Cracked. Quiet. Spent.
A relic that had once sung of power, now nothing but a shell and emptiness.
And I thought of Edmonds—of his mother’s tears, of his father’s legacy, of a boy who had been taught that the deep was the only truth worth chasing.
He had died with nothing.
No song.
No legacy.
No one is holding his hand.
A lesson carved into wet wood and blood.
Obsession and vengeance were two sides of the same coin. The difference was love—love that saidstop, love that saidenough, love that anchored a person to life instead of letting them sink into purpose until it became a coffin.
I pressed my hand to my wrist through my sleeve.
The black ink serpent lay quiet beneath my skin.
Not gone.
Never gone.
A reminder.
We could fulfill bargains, but we could not outrun the kind of person we might become if we let the sea take everything without fighting to keep what mattered.
Bash turned us away from the body. “Come on,” he said softly.
Dilly wiped her face with the back of her hand, jaw clenched like she was forcing herself to stay upright.
Emille exhaled shakily and followed.
Kit stumbled, shoulders shaking.
We walked into Angra do Heroísmo beneath the rain and the heavy sky, carrying our grief like a second skin, carrying the weight of what we’d done and what we’d survived.
No one looked twice at the dead man holding a broken shell lying on the docks. Not the pirates or the locals. Some things were better left quiet. Some questions were better off never asked. Edmonds would fade from history–a missing person eventually given up on by the Navy.
The rest of us–well, it was up to us to bear the weight of what we’d done.
So it went for the living. To always carry the dead without letting them bury themselves.
Epilogue: One Day
One Year Later
Exploration is not merely the act of venturing into unknown waters, but the relentless human insistence that wonder is worth the risk. The sea changes all who touch it—yet those who return do so carrying new worlds within them.
— The Mysterious Deep: A Comprehensive Understanding
The Wraith no longer cut through the waves like a blade—she glided.
Her black hull had been scrubbed, tarred, and reinforced, her sails repaired and dyed a storm-grey that caught the light like iron. What once had been gun ports now held brass-capped instruments: sounding tubes, barometers, telescopes, and anungainly device Emille insisted on callingthe bathymetric chamber, though it was really a glorified weighted bucket. The figurehead Bash carved years ago—a snarling wraith with a kraken’s tentacles—remained, but someone, Dilly, had added a garland of dried kelp around its neck “for luck.”
No one on board had objected.
