“What can you tell us about the pirates?” Cai took the opportunity to begin the investigation. Thankfully, Cain didn’t immediately reject their offer of help nor try to sorrowfully explain that their journey was for nothing and that the pirates had gone away. Instead, he seemed to pause.
“Ah,” Cain hesitated. “Let me get my brother, Dai. He knows a lot more about the situation than I do, being the skipper of that merchant ship himself,” he pointed out one of the five boats docked up at the yard and smiled briefly. “One moment.”
Five minutes of standing in the uncomfortable heat later, and Cain returned with a new man in tow. The newcomer was far younger than the weathered dockyard keeper, but the similarities between the two were unmistakeable. “Dai Elisedd,” the man spoke in a light tone, and though he had initially struck Arwen as stern looking, his face smoothed into a much friendlier visage when he spoke. “I never thought I’d ever have the pleasure of meeting your Teyrn. It’s an honour.”
“Thank you,” Arwen smiled gracelessly as she studied the newcomer, Dai. He was taller than his older brother, sporting a sleeveless white shirt that showed off his defined muscles and plain brown trousers. He had short blonde hair and blue eyes adorning his olive skin. Handsome. About mid-twenties of age.
“I run the Ysbrydfarer,” Dai gestured towards his boat. “Usually, I’m doing supply runs from the City of Stupor over to Glannau, with some trading on the side of course, but lately I’m too afraid to set sail for fear of those pirates- you know how it is.”
Arwen did not know how it was, but she immediately liked Dai’s casual friendliness. “City of Stupor?” Owen frowned.
“Ah,” Dai dragged the word out. “It’s a limerick the sailors throw around. Everyone there gets, you know,” he made a chugging motion with his hand, “at night, so it’s usually always full of drunks running around in a, guess what? Stupor. Hence the nickname.”
“It’s now known as Cyfoeth Port,” Cai further elaborated in case Owen didn’t quite grasp Dai’s explanation. “Though I think it used to be called Addien Hamlet way back when, until the trading route with Lontaine was opened overseas.”
Dai pointed an appreciative finger at the radiant knight. “That’s right. Once your Teryn’s great great grandfather or whatever got those uptight bastards in Lontaine to start trading, the Addien Hamlet was transformed into the port it now is. I used to ship their wares to Glannau- man do I miss their goods- it was just luxury items, you know? The real bother is the food and materials, but those pirates take it all, no matter what.”
Arwen had learnt of Lontaine from her father, though she thankfully never had to learn their complicated Romanti dialect. Lontaine were an overseas island territory located five days south of Cyfoeth which operated under their own Kingdom and royal system, though they used a highly similar procedure to Cyfoeth. Her father never had run out of stories over their infamous rudeness and distrust of anyone not originating from their large island. Furthermore, their insistence that only Lontaine citizens could cross to and from Cyfoeth from their country was always a sore point for King Blayney, however it did ensure a positive relationship without any drama, albeit a highly secretive one. News from the island Kingdom, therefore, was sparse, however the Princess had heard whispers that they had been struggling against a costly civil war for the past few years. “So,” Gwyn urged the conversation to that of their task. “What has been happening with these pirates?”
The happy-go-lucky demeanour instantly stiffened. Gone was the smiles and light tone, instead replaced by an intense look and a low voice. “Can I trust you guys not to instantly say I’m crazy?”
Arwen shot Cain a baffled look, but the man had a tight expression of his own. “I know it’ll sound insane,” he explained to her, “but please hear my brother out. He would never lie and has a full crew of men who share his story.”
“Alright,” Cai cautiously regarded the taller brother. “What’s going on?”
“First of all,” Dai rose his hands in a supplicating gesture, “I didn’t want to lie or underreport the situation to the King, but I thought if I told Cyfoeth the full story that no one would listen to me.”
A surprisingly similar situation to what Wynn was in whilst they were at Alaru. But why all the concern? Arwen was confused, whilst Cai simply motioned for the man to continue.
“Okay,” Dai sighed deeply. “What we’re dealing with? These guys… the pirates, I don’t think they’re of this world.”
Arwen just stared. Her question rolled out of her mouth in almost perfect synchrony with Gwyn’s “What?”
“Please bear with my brother, your Teyrn grace,” Cain pleaded on his younger sibling’s behalf.
“Some weird shit always happens to the ships when they get robbed,” Dai elaborated. “Always, like five or so minutes before we pass out, the wind picks up big! Like, from gently pushing us towards Glannau to a oh-my-Gods-we-can-barely-move type of gusts, out of nowhere. Then, we see another boat, an exotic looking one from memory, pull up aside us. And it’s never even affected by the wind! Our sails are flapping away, the masts creaking and doors slamming, yet the pirate ship never seems to be affected.”
