The head dancer’s words struck Sawyer Jean like a thousand barbed arrow points. Old scars came back to life, bleeding faint trails of mist as she recoiled back. The wind responded, not neutral to the folly. Sweeping gales ripped sand from the shore and tossed it at the dancer. Sawyer growled at the woman, “is it your bleary eyes that see me, or some magic hex you have hidden somewhere?”
“Neither,” Emned revealed. She did not move her lips to speak. “My red eyes came from my mother, but being able to see spirits, both here and up there, that, I’m told, came from my own soul. Though, speaking, hearing you?” She waved the waterskin, stealing a sip in between words. “I need a little extra help with that, something that opens the other senses.”
“Born lucky?” Sawyer smirked. “What are spirits like up in the Second Sea?”
“Like coral polyps, I believe.” Emned shook her head. “Some days it’s like a web, but all the spiders are made of the same silk. Little sparks flying back and forth, all of them talking. Maybe, I’m too far away to hear. In dreams, though, that’s when it’s easier to hear.” With a long sigh, Emned walked right through Sawyer and approached Gele as he took another step towards the sea. “Gele! Do you want a drink or not? Boiled root tea, with all the best herbs mixed in. I made it for us to celebrate you becoming a warrior.”
“I’m not a warrior, Emned,” Gele said, “I ran away in front of Nab, the King, and all of Gulw.” He ran his fingers through his blood-soaked hair. “The initiation, I did not know how horrible it was.”
“Do you remember the Beckoning, when all the dancing was done?” Emned threw the waterskin to him, forcing him to catch it. “You were in a terrible state then, exhausted and wheezing, and all you had was a smile on your face. That was what made you, not the King’s words, and certainly not the opinions of others. Now drink, for the spirits and the living, and the poor girl here stuck in between.”
Gele returned the drink. “Let me wash the blood from my hair and off my skin. The smell will ruin the taste of any drink.”
“Fine, come back soon and come back clean,” Emned said, shooting Sawyer a glare. “It gives me more time to speak to the woman across the sea.”
Gele wandered off, weary, but the sorrow wiped from his face. Sawyer could feel his thoughts wane as he walked out into the waves and scrubbed his scarf off in the seawater. The farther he got, the weaker Sawyer felt, somewhat dizzy and now suddenly tired.
“Your clothes, are you from somewhere cold?” Emned pointed at the pirate’s fur longcoat, adorned with badges she plucked from dead captains.
“Chorllow,” she said, “up with seals and walruses—big whales with tusks too. That’s where I called home before dire circumstances shunted me into the Anima’s jaws. Aside from blizzards, it was safe. Barely anyone else there except for poor farmers. The island had some magic to it, hidden underground, but going into that makes for a shit introduction.”
“I saw you at the festival and inside Clow’s house. So really, I’ve met you already.”
“Do you make all your friends by stalking?”
“What was I supposed to say? I was dancing in front of Galu and the Second Sea. No way I’d stop to act delirious and strike conservations with shadows.”
“Have you met any ghosts before, like me?”
“Too many, if you count full moons. But even the strongest drinks and potions, I can’t really hear them. Even when I sleep, the language, it’s not something mouths or even thoughts can converse with. Souls, we have them, sure, but us people, we are just cocoons. When we die, we grow wings and go up there. And along the way, I’m sure, we will learn something.”
“Terrifying,” Sawyer said.
“That’s why I’m ever so careful with this,” Emned held up the waterskin. “Tea made from things all over Galu. I like to think of it as nature making us closer to the other world. My mother used to describe it that way to me. Yet, sometimes, you fall into your head and can’t hear much at all. And then, some days, you hear far too much.”
“Elixirs are the same back at home. Alchemist potions flow through the streets of every city like rainwater. My favorites still feel thick on my tongue, and I miss the sweet taste of rum every night.” Sawyer sat down on the sand, imagining a bottle kissing her lips. It took her back to sitting on the Harpy, whistling to shanties and taking swigs. Then, as a kid back in Wilkin’s Port, she would walk around with blisters on her palms and carrying a broomstick spear, and asking bakers for free bread because she supposedly scared all the rats away. “Feels like I’m always starving on a full stomach now.”
“Death like yours isn’t pleasant, locked out of the Second Sea like a bird with broken wings.”
