Chapter 11 Lily
LILY
I stood at the front of the ship, the sky still maintaining its blue hue before darkness completely claimed it. The sky was an infinite expanse of bright stars overhead, a map that seafarers could always depend on if they ever lost their way.
Hawk had gone below deck to retire for the night, but I stood there alone, the skeleton crew maintaining the ship so others could rest. The sea was usually calm after the sun had set, and right now the surface felt like glass. It barely rocked at all.
There was a silent ringing in my ear, a substance that filled my entire chest and felt like a heavy stone. I wasn’t sure what I felt, if it was his aura or the presence of his dark magic, but I knew he was there.
In quiet moments like this, it was a lot easier to recognize.
My eyes shifted, and there he was, a king with his cape flowing in the breeze, a behemoth of a man who rivaled the size of a monster, with arms thicker than my head. His eyes matched the sky, dark but still full of light. He stared at me in silence, reading my face the way sailors read the stars.
I’d stayed out there even when most of the men had gone to bed for a chance to talk with him, to stare at his face and appreciate the comfort it brought me. Our souls resided in two different places, but I’d never felt closer to another person. Not to Zehemoth, not to my mother or father.
“Tell me your woes,” he said quietly.
I inhaled a slow breath as I looked upon his handsome face. “Jack said there’s an island called the Abyss, where sailors lost at sea reside. They don’t pass on to Caelum or Xian. They just…float somewhere in between. Is that true?”
He regarded my face for a long time, eyes still like a predator stalking its prey. “Yes.”
The guilt crashed into me like a wave from a tsunami.
“But that isn’t the fate of all. Some can’t rest until their body has been reunited with their loved ones. Others let go because they’ve always been part of the sea. If a member of your crew resides there, it’s because it’s where they want to be.”
“To be a ghost.”
“More a spirit.”
“And all the ships there…?”
“So they can scour the seas in search of a body they’ll never find.”
My eyes dropped as another wave of guilt crashed into me.
“Every member of your crew signed up voluntarily. They were aware of the risks but chose to go anyway. What happened is not your fault whatsoever, Xivin.”
“But it is my fault, because you warned me not to go.”
Another gust of wind moved over the ship and lifted his cape behind him before it came gliding back down.
“You would have been mad to trust the god of the underworld after he threatened you. Anyone else would have made the same decision. You carry the weight of the living and the dead, Lily Rothschild. Focus on the living, and let me handle the dead.”
“It just seems unfair that I’m alive while they’re forever lost at sea, because a god took pity on me.”
“It wasn’t pity,” he said quietly. “It was something far greater, far stronger…even then.”
I saw the sincerity in his eyes, the way he surrounded me in love without ever actually saying the words. The way he carried his heart on his sleeve like a shield he proudly wore in battle.
“Something I felt the moment I was within your presence.”
My eyes flicked away, not in rejection, but longing. My heart never sang for anyone the way it sang for him. It had been mute my whole life until his song filled my soul like water in a pitcher.
The connection between us was severed when Zehemoth’s words entered my mind. We’ve spotted a large fleet of ships southeast of where you are. They’re docked at port, and their ships are black as night, so dark we almost couldn’t see them ourselves.
Wrath seemed to instinctually know that I spoke to Zehemoth just by watching my expressions. Somehow he knew me better than anyone else who’d known me for such a brief amount of time. “What did he say?”
“He thinks they’ve spotted their fleet. Says their ships are black with matching sails.”
He gave a slight nod. “That’s them.”
“And everything Jack said about how they do business…is that true?” Or just a way to pump up my rage before the battle.
“It’s true.”
“Then those assholes are—”
“Talking to yourself, bonnie lass?” Jack must have opened the hatch and climbed up the stairs without my noticing because he appeared right between us, arms crossed over his chest, oblivious to the mighty god who watched him with an empty stare.
Whenever Wrath looked at someone else besides me, I could see the sharp difference in the intensity of his stare, the absence of the softness behind his eyes. The way he regarded everyone else with callousness in a way he never regarded me.
“Uh…yeah,” I said as I turned away from Wrath. “Talking to Zehemoth.”
