Soon the Scarlet Sphynx skimmed the waves like a ghost, its sails catching threads of wind even as sea spray hissed up from the jagged reefs below. The rudder barely touched the waves, which increased their speed. The Darkmerrow Archipelago that stood between Inner Varu and the open sea to the east loomed all around them, casting darkness that was eerie for this time of day. Dozens of black, knife-edged islets clawing their way from the sea like drowned fingers. Mist clung like a spectral fog that muffled the world and made it easy to get turned around. Only Okurac’s meticulous charts and sixth sense for sea currents kept them from grounding on invisible rock.
The islands were not just home to mysterious underwater ruins, but here was a graveyard of wrecks, their splintered hulls half-buried in white coral and kelp-choked shallows. Darkmerrow had a reputation for it, not just storms and reefs, but worse things. Things that lured ships in with song and bribes.
Elmira stood beside Orwyn on the forward deck as the fog deepened. She hadn’t said much since waking in the cramped guest cabin at noon. None of the crew had slept but her body had refused to be ignored any longer. As soon as they had cleared the harbor, Elmira had found a bed, stuffed her bag under it, and crashed, only removing her jacket and boots before exhausted, dreamless sleep took her. Much more awake and a lot less sore, her eyes now scanned the mist like searchlights, unease prickling at the back of her neck.
“Why does this place feel like it’s holding its breath?” she asked.
Orwyn didn’t answer right away. His gaze never left the water. “Because it is.”
The anxiety was too much. Something had to be done. Elmira excused herself and headed through the ship, aimlessly checking that everything and everyone was in place. Belowdecks, Nix muttered to himself in his engine nook, surrounded by softly glowing arcane coils and flickering runes. He tapped a crystal array with a tuning fork and frowned.
“There’s a pulse," he murmured. "Something... Not natural.”
It was as if she wasn’t even there so she headed outside again. On the gun deck, Rina was checking the bow locker when Lint scurried by, dragging a barrel with a sloshing sound.
“That’s not water, is it?” Elmira asked suspiciously, heart sinking in her chest.
“It’s not just water,” Lint explained. “I made it better. Boomier.”
Raina groaned. “We have not even cleared the isles, Lint. I swear, she does it to spite me.”
“I think she does it to spite life,” Elmira said, earning a rare chuckle.
Up on the quarterdeck, Tam leaned against the helm, one boot propped on a wooden locker, pretending to look relaxed but his fingers gripped the wheel with white knuckles.
“Alright, alright,” she heard him mutter. “Show me your worst, Darkmerrow.”
He didn’t have to wait long.
They came at sunset, just when the light shifted for the evening and shadows stretched long across the deck. A ripple on the water became a shape, then five, ten, dozens. Sleek bodies, scaled and glistening, eyes black as obsidian. Elmira drew in a sharp hiss.
Merfolk, but not the beautiful kind of storybooks. These were lean and muscular, mouths full of jagged teeth, wielding harpoons made of bone and coral, tribal war paint smeared their faces, and long fins fanned from their arms like underwater cloaks. And they had brought their pets with them. The thal were dim-witted amphibian humanoids that the merfolk had enslaved millennia ago, with gills, webbed fingers, bioluminescent markings, and seaweed-like hair that could tangle you into their deadly embrace.
The first strike was silent: the port-side rigging snapped like twine when ropes were slashed. As soon as it happened, Marlo let out a mighty roar as one of them tried to yank him into the sea. His massive frame anchored him to the deck as he grabbed a chain and swung it like a flail, knocking two merfolk clean off the railing.
“I’ll snap your fishy little necks!” he roared, eyes glowing as his muscles seemed to swell and ripple with rage. A third merfolk caught the chain but was yanked off its feet and swung in a wide circle before Marlo sent a ripple through the metal links causing it to lose its grip. Even Elmira nearly gagged as it made a squishy impact on a jagged piece of driftwood.
“TO ARMS!” Orwyn bellowed. The deck exploded into motion.
Even as Elmira’s daggers found purchase in a thal with the ugliest face she’d ever seen, she felt arrows whizzing past mere inches from her head on either side as Rina was firing arrows, each one precise and deadly. Her shafts found throats and hearts with surgical coldness while Elmira finished them off and pushed them back into the sea. Gods, she felt alive. But their vision was fading fast, even with the mage lights strewn across the ship.
“Fatestitcher, bring me your light!” she cried, tracing the symbol of Ayursha in the blackish blood of a fallen thal.
The answer was immediate and without hesitation. Golden threads enveloped her blades as they grew and elongated in her grasp. Her patron’s presence was a blazing fire within her, a light that enveloped the entire ship as it spread out 20 feet in all directions and lit up the surrounding islands. Her heart leaped into her throat. The islets and outcrops were crawling with thal and merfolk, all gunning for the Scarlet Sphynx, harpooned ropes trying to pull her lower into the water. Elmira swore and heard the others do the same.
Jessa flipped from the crow’s nest and landed amid a knot of attackers, twin karambits in hand. She ducked low, and moved fast, slashing legs and tendons. She grinned as she fought like it was a dance. Elmira lost sight of her when she reached the aft deck.
When they swam beneath the hull, Rina pivoted to fire alchemical grenades bursting traps that shocked the water like thunderclaps. Lint, meanwhile, was on the railing, lighting something that looked like it really shouldn’t have been lit.
