The fire snapped as if it remembered something. Around it, boots steamed, blankets clung to damp shoulders, and breath came out in fog. No one said much.
Until the boy broke the silence."Old man," he muttered, "you ever seen madness? Like… the kind that don't come back?"
The old man didn't look up at first. Just rubbed the rim of his cup, like he was remembering the shape of a thought. Then he said:
"Seen it? Boy, I lived beside it. Cleaned its boots. Slept under its roof. Madness ain't something you see. It's something you fall into."
The boy tilted his head. "So… what makes a man break like that?"
The old man stared into the fire now, its glow cutting sharp lines across his face.
"It is said men kill for wealth," he said slowly, almost to himself. "But wealth's just the name they give it after. What truly drives a man to spill blood… is love. Love twisted, love lost… love turned bitter in the gut. That's what makes the knife sing."
A hush settled again — heavier now.
Then he cleared his throat."There was a boy once… younger than you, maybe. Cleaned the bellies of ships with saltwater and vinegar. Lived quieter than most ghosts."He tapped his chest once."'Til he found something that remembered more than he did. A gem, they say. Full of voices. Stories. Sins."
He leaned closer, lowering his voice like it might carry too far."This ain't no tale for children. But since none of us are that anymore… I'll tell you what I know."
The old man tossed a bit more kindling into the fire. Sparks leapt, then vanished into the black above.
"They called him Naru, though names like that barely mattered down in the docks. He was skin and bone, more salt than flesh, and the belly of a ship was where he belonged — scraping barnacles, patching mold, coughing up seawater when it got too deep."
A few of the listeners shifted, some drawing their blankets tighter, others leaning forward, hungry for the tale.
"Naru didn't speak much. Didn't need to. Work was his voice. Pain was his song. The other workers—mean bastards—left him be. Maybe they saw something they didn't want to understand. Maybe they just didn't see him at all."
The old man paused, swirling what little liquid was left in his tin cup.
"Then one day, scraping deep beneath a rusted hull… his brush struck something that wasn't metal or rot. It rang. Low and strange. Like it had been waiting."
A hush fell again, thick as the mist curling through the trees.
"It weren't no gem, not really. Too dark for that. Too… warm. He touched it, and the sea stopped roaring. The world twisted. He said it whispered to him. Not in words — in memories that weren't his."
The boy beside the fire swallowed hard.
"And that's when the veil began to thin," the old man said, voice almost gone. "When the world started to remember him back."
The sky hung low over the port city of Vareth, bruised with the colors of morning toil — rust, gray, and the slow bleed of light through thick fog. Cranes moaned as boat lifts creaked skyward, their rusted chains groaning under the weight of merchant vessels and fishing hulks.
Naru stood by one such lift, a length of rope wound around his wrist, gloved hands braced on the rig crank. His back ached from the cold. Salt bit at his cracked lips. But his eyes were still, calm — the kind of quiet that doesn't come from peace, but from exhaustion made sacred over years.
He let the winch go slack for a moment and leaned against the hull. Steam rose from the docks, men's curses floated over the clank of steel, and seagulls barked overhead like they were owed something.
Then came the voice — familiar, dry, a little too awake for this hour.
"Busy like rats in a larder again, huh?"
Jarn, all shoulder and swagger, sauntered up with a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes. He tossed a bundle of rope onto the planks and exhaled sharply.
"If they keep this pace up, we'll be owed more than coin. A whole damn distillery. Maybe a woman or two to help drink it."
Naru let a tired chuckle out through his nose. "As if."
"Yeah," Jarn snorted. "As if."
Their laughter was thin, but honest — the kind you learn to carve out of hard days. It didn't last long.
A scream cut across the harbor — short, sharp, and real enough to stop everything.
They turned.
On the far side of the pier, the crowd had already begun to swell — laborers, deckhands, onlookers. Human noise built like rising water.
Naru and Jarn didn't speak. They just moved.
They pushed through bodies slick with sweat and rain, through curses and muttered prayers, until they reached the edge of the circle. And then they saw it.
A man — or what had been — lay beneath the twisted rig of a failed lift. His body was a ruin of pulp and broken angles. One leg twitched as if it hadn't gotten the message yet. His head… wasn't there anymore. Or rather, it was there, but spread like a broken melon across the dock. Bits of red floated in the harbor, and gulls circled greedily overhead, pecking without shame.
