The Wandering Isle

[Warpath]

Luned came into the room and closed the door behind her, and then they came together automatically. There was no hesitation now, no doubt between them: she pressed her hands to his chest and he put his on her hips, and then they closed their eyes and pressed their foreheads together. It was a wholly unique and pleasant sensation to Flint: to be exposed to someone and to enjoy it.

“He’s being stubborn,” Luned sighed, reaching up and running her fingertips over Flint’s cheek through his beard. “I’ve never seen him so scared of anything. He thinks he’s hiding it.”

“Aeril and I plotted the safest course we could imagine,” Flint said. “With luck we’ll avoid the sirens altogether and only the storm will need contending with. I recognize what he’s going through, but Aurelianus getting back on board is a greater threat than the storm.”

“A greater threat to me,” Luned said, opening her eyes to look up at him pointedly. “Besides, I don’t think it’s the sirens he’s afraid of.”

“The storm and the sirens were unexpected when we first encountered them,” Flint said. “We’d had weeks of smooth sailing to lull us into complacency, and in the end we faced those challenges successfully. Fear will make us far sharper this time. We can handle whatever’s out there.”

“I hope you’re right,” Luned said.

“I am,” Flint said. “By nightfall we’ll be most of the way through the storm.”

“This is going to be a long day,” Luned sighed. “And here’s me without a bed, now.”

She peeked up at him, the corners of her lips teasing upward, and Flint made a thoughtful sound. “Well we can’t have that,” he said. “It seems I have no choice but to share mine. I am nothing if not a gentleman. Everyone says so.”

Luned’s grin broke into a wide smile, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. “You are, but I strongly doubt anybody has ever said so.”

“You just did.”

“True,” Luned said, close enough now that her lips brushed his when she spoke. “But I think I know you a little better than most.”

“You do,” he said.

Their lips came together, and then Blue shouted down for all hands on deck, and Flint growled.

[Warpath]

The anchor came up and the sails unfurled, and a strong, balmy breeze immediately dragged them forward. Aeril spun the wheel dramatically and the ship leaned, and only came straight again when her nose was pointed south. The early afternoon sun threatened to burn Flint’s scalp, but he allowed it – the storm loomed dark before them, a wall of grey-black suspended in the sky and pregnant with lightning. The dry heat of the sun was about to become a pleasant memory.

Luned wrapped her arms around herself and watched Carcosa steadily shrink while the sailors worked around her. Someone – Flint? – wrapped a heavy jacket around her shoulders. When she realized it some moments later, she slipped her arms into the sleeves, casting a glance toward the oncoming storm. She couldn’t decide which was more dismaying: Carcosa shrinking away from them, or the storm rushing toward them.

A cold rush of air rocked the ship, and the overwhelming scent of rain was upon it. “Time to tie down!” Aeril shouted from the sterncastle.

The crew separated, each man drawing a length of rope around his waist and then over one shoulder, where it was expertly tied, and then lashed at the other end to mast or banister or sturdy rigging. They were arrayed in teams, each length of rope carefully measured so that every man could come to the aid of two others. The women, along with Muir and Gaspar, were carefully separated amongst the crew and had longer lengths of rope, permitting them the most movement.

Flint was stationed with Aeril on the sterncastle, and his leash was long enough to give him full run of it. Now he stood beside the captain, helping to lash her hands to the wheel tight, but not so tight as to cut blood flow to her fingers. “I still question the dearth of harpoons on your ship,” he told her.

“This isn’t a whaling craft,” she said without looking at him.

“Well,” he said, “now you know there are other things out here in need of spearing.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Retie my left, please, still too tight. You may ask Muir for his glaive, if it will make you feel better. You’d make better use of it, I guess.”

Flint glanced out over the deck as he retied Aeril’s hand. Muir was focusing closely on his weapon, fastening the blade in place tightly. Even from this distance, the brute could see that his breathing was shallower than anyone else’s, and he was the only crewman not glancing at the oncoming storm.

“No,” Flint said. “He needs every source of confidence we can give him now. Besides, I’ve never used a polearm.”

“Seems simple enough,” Aeril said. “Pointy end goes into the thing you want dead.”