“Hang on,” Gwyn held up a hand. “Minutes before you pass out?”
Dai waved him off hurriedly. “I’ll get to that, one second. Look, this pirate ship pulls up, and we all think hey! We’re about to get boarded and mugged, but every single time the same thing happens to every single merchant vessel and even passenger boats. The pirate ship draws close, until it’s pretty much touching ours, and then… nothing.”
“Nothing?” Cai cocked his head. He had a hand on his chin as he considered the man’s story.
“Not a peep.” Dai grew pale as he drew himself more and more into his own tale. “The wind dies down at this stage, but it’s unnatural. The air is so dead that both of the ships just sort of float uselessly in the ocean, and in Pwynt estuary, there’s never stale air- ever. When it happened to me, it took a second to realise no one was coming on, so we instead hopped over to the pirate ship to take a look. What we say, I’ll never forget. The pirate ship was in perfect condition- not even a scratch on it, but the entire crew- a good fifteen men and a single woman- lay dead.”
“They were all dead?” Gwyn sounded like he didn’t quite understand what he was hearing. Arwen herself felt the same, for that matter. In fact, there was that doubt creeping into her head again, promising that she wouldn’t be able to help them again. She wished it would just go away.
“Dead!” Dai confirmed with a near-fervent nod. “And I’m not talking about sliced and diced dead, but men sat at the table with bowls of food dead. Playing board games, relaxing on their hammock, walking around the ship, two corpses were even hugging! It’s as if something instantaneously just slaughtered the entire crew all at once.”
“What did you do?”
But Dai ignored the question. “Get this… when I looked at one of the bodies, it was completely intact. No wounds, no blood, not even a scrape or any sign of disease. They all looked well fed, and the ship was well stocked with food and water, so they couldn’t have just starved or anything. The point is, there is no indication that anything would’ve killed them, but there they laid. And… oh Gods… and when I touched the body, it was still warm. Still… warm. As if they had just died literal moments ago.”
Cain lay a supporting hand on his brother, who had grown more and more upset as he recalled his incident with the supposed pirates. “What my brother tells me,” he opted to finish Dai’s story for him while the distressed man recovered, “is that about a minute later, the entirety of his shipmates and him, all pass out at once. When they next wake, they’re back on their own ship, everything’s back to normal and no sign that the pirate ship was even there in the first place… except that the entirety of the goods they were transporting were missing.”
“Any injuries?” Cai pressed for more details.
“None,” Dai shook his head emphatically. “If our cargo hadn’t had gone missing, I’d have been sure I had something a little too strong to drink or something. But then I spoke to my crew, and they were all like; hey, I remember all that too, so it’s like some sort of shared hallucination or something crazy, but it happened! It must have!”
“The ship,” Gwyn caught the men’s attention. “The one that pulled up beside you, did it have any markings that could be used to identify it? You said it looked exotic… how so?”
Dai put a hand to his head and ran it across his hair as he answered. “Uh, no markings or anything. It definitely wasn’t a Cyfoethian ship, and while I don’t have much experience with Helvetian vessels, I don’t think it was one of those either. It had faded yellow paintings in these sorts of tribal-like lines across the hull, and its masts needed a bit of repairing, too.”
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“Right,” Arwen made a rash decision and pulled the Light Gem from her pocket, making a show of it in front of the two brothers. It was time to start being useful to them. “This lets me view one of your memories for a short period of time, but I want your consent before I use it on you.”
Cain peered at the artifact in suspicion. “What is that?”
“It’s an artifact,” Arwen decided honesty was the best policy. “It’s property of the Cyfoethian royal family and a tool I have been given express permission to use by King Blayney himself.”
Cain appeared wary of the artifact, but Dai was more fascinating than anything. “A genuine artifact?”
Arwen smiled humourlessly. “You don’t have any regrets over dead relatives, do you?”
-cut-
DAI ELISEDD WHISTLED to himself whilst at the helm of his prized possession, the Ysbrydfarer. It was a good day, the sun was shining beautifully in its summer powered state, basking the entirety of Pwynt estuary in a soothing glow, sending sharp glares of light flashing in Dai’s eyes as the Ysbrydfarer gently crested the smooth waves. In just a few more hours, he’d dock at Glannau and could finally reunite with his brother and nieces. His men were in good spirits, too, looking forward to seeing their wives and children once more after nine days of travelling overseas.