Sawyer laughed hard. “Heaven, they wouldn’t like me up there, even though I try to swim there anyway. Worse fates are out there. Obliteration is terrible and quick, and I’ve seen it firsthand several times. Souls live forever. You compared them to insects, but even then, people get squashed just as easily. You are invincible until you aren’t, I guess.”
“Shuran used to say stuff like that when we were younger.” The dancer had a faint wave of nostalgia wash over her. A lifetime long lost revived. “Nearly snapped her neck doing something stupid, laughed it off the next day. Wish I could be the same, but as I grow older, I see the chance of that fading.”
“You’re still young. How many old people have to wallow at their age? I’ve heard too many stories of that. Stories are warnings, whether it’s about monsters or more intimate things.”
“Maybe,” Emned shrugged. “Dancers always try to be like water, wind, everything. Best try before I’m only skin and bones.”
“What comes after that?” Sawyer asked. “What if you dance with such vigor, your skin and bones actually do fly away in the breeze?”
“Then my prayers would be answered,” Emned smiled, “that’s what the Beckoning is, or at least for me, it was a prayer. I asked for enlightenment, reaching the infinite wisdom of everyone who lived like us. Every mistake and victory, all of it, but the luxury of being able to change something down here.” She leaned back on the sand, laying down and staring up at the sky. “Eleven years ago, I performed the Beckoning, and now, after all these years of wanting more, I lived with enough regrets to realize that it’s hard to change anything, but still the want remains.”
“Same for me, out on the sea, that hunger was real; everything else could have been as fake as puppets and dolls. People died for my dream, killed by my hand. And thanks to them, I got one step closer.” Sawyer worried her words would bring out tremors. Under the sand, far below, she knew they were waiting. Souls went to heaven, the Second Sea, but the decayed bodies sank into the soil. Now full of worms, corpses clustered together like maggots. Writhing, they waited for her, creating a throne of flesh for her in Hell.
“Do you hold regret, sister from across the sea?”
“I do, but I know if I had succeeded, I would not.” Any tortuous throne would be worth the price of breaching the Second Sea. The truth clung to her like a hex. Wings. Old scars burned when she thought of them.
“What did. . .” Emned was cut off as she watched Gele emerge from the water, the blood washed from him completely. Yet, his fatigue, his sorrow, still showed its stains.
Redressing himself, Gele stumbled onto the beach. Sawyer tapped her fingers against her empty scabbard. Remember, Salt Wench. Your hunger is long dead. The familiar feeling of isolation flickered back, just for a second. Panic dragged her back to the prison at the seafloor. How long was I down there? Then Sawyer looked to Gele, trying to repress it all. She offered her hand to him as he rose back to his feet. Her hands phased through everything except him, her only anchor to the world. “Gele, are you sure you don’t want to rest?”
“I couldn’t sleep like this,” he admitted. “Let me have the tea. Then I’ll promise you I’ll be fine in the morning.”
“Promise?” Emned asked, “any traumas become far more vicious after sipping.”
“It’s not my first time with the drink, and it will not be the last.” Gele took the waterskin graciously. Sawyer watched him put it to his lips, and she sensed the liquid pouring down her throat too. And, as he did, Sawyer felt tears well up in the corners of her eyes. Nothing hidden, as if she was a puppet with strings tethered to each of his nerves. She sat there, watching as they both drank the tea: bitter, sweet, and cruelly sour, all at once. She breathed in the taste, the elixir’s hidden potency delivered to her as the sound of it splashing inside Gele’s stomach.
“By the voice that can speak to all, I wish you a good night, Sawyer, for I too could see the hatred held against you by all mankind.” Emned’s lips curved into a twisted smile as she drank as well. She took it all down in one gulp. “And for you, Gele, I will help you repair that canoe as a gift to my brother, our souls to one day meet in the Second Sea.”
“Thank you,” Gele said, side-eyeing Sawyer. He must have seen it as well, the brief flicker of Hell that always crept below, following her every step. Only now, Emned referenced it, so now he could too. Sawyer lurched back, tingles festering in her stomach. She felt fire inside her. The light off her seafoam skin glowed with the sheen of oil. The ghost’s form, was it even like seawater? Or rather, like the water found in the gray waters around Galu or the dull blue waves outside Wilkin’s Port? She remembered the sea in the north being black, with ice growing from the brine. She was none of them, something more foreign and strange. She was not water, maybe mimicking it. Maybe the green of the Second Sea held the answer. Or, if the absence of a soul was obliteration, then in this world of flesh, what was the absence of a body?
