“What is this?” Gypsy asks, leaning forward, her voice barely above a whisper. It’s like the sea itself has claimed her, whispering promises only she can hear—a language that’snever spoken to me. There’s something reckless in her gaze, a pull toward the forbidden that would make even the damned hesitate.
As much as I resent it, I can see why the goddess chose her. Gypsy’s curiosity and drive fit the task. It’s not mere impulse; it’s in her bones.
Ridley remains silent, allowing me to speak first. “It’s a map of the seas,” I say, watching her trace the cryptic symbols etched along the edges.
“No.” She shakes her head, disbelief tugging at her mouth. “I know what the seas look like. This… this is something else entirely. What are all these strange symbols, these circles? You’ve marked them everywhere…”
Ridley steps closer, his fingers grazing the map’s surface. “This,” he says, his voice low and intense, “isn’t just any map of the seas. It’s a map of all the places of power we’ve found.” His eyes flick across the various marks and annotations, like he’s reliving each discovery. “Places where the Trials have started and ended, where the keys were seen… where sailors met their end in ways no one could explain. The gateways.”
Yes. The gateways. The magical, invisible doors that lead to the pieces of the Lady’s realm...
Gypsy’s eyes widen, her gaze flicking between us with a mixture of awe and skepticism. “Wait a minute,” she says, half-laughing, as if she can’t quite believe her ears. “I don’t think we’re speaking the same language here.” She blinks, shaking her head. “What do you mean,gateways?”
Ridley’s eyes darken. I know what he’s about to say—still, I find myself holding my breath, bracing against the weight of it.
Back when I was young and still staggeringly naive, I’d stumbled across a journal buried in the stash of a sea witch. It was weatherworn and brittle, but I read it cover to cover. Inside, I found accounts of gateways hidden within the sea, ancientand terrifying. Ever since then, the ocean has felt like one vast, fluid monster, its calmness a mere disguise for the beasts it harbors, coiled and waiting. After reading about the gateways, I understood that the ocean was not a single monster but teeming with other creatures, hidden behind unseen gates, biding their time like soldiers waiting for the call to war.
Perhaps even that’s what they were from the start—fighters, brought to life by the goddess herself.
They exist. Alongside other things.
“Gateways,” Ridley repeats. “They are portals to other realms, places where the fabric separating our world from others is thin. Think of them as fields with their own magnetic forces, forces that don’t conform to anything we know.” His gaze turns distant. “The shipwreck where you all met—it’s one of these places. It doesn’t belong to this world as we know it. It has its own reality, its own set of rules.”
Gypsy stares at him, unblinking, the disbelief clear on her face. Clearly, to her, Ridley’s words sound like riddles or black magic—a territory she refuses to entertain. Even Zayan, who’s rarely silent, seems to have lost his voice, the usual gleam of his defiance fading as he absorbs the weight of Ridley’s words. Vinicola, though, seems to be the only one who takes it fairly well.
Finally, Gypsy speaks, her voice barely a whisper. “Then how did we get there? Zayan, Vini, and I?” She shakes her head, the lines in her brow deepening. “How did we cross into… another world?”
Ridley looks at her knowingly. “The compass led you through the gate. Or so we assume.”
“But there was no gate,” she protests. “There was only open sea. Nothing strange. Not even a storm.”
Ridley nods, a flicker of understanding in his eyes.
Of course, he does. When I was just a kid, a brat too angry for my own good, I told him I’d travel through every damned realm until I made the goddess pay. He’d looked at me then with the same expression I see in Gypsy now—a mixture of pity and disbelief, waiting for me to come to my senses.
Back then, he didn’t have proof, not a shred, to believe in me. I was just a kid, half-mad from grief and hunger for revenge I wasn’t conscious about. And I knew he thought me a fool—a sick young lad clutching at an impossible dream to dull the ache of losing his parents.
Still, he never said a word against it. Maybe he thought I’d break if he told me the truth. Or maybe, in that quiet way of his, he chose to be loyal even to a boy gone mad.
It’s only when we crossed the first gateway that he believed me. And when he did, there was no going back.
“That’s the nature of the gateways,” he says now, his thin, wrinkled lips spreading into a faint, lopsided smile. “They don’t make themselves known. To most, they’re just another stretch of water, same as any other. But for some, there’s a shift—a strange current, a note in the wind, the sea sounding offbeat, just enough to make the hair on your neck stand up.” He pauses, glancing my way. “Young master and I, we can sense it. It’s faint. A hunch, really. But it’s there.”
“Gypsy can sense it too,” I point out, remembering how she heard the compass buzz the moment the key drew near. I recall the way she and I both dropped, struck by that awful headache at the shipwreck’s summit.
“Oh.” Ridley’s brows lift slightly, though I can’t tell if he’s pleased or unsettled. Probably a bit of both. Sensitivity’s not always a good thing.
Being sensitive to the mystical—it’s a double-edged sword. Sure, it heightens the senses, makes you sharper when it comes to noticing the strange currents of the sea, the moments whenThe Lady stops her silent watch and decides to get involved. For some, it grants a kind of perception, an edge that could be life-saving.
But The Lady isn’t just some force to be felt and ignored. When someone senses her presence, feels that shift in the world, she’s aware of it. The Lady sees it all, and those she sees… she remembers. To catch the eye of an unstable goddess, one who is as likely to drag you under as she is to let you be, is no gift. It’s a curse that comes with a thousand unknowns.
And in our group? We’ve already got three marked by that curse.
“So, you’re saying there are hidden places all over the waters—places people have just been sailing through, clueless?” Vinicola asks.
“Exactly,” Ridley confirms. “That’s why some sailors vanish. Others get trapped, drifting through her waters with no hope of getting out.”
“That’s… that’s a mad stroke of bad luck,” Vini mutters, shaking his head in disbelief.