“Meet my special firecracker!” she screamed in delight, then tossed the bomb straight into the sea where it erupted into a column of spray and flame. Several merfolk and dozens of thal were thrown clear of the water, limp, and smoking.
Elmira paused for a moment, gasping for breath even as the onslaught continued. Fear and adrenaline coursed through her veins and stretched time to a delicate thread.
Then it snapped. Elmira’s muscles burned as she drew back and flicked the boomerang into the air but she didn’t care.
“Behind!”
Without hesitation, she jumped out of the way as Nix emerged from the belly of the ship with a magelens cannon barely stable in his arms. He didn’t speak, just dodged a thrown harpoon like it was an apple, aimed and fired. The blast scorched a line of steam across the deck and the sea, vaporizing five swimmers and burning more.
“Damn, Nix!” Rina hollered as she let the arrows fly.
A spear clipped the half-orc’s shoulder as he appeared on top of the quarterdeck, but Okurac remained calm. “Keep her steady,” he shouted to Tam before pulling a rope. “I’ll draw them!”
With a good grip on the rope, he took a running leap into the air and swung around the ship, catching a merfolk in the act of boarding. It shrieked as his sword cleaved his head clean from the rest of his body. Elmira stared at the empty space where her next target would have been and at Okurac, running sideway on the hull like it was an avenue.
“Focus, child,” the voice snapped. “You got targets on your six.”
“Shterc!”
Sure enough. Elmira barely ducked the cut of a halberd but the next swing caught her in her side. Luckily, the armor took the brunt of it but it was going to be a mighty bruise. The merfolk snarled and the razor-sharp focus of battle took over her mind once more.
Ever the showman, Tam took a leaf out of Okurac’s book and swung on a line from the mainsail, cutlass gleaming in one hand, drenched in black and red. He kicked a thal square in the face mid-swing, landed on deck, and grinned.
“Welcome to the Scarlet Sphynx, boys!” Tam shouted mid-duck, parrying a blade before lunging to aid Orwyn. Together they squared off against a particularly stubborn and massive thal, its gills flaring, trident dripping with blood. “Bleed for me, you barnacle-chewin’ coward!”
The creature hissed something guttural in its own tongue, but even its defiance faltered under their blows.
Five tense minutes later the battle drew to a brutal, breathless close, blood staining the deck and trailing into the water, thick as spilled wine. The remaining enemies slipped beneath the surface in eerie, wordless retreat, vanishing as if they’d never been there at all. Only the steady drip of red said something bad had happened here. Elmira’s light flickered out shortly thereafter, letting darkness swallow the deck like a rising tide and she felt exhaustion seep into her bones. For a breath, no one moved. Then slowly, eyes began to adjust, shapes emerging in the faint glimmer of stars and wounded moonlight.
The crew took silent stock of scratches and bruises. A few bore deeper wounds than others, but none fatal. Thank their fortune’s favor that they had not lost anyone. Elmira moved among them, offering quiet aid where she could, her hands aglow with the power of her patron. They accepted her touch without flinching, some even nodding in thanks.
Elmira caught the subtle shift in them then. Rina’s approving glance, the faint, almost grudging smiles from Okurac and Jessa. Recognition, maybe. Respect. Not trust, not yet. But something close. A belief that she was not useless.
Nix vanished below deck the moment his feet were steady enough and Lint followed close behind, still cackling under her breath and rubbing her soot-smudged hands together like she’d found a new game to play.
“You did good,” Orwyn said, watching as Elmira pressed her hands to the slash on his forearm, the healing power threading the torn edges of flesh together. He flexed his fingers once, testing it, then gave a grunt of approval. “You’re no ordinary cargo.”
“Cargo?” Elmira lifted an eyebrow at the phrase.
“Customer,” he clarified. “Tam told me you’re buying passage.”
“Indeed.”
“Why him?”
“Our stars aligned.”
Orwyn snorted, tugging his sleeve down over the new scar. “You are either the luckiest or the unluckiest landcrab I’ve met. If you’re ever looking to trade dirt for tide, come find me.”
“Sure will,” she replied, inclining her head. He huffed softly, shaking his head, and headed off to find Marlo who’d proven his nickname in the battle ten-fold.
The deck hummed with motion again, like a beast shaking off sleep. The Scarlet Sphynx had taken some bruises, but she still held together, hull unbreached. Marlo proved to be an excellent boatswain, lumbering about the rigging, thick hands making quick work of torn lines and snapped spars while Orwyn barked orders as the first mate. Rina moved with the silence of a hunter, retrieving arrows buried in wood and flesh alike. Jessa disappeared below, likely to scrounge what she could from the galley to whip something up for the crew.
Bit by bit, life stitched itself back into the ship. The adrenaline ebbed as the bruises bloomed.
Elmira stood at the prow when dusk came, the black water rippling beneath the keel like oil stirred by ghosts. The sky pressed low and heavy with clouds. The isles were thinning out and they would be clear of the archipelago within the hour. Not a moment too soon.
“They weren’t raiders,” she said, her voice barely louder than the wind.
Tam stepped beside her, dabbing at the blood crusting his lower lip with a stained kerchief. “No,” he agreed. “And they let us go for some goddamn reason.”
From behind came Orwyn’s voice, low and grim. “Maybe they were just raiders. Though they usually don’t go for this type of ship.”
The fog thickened again, curling around the Sphynx like a dangerous but comfortable blanket hiding them from prying eyes.
