The horizon grew from a mere line to a tangible reality, the island rising like a jewel in the dark embrace of the ocean. The moon's silver kiss illuminated the shoreline, revealing the jagged teeth of rocks and the sanguine blush of the sand beneath. The air grew thick with anticipation, the scent of land a siren's song to the weary sailors.
The ship groaned beneath Alaric, the timbers protesting the sudden shift in weight as the crew scrambled to their stations. The sea was a churning beast, its growls licking at the hull, its claws tearing at the sails. The wind screamed, a banshee's wail that sent shivers down the spines of the mortals aboard.
Alaric stood at the helm, fingers curled around the ship's wheel—cold, deliberate, unyielding. He could taste the storm in the air, metallic and wild, but it tasted nothing like her.
The wind didn't speak her name. The waves didn't whisper her secrets. Somewhere, out there, Banesa was breathing. Probably laughing. Maybe scheming. Definitely not thinking of him. The thought carved a hollow in his chest that no amount of sea spray could fill.
The ship groaned beneath him, a wounded beast obedient to his will. He adjusted course with a flick of his wrist, sending the prow slicing through another blackened swell. The crew—those still alive—scurried like roaches in moonlight. One dared to meet his gaze. Alaric smiled. The man pissed himself.
Somewhere, she would've rolled her eyes.
The waves didn't roar—they 'screamed', razor-thin crests collapsing under the weight of Alaric's hubris. His ship, the —Seraph's Waves—, bucked like a stallion with its veins slit open, salt and blood foaming at its jaws. And Alaric? He stood at the helm, grinning like a man who'd already won, fingers curled around the wheel like it was the throat of the world itself.
But history repeats itself messily.
The first cannonball tore through the starboard side with the grace of a drunken god. Splinters became shrapnel; the mast groaned, then snapped like a spine. Alaric's crew—those still clinging to life—scrambled like rats in a barrel of oil. The second shot hit the deck, and suddenly the air was thick with the perfume of gunpowder and screaming.
"Pirates," Alaric spat, tasting the word like rotten fruit.
A cannonball tore through the rigging above him, ropes snapping like spiderwebs under a boot. The —Seraph's Waves— screamed—not with wood, but with the voice of a dying beast. Through the smoke, he saw them, three sleek sloops cutting through the dawn mist like knives. Their sails bore no colors. Clever.
Second volley hit starboard. Deckboards erupted into splinters. A crewman's head vanished mid-shriek.
"Below!" Alaric roared. The surviving crew scrambled like crabs into the hold. He stayed. Let them think the ship abandoned. Let them come.
The lead sloop—'Jane', her nameplate read—drifted close. Fourteen figures swung across on grappling hooks. At their front, a man with a beard woven with fuse cords, smoking like a lit bomb.
Alaric smiled.
The moment Blackbeard's boots hit the deck, Alaric snapped his fingers.
From every shadow, his coven rose—vampires who'd fed on gunpowder and brine for decades. The pirates barely had time to piss themselves before the slaughter began.
Blackbeard swung his cutlass. Alaric caught the blade bare-handed, black blood oozing between his fingers. "You should've brought more men," he whispered.
Six minutes. That's all it took.
When it was done, Alaric knelt beside the headless corpse. He plucked a still-smoking fuse from the severed beard. "Hang this from the bow," he told his first mate, tossing the head. "Let the sea know who rules her now."
Then the harpoon struck him through the gut.
Alaric looked down at the barbed tip protruding from his abdomen like some grotesque new limb. He was still laughing when the chain went taut—when the unseen force yanked—when the deck rushed up to meet him and then there was only cold and black and salt.
The water welcomed him hungrily. As his body sank, the ocean darkened, ink spreading from his wounds like a stain. Fish scattered. Coral withered. The waves above boiled crimson where moonlight touched them.
Somewhere above, something laughed with Banesa's voice.
The moon ripped itself in half.
One moment, it hung silver and whole over Luna City, painting the cobblestones in liquid light. The next—it BLED. A jagged crack split the sky, ink-black at first, then seeping crimson like a wound left to fester. The Luna's Tears flowers lining the gutters trembled, their petals curling inward as if to hide from the heavens' sudden violence.
Alex Shrimpshy felt it before he saw it—the prickle at the base of his skull, the wolf in him snarling awake. He vaulted onto Valente Manor's rooftop tiles, claws scrabbling against slate, just in time to watch the eclipse swallow the moon whole. Below, Isabella's gasp cut through the eerie silence. "It's not supposed to happen for another century," she whispered.
Inside the nursery, swaddled in black silk and oblivious to the sky's betrayal, the heir of Valente Manor slept. Little Lev—kicked tiny feet beneath his blanket. His downy fangs hadn't even pierced his gums yet. His nightlight, a captured will-o'-the-wisp in a glass orb flickered wildly as cracks spiderwebbed across its surface.
On the thirteenth floor of Sub ST Hostel, the neon backpack girl—'Indu'—dropped her duffel on Bed 12D. The mattress exhaled a cloud of dust and old perfume. Three other girls watched without watching. Zoya chewing gum loud enough to fracture the silence, Mish sketching violent flowers in a notebook, and Laleh pretending to read a water-stained magazine upside down. Indu's bag glowed like a radioactive jellyfish against the gray sheets.
Laleh finally spoke without looking up. "Bathroom's haunted. Toilet screams if you flush after midnight."
Zoya snapped her gum. "It's just Parsi aunty's ghost. She died mid-pee in '89."
Mish's pen stabbed the paper. "Better than Bed 12A. Last girl woke up with her braids knotted to the ceiling fan."
Indu unzipped her neon bag. Inside, there were pens, markers, a small kit of skincare products and a jar of pickled mangoes with "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL GET RICH" scrawled on the lid. The hostel walls breathed around them, exhaling decades of layered voices—hushed confessions, muffled sobs, the occasional triumphant shriek when someone finally got the cockroach.
Downstairs, the night manager played chess with himself using bottle caps. The lobby's lone bulb swung gently, casting shadows that slithered up the stairwell like ink in water. Somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth step, the air grew thick with the scent of jasmine and something darker—iron, maybe, or the memory of it.
Indu was still arranging her pickled mango jars along the windowsill when the door creaked open. A figure stood there, backlit by the hallway's dimming fluorescents—a silhouette wrapped in a sari so starched it could've stood upright without her inside.
"No gaming." The woman's voice was a ruler against knuckles. "No shouting. No—what is this?" She stabbed a finger toward Mish's sketchbook, where a flower bloomed with too many teeth.
Mish snapped the book shut. "Homework."
The supervisor's nostrils flared. "After midnight, this hostel sleeps like 'corpse'." She pointed to the 'ayatul kursi' peeling off the wall near Bed 12A. "Recite. Wudu before bed unless you want jinn using your legs as toothpicks." Her chappals smacked the floorboards as she turned, the scent of jasmine oil lingering in the air along with her stern warning and existential dread.
Indu waited until the footsteps dissolved downstairs before exhaling. "That lady smells like my dadi's funeral flowers."
Zoya popped her gum. "She IS a funeral flower. Last term, a girl sneezed during quiet hours—" She mimed a throat-slash. "Gone."