The deluge of thoughts and worries clung to her like tar, pulling her into a spiraling pit. Shapeless, everything became swirling. She was not being dragged down, nor was she hoisted up. Inward she went. The tea took her, and it took her partner’s soul. And then, they flew because there was no end in sight. A vortex took her to an infinite lull, where things moved slowly as if they were just about to stop.
Across the sand, Gele laid on his back with a wide smile. A green sheen caked over his eyes, seemingly painted over by grass. Gawking at Sawyer, he murmured, “show me all of it.” Only the words sung out as thoughts, and the only thing to exit his lips was a quiet groan.
Sawyer could see the shapes shift and spin before her. As Gele’s words walked, the shadow it tried to make grew fins and tails, and as his imagination swelled, it mutated into something too complex and strange to fathom outside a dreamy fog.
“No,” she said. In the vision, Sawyer grabbed Gele by the hand, jumping through clouds and smoke. Drifting, Sawyer sobered for a second. An abyss burst open before her, threatening to swallow her and Gele both. How much do I show him? Sawyer shuddered. How much do I lock away? She risked him knowing, him realizing how much she hid behind the curtains of the past. Was she ashamed? No, she was scared of falling into it all over again. I am the one who cast so many into Hell. A glint of pride still emerged when she admitted it. I am the one who will stand atop the Second Sea, but I cannot throw this second chance away so early on.
Like a shepherd walking a lamb to a butcher, Sawyer guided Gele through the dream. The tea’s taste still stood heavy on her tongue as she recalled his desire to learn it all. At such a request, she wished for rum instead.
First, Sawyer saw a young boy in Navy uniform, watching the rain and lightning smite the blue sea. Storms defined men. That fact etched itself into his mind, forced there by a captain who held no love for anyone but was as resolute as petrified oak. The boy, in comparison, let his shaking hands grip the cannon. Out there, in the mass of blue and black, a world of ink and oil, something prowled. Either a monster or a ship, always those two things. The boy had spent enough fearful nights wondering what would kill him first, for the age of pirates had come, and the age of monsters had never ceased. When the black flag came, he would have no terror left in his veins because steadfast and brave, he fought until he was the last Navy man standing, and the thieves took him as one of their own.
The boy shed his disguise and became a girl again, now sworn to follow a black flag of a mermaid eating her own tail. Sawyer followed the pirate, pulling Gele with her, carrying him as a wisp in her hands. His soul became her lantern, better to see through the dark foggy memories. Years on a rat-infested frigate, battles in muddy swamps, and rocky crags filled the steps she took through time. Like the Beckoning, everything merged together, as if time became one little thing with infinite windows. Sawyer stopped to spectate all the hours of mopping decks sharpening blades, the sea shanties, card games, and the drunken stories of unnatural things. She showed Gele these as a counterbalance to the battles. Every time she let him see a dagger sink into a man’s throat, she revealed a moment of peace where she spent a long day and night watching the Second Sea. One day, I will be up there, the young pirate would promise, with the whales with blowholes on their stomachs and the fish with glass skin.
Sawyer hesitated to continue. Soon she would have to relive a gray-bearded man’s walk to the gallows and his final battle with a noose around his neck. The old captain Pilke, in his last breath, demanded his crew burn the city, and so she did. Sawyer was young then, barely twenty, too rash and too loyal, the first to answer the order. That night she watched towers turn to ash, clutching the torch in her hand. When screams went silent, she had her taste of beautiful vengeance. Her men voted her as captain for such destruction, and the Navy gained another villain to despise.
Nobody lived to replace me, Sawyer admitted as she gazed upon her crew’s faces once more. They stood in one large ring, with her in the middle. Their captain had never forgotten, but having to dig up their hard smiles and tired eyes admonished her for long-gone mistakes and follies, just as they did the first time. But, they were loyal to a fault and shifted to the side as she walked past.