A small part of Dai worried over the rumours of pirates that had been spreading for the past month and a half. It had gotten so bad that many of the merchant vessels simply refused to leave port and trade. What was most concerning was how cagey the victims of these robberies were, for none really spoke about their experiences. Dai had assumed these pirates did something pretty horrible to them, but he had his doubts. They were all uninjured, after all.
Still, more business for him. Dai had been largely absent from the supply route from the City of Stupor ever since the Ysbrydfarer had to undergo repairs, a costly and extended process that required a shipwright to travel from Cyfoeth all of the way to Glannau by foot. The village really did need their own shipwright for repair jobs, since anything that spanned beyond basic maintenance was outside of anyone’s expertise over here. Glannau had an annoying tendency, Dai grumped to himself, to jury-rig random pieces of scrap together when it came to their boats.
As the sandy hills of Continent’s Beach’s dunes began to smooth out into the flat terrain typical for Continent Garden, one of his men called out that he had spotted a ship up ahead. Dai followed the crewmate’s outstretched arm and spotted the ship in question, heading down the estuary and towards them.
Literally directly. Dai frowned. They’d have to steer course soon else they would risk colliding with the Ysbrydfarer… the last thing he wanted was another three weeks aground because of repairs.
As the ship drew closer, Dai begun to grow more and more concerned. It wasn’t a Cyfoethian ship, and it hailed no flag nor markings on its sails. Its painted pale-yellow colour seemed old and flaky from even afar, and the sails were frayed at the edges. The mystery ship clearly needed some maintenance work.
Almost as if sensing Dai’s mood, the wind started to grow turbulent. The sails began to flap inwards as the ship lurched forward, Dai struggling to maintain balance as the sudden change in direction began to slow the Ysbrydfarer down. “Get the sails into the wind!” Dai yelled at his crewmates, but they were already on it, reducing the number of sails to account for the sudden intensity of the winds whilst angling the remaining sails and pulling the bowlines taught.
Dai expected the Ysbrydfarer to begin picking up speed, but instead it continued to slow as the wind began to harshly slap at his face from another direction. His crewmates sensed this too, and immediately adjusted the sails once more, yet the moment they were pointed into the wind, it changed direction and pushed against the Ysbrydfarer’s hull. As they slowly crawled to a halt, Dai became fearful. At this rate, they’d start going backwards! No matter how they tried to angle the sails, the wind simply changed direction as if it knew it was trying to ground the Ysbrydfarer to a halt.
Meanwhile, the mysterious vessel drew closer and closer, seemingly unaffected by the insane wind that was now howling in Dai’s ears, drowning out his yells and that of his crew’s. By this point, the Ysbrydfarer had completely stilled, heralding the wind to start blowing in completely random directions before altering its direction almost instantaneously in sharp gusts that pushed him around like a ragdoll.
The other vessel drew even closer. By now, Dai could see the crew working along its hull, except… they weren’t any. There was not a single soul Dai could sight. It was as if the mystery ship was steering itself into the Ysbrydfarer.
“We need to move!” Dai screamed; his voice completely snatched from him in the howling winds. “It’s going to collide!”
But no one heard him in the panic. Even as the wind assailed him in gusting blows, the crewless vessel slowly meandered its way over. It drew closer, and closer, and closer, and all Dai could do was watch as it calmly angled itself to pull up to the starboard side of the Ysbrydfarer- a typical boarding manoeuvre for pirates. Dai couldn’t hear his own yells at this point, so he simply stood paralysed as the ship gently pulled alongside as if coasting in a lovely spring breeze instead of the gale-force winds that was surrounding the Ysbrydfarer in its trapping embrace.
It slowed down, calmly, gently, and then stopped.
Instantly, the wind broke, sending Dai sprawling onto the floor. The cries of his crewmates below confirmed the same thing had happened to them, and Dai immediately sprang to his feet and yelled orders. “Grab the weapons! Secure of wares! Prepare for boarding!”
Even in their dazed and confused states, his crew dutifully rushed to follow his orders, but Dai remained frozen- an unsettling feeling overcoming him. The air had gone still, as in completely so. The summer wind that had been propelling the Ysbrydfarer forward just minutes before was gone. It was as if Dai and his crew had been caught in an empty space.
Both the Ysbrydfarer and the crewless vessel remained eerily still. Over the sounds of his crew scrambling for their weapons, the small waves of the ocean gently sloshed against the boats, sending them into a calming listing motion to and fro. Even ignoring how the mystery ship’s crew managed to perform a boarding manoeuvre when absent from the helm at the very least, Dai would’ve expected a band of pirates to have rushed out by now. Why give him time to prepare?