“It’s a long weapon,” Flint said. “The farther you are from your enemy, the easier it is to miss. I’d be as likely to skewer you as a siren.”

“Let Muir keep it, then.”

Flint grunted, and then the rain came down on them in a solid sheet, and they were instantly drenched.

“Here we go,” Aeril said, but not even she could hear her voice over the fierce patter of water on the deck.

[Warpath]

The rainwater rushed off the deck through the banister rails, four dozen small rivers launching themselves overboard and separating back into illimitable drops before merging with the sea. The only light came from the waterproofed lanterns on deck and the constant flashes of lighting. The thunder repeated its monstrous peals over and over, brutalizing any attempts at communication. The crew struggled against the water and endured. Flint watched them stoically from on high, armored arms crossed over his chest.

Aeril shouted something indecipherable so Flint crossed the deck to her and leaned close, putting his ear near to her mouth. “We should have been through by now!”

The brute nodded, and didn’t know what else to say. Night had fallen at least an hour earlier, and the storm was as intense now as it had been when they first entered it. They had assumed that it was a circular system centered on the island, but now it seemed to stretch farther to the south than it had to the north. The sails strained against the wind, however, and the ship glided across the waves as if half airborne. The storm couldn’t go on forever.

Unless the world had ended while they were on Carcosa, which was not as distant a threat as one might hope. Flint’s mind drifted for a moment as he recalled the stories he’d heard of Caden Law and the devastation recently visited upon the entire island of Scara Brae as part of a narrowly aborted Armageddon. This was Althanas, and so the end of the world was never all that far off.

Flint pressed his cheek to the side of Aeril’s head and shouted into her ear: “It’s too late to change course now. We endure!”

The brute leaned back and Aeril nodded at him, eyes narrowed against the downpour. He could see the strain in her neck and shoulders, but there was no helping it now. He could not take up her burden, and the crewmembers with the requisite skills would be just as exhausted.

So Flint straightened his back and banished all signs of his own fatigue, and gave the captain a hard look, and she returned it.

[Warpath]

Shipmen called it the crow’s nest, but Blue the dwarf was beginning to think that calling it the fool’s nest was more apt. She had her back pressed against the rails and her hands wrapped firmly around the banister, and she fought down the urge to vomit. Normally she had a very strong stomach, but the storm was tossing the ship about wildly and no stomach would be up to this task. It was bad enough on deck, but the masts were swinging from side to side like a metronome. That she hadn’t been struck by lightning a hundred times over by now was a miracle, and she began to imagine that the ship’s drunken rocking was the only thing keeping her alive.

She risked another peek out at the horizon, praying for signs of an end to the storm. There was no hope before them, and when she looked back she saw no more reason for raised spirits. It was as if the storm had no end.

Or that it was following them.

Her heart skipped a beat at the thought, and she felt in her bones an absolute truth to it. She had no evidence but her certainty: the sea was a roiling mass of black hills, the sky a turbulent blanket of charred clouds and spears of lightning, and neither changed an iota. Either they weren’t moving – unlikely, given Carcosa’s disappearance – or the storm was.

If they packed up the sails and hunkered down, Blue thought, perhaps the storm would pass them over. The more she thought about it, the better the idea seemed, and she was prepared to climb down from the nest to run it past Aeril when a new thought occurred to her, a thought that drew her eye out to the horizon in the direction they’d come from.

As she watched, she felt her heart quickening in her chest. The lightning flashed and struck, drawing blazing veins in the sky and in the empty space between the clouds and the sea, and she tightened her fingers on the sodden wood that surrounded her.

“It can’t be,” she murmured. “No.”

The storm wouldn’t pass them over because it was chasing them, and it was about to catch up.

“Hoy!” Blue screamed, waving her arms, but her voice was swallowed up and nobody on deck was looking up. “Hey! Look at me, gods damn it, look up here! Hey!”

She looked back out at the horizon and moaned in dismay, now sure of what she thought she might only be imagining. The lightning flashed, and for an instant the sea and the ship were illuminated, and she could barely – just barely see a shape beneath the waves, a shadow rushing toward them.

Whatever it was, it was tremendous. It was tremendous, and fast, and as it drew nearer the rain fell harder and the flashes and arcs of lightning became more intense. It was the heart of the storm.