The tea made her steps sluggish and clumsy. Emned, this is her potion, don’t forget that she can see this too. Pushing forward, Sawyer drifted through her memories. Gele, as a soul in her hands, shuddered at the pirate’s dead faces. This is what a victim of drowning looks like. We were almost the same. Bloated and pale, her lost companions watched her go. Only a few reached out, trying to stop her. She shrugged off Wess the boatswain, with a look of betrayal on his fox-like eyes. Snails crawled on him, and crabs plucked at his pickled skin. Conrad, the gunner, reached for his blunderbuss while Duncan, the wizard, stopped him. The magician, throat strangled by seaweed, gave her a silent nod. Pointing at his face, caked over by barnacles, he mouthed a quick warning before the dream swept her and Gele away. “Chorllow.” Sawyer heard Duncan hiss the word as the wizard waved goodbye to her. This is Hell, where those eaten by the Anima ended up. I should be here with them if luck was not so cruel.
“Show me what Chorllow is, please, Sawyer,” Gele whispered. “What is it?”
She ground her teeth together. Damn him, that wizard. “Wilkin’s Port was my home, Chorllow was my shelter. But, more importantly, it was home to the greatest treasure under the Second Sea.”
A cold breeze came past her. Now Sawyer had to go back. In the abyss, dwelling inside the web of memories, there was the island in the northern seas. She took Gele to it, to the beach of onyx black waves lapping onto rocky sand. Whale-bone obelisks, each covered in mermaid runes, guarded the shoreline. “May the Siren cherish these spawning grounds,” they read, over and over, in a frantic pattern. When her crew had first arrived—however many years ago—it was on a full moon, and the spirits were a lavish red and burning green. And among the color, shadows swarmed around the island, swimming through the burning waters.
That night, when she and her crew climbed over the high, gray grass hills, it was something more out of an old widow’s story than something real. Half of the men who followed her would not live to see the dawn. The pirates marched upon limestone pithouses nestled in the eroded ruins of an ancient fortress. Castle walls had wasted away, leaving only the outline, a skeleton of granite bones. Two thousand years ago, this was the seat of an Empress who ruled the northern seas. Now, it was the shelter for seal-skinners and sheep farmers. Chorllow’s legacy did not live on, forgotten except for in the pages of old dusty tomes. Duncan told Sawyer just as much as he surveyed the dead castle through his spyglass.
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But corpses still hold magic, as spirits did. Sawyer remembered the young wizard’s warning. And it became loud and blaring when they kicked down the hovels’ doors. Children sang songs in weird words. Their lips were a dark green. Their eyes had glossed over with a prismatic shine, like stained glass, mimicking the colors in the Second Sea. They were blind to the swords and deaf to the shouts. Scratching runes into the floor with stone knives, they stared into a window only they could see, and then kept singing. “Take us, make us fly,” the runes read, their chants echoing said wish. Sawyer put a blade to a boy’s throat, and they only pointed at a rusted iron hatch outside. But by then, the children were laughing. They said the Siren was ready. Thunder rumbled in a cloudless sky. Shadows whirled over Chorllow. Wess, frightened, said that he could not find any adults. Conrad warned of raining oil. The gunman screamed of a deluge of shadows. The Second Sea was collapsing onto the earth. When the pirates came to peer at their doom, they saw sea monsters breaking through the surface above and tumbling down the sky. So many united as a devilish hailstorm. The children cheered, saying it was their turn to fly next.
The first creature died when it splattered against the ground. Sawyer, as a ghost, whipped away as it landed. Half planted back into her old self. She kept reminding herself of the soul in her hands. She held Gele close to her, guarding him. Following the memory, she made for the hatch as green jellyfish fell from the sky. Those that survived the long fall lashed out at the pirates with ribbony tentacles. One touch burned the skin. Any further contact turned the man into a puppet. Thralls with greened lips and purple veins struck their former comrades in the back. Swords clashed against swords beneath the Siren’s rain. Those who died had their souls siphoned by the creatures, which scuttled along the ground like slugs. Gunshots rang out. Horror conquered the fearless thieves. The pirate captain and her most trusted crew climbed down the hatch, retreating to the dead castle’s tunnels. Silence ruled the village thereafter, with the soft whispers of the children’s song droning on.
