CRASH.
The sound wasn't outside. It was everywhere. It was the sound of a mountain of water slamming into a wall of timber, a violent, vibrating impact that shook the world down to its rivets.
The ship groaned. It wasn't a mechanical sound; it was the scream of wood being tortured, twisted, and bent beyond its natural limits.
Then came the secondary sounds. The chorus of the damned.
To my left, the wet, retching sound of someone dry-heaving on an empty stomach. To my right, the low, rhythmic whimpering of a man who had long since lost his mind. Above, the muffled shouting of the crew and the snapping of canvas in a gale.
And beneath it all, the rattling. The endless, metallic chattering of a thousand iron chains sliding against the damp floorboards.
I sat in the dark, pressed against the curved, slick wood of the hull.
Every time the ship pitched rolling violently to the left my body was thrown against the wall.
"Ghh..."
The sound escaped my teeth before I could stop it.
My shoulder didn't feel like a joint anymore. It felt like someone had replaced the ball and socket with a handful of rusted nails and broken glass. It had been months since the shockwave in Brent threw me against the porch. Months without a doctor. Months without healing. The joint had likely healed wrong, fusing into a tight, inflamed knot of agony that pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
It was a hot, sickly weight attached to my torso, dragging me down.
But the ribs... the ribs were worse.
Every breath was a negotiation. I had learned to breathe shallowly, sipping the air in tiny, careful doses. If I inhaled too deeply, the fractured bones in my chest ground together with a sensation so sharp it made my vision white out. It felt like I had a serrated knife buried in my lung, twisting with every roll of the ship.
Breathe in. Shallow. Breathe out. Slow.
It had been... how long?
Time had dissolved. It had liquefied into a grey smear of suffering.
Since the moment the merchant marked my coat with that black paint, my life had become a blur of transitions. From the cage in the wagon to a holding pen in a port city that smelled of dead fish and desperation. From the pen to the docks, where I was stripped of my wool coat the one Sylvia made for me. now I'm left in just my tattered tunic and trousers.
And then, into the hole.
We were cargo. That was the only word for it. We weren't prisoners of war. Prisoners imply a political value. Prisoners might be traded. We were livestock. We were inventory listed on a manifest, destined to be used until we broke, and then discarded.
I shivered, pulling my knees up to my chest, trying to preserve whatever body heat I had left.
The hull was freezing. The water outside the ship wasn't like the water in the lake back home. It radiated a cold that seeped through the wood, through my skin, and settled in my marrow. The floor was slick with a vile mixture of leaking seawater, vomit, and human waste.
CRASH.
Another wave hit. The ship lurched violently upward, hanging weightless for a sickening second, before slamming back down into the trough.
My stomach twisted. I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting the nausea.
Don't throw up, I told myself. You have nothing left to throw up. You'll just dry heave until you tear your ribs apart.
I focused on the darkness. I focused on the sounds.
I slowly peeled my eyes open. It was pitch black, but after weeks in the hold, my eyes had adjusted to the gloom. I could make out shapes in the shadows.
We were packed in tight. Row upon row of shackled figures, sitting shoulder to shoulder.
I looked at the person chained to the wall opposite me.
It wasn't a human.
Even in the gloom, I could see the distinct silhouette. He was hunched over, his skin pale and sickly, covered in a map of dark, yellowing bruises. But it was the top of his head that drew my eye.
Two dark brown, triangular ears twitched nervously atop his messy hair. They were flattened against his skull, instinctively reacting to the thunder of the waves. Curled around his legs, tucked in tight for warmth, was a scruffy, brown wolf tail.
A Beastfolk.
I remembered Sylvia telling me about them. She said they were a race of humans who possessed animal traits, ears, tails, sometimes claws. She never told me where they came from, only that they existed all over the world.
He looked just as miserable as the rest of us. He was shivering, his pale skin stark against the darkness, his wolf ears pinning back every time the ship groaned.
I looked further down the line.
There were others. A woman with patches of scales on her neck. A man whose eyes reflected the dim light like a nocturnal predator.
The Western Continent was mostly human. But here, in the belly of this ship, the world was mixing. We were a melting pot of misery.
My heart clenched.
Mom.
The thought hit me harder than the waves.
I pictured her face. I pictured the way her nose crinkled when she laughed. I pictured her holding Iris and Sora, shielding them from the cold.
I hope they got away, I thought.
It was a simple, desperate prayer. I didn't try to visualize where they were or what they were doing. I just held onto that one sentence.
I hope they got away.
I shook my head, the movement sending a fresh spike of pain through my neck.
