Chapter 1: Salt and Shadows
The first thing I knew was heat.
Sand burned against my cheek. My lungs screamed for air like I'd been holding my breath for an eternity. I gasped, choked, and rolled onto my back.
Blue sky. Palm trees swaying. The crash of waves somewhere close.
Where the hell am I?
I tried to sit up and my arms didn't cooperate the way they should. The muscles were wrong. The weight was wrong. I looked down at my hands and felt my heart stutter.
These weren't my hands.
Callused palms. Rough fingers. A scar across the left knuckle I didn't remember getting. I flexed them, watched them respond, and a cold terror crept through my chest.
The last thing I remembered was... what? Rain. Headlights. The screech of tires and then—
Nothing.
I forced myself upright. My body moved like I'd never used it before, which made a horrible kind of sense if I thought about it. If I let myself think about it. My breath came in short gasps as I took inventory.
Young. Mid-twenties maybe. Lean muscle under sun-darkened skin. A sailor's body, built for rope work and climbing. I was wearing rough cotton pants and a shirt that had seen better decades. My feet were bare.
A small knife hung at my hip. I found a pouch with eight coins I didn't recognize—Spanish? Portuguese? The metal was worn smooth.
Think. Think.
I looked around. Beach. Jungle. In the distance, what looked like a small town—wooden buildings, a church steeple, the masts of ships in a harbor. The architecture was old. Colonial. Caribbean.
Caribbean.
My stomach dropped.
I knew that style. I'd seen it in movies. Specifically, I'd seen it in Pirates of the Caribbean. The memory surfaced fragmented—cursed gold, skeleton pirates, a man in a tricorn hat swaggering across a sinking ship.
No. That's insane.
But the evidence surrounded me. The period clothing. The colonial town. The Caribbean heat pressing down like a physical weight.
I stood on shaky legs and walked toward the water. My reflection stared back from the shallows—a stranger's face. Sharp features. Dark hair matted with sand. Eyes that belonged to someone else entirely.
I had died. That much felt certain, like a half-remembered dream. The car. The impact. And then I'd woken up here, in this body, in what looked like the early eighteenth century.
In a world where, if my fragmented movie memories were right, magic was very real.
Aztec gold that curses anyone who touches it. A sea goddess bound in human form. A man with tentacles for a face who collects souls.
I laughed. It came out cracked and desperate. This was impossible. This was insane. This was—
My stomach growled so loudly it echoed.
I pressed my hand against my abdomen. The hunger was real. The thirst was real. Whatever else might be happening, my body needed fuel, and it needed it soon.
The town. I needed to reach the town.
I started walking. Each step felt more stable than the last as I grew accustomed to this new form. The original owner had been fit, at least. Quick on his feet. I noticed I moved differently than I remembered moving—lighter, more balanced.
Who were you? I wondered. And what happened to you?
The answer came in fragments as I walked. Flashes of memory that didn't belong to me—or maybe belonged to this body but not the mind now driving it. Ropes. The smell of tar. Shouting voices and the crack of a sail catching wind.
A fight.
A knife.
The splash of a body hitting water.
I stopped, my hand going to my chest. There was no wound there, but the ghost of pain lingered. The previous owner of this body had died. Stabbed and thrown overboard, if the fragments were accurate.
And somehow, I had taken his place.
The theological implications were enough to make my head spin. I shoved them aside. Survival first. Existential crisis later.
The town grew larger as I approached. I could see people now—rough men loading barrels onto carts, women in faded dresses moving between buildings, children chasing chickens through the dirt streets.
A sign swung above what had to be a tavern. I couldn't read the words from this distance, but the smell of cooking meat drifted toward me on the breeze.
My mouth watered.
Eight coins. That's probably enough for a meal. Maybe.
I quickened my pace. The harbor spread out to my right—small fishing boats, a few larger merchant vessels, one ship with cannon ports that spoke of less legitimate business. Tortuga was somewhere in this world. Port Royal. The Black Pearl.
Jack Sparrow.
The name surfaced with surprising clarity. I remembered him—Johnny Depp's performance, the swagger, the endless scheming. Captain of a ship that was somehow always the fastest despite looking like it should sink. A man who made deals with entities that should never be bargained with.
If I was really in this world, he existed somewhere. Along with Davy Jones and his crew of the damned. Along with Calypso the sea goddess. Along with curses that could make men into monsters.
I needed information. I needed to know where I was, what year it was, which events from the films had already happened.
I needed to survive long enough to figure any of that out.
The tavern door was right there. I pushed it open and stepped inside.
