Krystof's calloused thumb caught on the seal's familiar groove—worn smooth from years of anxious rubbing, back when he still prayed to gods who never answered. The brass carried the metallic tang of his own fear now, mixed with memories of Varyn's wine-sour breath after those private councils. That particular stench of fermented grapes and something fouler beneath, like meat left too long in a nobleman's cellar. The kind that left Lord Hasterly twitching on the marble floor last winter, though the physicians called it "a palsy."
The throne room didn't reek. It confessed. Armor grease and old slaughter, the collages not sagging but slouching—like the drunkards outside the Silk Slipper at closing time, their gold thread tarnish-black where trembling hands had clutched them.
"Map the north," the king's voice sloshed with the wine in his cup—real Merrish crystal, worth a garrison's quarterly pay. His eyes held that glassy sheen Krystof knew too well—not just drink, but the white smoke from the alchemist's pipes. Pupils wide and hungry as a winter wolf's.
"Every godforsaken inch you chart brings us closer to completing the Chain of Cryxar. Fail me, and your family's lands become crown property—your sister's dowry, your mother's grave, all of it." The threat had hung in the air like smoke from a pyre. Now here they were, blown into legend itself like dice cast by drunken gods who'd grown bored with mortal suffering.
The memory flooded his mouth like sucking on a rusted nail - that acrid metallic bite he'd first tasted at sixteen, when he'd clenched his teeth through his first battlefield stitching. Now his salt-rotted boots split further with each step, letting the deck's crusted grime work between his toes like the persistent sand that had plagued their last port. The leather had given up before dawn, just like three of their deckhands when the third wave hit. Each step made the planks moan like his father's back after harvest season, bent double under the weight of a lord's tithe.
The Dreamweaver wasn't just damaged—she was unmade. Railings splintered like broken ribs. Canvas hung in tatters, fluttering like the last breaths of the men they'd lost. And the stains… Some were rust. Some were wine. One, near the starboard hatch, was the exact shape of the cook's boy, who hadn't been fast enough when the wave hit.
The crew moved like corpses waiting for burial. Willem's hands—once steady enough to stitch a wound mid-battle—now fumbled the simplest knot. His "grog shakes" excuse didn't hold water anymore.
And Nel—
Gods, Nel.
His voice wasn't just raw. It was ruined, shredded down to a wheezing rasp, the way Krystof's uncle had sounded after the mine collapse. His blistered hands drew shapes in the air—not orders, but pleas. "Rig that mast with whatever the fuck still holds together! Even if it's your fucking grandmother's damned petticoats!"
Tymos stumbled past carrying coils of rope that seemed to weigh more than he did. "Captain Nel, sir, the forward hold's taking on water something fierce. Bilge pumps can't keep up."
"Then quit gawping and man those fucking pumps!" Nel's roar carried across the deck, raw as salt in an open wound. "I want every spare scrap stuffed in that leak - shirts, hammocks, your grandmother's damned lace curtains if that's what keeps us afloat!"
Krystof waited until the crew scrambled to obey before stepping close. His voice dropped to the low murmur - pitched just between the groan of stressed timbers and the snap of wet sails. "That shoreline's no natural thing," he said, thumb worrying the familiar notch in his sword's crossguard. "I'll take twenty. The ones who still have their wits about them."
Nel's face went stiff as week-old sailcloth, the old scar along his jaw whitening like a fresh stitch. "That ain't shoreline," he spat. "That's teeth." The froth below swallowed his phlegm with a sound like a starving man gulping broth. "Twenty years running these waters, and never once has my spine itched just from looking at dirt and trees. Those branches twist like broken fingers, Krys. That ain't right."
Krystof's eyes ached from squinting—not that it helped. The dark here wasn't just absence; it was a thing, thick as tar, clotting the air until even breathing felt like swallowing smoke. Stale. Old. Like the inside of a coffin left too long in the Aetheris, and then there was Nel, hunched at the helm like some weather-beaten gargoyle, the broad slump of his hat swallowing what little outline he had left.
"Goddamn dark never lets up," Krystof muttered. The words vanished, sound eaten before it could echo. Weeks since Aetheris Birth had last stained the sky. Weeks since anything but this choking black. Felt less like sailing and more like being buried alive.
Nel's chuckled. "It seems like Aetheris died in the Umbral Realm long ago and never resurrected," he muttered, the rasp in his voice a testimony to years of shouting orders against the gale. "The old tales. Same ones they used to keep my cousin's sticky-fingered whelps from raiding the casks." His thumb worried at a splinter in the rail, the motion automatic as tide. "Worked, too. Till the little shits learned to pick locks."