Muir had been right.

Blue screamed until it tore at her throat and she felt herself go light-headed, waving her limbs.

The shadow fell beneath the ship, and then it grew.

[Warpath]

Movement caught Flint’s eye and he glanced upward. Blue was waving frenetically down at them, and when she met his eye she pointed emphatically down. He crossed the deck in a few long strides, clutched the railing, and peered over the edge. He searched desperately for signs of sirens or other invaders, and only after a long moment did he realize the problem was so much worse.

A shadow was growing beneath the ship, darker even than the waves themselves, and the flashes of lightning revealed it to be ever-larger. Something was coming up on them from below.

“Brace!” he hollered madly, turning back to Aeril. She saw him and the panic in his eye, and turned the wheel sharply to one side.

The ship lurched once, and then chaos reigned. The deck fell out alarmingly from below Flint’s feet, and in the peripherals of his vision he saw the sea rising up to either side of the ship. He landed hard on his side and slid across the deck toward the front of the ship. Aeril cried out in pain and fear behind him.

The waves crashed and roared against the sides of the ship, and the deck was raised up so quickly that Flint felt his stomach lurch, and his hands grasped at the floorboards in a futile search for a grip. He didn’t find one in time, so that when the boat reached its apex his back lifted four inches off the deck before falling back to it again.

Flint pushed down the pain, and let the tactical side of his mind race. Something colossal and heavy had been attached suddenly to the underside of the ship, he decided: the first shock had been the ship suddenly slowing down due to the extra drag, the second had been a new and monumental weight dragging them downward, and the sudden rise had been the counteracting force.

“Some sort of anchor!” he roared, crawling to his feet. “The sirens have some sort of anchor!”

He raced to the edge and looked over, but could discern nothing beneath the waves. The ship was going much slower now, and even over the rain he could hear the masts straining against the sails.

“Do you see anything?!” Aeril shouted.

He shook his head fiercely.

“They may try to cut through the hull from below! They’ll cut holes!”

“Holes I’ll plug with their corpses,” he growled.

He was about to turn from the rail to go below deck when the ship lurched again, and once more the sea rose steadily up to either side as the water beneath them was displaced. He gripped the rail hard, and his stomach sank when it began to seem as though they would be pulled right down beneath the surface. What could be so large, so heavy to pull them this way? A hundred sirens wouldn’t have the strength, a thousand…

And then cold realization struck him, and he looked down on the deck, where Muir stood pale and still, the lone man not looking over the edge.

No sane man looks directly at death when he knows death’s face.

[Warpath]

The waves were alarmingly high, battering the sterncastle with foam and spray, but the ship dropped no farther. Aeril turned the wheel one way and then the other, and then she looked out over the deck desperately, lost. What could she do? What could anyone do?

The men began to shout, giving conflicting orders, demanding guidance, calling out for help. One or two threw things down into the water, mops and buckets and even a knife, but those things disappeared into the depths and changed nothing.

Flint paced, opening and closing his fists rhythmically, and he watched the sea, and he waited, and he was the only one that didn’t cry out when their foe revealed itself.

At first they thought they were stone spires rising from the sea around them, black towers as thick as tree trunks. “A mountain!” someone shouted. “We’re caught on a mountain!”

The spires kept rising, and Flint stopped his pacing to watch them, tense. They were not stone. They reached a hundred feet into the air, fourteen or fifteen of them surrounding the ship, and then the spires curled so-slowly downward upon them, first like the fingers of a giant hand, and then they seemed more like spider legs without joints.

Muir danced away as the first tendril came down on the ship, lighting gentle and limp upon the deck, one end rising up out of the sea on one side, and the other end disappeared over the edge on the opposite side. Gradually, slowly, one-by-one, the remaining limbs came to rest on the ship. One lay over the main mast, and Blue was already scrambling down out of the crow’s nest.

What happened next came as no surprise: the tendrils tensed, and pulled, and tightened, and the wood of the ship screamed. Flint charged the tendril nearest to him, but hesitated when he got a close look at it. From a distance it looked like stone, but up close it reminded him of something far more terrible.