It had been weeks of travel in this floating coffin. We had left the port, sailed into the open ocean, and just kept going. I didn't know where we were going, but the length of the journey terrified me.
This wasn't a short trip to a neighboring kingdom. This was an exodus. We were crossing the Abyss. We were going to the other side of the world.
To the East.
I leaned my head back against the wet wood, closing my eyes as a tear leaked out, hot and stinging against my cold cheek.
I was alone. I was a slave. And I was thousands of miles from the only home I had ever known.
I drifted into a fitful, feverish sleep. It wasn't a choice; my body simply shut down, unable to process any more pain.
Hours passed in the black void.
GROOOOOOOOAAAAAAARRRR.
The sound ripped me from unconsciousness like a hook through the cheek.
It wasn't thunder. It wasn't the wind. It was a sound that didn't belong in the air; it was a noise birthed in the crushing depths, amplified by the water, and transmitted directly through the timber of the hull into my bones. It was a low, vibrating bass frequency that rattled my teeth and turned my insides to water. It was the sound of something colossal. Something hungry.
My heart hammered against my bruised ribs, a frantic, bruising rhythm.
Above us, the ship erupted into chaos.
Thud-thud-thud-thud.
The ceiling boards shook as dozens of boots sprinted across the deck. I heard the muffled, frantic shouting of the crew, their voices distorted by the thick wood separating us.
"Starboard! Hard to starboard!"
"Get the—!"
"It's under us! It's right under us!"
I pressed my back against the wet, slimy wood of the hull, my breath catching in my throat. I looked around the hold. The single lantern hanging near the stairs was swinging violently, casting long, nauseating shadows that danced across the faces of the other slaves.
They were waking up.
The Beastfolk across from me was pressed flat against the floorboards, his hands over his wolf ears, his tail tucked so far between his legs it was almost invisible. He was whimpering, a high-pitched, canine sound of absolute terror. To my left, the woman with the scales was hyperventilating, clawing at her own throat.
The hull felt like a tomb. The air was thick with the smell of old bilge water and fresh panic. The wood itself seemed to be sweating, moisture slicking the walls where green algae and mold had taken root in the cracks. We were rats in a floating trap.
Then, it happened again.
GROOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRR!!!
This time, it was louder. Closer.
The roar didn't just vibrate the ship; it pierced through me. It was a sound of pure, ancient aggression that bypassed logic and struck directly at the lizard brain. Terror, cold and absolute, flooded my veins. It felt like the temperature in the hold dropped ten degrees in a second.
The light from the grate above vanished.
It wasn't a cloud. Something massive had moved between us and the sky. The shadows in the hold deepened, swallowing the faces of the other prisoners, leaving only the whites of their terrified eyes visible in the gloom.
The shouting above turned into screaming.
Then, came the impact.
SLAAAAAAP.
It sounded like a wet whip the size of a redwood tree striking the side of the ship.
The entire vessel shuddered. Dust and splinters rained down from the ceiling.
Then, a new sound began. A grinding, creaking protest of wood being pushed beyond its breaking point.
Creeeeeeaaaaaaak.
The floor beneath me shifted. It didn't roll with the waves. It didn't pitch.
It rose.
My stomach dropped into my feet. It was a sensation of weightlessness, sickening and wrong. The ship wasn't floating anymore. It was being lifted.
I scrambled to grab the iron bars of the wall, my chains clattering. The angle of the floor tilted sharply. Slaves slid down the incline, screaming as they piled into each other, chains tangling, limbs crushing limbs.
I stared at the wood of the hull right next to my head. I could hear it. I could hear something wet and rubbery grinding against the outside of the planks. It sounded like massive suction cups popping and re-sealing, a squelching, shifting noise that traveled up the side of the ship.
We were going up. Smoothly. Terrifyingly.
Whatever was out there... it had grabbed us. And it was lifting the entire ship out of the water.
The floor didn't just tilt, it became a slide.
"Curse it all to hell! Cut it loose! Cut it loose!"
The shouts from above were frantic, barely audible over the roaring wind and the groaning timber.
The ship lurched forward, the bow dipping sharply as if bowing to a dark god. Gravity shifted. The wall I had been leaning against became the floor, and the floor became a cliff.
Above me, through the iron grate, I saw flashes of movement.
"Die, you foul beast!"
A man in tattered leather armor, looking more like a bandit king than a sailor, vaulted across the gap in the grate. He moved with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for a human. He was a blur of steel and violence. He didn't use a technique; he used pure, raw kinetic force. He leaped into the air, his longsword flashing in the lightning, and drove the blade downward.