It was then that Dai saw the first body.
There, on the crewless ship, just on the port side, by the mainmast. It was definitely the corpse of a human male! It was just lying there, motionless.
“Captain,” Dai’s first mate ran up to the helm. “We’re all armed and ready, sir.”
“Tell them to stay by the wares,” Dai muttered distractedly. “I think something’s gone horribly wrong.”
“Sir?”
Dai walked past his first mate with a light tap on the shoulder. “Wait here.”
He climbed down from the helm and onto the main deck, where the adjacent crewless ship awaited. Above him, the sky shone brightly under the bright sun, the puffy clouds above lazily drifting northward without a care in the world. It was silent, so very silent, and all Dai could hear was the water greedily lapping at the ships and the creaking of wood underneath his feet as he walked.
There was a small gap between the two ships, only about a half metre or so. Dai climbed onto the railing and made the jump, landing firmly on the deck of the opposing ship. He paused, as if anticipating the pirates to burst forth from the lower deck with their cutlasses and broadswords drawn. Instead, the same eerie silence awaited him.
Now that he was on the vessel itself, Dai spied a couple more bodies strewn around the upper decks. On the ship’s port side, on the stairs to the poop deck, a body lay half-way up as if the man had died whilst climbing them. Another corpse lay face-down on the bowside area of the ship. Dai approached the initial one he had spotted on the main deck.
The body was wearing ragged, unwashed clothing stained with dirt and other bits of grime with unknown origin. Black hair lay completely still in the dead air atop an olive-skinned head. Dark green eyes stared lifelessly into the sun, and the corpse’s mouth was tensed in a look of concentration. Weirdly, Dai ascertained, there was no blood or any sign of injury on the body. Whilst torn and filthy, his clothing was not marred by any blades nor were there any limbs twisted out of place or any other indication of what could’ve killed the poor soul.
A thud behind Dai caused him to whirl. But it was just his first mate. “Is that a body?”
Dai nodded grimly. “There’s more around.”
“What killed them?” he sounded uneasy.
“I don’t know,” Dai shrugged. “I don’t know…”
They checked out the other bodies and found the same signs, or lack thereof. When Dai grabbed the arm of the body by the stairs to check for a pulse, he reared his hand back in surprise.
The first-mate stiffened behind him. “What happened?”
“It’s warm,” Dai muttered, reaffirming his grip on the body’s wrist. No pulse, but sure enough, the skin was warm and soft. “They’re not even cold yet.”
Dai decided to call upon the rest of his crew, who boarded the crewless vessel with their rapiers in tow. Immediately, they fanned out and began to investigate the ship, checking the ropes and even over the side in case someone was hanging off of the boat. Whilst they searched, Dai and his first-mate snuck quietly into the lower deck and began to investigate.
Like the Ysbrydfarer, the lower deck was comprised of a starboard side hallway leading into multiple rooms. Strewn around the place were multiple bodies of men. Some lay in bed, others sat at tables hunched over board games and food bowls, two were even hugging on the floor, as if struck by some unseen force and fallen during their brotherly embrace.
“Captain!” a voice from the main deck caused Dai to jump. “We found something… uh, interesting!”
Dai and his first mate exchanged a furtive glance. “On my way!”
What their men wanted to show them was inside the cabin underneath the poop deck. There lay a surprisingly luxurious suite of furniture and tables, with glassware and paintings decorating the small room. A windowed viewport out of the aft gave way to a desirable ocean view, but it was the corpse beneath the window that immediately caught Dai’s attention.
Sat upright on a velvet-coloured couch was an olive-skinned woman with a wispy frame, confined within a flowing grey dress adorned with laces and frills that left her shoulders bare. Flowing black hair reached down to her shoulders behind her narrow face and thin brown eyes which gazed almost lovingly at a glittering black orb cradled in her lifeless hands.
The orb seemed to be made of glass, but it was hard to tell by the way it refracted the light around its circumference, creating an almost dizzying effect if Dai looked at it too long. Within its pitch-black depths were glittering pinpricks of white light, as if the orb had sectioned out a small portion of space and its stars to fill itself with. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” one of his crew members answered, sounding baffled. “I haven’t touched it or anything. All I did was call you when I saw it.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Dai muttered. He slowly reached out an arm to it, his hand snaking ever so close to its surface. His outstretched finger crawled closer and closer, until a cold sensation filled his fingertip as it made contact with the surface.
The memory abruptly ended, and Arwen found herself stood facing the curious eyes of Dai and his brother.