“What is it?”

Caspia’s voice was a harsh rasp. Her anger with Jev and Rodney was still clear in her throat. But this was an emergency—an unknown Owin had never dreamed would happen.

The crew was gathering. Everyone was on deck.

“There’s something immediately north of the front hull, captain,” said Owin. “Something large and red. I don’t know what it is.”

As he said it, the sea before them splashed about. A monstrous growling rumbled deep below the vessel.

Caspia’s eyes went wide. “ALL HANDS ON DECK! MAN THE CANNONS! JARRA, ON WATCH!”

The mage sprinted toward the helm. She followed him as the crew dispersed like insects, the ship losing all sense of still.

Owin lifted Cloud. The pup wriggled and barked. “Ye gotta go inside, boy,” he said, blood chilling by the second. “I don’t want’cha out here if we rock and sway.”

Cloud fought him on that until he was put down by the kitchens. Owin bolted for the door, and almost slammed it closed before he saw that Cloud had trailed him.

“No! Sit!”

Cloud yapped.

“Not now!” The ship shook a bit, as the creature below brushed against it. Something rose from the water, dripping and splashing.

It’s so loud…

Benni appeared from the back room. “Benni!” said Owin, fighting to pry Cloud off his leg. The rainwolf had clamped down on his ankle, you see. “Take him!”

Benni rushed toward Owin and grabbed Cloud. The dog yapped and fought, whipping back and forth with fangs bared. Cloud never acted this way—but Owin had no time to waste on his upset hound. The moment the cook took his pup, Owin slipped out the door to the deck and made for the crow’s nest.

“FIRE!”

Cannons blew into the sea, splashing up geysers. He climbed the ladder and gripped the pole of the nest, feet on the edge to get as much height as he could.

And what he saw…

It was a gargantuan creature. A behemoth. A bulbous, fleshy head with nary a body, but many tentacles. It was larger than the ship, and tossed it with appendages like a boy would flick a bug. At the sight of it, Owin’s thoughts came to a halt. He was unable to comprehend a creature so strange.

Then he remembered seeing something like this before… in the markets! The fisherman’s markets of Marniko itself, being the sea trade city-state it was. There was no shortage of sealife for sale, was there? Yes, fish of all kinds, clams, crabs, lobsters—but one other thing. A rare thing that they didn’t often have. Something exactly like this creature here, but small enough to be held with two hands. Eight tentacles, beaked mouth, no bones. He forgot what the animal was called, but this must have been a god among them.

“KEEP FIRING MEN!”

Caspia’s shrill voice vanished beneath the cannonfire. The monster stuck out a tentacle, only to get pelted with projectiles. Owin could barely see behind the main sail, but witnessed Ken and Lepp loading another ball into the cannon on the west rail. Armando and Thoma did the same beside them.

The ship lurched into the sky. It happened so suddenly that Owin thought—for the briefest of moments—that the sea had fallen away below them.

The ship came back down. Owin held the pole and braced for impact of keel to water as he and the crew were lifted several feet from the planks while the Queen Camila plummeted.

When it made contact, he heard the sounds of men colliding with the deck. He himself slid down the pole and slammed flat against the crow’s nest floor, palms scraping hard against the wood. He looked at them. Filled with splinters like a hedgehog’s back—stinging and bloody.

He stood, hands sore and weak. The pain was less than the terror he felt at the monster, however. He could do nothing as it wrapped its slimy tentacle around the ship. Below, men screamed and yelled, stabbing and hacking at the appendage with various swords, axes, daggers. The monster didn’t react.

I can’t just stand and do nothing. But what could he do? If weapons didn’t work against the beast, then what would?

He suddenly found himself barking things down to the crew. “It’s moving north!” He leaned out, saying, “It’s coming back around! Hurry men! Hit it with all you got!”

And come back around it did. The beast lifted a tentacle out of the water and flicked the hull. Owin heard the sound of wood splintering apart, as if a boulder had been lobbed against the side. With contact, the vessel swayed.

“CAPTAIN!” screamed Victor. “WE’RE TAKING ON WATER!”

This was bad. A monster attacking, creating problems in the ship that could sink it—what even was this thing?

Happy Ken’s words echoed in Owin’s mind; Sometimes words don’t work, Owin.

There’s nothing I can do…

Another tentacle whipped into the air and crashed down on deck. Caspia shouted at Jarra, who sprinted to the seafiend’s appendage and promptly blasted it with a stream of red fire.

A shriek punctured the air. It echoed around like an explosion, a cry so terrible it chilled Owin’s blood. He clasped his hands over his ears and knelt, grinding his teeth. It was like the sky was vibrating. Ringing.

It drew its tentacle back.

“MAGE JARRA!” shouted a man on deck. “SIR MAGE!” shouted another. Chaos ensued with yells and shouts, cannons firing into the sea, the monster shrieking and moving from one end of the ship to another. This was so out of Owin’s hands it wasn’t funny. What could he do? Just watch as Jarra burned it when it got too close, waiting for the bottom of the ship to take on water?

He started climbing down. In this regard, he’d be able to help it not sink, right?