“He can hear you out loud?” he asked as his eyes combed the skies for a dragon that wasn’t even there. “Or do you speak to someone no one else can see?” There was a playfulness in his eyes, like this was all a joke.
Except it wasn’t a joke at all—because my shadow was the king of the dead. “Zehemoth said he’s spotted their fleet southeast from here. They’re docked at a port. He describes their ships as the color of midnight with matching sails.”
He nodded in confirmation. “A flying crow’s nest saved us three weeks at sea, and by then, we’d have grown weary from hunger and scurvy. We’ll change the direction of our ship and ambush them at port.” He headed to the other side of the ship to communicate the change in course to his first mate.
Wrath adopted his previous expression when it was just the two of us. “Rest tonight because you’ll need your strength tomorrow. You should arrive around sunset. If the battle continues for too long, you’ll be at a disadvantage in the dark.”
“Alright.”
“Do not fear. I’ll be with you.”
I wasn’t afraid to fight alone, not against a bunch of jackass pirates, but I didn’t tell him that, because I always felt better when he was near. Felt ten times stronger and ten times wiser. Felt like a queen and he was…my king.
He approached me, slid his hand into my hair and kissed me on the forehead, granted me a blanket of affection that would cocoon me throughout the night. Then he disappeared without a word, gone like he was never there.
Hawk and I stood at the front of the ship, seeing the distant sight of land still many leagues away.
Have you landed?
Yes. At one of the small islands nearby.
Good. “He and Movack are grounded on an island. Hopefully they haven’t been spotted by anyone.”
“Who cares if they have? They’ll be even more terrified when we show up.”
“Don’t want our dragons to be the targets of their cannons.”
“I don’t dismiss their well-being because I don’t care,” he said.
“I dismiss it because they’re the most powerful creatures in the known world—and you easily forget that.
They’re not defenseless cats that keep warm on your lap in front of the fire.
They breathe fire and roar so loud they make the earth tremble under your feet.
I’m more concerned about us than them right now.
” He looked across the sea again. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’m ready to cut off some dicks, that’s for sure.”
He gave me a nudge in the side. “That’s the spirit, sis.”
We stood together at the rail and watched the landmass grow closer. It was hard to see the details at this distance, but the closer we came, the colors began to change, the images became clearer.
One of the pirates whistled from the crow’s nest. “They see us, Captain Ironhook Scurvy. Their ships are leaving port and headed for us.”
“A battle on the seas,” Jack said. “Just the way I like it.”
My heart should start to race a little quicker in my chest, but it was perfectly calm.
I fought alongside allies I barely knew, only had Hawk as a true comrade, but a band of asshole pirates didn’t make me flinch.
After the Barbarians and their cursed blades, everything else seemed far more trivial.
As the ships came into sight and their armada could be distinguished in the fading light, I saw the black sails and the flags that bore the symbol of their name—Liberators. It was an ironic choice, considering they did the opposite of liberating, unless that was intentional.
The men on our ships prepared the cannons and put on the flimsy armor they owned in preparation for battle.
Hawk and I were covered in protection forged with dragon scales, far superior to anything they had because that kind of weight would slow the ship far too much.
To be fair, if either of us ended up in the water, we’d drown in less than a minute. We were basically two anchors.
Once the ships were close, the battle began. The enemies made their turns to fire their cannons at us, and our fleet did the same. But some of their ships had a set of cannons directly at the front, so they fired off chained cannonballs that took out the sails of several of our ships.
I’d never seen anything like that before.
Wrath suddenly appeared beside me, an invisible king with his signature calmness.
We watched the scene before us, seeing ships fire at ships and masts collapse and tilt the galleons sideways as they landed.
“They’re better sailors with better ships.
They will outmaneuver you and sink you into the deep. ”
“Then do I call for Zehemoth?”
“You call for the army I’ve given you.”
Some of their ships drew close to ours, and soon, their crew boarded our galleons.
Battle commenced, and steel clanged against steel.
Cries of war and cries of defeat rang out along with the smell of gunfire and the cloudiness of smoke.
I did not expect their victory to be swift and our defeat so pathetic.
The galleon where I stood had survived the cannons so far, but that wouldn’t last long. “There’s no graveyard or cemetery on the sea.”
“You command all things that are dead, not just men.”