. A few more things crashed down from the Second Sea. Sand turned to water, waves ruptured the beaches and the cliffs. Ant colonies were purged and mice were dragged away to drown. Beetles were flattened by scampering boars. An alligator waited to die. A brass rod prodded a tree root. Sawyer broke apart again. No! No! No! I will not lose my mind again. She tried to resist, but the pain burned like hellfire. A leviathan smacked into the swamp, snapping mangrove trunks. For a moment Sawyer could see annihilation in the face as she was pulled from the cacophony and the chaos. The souls flung her free of what they saw. A tidal wave kissed the cliffside, freezing into a wall of ice before it scattered into a flurry of seafoam. Sawyer rose from the earth as a ravine sprouted below her feet. Her thoughts flickered, shattered one moment and restored the next.
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The dead tree loomed over her. The fungi that once latched to it fell to the ground frosted or withered. Copper wire strangled the bark, and brass rods were hammered into the temple’s roots. A circle of the earth’s oldest metal surrounded the tree, with one man at the center.
“Arnold!” Sawyer called out, but her voice was mute against the roaring thunder and the captain’s manic screams. “It all leads to this!” Arnold declared to himself, braving the path ahead. Every color known to man and a thousand more burst from the temple’s rotten bark. “Mother, the Siren, you will be avenged! I am the survivor, the one who never stops, the one who trudged through the darkness! The Merrow will be the bane of the thing under the ironworks! It will never wake up!” Runes were inscribed onto the tree. The language of the mermaids, the same language the Siren tried to utilize, the same language found in the depths of Vall's catacombs, the same language inscribed inside nearly every tome Sawyer pried from the hands of dead wizards, and finally, the same as what Gele used to save himself. Arnold had given the world above one command: “Annihilate Allecros.”
Ripping Coan’s Sword from his belt, Arnold thrust the blade deep into the bark. The amber handle—with the creature wailing inside—sank into the tree and began to become devoured by the flurry of color. The amulet around his neck, the eye beset by mold, leaped from Arnold, offering itself to the ritual. The silver chain bound to the amber, and the eye glared directly at Sawyer.
“Finish this, for I am a man too weak to reach the end,” Arnold begged, clamoring for breath. His face was flushed with frostbite. And the color of his eyes shared the same luster as the dead tree. His hands trembled as they reached for a bronze hammer. With a resounding BOOM! Arnold struck the brass rods one by one.
“Rat,” Sawyer snarled as she stood helpless before the ritual. The wings on her back twitched and folded. Under her coat, they tried to fly—as if they knew what was being performed. “Shit,” she cursed again. Even as she stood a few feet away from the madness, she could do nothing. The wind belonged to the spirits now, repossessed, whirling around in the cyclone above and tearing at the jungle. Looking around, she realized that all the pirates were gone. Either deserting or watching the House. Yet, a figure remained shrouded in the curtains of leaves and fronds, one Sawyer had seen before.
A hill of gravel and pebbles loomed over her. Galu. On the slope, Sawyer sat atop blood-stained stones, glaring at the mermaid standing before her. Her skin was built of purple scales, all except her legs. “Sonia,” Sawyer muttered. As a girl, she had dreamed of Sonia. The mermaid was dressed in bronze and cut up by runes, gallant and calm as Sawyer felt the earth shake. “The Merrow is coming,” she spoke as if coaxing a baby to sleep. “This could be the site of the spawning grounds, where the sky erodes, and what we call the Second Sea will take us back.”
And Allecros will face the wrath of a madman, Sawyer thought, half-ignoring the mermaid’s enigma in favor of the threat. “I don’t care. Send me back,” she demanded, “I have no questions, no qualms. I need to be at Gele’s side, there’s still time to stop it!”
“And then what?” A third voice sliced through the air, shaking the gravel. A tremor knocked Sawyer back on her knees. Her wings folded on their own as if they belonged to someone else. “Will the Second Sea simply stay up there, waiting to be your prize?”
At the height of the gravel hill, a woman wearing brass plate and a black cloak stood shrouded in the shadow of four wings—two white and two black. Torn from the Harpy Broodmother and Angel Queen. Sawyer’s own wings nearly tore themselves from her spine, desperate to return to their source. “Deneve,” Sawyer spat, trying to hide her awe.
From end to end, the wingspan of the Barbarian Queen stretched beyond twenty feet in length. Deneve’s wings waved through the air like how a paintbrush smoothly glides across a canvas. With agile grace, they took Deneve up into the air. And finally, Sawyer knew for sure that Deneve could really fly. “Sally, will you end up like me?” Deneve asked from above with a mocking smile.
How many days did that little girl from Wilkin’s Port pretend to be the Barbarian Queen when she wandered the streets, fighting with other kids and playing with broomstick swords? Who infested her imagination when she was in the navy, hiding under a faked name and no way home? Sawyer Jean glared at the ghost. She wanted to say that the Barbarian Queen started it all: the dream, the ambition, the Siren, and the wings. “I don’t know,” Sawyer shrugged, kicking gravel with her boot, “I’m not close to the end yet, despite what the world has to say on the matter.”
A smile curved on Deneve’s face, “one day, time won’t be so fickle, and you could stay with me as one of us. If Sonia gets a say in it, maybe even the other half of your soul can come too.” The wings fluttered, taunting Sawyer. The one thing she could never have was so close. “The ceiling over our heads, it’s far too low, don’t you think?”
