“This island is really shitty,” I muttered to myself.

I had said my goodbyes to the girls and morphed my tentacles into existence before setting off in the general direction of the ziggurat. If I were a big asshole pirate warlock, that’s where I’d put my defensive magic. After a bit I detoured in the direction the girls went, however, and started to lay down some of the traps I said I’d make. Nothing fancy, just a couple of alarm spells that’d notify me if anyone came by. They weren’t the best alarm spells as they didn’t have any way of differentiating… well, anything, really. They just sent me a mental ping if anything—and I mean anything—crossed them. It took me about a half hour to set up a small net of four of them, covering a large patch of land between our little hidy hole and the village.

While I was working, I kept noticing just… awfulness everywhere. A body of what I think is a man, several months decayed, with a caved in skull. Trash was omnipresent. As I got closer to the village, the smell of human waste grew stronger and I kept noticing human waste here and there. Just little piles of shit.

The land itself reminded me a bit of some southeast Asian counties, if you were to somehow make plant life depressed and suicidal. Plants grew in clumps here and there, usually surrounding a tree or two. It’d create a little bunch of plant life that instead of being green was usually sickly yellow, with large swaths of tacky wet dirt between. The only plant life I saw that was doing well was the bamboo forest to the south, and I had to think it was because it was away from all the people on the island. Or it was just bamboo and bamboo don’t give a fuck about anything, it just grows.

Probably the latter.

I did manage to find a stick big enough to etch the enchantment I’d used on the ship, recreating Colm’s Patented Magic Stick For Finding Magical Aura Sources. I’m work shopping the name. It ate into more of my allotted two hours carving the spell forms into it, but I figured with the stick I’d be able to more easily track the wards on the island, rather than stumbling around hoping to catch a whiff of magic with my senses.

With the new stick I quickly homed in on a source of aura, which was surprisingly close. Hidden in one of the vegetation clumps, buried under three feet of the muddy earth that seemed to comprise the island (took me longer to realize the ward was under me than I am comfortable admitting), I found the ward etched into the bottom of a rectangular case that reminded me of a guitar case.

I got absorbed into studying it. It was made with the same beautiful lines as the beacon in the ships engine room had had. Obviously the work of the same person. I didn’t recognize what little language was used with it. It reminded me of cuneiform of ancient middle east, with some Cyrillic thrown in every now and then. Without knowing what was written, I couldn’t figure out exactly what the wards did. But based on the shape and flows of the magic moving through it, I knew what kind of ward structure was moving through the island, and I knew that it was a largely mental effect.

I also knew how to break it.

I leaned back and stretched my back, groaning in relief as it popped several times. I caught sight of the sky and saw the sun dipping towards the horizon. Uh-oh. I was waaaay over an hour late for my meet-up with the girls. I quickly closed the case, dropped it down in the hole I had dug with my claws and covered it with some vegetation. I then booked it back to the “base.”

I hope they weren’t too worried.

* * *

“We were worried sick!” Alice yelled at me.

I hung my head sheepishly. Also, just to avoid hitting it on the low ceiling. “Sorry,” I said. “I got caught up in the ward scheme of the island.”

Ida abandoned whatever she was about to say, latching onto my words. “You found it?”

“Them,” I correctly. “It’s a series of wards that form a network, like a cellular network for phones. There’s just enough of them that the slight overlaps in area-of-effect reinforce each other without causing too much feedback. Which brings us to my plan.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I told them my plan.

“That’s…” Alice hedged.

“Stupid,” Ida said.

“If we can set it off at the right time, with the right prep, everyone but friendlies will be affected,” I said, gesturing expansively with my hands. “And people with magical senses will be affected the most.”

“And you can do it?” Alice asked. “Not to doubt you, but you said yourself that you’re mostly self taught.”

“I can do it,” I said. “In fact, I have done it. On a much smaller scale, of course, but I have a similar set up at my house in case I want to salt the earth and start over.”

Alice gave me a concerned look but Ida just nodded in a way that communicated “Yeah, that tracks with what I know about you.”

“How’d the meet with your friends go?” I asked, pulling out another stick I had picked up on the way back and started carving wards onto its surface.

Alice glanced at Ida, her expression telling me the meet didn’t go well. Ida’s expression was closed, but what leaked through was frustration.

“Not well,” Ida said after a moment. “The times when the main crew return to the island are when it is the most hard for the servants. When I was here last month, there had been many people attending the planning meetings. But with all the new prisoners…”

“They don’t want to make waves,” Alice continued for her. “It’s very easy to get replaced by new blood right now.”

“You gotta go back and tell them to get ready,” I said, not taking my eyes off the stick. I had to copy certain parts of the pirate wards accurately or all I’d get was a marked up stick. “I have a feeling that the wards affect increases when the warlocks return. When the wards go down, all the emotions and desires the wards have been suppressing might rush forward.”

Alice nodded along to what I was saying. “Yeah, that can happen with prolonged emotional manipulation. I once had a boyfriend that had a temper, and used to smooth it out so he’d be more mellow. Once I stayed over at a friends house and he lost his shit at a video game and trashed our bedroom.”

“You manipulated his emotions?” Ida asked, incredulous.

“He was so nice when he wasn’t angry!” Alice said. “Almost perfect! I only did it—“ She suddenly sighed. “Okay, I did it to make life easier. I was young and dumb.”

“The point stands that when you change someones mental or emotional state, the emotions don’t really go anywhere,” I got the conversation back on track. “You just kind of cover them up for a bit. So when the wards go down, you’re going to have a lot of people suddenly able to feel what they are actually feeling for the first time in however long they’ve been here. Prisoners and pirates alike.”

Ida’s eyes widened. “Chaos,” she said.

I nodded. “A clusterfuck,” I finished up the stick and brought out the other one I had nabbed, repeating the process on it. “And speaking of; did you get any intel on when they’re going to do the sacrifice?”

“Sometime after midnight,” Ida said. “They were moving supplies to the ziggurat, something about the position of the moon.”

I took a deep, relieved breath. “We got time, then,” I noticed Alice was staring at my hands while I worked. “Something wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, just… You’re moving so fast.”

I paused what I was doing. Am I being fast? I resumed my carving, using my index claw, and watched my hands work as I carved into the wood. It didn’t seem that fast. I glanced down at the other stick I had carved, a branch about the width of my wrist, and looking at the designs on it—oh. I had covered the entire stick in complex designs in a few minutes. I’m not a particularly slow artist when I’m working, but I distinctly remember it taking five to ten minutes to put a ward on a hand-sized piece of paper when the pirates first attacked the ship.

I guess the things I had implemented to make me seem normal were holding me back in more ways that one? Well, whatever. Glad all this improvement was happening before I went and entered a death match on top of a pirate ziggurat.

We hammered out some finer details of the nights plan and split up to finish the final preparations. I needed to enchant at least a dozen more sticks, Ida needed to inform those she could that shit was about to hit the fan without alerting the warlocks to our plans, and Alice was setting up her own “surprise” for the warlocks.

For the last week—hell, for the last eight years, I’ve just been reacting. Running. Not anymore. Tonight, I am going to be the one ruining plans and lives. Tonight, I am going to fuck shit UP. These pirate warlock pricks picked on the wrong asshole.

Because I didn’t learn magic by doing it right. I learned magic by fucking up. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s ruin magic. The only trick is surviving it.