But as he started, he saw another thing in the water not far away. It was a darker color than the tentacle menace, and… bigger. Much, much, bigger.

Frantic as the wind in winter, Owin rang the bell repeatedly. “CAPTAIN!” His voice went hoarse at the volume with which it rose. “ANOTHER! ANOTHER BEAST APPROACHES!”

He pointed. Caspia eyed him, and turned around as a giant maw emerged from the water.

A beast—a titan of a fish, large enough to fit ten ships, fit ten houses, reared up out of the water. Its body hued in the dark colors of a storm, with a pointed snout; head the shape of a diamond. It looked shark-like with its many teeth and narrow face… but it had, in the glimpse Owin got as it roared out of the water like a mountain… glowing yellow eyes. Its body the dark color of a storm, it opened wide and bit down hard on the smaller tentacled fiend.

Crunch.

The sea ran red. A wave as large as a cloud, murky and brown with brine and blood, went splashing over the side of the ship, painting the crew and the planks with a thick carmine slosh. Owin avoided most of it, getting only a bit on his face and shoes—whereas the flags, the sails, the ship at large, went from orange to scarlet in only a moment.

And then the beast submerged again, swimming forward, its body like that of a serpent. By the time its tail had moved to the place where its head had been, Owin was sure he could have counted to thirty.

That left only the crew, slowly rocking in its wake. The attacking fiend of many arms was gone.

For a long while, Owin just stood in shock, unable to fully understand a beast so large and strange. What if it came back? They would be completely outmatched…

But it didn’t. Mouth agape, Owin watched the swirling foam of the sea finally fade back into the waves, the creatures lost to the deep.

The crew moved below to repair the damage. Some men were already coming back up with buckets of water, dumping them over the side before returning to get more. But Owin could only stand and wonder.

“Roper!”

Caspia.

Owin remembered again that his hands were the beds of dozens of splinters. His pain, forgotten in his awe, returned.

Wincing with each grab, Owin descended the ladder. Caspia stood at the summit, arms crossed. Owin looked up at her stern expression with a tight feeling in his chest. His palms were throbbing.

Caspia exhaled, and ruffled his hair. “You okay?”

He began to nod, but shook his head instead, and showed her his hands. Caspia’s eyes narrowed. “Jarra can help you with that when he’s gotten a bit of rest. For now, you’ll have to ask Benni for a temporary pain reliever.”

“R-right.”

“Hey,” she said, stopping him as he made his way to the door.

“Yeah? I—I mean, aye, Captain?”

She pursed her lips a little. “I think we’re further gone than any one else has been in hundreds of years.”

That sounded about right to Owin.

“I’m willing to bet that worse beasts than those exist in waters further ahead. Can I trust you to be just as useful then as you were today?”

Owin’s brows knit. “Useful? I couldn’t do… anything, sir.”

Caspia hmmph’d. “Bollocks. That bell was everything. Better to prepare for the unknown than lettin’ it getcha, right? Even if you only get a moment.”

Owin felt strange when he reflected on her words. Did he really deserve that much praise? They would have seen it at some point, right…?

Caspia smacked him on the back. Not hard, but enough to knock him out of his thoughts. “Go check on your pup and get cream for your hand.”

So he did.

...

Caspia sat and put her feet on her desk. She rubbed her arm over her sweaty forehead with a long sigh.

It’s always going to be this way, ain’t it?

She recalled Jarra’s words, words he told her in private not long ago; A dark presence was on this ship.

What kind of presence, he did not know. How dark—he didn’t know that either. Just that a foreign presence, something sinister, was lurking on her vessel. With her crew. Her men.

And then there was the ever-growing threat of continuing forward. For a thing, supposedly, had been trailing them for the past several days now. She slammed her fist against the desk, face twisted up, teeth grit.

“Gods dammit…”

Rodney and Jev’s constant fighting only made it worse. They couldn’t even come together to fight off the kraken, let alone whatever horrors lie down the road. It made her want to shout, to grab a heavy object and destroy every window in her captain’s quarters. She slammed her fist against the desk three more times in a fit. Only Jarra’s magic was effective in the end, she mused.

She took off her cap and sighed again. Yes… it was always going to be this way. Because it always had been this way.

She was twenty-nine now. Her crew ranged from men ages eighteen to fifty. She’d fought a long, hard, uphill battle to become the captain she had always wanted to be, and at times it felt like she was still fighting.

She remembered when she was ten, and saw a ship for the first time in Marniko’s ports. A beautiful galleon, much like her very own Queen Camila—titled A Gliding Hope.

That ship stuck with her every step of the way. When the captain climbed onto the dock and shook her hand—Captain Amelia Cafaro—she knew she wanted to be just like her. A strong woman with scars and shadows, but a woman who held her chin up through the gray to see the light.

So she trained with her.

More memories. She was thirteen, knocking blades with Cafaro on deck.

She was sixteen, manning the helm alone for the first time after Cafaro had made her wait so long.

She was seventeen. She—

No… she was nine again… all the way back to a time before she’d ever seen a ship. Back to before she lived in Marniko at all. Before she had to.

“Caspia,” said her father from the front of the wagon, “You stay inside, okay?”

