The pain of landfall isn’t just agony—it’s annihilation. Air burns like acid in my lungs. Sunlight sears straight through my flesh. Skin blisters. Veins boil with salt and silver. The very magic that sustains me rejects the memory of what I was before.
And gods know I’ve tried.
I’ve set foot on sand and soil until my bones turned to fire, until smoke curled from my palms like the ghost of some forgotten man. I’ve downed potions brewed from drowned stars, traded centuries for a taste of daylight. I’ve bartered with witches who spoke to the dead and bled moons dry.
None of it worked. Nothing is strong enough to unmake what the sea has claimed.
I had chased hope before. Relics dredged from sunken temples. Blood bargains whispered in dead languages. Every promise ended the same way—with pain, ash, and the sea laughing at my desperation.
And yet I remain. Hunting. Searching. Clawing for a way out, even if it means bleeding on every shore I’ll never touch. There’s a restlessness in me the ocean can’t soothe—a tide surging in my chest, hungry and unrelenting. I don’t know what it wants.
Freedom, maybe.
Or something darker. But it’s growing louder.
Garen’s voice cracked through my thoughts like a whip.
My quartermaster—bald, broad-shouldered, with a thick salt-and-pepper beard and eyes like storm-worn stone—was wild-eyed, steady-handed, and the only one on this damned ship who could match my cynicism blow for blow. Stoic to a fault, he stood with arms crossed and that infuriating smirk firmly in place.
“A cap'n should be brooding, not pensive,” he said. “What’s got ye tangled up?”
“Just wondering why I keep you around,” I muttered. “Ye’d miss me.”
“Perhaps. Or maybe I’d enjoy the silence. You snore like a dying seal, Garen.”
He laughed—steady and low. The crew glanced over, reassured by the familiarity.
That’s what they needed to see: their captain unshaken. Unflinching. Immortal.
Charisma is good currency on a cursed ship—and I spent mine like coin. I gave them the smirk, the wink, the devil-may-care tilt of the head. Anything to keep them from seeing the cracks.
Let them believe I was fearless. Saints knew I used to be.
Inside, the gnawing never stopped. Not just guilt. Not just rage. Something colder.
A fear I couldn’t name—the kind that makes you wonder whether you’re still a man, or only the monster.
Ahead, the Veil loomed—a bruise on the horizon where sea and sky bled into each other. They said it marked the edge of the living world, where the ocean chose who passed and who perished. But I’d heard older tales too.
Whispers of drowned gods sealed behind that curtain of mist. Of ships that vanished with their shadows still screaming.
Sailors claimed time slipped sideways near it. That memories twist if you stare too long.
I didn’t believe in superstition.
But the Veil made even me hesitate.
The poachers gathered there too—filthy bastards chasing blood and coin. They said the Veil’s waters were thick with rare beasts, scales that glow like lanterns and bones that sang when burned. The kind of prizes that fetched fortunes in black markets and noble courts alike.
The closer you get to the Veil, the stranger the catches.
And the fewer men who come back to brag about them.
“Prepare the men,” I told Garen. “Sober enough to fight. And tell Marisol no bloodletting rituals until after we all board this time.”
He nodded and vanished into the mist, leaving me alone with the wind and the creaking of the ship’s bones.
Then came the scent of blood—thick. Metallic. Necessary.