“Is it?” Sawyer forced a laugh. Her hands were shaking, she felt like she was going to faint. Her own wings, deformed imitations, frantically flapped, trying and failing to follow Deneve up into the sky. For a moment, she believed that insanity or pure oblivion was on the horizon. But instead, the Barbarian Queen landed before her and whispered, “see for yourself.”
The wind was screaming. Was it still the wind? Gales that ripped through the air like a barrage of cannonfire rushed through Sawyer, dragging with it a sense of primordial fear. The cyclone spun and dark clouds bellowed. A guttural roar burst forth as lightning crashed into the water. Sawyer ducked, falling to her knees as the hurricane above nearly tore her open with tornados and waterspouts. Where am I? There was no island. The pirate ship was gone. Her wings were close to snapping as they stretched out, trying to feel the storm themselves. And then Sawyer looked down at her feet.
Every person who had ever lived gazed back at her.
I made it, she said as they showed her Hell. Seafoam leaped up at her. Hatred struck. Infinite torture for the wicked. There was no escape from the rage of the victims. The shame of the better man shackled her to the window to heaven. Only a thin line of water kept her from plunging into its depths. The world above would not let her in yet. Sawyer pressed her hands down on the Second Sea, begging for it to free her. She saw herself among the totality. There is nothing for me there. Sawyer saw herself surrounded on all sides by screamers, pulsating through her every second. The Anima’s confinement was silent, and it corroded her psyche until it reformed itself inside the same absence. But here? There was no solitude. The judgment would never end. The Salt Wench would spend eternity on the gallows, where the noose would never snap her neck. Take me back to the Anima. She begged Deneve to take her back. What would she be if she spent forty-six years in the judgment of her peers? What would the ghosts do to the one who ate the souls of a hundred innocents? Sawyer sobbed. Curling her knees against her chest, she panicked at the highest point in the world. This was what she had wanted all along. The first person to climb to the Second Sea and bask in what lies beyond.
The moon hovered over the horizon, slipping away as the beginnings of twilight pursued the end of a long, dismal night. The new blanket of daybreak swept over the water, revealing a single shape in the water so large that cast a shadow over half of the Second Sea. Blotting out the sun, the creature glistened in a pale blue shine. Amorphous and shapeless, the sea monster seemed to twist and stretch as it sank toward the sky. Sawyer shivered as she watched the blurry mass descend to the world below. Lightning rolled, striking the water. Wind battered against the Second Sea, trying to fight against it. The spirits and their leers vanished, leaving Sawyer alone to witness the summoning of the Merrow.
The water began to shake. Waves devoured themselves in a frenzy. A whirlpool the size of Vall itself was born as the shapeless blue mass reached the surface of the Second Sea. Fingers sprouted from the Merrow. A hand and then an arm clawed at the window between the earth and the limitless world above. Moving it aside like a curtain, the fingers breached the Second Sea. Sawyer watched helplessly. The spirits screamed. The thing that struck fear in leviathans, spirits, and the Siren had arrived. A smiling mouth appeared on its newly formed face. Sapphire eyes opened like two craters, all-engulfing pits that could have swallowed Vall whole. They glared at Sawyer as the lips began to whisper a beautiful, somber song. Sawyer could not understand it, but the sound struck her as lovely. Even the mermaid's tongue was nowhere as soothing. Finally, there was peace.
“What an end to the most wicked woman to have ever lived,” Sawyer sighed. Pressing her hands against the Second Sea, she groveled on her knees. What legacy would Allecrea hold for her? Torn asunder, would the last of its people remember a counterfeit to the Barbarian Queen, a suicide mission to Allecros, or would the annals of history be too stuffed to remember another murdering thief? Whatever it was, it would meld with the pure hatred the spirits already held for her. There was never any escape. Oblivion was bliss after all. Sawyer tapped her empty scabbard. If she had a sword, the most valiant battle would have commenced: her atop the Second Sea versus humanity’s doom. She could have been vanquished as a hero, maybe. At least up here, the Second Sea was as beautiful as she imagined it. The animals rained down all around her, breaking through the seafoam ceiling to escape the Merrow. Things she never saw surrounded her, introducing themselves as she waited to die. “I don’t want to die,” she said, gritting her teeth. No respite, no solace, what waited for her at the end? The Salt Wench can earn no redemption. No power, the fingers about to crush the world like a grape proved that clearly. “Not dead yet. If I was damned they would have latched me to my punishment by now,” Sawyer fought to stand on her knees. It was far easier to sit, to let it wash over her. But she rose. There is still time to decide. I still got a choice. Sure, I’ll be the witness. I’ll stay fighting until the end. Too many mistakes left to mop up. Maybe one more chance to go out feeling decent. Obliteration isn’t here yet. Sawyer Jean was born again, she could still do something.
Decided, the phantom did not falter. Tearing off her coat, it bound around her fingers as a coil of mist. She took her shirt too, letting the wings open, crooked and gnarled. Press on. The sky, the cyclone, met the Merrow with resistance, making the creature struggle to fully fall into the atmosphere. There was still time. Press on. Sawyer let the wings flutter. “This is it, all I’ve ever wanted,” she said, disgusted. “Which monster will live to see the day? And what will they do after that?” One leap, and then she flew.