Under the fortress, a crypt rested in dim dismay. Murals of an armored knight flying on black and white wings adorned brown granite walls. Seven coffins of tarnished brass and encrusted with ice sat in a circle, with one of rusted iron in the center. At the foot of each one were stone statues whose heads and shoulders did not survive time. One displayed a four-armed woman. A mermaid with human legs clutched a tread and needle in one hand, a hatchet in the other. And, for the Empress at the center, four wings stretched out of her back. The only human in history capable of flying to the Second Sea laid dead inside that vault. What a waste. All around the crypt were runes glowing with an innate green phosphorescence. Something had taken the tomb before the pirates could. Well over a hundred people clad in seal-skin robes laid on their stomachs, sputtering words in a cacophony of hymns, sobs, and prayers. “Take us to the far waters,” they pleaded. The runes said the same. Emaciated, their muscles had atrophied away, leaving only the pale skin and bone. Their faces matched the children and the pirates turned to drones—lips of sickly green and hollow eyes displaying all the colors of the Second Sea. “Take us to the far waters,” they begged their master.
In the far corner, a fat jellyfish—bloated and covered in twitching eye spots—latched its tendrils to the necks of each one, suckling on the blood. A factory and a slaughterhouse created by one disgusting abomination. As a spirit, Sawyer could see the souls inside its translucent body dissolve one by one. Something was growing in there, taking form. The ghost noticed an embryo floating inside. Her old self, however, was far too hasty and unwilling to let the monster reveal its nature. No, don’t be stupid, the phantom gulped, knowing the punishment for such a move. One pistol shot ruptured the Siren’s insides, but the tendrils got to young Sawyer instantly, knocking the gun away and pulling off two fingers with it. But by then, her crew avenged her loss, slaying the Siren before another second had passed.
“This was the moment,” Sawyer told her partner as she hovered over the coffins. Before even tending to her wound, the captain stepped over the Siren’s victims’ dying bodies. With all her strength, she shoved open the iron box. “This made everything worth it,” the phantom whispered as she lived it once more. The skeleton of a long-dead queen had four wings fused to its spine. And the bone, somehow, seemed to flicker as the light of the runes extinguished and the children’s song ceased. Now, I need to stop. She shivered, feeling the chill of a bygone era return. I cannot show him anymore.
A headache struck her. The tea clung to her throat and lungs. The crypt’s walls peeled away, taking her back to a void that made no sense. Again, Sawyer strode through a tunnel both rooted in and simultaneously disconnected from time and space. She did not walk. Instead, she was absorbed by the pocket, identical to how rainwater soaks soil. Whatever the void was, it made her mud. Stop, she hissed through grinding teeth. I do not want to be the past. I do not want to be the earth, do not confuse me for the soul I now cling to. He and I are different spirits above. You know this more than anyone. You know what I want.
In response, the abyss dragged on her feet with invisible arms, taking her deeper. There was no form to it anymore, not even a dream. Judgment, that’s what she assumed, so far down. Flashes of her past kept searing her concentration as the tea bubbled in her stomach.
She waded through a red river, surrounded by dirty dead men. Her blade bounced off a gray wizard’s axe as she barely deflected it, slicing off her ear instead of breaking open her skull. The old man cackled like some roused bird. His laugh bellowed from a belly protected by thick bronze armor. What a foolish thing to wear in waist-high water. All Sawyer had to do was shove the magician down and pin him under until he struggled no more. How close I thought I was then, she remembered how good it felt taking the leather-bound books for herself. It must have been just a few more steps. There could have been a few minor mistakes. But nevertheless, she never got to be like the winged queen from the crypts. To no surprise, the world loved to keep people pinned to the ground. The birds and the creatures of the Second Sea mocked her in life.
“You are far worse than I originally thought. You’re a wicked woman who should never have been allowed to progress past infancy.” A snarl emanated from the void, crawling out of it. Two red eyes sliced through walls that did not exist before they were destroyed. Emned wrapped her hands around Sawyer’s throat and pushed her through a blanket of discarded wants and tortured aspirations. “All those people dead, for what?”
The sky above Emned morphed. There was no ocean, no sea monsters, no wishing for mermaids or spirits. Instead, Hell loomed over Sawyer, inevitable and grim. The corpses of her friends and her victims sat at long tables, sipping rum from teacups and chewing charred venison. The skin had slipped off their bones, and the muscles wriggled like worms. Twisted and strange, but the smiles were so happy. Children with open stomachs ate forever. Headless men and women danced. In gargled songs, the corpses cursed the half-rat half-bat chimera that sent them here. Duncan the wizard and Wess, the boatswain, sat at a table playing cards, waiting for someone to sit in the empty chair.