"Gods," Jarn rasped, turning away. He doubled over and heaved, body wracked by dry sobs. His eyes glistened.
Naru didn't move.
He couldn't.
He knew that cap. Knew the belt with the missing loop. Knew the whistle that hung from the man's hip.
That was Torrin.
Torrin, who used to steal fruit when they were kids. Torrin, who had pulled them from the gutters with hands calloused from kindness. Torrin, who made him laugh like the world wasn't eating them piece by piece.
Gone. Just… gone.
Naru's stomach didn't twist. His throat didn't tighten. But something colder than sorrow settled in his chest — like the water had risen inside him, and the tide wasn't going out.
He stood there, long after the crowd began to disperse, long after the gulls had been shooed away.
And that was the last time anything made sense.
They didn't talk about the body.
There was nothing left to say.
Instead, they drank — deep, bitter pulls from bottles that tasted like rot and escape. They sat slumped against the back wall of the rusted warehouse, heads tilted toward the stars they couldn't see, letting silence stitch up the screaming in their minds.
Torrin was gone.
The only thing either of them had that resembled a father — a man who pulled them from gutter filth and taught them how to stand upright in a world that beat men down for fun — ripped away in a flash of steel and gravity.
Now there was only drink. And grief. And whatever was waiting the next morning.
And they met that morning, gray-eyed and slack-limbed, stinking of old sweat and stale liquor, but standing.
Jarn was the first to speak. His voice cracked like a rope pulled too tight.
"We gotta bury him right."
Naru didn't answer at first. Just stared at the ground, then nodded once. Slow. Heavy.
"Yeah," he said. "Burn him proper. Let the wind take him."
They were walking back toward the docks, boots dragging against the worn planks, when voices broke the morning hush behind them.
Two men, laughing.
"Such a sad way to die," one said. "Brutal."
"Yeah, but did you hear? That old bastard said he saw something — a glint, right before it happened."
"No way. That's what people are saying?"
"Swear to the gods. He was raving about it — said it was calling to him. Ha! Senile old man probably heard his own reflection."
They laughed again. Loud. Ugly.
Jarn stopped walking.
Naru already had his fists clenched.
The two turned — too slow.
The blows came fast, sloppy with rage. The kind of fight that didn't need technique, just pain. Fists thudded against ribs, jaws cracked, someone hit the dirt with a grunt. A boot found someone's stomach.
When it was done, the two loudmouths lay groaning and bloodied on the edge of the dock.
One of them, wheezing through split lips, spat a curse. "You'll pay for this, you mindless brutes. He was senile. And you beat us up 'cause you can't handle the truth. Mark my words—you'll regret it."
"Then make sure they're loud words," Naru said. "So the wind remembers who lied first."
They staggered off, bruised and limping, swallowed by the mist.
Jarn wiped blood off his knuckles, breathing hard.
"You good?" Naru asked.
"No."
They walked back to their post in silence.
The lift creaked. The chains groaned. And the world, uncaring, kept turning.
It was midday again. The sun hung high, baking the rusted steel of the docks and casting hard shadows across every crate, bolt, and body.
Naru and Jarn sat shoulder to shoulder on the edge of a loading platform, legs dangling, the sea breeze brushing their boots. They shared lunch the same way they always did—half a boiled yam, a pinch of salt, and a strip of dry fish between them. No words for a while, just chewing and wind.
Then Jarn spoke, voice softer than usual.
"Remember when Turin caught me stealing from the salt crates?"
Naru chuckled, eyes on the water. "Didn't just catch you. He waited. Watched you plan the whole damn heist like it was clever."
"Then clapped me on the ear and made me carry sacks for two weeks straight," Jarn said, laughing a little now.
"You were twelve," Naru said.
"Yeah… you were eleven. Idiot tried to take the blame for me."
They went quiet again. The breeze carried gull cries and the distant clang of metal.
"Feels like we barely had time," Jarn said eventually.
"We didn't," Naru replied. "But it was enough."
A beat passed. Then, as if on cue, Jarn nudged Naru's elbow.
"We should get wives," he said with mock seriousness.
Naru raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?"
"Wives. Kids. All of it. Can't go out like old Turin. No one to carry our names. No one to remember."