In Ettermire he’d encountered a cockroach the size of a stagecoach, and the alien armor covering it still haunted his nightmares. The surface of those tendrils was similar, plated and segmented and hard, gleaming with water. Flint viciously kicked at it, but his blows did nothing.

On deck, four sailors were attempting to pull one tendril up off the deck, but their efforts were utterly in vain. Muir had the most luck, driving the blade of his glaive down into one of their enemy’s limbs. The blade sank into the surface a few centimeters, and could be driven no farther.

The wood of the railing snapped in two and then three places, and the ship rocked violently first to one side, and then the other, tossing the crew off their feet. Overhead the mast began to groan, and with an explosion of splinters a crack appeared right at the base of it. Their ship was being steadily crushed, and the sea churned around them.

Flint untied himself and bounded over the railing, dropping off the sterncastle and landing heavily beside Muir.

“Gaspar!” he roared, but the Fallienman was already crossing the deck, bounding over the tendrils one after the next.

The three of them gripped the glaive, and with their combined weight and all the strength they could muster, they forced the blade down into that unholy tentacle an inch at a time. The blade sank, and just when it seemed that the tendril was a thing beyond sense or pain, the ship lurched so hard to port that Roberson was thrown overboard, only saved by the rope still tied around him.

The tendril loosened and then lifted off the deck, launching upward with such force that the three men were tossed aside.

“The glaive’s still stuck in it!” Muir shouted. “Find something sharp for the others!”

“They’re going slack!” Luned said. “You’ve hurt it, it’s letting us go!”

The injured, upraised tendril rose up, up, well over the mast of the ship, and then it dropped fast onto the front of the ship, and the force sent them all airborne, tumbling insensible through the air, limbs flailing, thunder and waves roaring, and the waves rushed up to meet them.

And amidst the chaos, as they slid and tumbled and rolled over the slick, shattered deck, they saw it.

It was hauling itself up out of the sea, a dozen oozing eyes flashing in the lightning, and it opened its maw too full of teeth.

[Warpath]

The ship leaned forward until the sterncastle rose up into the air, and from behind the wheel Aeril was looking down into the sea. She watched as the leviathan emerged from the sea, a black shape divorcing itself from the darkness surrounding it. It was bigger than the ship, so much bigger than any living thing had the right to be, but it was impossible to tell exactly where it began and the sea ended. The lightning illuminated it in glimpses: this eye from a fish, that from a crocodile, a lipless grin taken from a shark, limbs like a crab amongst a jellyfish’s ribbon-legs, and she could not tell if it had a tail or a squid’s tentacles. And then it opened its mouth to reveal a void ringed in a hundred thousand gleaming razors, a mouth that loomed above the ship and seemed poised to devour it whole, and Aeril felt herself go cold and calm.

So this is it, she thought. Wow.

This is how I die.

[Warpath]

The ship was failing all around him, cracking and splintering and snapping. The mast was leaning alarmingly to one side, and one more good shake would doubtlessly break it off and send it to the bottom of the ocean. The rain beat down on him, making everything slick, but Flint endured. He climbed, curling his fingers into the gaps between the boards, shoving off from the tendrils.

Luned had her back to what was once the floor and she was standing on one of the tendrils, gripping her rope to keep herself steady. She looked down first to see the monster poised to swallow them, but then she saw Flint, and she had no more attention to give to death. She held on to the rope with one hand, and reached out with the other. Her braids were coming loose, and her hair hung soaking wet and wild around her face, and her eyes were wide.

She was screaming something – his name? He couldn’t hear her over the cacophony. He was afraid, but not for himself. For the first time in his life, he had no thought of his own pain or safety, and had no need to push his fear aside. For the first time he embraced it, and it gave him strength. He didn’t care if he lived or died, just so long as she lived – just so long as she had a chance.

His mind raced, desperate. He had to contact Agnie somehow, get Luned back through the doorway to Radasanth before –

The wood of the ship cried out, and another railing snapped and splintered, and the back half of the ship shifted downward alarmingly. It couldn’t bear its own weight. The rope in Luned’s hand suddenly went slack and she cried out, stumbling and then shoving herself back. Flint’s heart stopped, but she didn’t fall. She gripped the tendril with both hands now, crouched against it, and the look in her eye spoke of all the hope abandoning her.