Krystof's laugh came out as a dry rasp. "Eternal fucking dark," he muttered, thumb scraping at the salt-rusted buckle of his vambrace. "Like the gods pissed out the Aetheris and called it a day. Makes you wonder what's lurking beyond the veil of darkness."
Nel's laugh barked out, a sound at once mocking and mirthless. "I have no interest in finding that out. My black ass stays at the ship." His hand slapped the weathered timber with affection, a touch that belied his gruff demeanor. "It needs my attention, and I'm a damn sight handier with a spanner than a sword."
"You'd better be," Krystof sniffed, flicking an errant splinter from his gauntlet. "Willem's looking like he'd squeeze piss from a fist if you asked him to rig another stay."
Nel's grin was all teeth—the kind that showed just how many were missing. "Willem's been fraying since we hit the Doldrums." He spat over the rail, the glob catching the dim light for half a second before the dark swallowed it whole. "But you know how it is. Give a man long enough rope, he'll either tie a knot or hang himself with it."
A creak from the rigging. A sigh from the timbers. The ship held its breath.
Nel shifted his weight, boots scraping against deck planks worn smooth by decades of desperate men. "Still time to turn tail," he said, too casual. The kind of casual that meant he'd already made up his mind.
Krystof flexed his hands, felt the old break in his left pinky twinge. "Since when do we run?"
The island exhaled. The dark leaned in.
Krystof studied the coast—the way the shadows pooled too thick beneath those spiraled trees, how the air wavered like heat off a pyre though the chill set his teeth on edge. "Better to face a known devil than float here waiting for one to come gnaw on our hull." His hand found his sword's grip by instinct, the leather worn smooth where his thumb always rubbed when death lingered near. "I won't steer blind into dark waters. Not again."
Nel's fingers worried the rope's frayed end—that old nervous habit from his first sinking, back when he'd been green as summer kelp. The man had weathered the Storm Wars and the Grey Tide mutiny, but now—now his hands trembled like a landsman's on his first watch.
"As you please Ser Second Sword," he said at last, the word heavy as an anchor chain. "But when you don't come back—" His jaw worked around the thought like a bad tooth. "It's me who tells twenty mothers their sons are food for whatever's out there. Me who drinks with the widows. And all for the orders of a pampered shit who couldn't tell starboard from shore leave if his crown depended on it."
The rope snapped in his grip.
Krystof adjusted the Dawnbreaker at his side. "Then make sure we do come back. Keep the ship ready to run if things go sideways—and I mean ready. Sails rigged, anchor weighed, every man at his post."
Nel nodded grimly, his eyes studying the alien shoreline. "I'll have the lads ready the boats. But Krystof... if you take too long, I'm assuming you're dead and acting accordingly."
"Understood." Krystof's grip tightened on Nel's shoulder - not the practiced clasp of comrades, but the desperate hold of a drowning man. He could feel every corded muscle beneath the salt-stiff wool, the same shoulders that had dragged him from the wreckage at Black Cove when the Dawn Chaser went down. Twenty years of hauling lines and boarding actions had turned the man to ironwood, yet now—now Krystof felt the faintest tremor.
"And Nel—" Krystof's voice cracked like old rigging, the words thick with the same brine that had stolen his father's ship. His grip tightened until his knuckles matched the whitecaps beyond the rail. "When the sea spits back our bones... tell that purple-lipped drunkard to sink his fucking Chain with the rest of the deadweight."
Nel's answering smile showed too many teeth—the same grin he'd worn watching nobles drown in their own finery during the Grey Tide mutiny.
Nel's grim smile held no humor. "Aye, I'll be sure to phrase it just like that when I'm explaining why I lost his Second Sword to a cursed island. May the gods have mercy on us all—because I doubt anything else will."
"Prepare the boat crews! Move your rotting carcasses!" Nel bellowed, salt-crusted beard bristling. "Tide's got teeth in an hour—you wanna swim with the crabs tonight?"
A deckhand crossed himself. The men moved faster.
Nel caught his arm as the men scrambled. "Keep your steel up and your wits sharp," he muttered. "Even the fucking seagulls here lie."
A humorless grin. Then Krystof was gone—striding toward the huddle of scouts with Dawnbreaker already loose in its sheath. The kind of walk veterans recognized. The last walk before the shadows got hungry.