Their table was set at the edge of Hell, her own little pocket of everything Sawyer lived up to be. Spilling over the walls, little speckles of fog poured down, taking everything it touched. A thief, some follower Sawyer had forgotten, wandered too close. He only had to dip one finger in before disappearing among the mist. Obliteration was swift and decisive. One day—if time even touched this realm—everyone would fall to the fog, or maybe the fog would come to them. A guillotine, or the gallows, that’s all this was. Hell was just an executioner, a slow one that enjoyed long last meals.
An oppressive yet familiar dread pressed down on Sawyer. The imaginary pit where the souls damned by the Anima and taken by magic ended up, was the same as where she was. For years, maybe decades, perhaps even centuries, Sawyer teetered on the edge of eradication and immortality. The Anima’s bony tongue could have pried her free, or the teeth could have succumbed to rot and shifted. Either way, at any moment, she would have been taken here, and the sequence of waiting to die would have started anew, trapped in a paradise she did not want.
Emned stood below it, appraising the sight. Her hands were still tight around Sawyer’s throat. The spirit kicked her away. Stumbling, Sawyer backed away slowly. It’s not real. This Hell is not real.
“I watched it all, your entire life,” Emned said, circling her at a distance, cautious of the spirit. “You cannot be allowed back into the world.”
“The Salt Wench is dead,” Sawyer muttered. “Voyeurs always act like the secrets they spy on so great, what of my exploits disgust you, the killings, the sorcery? They died with me, and I had been stuck alone at the bottom of the sea ever since. Every day went on like a year, growing ever the more insane and twisted. I lost count of how many times I had to pull myself back from what should have been the end of all thought. There were times I’d sunk into something depraved and feral, more animal than me. Isolation is poison and killed the woman you hate so much. You saw those memories too, how incomprehensible they were. You know better than I do.” She remembered them more vividly than her first butchery or her first kiss. The dissolving of sanity and how the loneliness crept, chipping away and what she believed to be real or fake. Hell was nothing more than an inescapable bubble that got smaller and smaller. While her soul was lodged inside the Anima’s teeth, her mind shrank and rotted. Eventually, she saw little creatures, so tiny she bet no human had seen them before her—all different shapes and colors, like the Second Sea. They brought her back each time her mind melted away. They were a mirror and a reminder of the Second Sea. I still need to go, she would recall, and it would come back again. “I have lived many lifetimes inside the Anima, as a man or a minnow though? I cannot tell anymore. And now, after all that,” she looked upon Emned, “I finally met my judge. So, what will it be? The gallows? Will you gut me? Or maybe, you want me to walk back into the sea where the Anima is surely waiting?”
“I want you to leave my brother,” Emned stated clearly, “if you stay at his side, you would drag him down the same path; you would kill him, or worse.”
Sawyer could not feel him anymore. Through his eyes, she saw him gagging and spitting up the tea. Far away now, she wondered how clear the visions were to Gele. How many times would she have to show him? “I wouldn’t,” she absently promised. How could she know it to be true? She thought of Gele, dressed in blood and bells, before his people. Why didn’t we just run away before when we first met? There was no point in hiding. The woman with red eyes could see through her meaningless lament. “You cannot trust me, Emned. I have made it clear that my devotion to my dream has yet to die.”
“Even with that, will you keep it a secret forever? The magic you succumbed to, when will you expose that to Gele, Sawyer Jean?” Emned glared at her, veins popping out of her forehead. “When will you show Gele the scars that cover your body, the ones you created by. . .”
“Stop it!” A scream sliced through both of them. Sawyer blinked and was back on the silver beach, with Gele hunched over on the sand. “Enough,” he begged, shivering. “I have seen so much already.”
The taste of the tea left Sawyer’s mouth as Gele spat it all out into the water. Trembling, he stood up, wiped his lips, and then collapsed. “Don’t,” he ordered when Sawyer came running to his side. Sweat coated his face. Flushed with paleness, he vomited again. “Emned,” he groaned, “I need to go with her. I need to see what’s across the ocean. I need to know what to fear. I’ll take her stories as a warning, I promise you, but I have to go to see those sights myself too.”
“She is a witch, Gele, did you not see?” Emned lurched forward, nearly reaching for the ghost’s throat again. “Did you not see what she locked away? The horrors on that island, the people she slaughtered, those memories are only a fraction of her crimes against this earth.”
