A stalwart ship swayed and danced over the angry waves east of Bemean, listless for the rage that the oceanic deities threw at it. At the helm of the proud ship stood an equally proud skipper, eyes as focused on the horizon as they were on the future. He knew in his heart of hearts that it would be but a few more expeditions before he crested his vest with honors unmatched. Running amok his ship were the proof of his managerial talent; a bewildering scramble of workmen scurried across, over, and under the deck, hurriedly pulling at ropes and pullies. The sight was incoherent to all but the skipper and one other passive onlooker of the chaos.

  There was one individual in the sea of hurried people who was not partaking of the dance of the deck; rather, he casually meandered through the crowd towards the skipper with a mug of stout in his hand, liquid sloshing all about the deck along to the sway of the ship. The dropped ichor would mix with the biting waves that crashed against and over the ship’s side, taken away and lost to the vast ocean. This noon drunkard was by far the most irritating member of the skipper’s crew, it was a certainty that he had a lazy bone, and that bone was the most energetic bone in which all others were exponentially lazier. Add onto this that the man had nothing but his bones and there was now nothing to hold back his exceptional lethargy. His spilt drink ran about the ship with more effort and drive than him.

  The lazy drunkard made his way up to the skipper. “Ah weather, she ain’t always the nicest. I still love her though” The drunkard was old, so astoundingly old that not even muscle remained on his body. His intense age and the segregation he had experienced from the world for so long caused him to have a strange dialect, a dialect created by time not culture.

  “I didn’t think a pile of bones like you would still have someone like that in their life… or death?” The skipper was not always sure how to address the drunkard next to him. There was an etiquette that one must show when speaking with the undead and the skipper lacked the experience to know what it was.

  “Who? Oh yeah, she out thar somewhere and soon I’ll fish her out and give her one on the neck like she did me.” The drunk skeleton haphazardly threw his drinking arm across his exposed ribs and pointed to an empty space where usually one would have their second arm. The partial remains of a shoulder no longer burdened with socketing an arm had a sharp indentation along its open edge, as if some great sea beast had made a meal of him some eons ago. As he pointed to the gap, his brew briefly tilted beyond its critical point and the alcohol dripped down through his exposed bones to the floor where the rest of his drink had fallen. He could no longer experience consumption since his organs passed on without him, but he enjoyed the nostalgic act regardless.

  Of course, the diligent skipper was so focused on guiding the ship that he had not noticed any of this. The skipper stifled a laugh as he struggled to maintain composure and professionalism. “Oh yeah? What is she like?”

  The drunkard next to the skipper although utterly useless in practical aid often made himself slightly tolerable as a jester to entertain upon tiresome journeys. “Ah great behemoth, of size unrivaled and ferocity even more so. A greater terror I have never met, she be the cause of who I am now and all I long for is to meet her again to return my favors threefold.”

  The skipper, now unable to hide his surprise, replied through the unintended interruptions of his own chuckling; “You speak very colorfully of your… terror. What is she, the white witch?”

  “The white which what?”

  The skipper was so surprised by this response that he had to take a moment to look at the skeleton’s face to confirm he was serious. Sadly, there is very little that can be gleamed from a washed-out empty skull. “I know your five years back with the living have mostly been spent in isolation, but even then, to be so ignorant as to not know of the white witch.”

  “You, young’uns always coming up with yar new sayins and meanings and it’s hard to keep it all straight.” The skipper could not believe his ears. He could not understand the minds of the powers-that-be who threw this excuse of a sailor on his crew for this mission. The drunkard may be of ancient age, but without modern experience he was of juvenile wit. Surely the powers-that-be understood that this skipper was of the best that the Pangean Entente had the grace of working with. If it were not for the words of his commanders, this pile of bones would have been left behind on Parapet Island even before getting the chance to step foot on his ship.

“How on the Devadoot’s wishes did you manage to get on my ship?”

  “Has your memory be fading capt’n? I be on your crew since a week before we departed.” The skipper no longer was paying attention to the skeleton at his side. He was too lost in the throes of grief that perhaps he was the dumping grounds of the undesirables of their militant force. Send all the hindrances on a ship and give them some long, arduous and far task like scanning the edge of the world for a growing hole and hope at least a few manage to not return. He should have known better, the edge of the world nearly never had a hole in it, and it surely never had one which grew.

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  “No, perhaps they’re just testing me.” The skipper mumbled to himself, solidifying his will and confidence. He looked out in the distance and noticed that the ocean at some point had become entirely still; it did not take long for the skipper to notice the oddity of the situation. The ocean was not calm but completely and inexplicably still, as if it were frozen in time. The crew had stopped their work as well, watching the stilled ocean. Waves about to crash against the ship seemed hesitant as though preferring to hold impossibly still.