SCHLICK.
A spray of dark, viscous green fluid rained down through the grate, splattering onto the screaming slaves below. The fluid hissed as it touched skin, acidic and hot.
"Pull back, Jarek! It's too thick!" another voice screamed.
Through the gaps in the splintering deck, I saw a second warrior. This one was massive, wielding a war axe that looked heavy enough to crush a boulder. He spun, the momentum of the swing creating a visible distortion in the rain, and swung the weapon into a massive, rubbery wall of green flesh that had crested the rail.
SCHLICK.
The impact sounded like a cannon firing. The tentacle recoiled, thrashing wildly, smashing the ship's railing to matchsticks.
But the monster didn't care.
SLAAAAAAP.
Another tentacle, thicker than the main mast, rose from the churning black water on the port side. It slammed onto the deck, crushing a ballista like it was made of paper. The impact sent a shockwave through the ship that threw me hard against the iron bars of the cage.
CRAAAAACK.
The sound came from beneath us. The keel. The spine of the ship was snapping.
The roars grew louder, a deafening, wet bellow that vibrated inside my skull.
I scrambled to the side, pressing my face against the hull, peering out through a gap where the wood had started to buckle.
My heart stopped. My mind went blank.
We were hundreds of feet in the air.
Below us, the ocean was a churning, black abyss of whitecaps and storm swells. The waves looked like tiny ripples from this height. And rising out of that darkness, holding our massive slave galley like a toy, was the creature.
It was a Kraken.
It was a nightmare made of dark emerald flesh and barnacles. Its head was a bulbous, misshapen dome the size of a castle keep, dominated by two eyes that glowed with a pale, bioluminescent malice. A beak, black and jagged like obsidian, snapped open and shut, dripping water and slime.
It held us up, inspecting us against the lightning-streaked sky.
"Gods... gods help us..." the Beastfolk across from me whimpered, clutching his tail, his eyes rolled back in his head.
Then, the torture began.
The Kraken didn't want to just hold us. It wanted to open the prize.
The two massive tentacles gripping the bow and stern began to pull in opposite directions.
SCREEEEEEEEEECH.
The sound of iron nails shearing and wood splintering was deafening. The ship began to bend in the middle.
"Jarek! Look out!"
I looked up at the grate again. The warrior with the sword Jarek was sprinting along the tilting deck, trying to reach the main tentacle. He moved like a spectre, dodging falling debris with supernatural agility. He planted his feet and swung, carving a deep gash into the suction cups.
But he was fighting a mountain.
A third tentacle, faster than a whip, lashed out from the darkness.
There was no block. There was no parry.
SQUELCH.
The tentacle wrapped around Jarek mid-air. It didn't squeeze slowly. It constricted instantly. I heard the distinct, wet pop of his armor and his ribcage collapsing simultaneously. Blood erupted from his mouth. The tentacle whipped back, flinging his broken, limp body into the stormy sky, a ragdoll tossed into the void.
"JAREK!" the hammer-wielder screamed, his voice raw.
Then, the ship gave up the ghost.
BOOOOOOOM.
The hull directly beneath the cage snapped. The world split open.
The galley tore in half.
The sudden violence of the break sent the contents of the hold flying. Slaves who weren't chained to the walls slid out into the open air, their screams swallowed instantly by the storm. I watched the woman with the scales tumble out, her hands reaching for purchase on the wet wood, finding none. She fell, spinning down, down, down toward the black water and the waiting beak.
My half of the ship dangled precariously in the Kraken's grip.
The structural integrity was gone. The floorboards buckled. The heavy iron bolts securing our chains to the wood groaned under the sudden shift in weight.
I hung there, suspended by my wrists, my feet dangling over the open abyss where the floor used to be.
"Please!" someone shrieked. "Don't let me fall!"
The wood around my bolt splintered. The rot, the dampness, the sheer force of it was too much.
PING.
The bolt holding my chain ripped free from the timber.
I fell.
For a second, I was weightless. The wind roared in my ears, cold and wet. Rain lashed my face like bullets.
I tumbled through the air, debris falling with me, barrels, crates, pieces of the mast.
I looked down. The ocean was rushing up to meet me, a hard, black wall of death.
WHACK.
Something hard, a loose plank, a crate, I didn't know slammed into the side of my head.
Pain, white and blinding, exploded behind my eyes.
The world spun. The lightning, the green monster, the falling bodies, all blurred into a singular, grey smear.
My consciousness flickered out before I even hit the water.