He hung from the ship with one hand, eyes locked on hers, and with his free hand he reached down into his pocket and closed his fingers around the vial of Swaysong. When he pulled it out he hesitated, and her eyes went from his hand to his eyes, and realization dawned on her face. He felt a strange, unfamiliar pang in his chest and wished desperately that he could tell her that he was sorry; he wanted so badly to explain. Instead he popped the cork out, and Luned screamed.

He didn’t need to hear her to know the word, but he raised the vial to his lips anyway.

The Swaysong had no taste, but it was cold. He swallowed it, or tried to, but the moment it touched the inside of his mouth he could feel it sinking into his flesh, filling his cheeks and his jaw, spreading its cool touch over his nose and down his throat. It spread perceptively throughout his body, working its way down and then in toward his bones. It crawled up into his skull and it laced its way down along his spine, and then he began to feel wrong.

He was too aware of himself, and the world began to fade away. The unpleasant cold of the rain seemed distant compared to the comforting chill within him, and the thunder and the waves and the rain dropped away to a hushed din from somewhere beyond, so insignificant next to the beating of his heart and the rhythmic rush of blood through his veins. Suddenly the night was not so dark and its colors intensified and supersaturated, and when the lightning streaked across the sky it did so at a crawl, and its luminescence was no harsher than the sun in the early morning gloom. He forgot pain and fatigue and weakness, and wondered what had prevented him from scaling the ship with ease: the weight of his own body was nothing – a single feather, no more than the droplet of rain just about to strike the bridge of his nose.

So this is what it felt like to be a god.

He let go, and fell.

[Warpath]

The ship was not perfectly vertical, but it was held up at an extreme angle. Flint slid down along the deck toward the leviathan’s open maw. He was aware of the imperfections in the deck ripping at his leg and side, but the pain was nothing, another piece of information he consumed. Strange – a moment ago death seemed only seconds off, but now he felt as though he had all the time in the world.

His boot struck the tendril immediately below him and he twisted, curling at the waist and catching it in both hands. “You will know first,” he growled. “You will know first, and no one will forget after you.”

He braced his boots against the deck just beneath, and pressed his fingers into the surface of the tendril. What had seemed so hard was now pliant, supple, and his fingertips sank in, pierced, and some warm liquid welled up against his palms. He took great handfuls of flesh, reveling in the feel of individual ropes and strings that made up that appendage, and then he pulled.

“I…AM….FEAR.”

Blood gushed around his hands, splashing on his neck and chest as he butchered the alien limb with his bare hands. The tendril shivered in his grip, eager to lash but the requisite muscular control had been severed. Flint squeezed and twisted, ripping and yanking chunks of white flesh free and tossing them back away from him. He felt the world lurch as the leviathan loosened its grip on the ship and the sterncastle dropped back down toward its proper place in the sea.

He released the mangled meat and let himself slide farther downward before the ship fully evened out. The leviathan was already lifting the next tendril away, so he shoved away from the deck and went airborne, and reached both hands out to catch. He struck the tendril hard, wrapping his arms around it, but the monster trembled in fear and the appendage lashed, lifted high away from the deck and quivering, shaking him loose.

Flint was ripped free and sent tumbling through the air, freefalling. The ship was far, far below him now – how far had he been thrown up? He didn’t know, but he felt no fear, only exhilaration. Death has no meaning to gods. His upward momentum was spent and he righted himself in the air. For a perfect moment he was suspended in midair, frozen in place with his limbs spread wide, and he could see the ocean spread out in every direction below him and the ship seemed tiny and insignificant. He saw Aeril there, and Luned, and Muir and Gaspar clinging to a railing together, and Blue hanging by her right arm from the rigging, and the leviathan was settling backward into the water, lashing its tendrils in the air furiously.

The young god – no, titan – he fell toward the ship. Was it fifty feet down? A hundred? He didn’t know and he didn’t care. The leviathan must have seen him, because it swung one of its tendrils to intercept him, but this was the one they’d stabbed with Muir’s glaive. He caught the shaft of the weapon with speed he didn’t know possible, twisting his body with an acrobat’s grace. The tendril lashed one way, and then the other, but Flint felt no concern. It could not shake him loose.