“Why?” she asked.

His face turned dark. Their horses clopped against the muddy trail, a light rain pouring down over their caravan. “Bad men are about, Caspia. Bad men who hurt little girls.”

Initially, she felt fear at these words. “Bad men?”

Her father, black of hair, tan of skin, and green of eye like her, nodded. “Stay in here and I will keep you safe.”

Her mother called for them all to huddle just a bit closer together, beside her brothers and sisters, her aunt, her sick uncle, and all of their barreled grain.

Footsteps outside. Many of them.

“Stop,” said her father to the bad men. “We don’t mean you any harm. We have goods, if it will get you to leave us be.”

Then came the sound of loaded rifles. “Eastern caravans have nothing we want.”

“They’re not for you!” said another person, probably the man they had been traveling with, in the other wagons.

Then came a crash. A few men shout, someone falls… and a rifle goes off.

Caspia’s family shook, huddling closer. But Caspia’s fear is gone, replaced with anger. Anger that she had been told to stay back and wait. Anger that she’s small and young, and can’t do anything to help her father.

“Stand back!” he said from outside. The horses reared up, wagons shaking. Another rifle went off, a body falling limp to the ground. Her mother and siblings gasped as Caspia poked her small head out of the wagon canvas, looking upon the scene.

Her father was dead. A red wound took the place of his face, he on the ground, bleeding into the mud.

A bad man with a rifle was pointing it right at her. Five others surrounded him, all dressed in a distinct red coat. She always remembered that—her clothes, and her family’s clothes, were so gray—but the bad men wore red.

She felt her heart about to burst. She was so angry—she wanted to kill all of them, force them to give her back her father, force them to swallow the barrels of their guns and pull the triggers—but she couldn’t.

She was still so small.

They shot at her. She fell back into the wagon unharmed, but even angrier.

She didn’t see what happened next, as men from other wagons in their group hopped down and rushed the bad men. In the end, their caravan kept moving, and lost only two people.

But the raids on the trails didn’t stop there. Over the next few seasons they continued, until Caspia eventually lost her brother and uncle. Each time she was unable to fight back. Unable to do anything. Even at such a young age she understood her helplessness, and loathed herself for it.

Her family stopped trading and moved to Marniko. “It’s safer here,” they said—where instead of mercenaries on trade routes and wars in the north, there was simple burglary, simple murder every other day, simple theft and violence that was digestible to a degree. They never went back home.

They said that godless men were damned, and maybe that was right. Caspia didn’t believe in Dwen, Kaive, and Twella. She’d never caught a break either. Not since she first saw A Gliding Hope. Not since she first admired the strength of Captain Amelia Cafaro. She could do things. She could act.

“So why can’t I, damn it!?”

She slammed her fist again. We’re always fighting, she thought. We’ve never stopped.

That’s partly why she took this mission. To get away from it all. The destabilizing power vacuum in the wake of Varagis’s wars with Highwater. The rapidly increasing crime in Marniko, where every other day she’d have to kill a man in the streets who tried to grab her, or re-paint her ship when others lobbed booze, eggs, and shite at its hull.

Not to mention all that piracy in the south.

If the edge of the world did exist, wouldn’t it take her away from that? The things she can’t control?

She was about to slam her fist again when Jarra entered her chambers. “Can I help you?” she asked, not so much as looking at him.

“Captain…”

Caspia eyed him. “You really need to get some rest, Jarra.”

He was quiet. She looked. His eyes were, as always when it was just the two of them, filled with concern he’d rather hide from the crew. “I can feel the remnants of death on these waters, Captain.”

“I know about my vessel.”

“No,” Jarra said. “Older death. Darker death.”

“Doesn’t get darker than ghosts, right?” She put her hat back on her head and tipped it down. “Or evil hiding somewhere on the ship.”

“I’m sorry to say it does, Captain Caspia. We’re going further than anyone has gone before.”

“The edge, you mean? Is this the ‘remnant of death’ you’re talking about?”

“You and I both know there is no edge.”

She didn’t respond to that.

“I mean there’s an aura occupying this stretch of sea, Caspia. Something foul and old. Fouler than krakens and leviathans. Fouler than ghosts.”

Still, she said nothing.

“I leave with you that. Sorry to do so. But the cap—”

“—The captain has to know,” she finished for him. He pursed his lips, nodded, and bid her farewell for the night.

...

The sun had gone down by the time she was done with her thoughts. She left the captain’s quarters and approached the helm, stopping for a moment to look out behind the ship. The faraway, faded blue lights were just a tad closer. The lights no one but her could see.

She withdrew her spyglass and peered through.

The ship’s faint glow was deeper than it looked from so far away. The sails and flags were distinct in their lack of speed, flowing as if draped in a wind so slow it would hardly sway a tree. Yet so, the ghostly vessel was meaning to catch up to her.

Monsters below. Evil beside us. Spirits behind. Danger ahead.

One enemy at a time, she thought, remembering also the growing distrust between her crew. With a bit more force than she intended, she collapsed the spyglass and stowed it away, scowling.

She turned and walked back to her quarters. She didn’t fall asleep that night.