“I would not show her the initiation, and I would not show her my shame.” Gele ran his fingers through his hair, and a dried crimson coated his fingers. He still had not washed it all out.
Sawyer stepped forward but retreated when she met eyes with Gele. Furious and afraid, he knew her better now than he did before. The way he looked at her stung more than the sight of Hell. This would last forever because he will go to the Second Sea. Sawyer had to remind herself of that. The turquoise waves far above replaced the sight of feasting corpses. Yearning, she wanted to float up and touch the water. She had tried the first night, stepping on air; they were steps on a ladder, a waterfall that took her up like a million tiny arms. But, when she got too high, she instantly returned to Gele’s side.
“I cannot do it alone,” he said, taking the words from her thoughts. “I cannot go without a guide. If I did, I would be lost for sure.”
“Gele, please,” Emned said, terror dripping into her words. Was she looking at it again, the magic the spirit once performed? “Do not be like your sister, do not be brave now. She will lead you to death, no, to somewhere far worse.”
“Two-thousand years ago, there was a woman known as Deneve the Barbarian Queen.” Sawyer stepped back, tired of it. I would not show her the initiation, and I would not show her my shame. Gele’s words bounced and echoed in her head. He had already shown him. She would be a shit friend if she did not meet him in turn. Confessions were worse when they came slow.
Sawyer grabbed the sleeves of her longcoat, rolling them up. The scales on her forearm hurt when she touched them, even as a ghost. Hesitating, Sawyer took off her coat completely, stepping on it with her boot, afraid it would vanish into mist forever if she did not watch it. Then came her seal-skin shirt, a memento of the north. Under it was keepsakes from everywhere else. “Deneve was famous for two things. One was raiding the mainland from her seat in the icy islands, cutting through kingdoms that lived long before Allecrea’s day. And the other, she murdered every single harpy and angel from the far continent, slashing off the wings of their queens and asking a mermaid seamstress to tie them to her spine. Then, she flew to the Second Sea and hunted alongside the gods.” Taking a deep breath, she ignored Gele’s petrified face. Emned too, her eyes were wide scarlet saucers. “Chorllow was the name of Deneve’s castle, as I came to learn. Forgotten knowledge said she was buried there, and I found the tomb. There I made two discoveries. The legends were true, and that humans could steal wings. And the other, that creatures from the Second Sea could use human souls to change their shape, as the Siren almost did.”
Gele stood up, his breath uneasy and his heart thrashing. She could hear it inside his chest. “You performed magic, using people’s souls? You sacrificed people for something as simple as growing wings?”
“I did it three times, hunting every wizard with even an inkling of knowledge. First two times were for becoming an angel or harpy, the last, I thought the mermaids may have what I needed, so I tried to grow fins and scales. I used Deneve’s bones twice, then Sonia’s, a mermaid chimera who walked on human legs. That final ritual was the most successful. I was an expert then, and apparently, chimeras are attuned more to magic than any other. At least, that’s what the dead wizards claimed.” The result was clear. Scales wrapped around her arms and chest in bright purple bands. They bled streams of fog as she poked them. Gills grew where her ribs were supposed to be, and a fin grew out her side. Throwing off the bandana and pulling back her hair, she showed him how sparse feathers sprouted from her forehead. On her back, two tiny malformed wings sprouted. They twitched and flapped but were too small to lift a cat, let alone a person. Both a ghost and a beast, the pirate turned around, letting Gele see the results of her rituals. He picked her apart, trying to decide if he was repulsed, pitiful, or terrified to be trapped with a demon conjoined to his own soul. His eyes reflected something fierce, a feeling not marked by betrayal but a sense of doom that he had to either accept or never be able to escape. There was a little thread of trust that he still clung to as he weighed everything that had happened so far. Sawyer could see it all on his face, a battle over his desires to see the world and his disgust over what it had to offer. To her, she was standing back at her parent’s door, knocking on it as a thief who dared to come home. Being unwelcomed was a common feeling, but still, her heart toiled. A yearning came desperate and fierce as if she was about to be thrown back into the Anima’s jaws.