He held tight as the appendage dropped out of the sky, and the sea rushed up to meet him, and the wind roared in his ears and he smiled. He smashed into the surface of the water, and there was almost enough force there to tear him away but not quite, and the black sea embraced him in roiling cold and the tendril slowed its descent and drifted.

Flint looked, and saw the underside of the ship, and saw how vast the leviathan was. It gripped the ship with only the upper quarter of its body, the rest was a shadowy mass of tails and tentacles and tendrils swaying dreamily in the deeps. He didn’t know how to think of it: fish or whale or squid or lobster, it was something of all of them, all the sea in one body. He wanted to be closer to it that he might break it, so he twisted in the water and wrapped his legs around the tendril he hung from, and he pushed the glaive deeper in. The tendril lashed, and launched him upward once again.

The wind rushed around him again, too fast for him to determine where he was or where he was going: he didn’t care. He gripped the tendril tight and twisted the glaive, yanked and shoved viciously until the meat around the blade was raw and soft and ground up to uselessness, and then the tendril whip-snapped and Flint was, at last, shaken loose.

He fell for what felt like a long time, but everything was moving so slowly now, and then he felt his back strike something solid and something gave way – wood or bone, he couldn’t tell at first. He fell again, and then he struck the deck of the ship violently. It was his back, he decided – it was broken, utterly shattered. He couldn’t feel his legs, and his vision was blurring. He could feel himself bleeding internally, feel the ruptured mass of organs he didn’t know the names of, feel the nerves misfiring.

There was the briefest instant of fear, and he felt the darkness closing in on him, and then he denied it. The sounds came rushing back, the sea, the shouts of pain and fear, the thunder, the crashing waves, and his vision sharpened. He let anger take over, anger at his frailty. Get up, he told himself. Stand up. He tensed his back and felt his spine pull back into place, every segment snapping and cracking and fusing, sometimes the wrong way so the bone snapped and fused again until it felt right.

His heart had been fluttering, but now it found the beat again, and it pounded harder than ever – maybe too hard. He felt the blood straining against his veins, threatening to burst free, so his veins hardened until they strained against his flesh and threatened to tear rends in it, so his flesh hardened to hold them. He stood straight and stretched his arms to his sides and tensed, flexed, and his strength was such that he broke a bone in his left shoulder. The bone knitted too fast, and tore the ligament free entirely, and he could feel the tissue stretch between the bones to reconnect again, and when it pulled it did so too hard and yanked the bone away from the muscle, but the tendon healed.

It all happened in seconds, and the agony made him laugh. This time he flexed and felt his body strain against itself, but it held. He was learning how to be greater than a god, and there would be missteps, but what did it matter? The flesh obeyed.

“Flint!” someone shouted. He turned. Muir? He tossed the glaive back. He didn’t want to break it. Everything was so frail.

“Flint it’s coming back!”

What was coming back? He stretched his back and felt the muscle spread, pushing up against his skin. The flesh almost tore; he felt a bead of blood swelling against his shirt. He didn’t stop, even when the fabric ripped. What did it matter?

He found himself on the ground again, sliding violently across the deck. What was this? He slapped his hand against the wood and dragged himself to a stop, and looked up. The leviathan had rushed the side of the ship, and the impact had almost cracked it in half. Indeed, it was leaning, groaning, sinking. Its spine had been broken.

For a moment, Flint’s thoughts were confused. He had failed? He stumbled, suddenly feeling too heavy – too dense. His triceps were too large, too strong, and he almost broke his arm when he reached to catch himself. He was a fool, no god he, no titan. He remembered Ezura, the way she had swelled to grotesque proportions, the way her muscles had crushed the rest of her body. He had doomed himself.

It was hard to breathe. His ribs were too heavy, pressing in on his lungs, and he couldn’t fill them. He tried to take a deep breath, and cried out. He didn’t know what he overextended, but it tore. He coughed, and tasted blood.

He fell to one knee, and his vision swam. The leviathan laid two of its tendrils across the deck and began to pull itself up out of the water, intent upon bringing its full weight down on the ship. Its mismatched and myriad eyes twisted this way and that, both furious in its pain and gleeful at the coming revenge.