[JONAS THE BARKEEP]
Jonas had tended bar in this shithole for fifteen years. He'd seen every kind of sailor, pirate, and desperado the Caribbean could spit out. Thought he'd seen everything.
The man who walked through his door at midday was different.
Not in any obvious way. Young sailor, rough clothes, hungry look in his eyes. Nothing special about that. But the way he moved—careful, like someone learning to walk again. The way his eyes scanned the room, not looking for threats exactly, but cataloging. Taking notes.
Like a man dropped into a place he'd never been but somehow recognized.
"Food," the stranger said. His accent was strange. Not quite English, not quite anything Jonas could place. "Whatever these buy."
He dropped coins on the counter. Spanish. Jonas counted them, shrugged, and shouted to the kitchen.
"Sit anywhere."
The stranger chose a corner. Back to the wall, eyes on the door. Smart, that. The kind of positioning that kept men alive in places like this.
Jonas watched him eat—watched him devour, really, like he hadn't seen food in days. Maybe he hadn't. Ships went down all the time. Men washed up on beaches with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
But something about this one felt wrong. Jonas couldn't put his finger on it. Just a feeling, like storm clouds on a clear horizon.
He served rum to a pair of dockworkers and tried to forget about it.
Some men were born to trouble. Best to let them find it on their own.
The food was terrible and the best thing I'd ever tasted.
I scraped the last of the fish stew from the bowl with bread that had seen better weeks and didn't care. My body—this body—had been starving. The original owner must not have eaten for days before his death.
Around me, the tavern buzzed with conversation. I listened while I ate, picking up fragments.
"—Spanish galleon spotted near—"
"—heard tell of that madman Sparrow, got himself marooned again—"
"—Navy's getting bold, saw them string up three men in Port Royal last week—"
My ears pricked at the name. Sparrow. Jack Sparrow. He existed. He was out there somewhere, already making the kind of reputation that would follow him through four movies.
Which means I'm before the first film. Or during it. I need to know the year.
I caught the barkeep's eye and raised my empty bowl. When he came to collect it, I asked as casually as I could manage:
"What's the date?"
He gave me a strange look. "You hit your head, boy?"
"Something like that."
"Third of March. Year of our Lord 1720."
I did the math against what little I remembered. The first film was set around this time—maybe a little later. Will Turner was probably still a blacksmith in Port Royal. Elizabeth Swann was still a governor's daughter. Jack was somewhere, scheming his way toward the Black Pearl.
And Barbossa's crew was almost certainly cursed by now, wandering the Caribbean as undead pirates searching for the last piece of Aztec gold.
I thanked the barkeep and settled back in my chair.
So what do I do?
The smart thing would be to find a ship. Any ship. Get myself as far from the main plot as possible and live out whatever years this body had left in comfortable obscurity.
But something told me that wasn't an option. Not just the practical difficulties—I had no money, no connections, no proof of who I was or what I could do—but something deeper. A pull. A sense that I was connected to this world in ways I didn't yet understand.
The original owner of this body had died violently. I had somehow taken his place. That didn't happen by accident. Not in a world where curses were real and gods walked among men.
I was here for a reason. I just needed to figure out what it was.
A commotion near the door pulled my attention. Three men had walked in—sailors by their look, with the swagger of men who'd spent too long at sea and too much money on rum. One of them, a big bastard with a beard like a bird's nest, was scanning the room.
His eyes landed on me.
Shit.
I didn't know him. But the recognition in his face was unmistakable. He thought he knew me—or rather, knew the man whose body I now wore.
"There he is!" The big man pointed. "That's the bastard who owes Marcus ten pounds!"
I was on my feet before I knew I was moving. The knife at my hip suddenly felt very inadequate against three men who looked like they'd broken bones for breakfast.
"I think you've got the wrong person."
"Oh, we've got the right person." The big man smiled. It wasn't friendly. "Marcus died waiting for that money. Fever took him. But a debt don't die with the debtor, does it boys?"
The other two spread out, cutting off my escape routes.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I'd never been in a real fight. Not in my old life, not in my old body. And this body's original owner had gotten himself killed in one.
The tingling started at the base of my skull.
I didn't know what it was—not then. Just a strange sensation, like static electricity building under my skin. It crawled down my spine, urgent and impossible to ignore.
The big man's fist came at my face.
And somehow, I was already moving.
This body isn't mine, I thought as I walked toward the tavern sign. But it's what I've got.
The smell of cooking meat pulled me forward like a rope around my chest. Behind me, the ocean crashed against the shore—a sound that should have been peaceful but now carried something else. A promise. A threat.
I didn't know why I was here. I didn't know what had happened to the man whose skin I now wore.
But I was going to find out.
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