“It did not work,” she admitted openly, “all I was able to learn was that it would take more souls than I could kill in a single night.” Pausing, she decided there was no reason to hide it anymore. “At the end of every sacrifice, I saw something from the Second Sea. Gele, there are things out there that human souls have never seen. Something out there, whether it is the sun or the moon, completely eclipses the network of spirits. You and I, we’re insects, little mites. Something is out there. I saw it three times, and I still don’t know for sure what it was.” Sawyer paused, looking up. She knew they were all there, both the souls of humankind and the things that were something else. “In Allecrea, they say chimeras, like me, are bound to go to Hell ’til the feral part of them festers and swallows them whole. I expected that to happen so long ago. Gele, I am sorry I kept this from you for so long. But it seems I cannot run anymore. In the Anima, I thought I would die at any moment, to be punished until the end of time. In all, nearly a hundred warped faces that I cannot remember, all screaming for me, begging for mercy. I culled them like livestock. You cannot fly without blood, and all I wanted was to fly. And now I am a chimera, a beast so putrid even the Siren would be disgusted. That is Sawyer Jean, and I will say that in front of you and the Second Sea. Do what you must.”
“Was that what she was hiding?” Gele asked Emned, stunned and exhausted. He could not take his eyes off Sawyer, even as she donned her coat again. Monster. That is what he would think from now on. Sawyer was sure of it. His eyes cut her as he glared at her. Even the Anima, with every tooth hovering over her throat, always gnashing together, barely missing her soul, that dread did not match the feeling in her when he looked at her.
Emned nodded, “she’s a beastman, no, a demon. An evil spirit Gele, do you really want to risk being with her out on the sea?”
“I already said I cannot do it alone,” Gele walked forward, outstretching his hand. “I cannot abandon you here. I need a guide, and a sea monster will be welcome against the other creatures that haunt the world. Sawyer, there will be people like you, both wizards and pirates. One man is not enough to survive them.”
Sawyer stepped back, tempted to run into the sea. Flashes of children crying in their mother’s arms haunted her. All she remembered was the rush brass rods and copper strings provided her when sparks and lightning ran through their flesh and then into hers. The taste of magic metal branded her deeper than the screams. Even still, only the roars of shackled farmers—who one by one turned to sacks of skin as their milky souls dripped out through their lips—visited her while she waited to die in the Anima. There was no sleeping there, only phantoms.
But despite that, Gele moved forward and took her hand anyway. “I need you, Sawyer. Others are willing to perform the same atrocities. I need to know everything about the world beyond this beach, even your most evil crimes and the darkest magics mankind possesses.”
“I promise you, Gele, my friend, I will not lead you to the same mistakes I have made. Everything I have done, the reasons and the hunger for it, that died with me.” Sawyer swallowed everything, not discarding it, nor stowing it away. The one who saved her soul had dreams, and he would not sacrifice her, she hoped. Trust or desperation, what fueled his reasons for staying with her? The desire to go, to be free. It captured him as much as it strangled her.
“Gele, are you sure?” Dread tingled in Emned’s red eyes as she placed herself between the ghost and her friend. “Shuran asked me to look after you, and I can’t do that if you stand by her. If I let you go. . .”
“I would have run away, regardless,” Gele admitted, tears welling up in his eyes. Flashes of the initiation whirled in his head. The smell still clung to him, making his words quiver. Sawyer could see it, and still, she hid from him. “I would be no safer on my own, and there’s no chance of me staying here on Galu for the rest of my life. I am not a warrior. This is the only way I can go.”
Emned sighed sourly. Gritting her teeth, she stepped aside. “You have your sister’s worst qualities. Please, be careful, my brother. When I came here, I could not tell which soul was which. If she tries another sacrifice or drags you through it too, you need to erase her from this world.”
“I promise you that I will,” Gele looked to the phantom, “I would end us both if need be.”
“Thank you,” Emned said. “And in return, I will help repair your boat, Gele. Shuran and I used to take it out on calm nights, you know. And for you, Sawyer Jean, protect him, or I will find you in Hell or the Second Sea and annihilate you myself.”
Sawyer did not need to reply. The message was clear enough. She had not even shown the results of her ambition—if the abomination that was her body could even be called that—to her crew. Only Wess and Duncan knew. Did they speak of it in Hell, at the table with the empty chair? She wondered what the version of herself that died outside Allecros would think of the state she was in now. The twisted, useless wings quivered under her shirt. Each time they moved, her chest felt heavier and heavier. Silently, she prayed to lost voices; Please, anything but being left alone again.