Flint began to fall to one side, and reached out. The movement was too sudden and the radius snapped, the bone tearing at his skin and pressing out on the inside of his gauntlet, and he felt his veins bursting one by one, and bruises spread beneath his skin. He had failed himself.

He had failed them all.

He had failed Luned.

[Warpath]

He struggled against death, fought for every breath. Despair settled over him, pushed him down, and he clawed for the light. The end was inevitable, but he refused to go easily. Oh-so-carefully he turned his head, blinking and straining his eyes to see. He caught a glimpse of Roberson, hanging limp from his rope. The deck was so empty, he thought, and then he realized the masts were gone. He turned his eyes to where Blue had been in caught in the rigging, but the rigging was all gone.

Someone was screaming Gaspar’s name, Muir he guessed, and the pain in his voice was heart-rending. It could mean nothing good. He turned his head the other way, but could not see onto the sterncastle from where he was. All he could see was Aeril’s hand and wrist, still bound to the wheel. Her fingers were delicately curled, and still. He was glad not to see her body, for he found that he had admired her. He wanted to remember her strong.

He turned his eyes to the sky and wheezed, and gave up on breathing for a moment just to rest. His eyes drifted closed, and through his eyelids he saw the lightning dancing, flashing, and the light gradually faded, each flash a little duller than the last.

“They got it, didn’t they?”

A girl stood alone on an empty street, filthy, soaked, and shivering. Loose pieces of paper drifted across the cobblestone behind her, tossed by the evening breeze. The script on the papers was Aleraran, and Flint didn’t read elf. Even underneath the grime, her hair tangled and snarled, shivering for fear and cold and exhaustion, her eyes spoke of unrelenting purpose.

“You look vulnerable,” he told her.

“If I had Swaysong, I could undo it,” she said.

She looked down, and he followed her gaze. Ezura’s corpse was there, misshapen and grotesque due to the Swaysong he forced her to drink. When he looked back up at Luned again, her face was bloody, and she had bloody cuts on her neck. The vial was in his hand, empty.

“I’m leaving,” she told him coldly. “You can find your own way out.”

Flint’s eyes snapped open and he took a harsh, deep breath, and felt his ribs shift and strain against his lungs. His chest burned. How long had he been dead? He didn’t know, but the darkness was already closing in again. He tried to growl, but instead he gurgled blood.

He couldn’t lift himself, so he turned his head and spat and coughed.

“Oh gods, thank you,” someone said. “Flint!”

He struggled to focus his eyes. Luned?

Her leg was pinned at an awkward angle underneath one of the leviathan’s tendrils. She was in pain, but her concern overrode it, and he realized with a chill that she’d watched him die. If the leviathan didn’t hurry, she’d probably have to see it again.

“Flint, look at me,” she begged. He focused his eyes on her again. “Stay with me.”

Slowly, despite the agony it caused him, he nodded for her. I’m not going anywhere, he wanted to say, but couldn’t because he was. The corners of his vision were cloudy and ethereal, and he was reminded of that brief instant some months ago when Resolve had torn his soul from his body. He swore he could see shapes and figures standing just outside his vision, watching with interest as his body failed him. Ezura would be there, he knew, and countless others.

“Flint,” she said, “listen to me. I need you to get up. I need you to get that thing away from the ship. I need you to kill it, so I can fix this.”

“Can’t,” he rasped hopelessly. “Dying.”

Tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head, and he gave her a pained look. “No,” she said. “Flint you’re not dying. Look at me, focus. Okay? You gauge strength by seeing it controlled, remember? Control it.”

Flint’s mind wandered, but this time it went with a new clarity. He remembered a rosy-cheeked Luned full of doubt and want, pressing her forehead to his chest. He remembered reaching for her hair in the dark, as afraid for her as he was of her. He remembered her rain-soaked, shaking out sodden pages. He foresaw the leviathan hauling itself up onto the ship with one final effort, foresaw the scream cut short and the instant of panic and pain before her life was crushed out of her.

It made him angry.

“What are you!?” she screamed at him, breathing a little heavier as he crawled to his feet.

Of course, it seemed so obvious now. How did he forget?

He was fear.