  The Skeleton drunk emptied the remainder of his mug down his nonexistent throat before handing it over to the skipper.

  “I hope ya get this refilled when I come back.” he joked in a dry and undeniably bored tone. The skipper, confused, stood motionless as he watched the skeleton disappear below deck. Never before in his years of sailing had he witnessed the ocean stop. He had heard of the strange anomalies that plagued the waters nearing the edge of the world, but he always dismissed the stories as exaggerated fairytales.

  Suddenly, a loud deafening moan broke the silence and the entire boat seemed to vibrate in panic, each plank of the ship brought to the limit of its durability. Once again silence fell: no rushing water, no creaking wood, no flapping sails, no howling winds; and then, a booming sound as a devilish face crashed through the still water along with a long oily body flying into the sky.

  The monster towered far above the mast of the ship; still the creature’s lengthy body delved far deeper into the depths of the ocean than what any human eyes could perceive. The creature's face was concave, collapsing deeper into its head than the size of its outer dimensions would seemingly allow. From deep within that cavernous maw came a long white proboscis which stretched down to the deck of the ship where the tip ended in a phantasmal hand waiting to grab on to any hapless soul within reach. Like gems cascading down the creature’s yellowish stomach were a line of fist-sized eyes each with three pupils and three intersecting irises trailing down to about the height of the crow’s nest.

  At the crow’s nest a crewmate, his spyglass no longer of need, stood perfectly still as he stared into an eye of the behemoth whose eye stared back. The proboscis of the beast slowly slithered up the mast to the crow’s nest. The ethereal hand at the end of the proboscis began grasping at the air in anticipation as it slowly floated towards the petrified crewman. its fingers soon reached the soft warm skin of the man, they caressed his cheek gently as they slithered down towards his neck. The long spindling fingers stretched and twirled around his throat then began to tighten, crushing the poor man’s neck to the point of revealing his veins on the verge of popping from their organic confinement.

  Suddenly, a large metal rod pierced through the proboscis severing it in twain. The monster reared its body releasing a piercing cry whose sonic vibrations created its own waves and stole the consciousness of the crewmembers rupturing many of their eardrums in the process. The metal rod which pierced the proboscis was attached to a tight cable that began to whir as it rapidly pulled down towards the deck of the ship and dragging the metal rod with it. The cable continuously sank into a large metal container until finally the metal rod clicked into its holster.

  The one-armed skeleton had his favored weapon, a steam powered harpoon gun in hand and already dripping with its first taste of prey. This was not his fated foe, but the occasional exercise helps prevent one from becoming dull. The savage beast having identified the cause of its agony still standing from its sonic retaliation unleashed another explosive screech. The strong roar reverberated through the ship splintering many planks and knocking many supplies and tools around. The skeleton, unlike the rest of the crew, was thankfully immune to these sonic assaults as he had no ears for which to rupture. His harpoon gun began to whir, large plumes of smoke billowed out from small pipes that jutted out from the mechanism. The harpoon blasted out of the holster guided towards the beast’s uppermost eye piercing through and lodging itself deeper into the monster’s anatomy. A grey cerebral matter managed to ooze out of the beast’s eye and drool down its serpentine body. The cable then whirred once more, tugging back against the lodged harpoon. Too deeply wedged within the beast to be recalled, the whirring cable instead launched towards the harpoon rod and its unluckily connected catch.

  Before approaching his destination, the cable pulled back on the harpoon with an extra huff of effort and successfully dislodged it. The mechanism then exhausted all of its remaining pent up steam downwards expelling an explosive burst of smoke that propelled the skeleton upwards over the creature’s head.

  For what seemed like an eternity, the skeleton floated idly at the climax of his jump waiting for gravity to finally overcome his momentum. In this brief tranquility in the middle of his fight he thought he could hear the faint chime of a bell.

  Gravity took hold of the skeleton and pulled him downwards with accelerant vigor. The pistons in his mechanism started to pump rapidly and the barrel glowed a dim orange. One final time the mechanism expelled all its built-up steam out of its back, launching the harpoon cleanly through the beast’s head and lodging itself into the ship. The cable then retracted and, with the harpoon lodged, pulled the skeleton through the creature’s head wound bursting out the exit along with some pungent giblets and landed eloquently on the ship. The creature without a sound lifelessly sank into the ocean abyss.

  The skeleton was waiting for his round of applause but was disappointed to see that his entire audience was incapacitated, all except one.

  Directly ahead of the skeleton there was what seemed to be a small pink rhombus, or it was a rhombus, but its body would reject any stable state. It would shift and transform, shrink and grow, continuously morphing into other shapes. The pink shape finally locked into a form resembling that of a featureless human with only one limb. The arm was outstretched towards the skeleton holding a glowing parchment: It read.

You have been invited to The Tournament You are The Sailor