The poachers’ vessel rose from the fog like a stain, rigging strung with mermaid-scale nets and occult sigils shimmering faintly under torchlight. Rage surged through me.
I had been like them once. But now—
I was the consequence.
Marisol—feral and gleaming with salt spray—grinned at my side. “They’ll never see us coming.”
“Good.”
We hit hard. This was more than revenge—it was necessity. Part of the curse. The hunger haunting us didn’t crave food or wine or warmth. It wanted something darker.
Blood. Souls. Magic. Life-force.
We hadn’t named it, but we all felt it—tightening around our ribs when we went too long without a kill. Poachers were easy targets. Hated by the sea. Already damned. Their deaths fed something in the curse, sated it just enough to keep us breathing. We didn’t just hunt them to cleanse the waters. We hunted them to survive.
The Black Marrowmoved like a phantom, slicing through fog. The stench of salt, rum, and fear clung to the air as we boarded.
My boots hit the enemy deck with a wet thud—slick with blood, oil, and seawater. Chaos erupted.
Screams tore through the dark. Steel met steel. Gunfire cracked the night sky.
The air reeked of sulfur and char. A musket fired inches from my head—the shot skimming past, hot as a branding iron.
I didn’t flinch.
I met the first poacher with a backhand slash—blade catching jawbone and severing it clean. Blood sprayed, hot and immediate. Another lunged, snarling, but I drove my shoulder into his gut and threw him into the waves without looking back.
Around me, Garen’s sword rose and fell with brutal precision. Marisol danced through smoke, twin blades, a blur of silver.
One man turned to run—only to be dragged screaming into the sea by spectral hands that rose, glistening, from the surf.
The others didn’t flinch.
Each of us had beenblessedin our own way. All of us were touched by the same curse.
A harpoon slammed beside me, splintering a crate in a spray of bone and seaweed. Flames licked up the sails. Nets snared legs and throats alike.
Blood sluiced through the deck’s grooves.
The poachers died gasping—choked by their own greed, tangled in the very traps they’d set.
And the ocean roared for them—louder than cannon fire. Louder than screams.
Once the poachers were dead or dying, my crew began picking the wreck clean—stripping weapons, coin, and any occult trinkets. We were still pirates, after all.
Ironic, really, punishing them for what we once were. But we had rules.
We didn’t trade in scales. We didn’t desecrate the sea.
While the crew looted, I felt it—a strange pull beneath my boots. Not hunger. Not greed.
Something else. Something older. Something stronger.
At first it was only a hum—a soft vibration beneath my feet, like the ship itself had begun to whisper. I followed the sound, drawn deeper into the shattered hold by something I couldn’t explain. The scent of charred wood and damp salt thickened with every step. Crates lay splintered. Cargo scattered. Blood still warm on the walls.
And at the center of it all—nestled in the wreckage like a wound in the world—was a shard of quartz.
Jagged and crystalline, its edges raw, appeared freshly broken. It pulsed with a light not meant for this world—slow and deliberate, like the heartbeat of a beast waiting in the dark. Theglow shifted: silvery-blue, then violet, then bone-white—colors that clawed at the back of my mind with half-formed memories.