"Thought you said women were more trouble than the work crews."
"Yeah, well—grief makes a man rethink."
They both chuckled, low and tired.
"We'd be awful fathers," Naru said.
"Speak for yourself," Jarn smirked. "My kid'd be lifting crates by five."
"Yours would be stealing salt."
They laughed for real then — not long, but loud enough to scare off a gull.
When the laughter faded, the quiet came back. They didn't speak more of Turin. They didn't have to.
Lunch ended the same way it always did. They stood, brushed crumbs from their trousers, and walked back toward the lift chains and ship riggings — toward the same rust and sweat they'd left behind.
The world hadn't stopped for Turin. And it wouldn't stop for them.
Evening.The sun sagged into the sea's edge, bruising the sky purple and gold. The shipyard echoed with final clangs and groaning winches — the day's end humming in tired metal and worn-out men.
Naru, alone now, wandered toward Turin's post — the one no one had taken up since the accident. It stood silent, swallowed by the shadow of cranes and rusted hooks. The boat lift, once bustling under Turin's stern eye, now sagged like a carcass, half-drenched in the oily seawater below.
Naru stepped forward.
The boat that crushed him still bobbed gently in the dock, its belly dark with dried blood and seawater scum. The stains hadn't washed out — they clung like guilt.
Naru stared into the water, grimacing at the stink. He muttered to himself, "Maybe the old fool was going senile…"
But before the thought could finish crossing his mind —There it was.
A shimmer. Silver. Flickering like a candle's last breath, deep in the murk.
He blinked. Leaned closer.
Then, without hesitation — maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of loyalty, maybe out of guilt —he dove in.
Water crashed up.The dock creaked.Then silence again — save for the ripples.
Cut to: Jarn.Jarn wiped sweat from his brow, walking toward Naru's post with two pieces of wrapped yam in hand.
"Naru!" he called out.
No answer.
He peered around the stacks of rope and gear — empty.
"Tch. Probably skipped off early…"
He turned to go back and close his own station when—
Footsteps. Running. Urgent.A fellow dock worker — no older than sixteen — stumbled into view, panting.
"Jarn!""You seen Naru?"
"No time—you need to run."
"What?"
"There's guards! After both of you."
Jarn stiffened.
"They say it's assault — those two infantry men you roughed up? Turns out they weren't just idiots. They were ranked. Their squad leader's out for blood."
Jarn's grip tightened around the yam bundle.
The boy continued, frantic:"They've been going from post to post, dragging up anyone who knew you. I ran to your spot — thank the stars you weren't there — but Naru…"
He looked around."Where is Naru?"
Jarn's stomach dropped.
He didn't answer. He just started running — back toward the docks, toward Turin's post.
Back to Naru.
His limbs trembled from the cold, fingers numb, lungs burning.
But he reached again — this time deeper, fingertips brushing through the veil of algae and sediment. Something slick slipped past him, but he reached again.
There.
His hand caught on something solid — angular, cold.He pulled it free.
A gem — not just silver, but lined with gold veins, shimmering even through the slime and grit.A pendant? A piece of a hilt?
Naru surfaced with a gasp, coughing up seawater.The sky was darker now — stained with the last light of dusk.
He stared at the object, clearing muck off with shaking hands. The old man hadn't been senile. He'd seen this.
As more grime peeled away, something shifted — not in the water, not in the air…
But in his mind.
A sudden jolt.
The world dimmed. Sounds muted.
Then—A vision.
A man — bold, furious — driving a blade deep into another's chest.Steel piercing flesh. Blood splatter. A choked scream.And on the hilt — the gem.
The man lifted his head.Eyes locked with Naru.As if he saw him.
Naru reeled back, breath caught, panic rising —
And then—
"Naru!"
Reality slammed back.
Jarn's hands shook him hard by the shoulders.
"Are you even listening?! We have to run — now — guards are out for us!"
Naru blinked, still reeling from the memory, or vision — whatever it was.
He looked at the gem. A piece of something older. Darker.He slipped it into his pocket without a word.
Then they ran.
Down the rusted stairwells, through the back alleys of the slums, past flickering oil lamps and barking dogs.
Two orphaned boat-lifters —One haunted by grief, the other now haunted by a vision.Running toward a fate neither of them could yet name.
Fade to black.