~Dahlia
The first thing I heard was screaming.
All of Theloch would have heard my mother’s suffering cries.
I came into this world from cruel agony.
The sea was moving. Not with waves, but with the beasts that rode them. Foul monsters prowled the water, thirsting. Every day they could not catch us only made them more voracious.
The whole world was caving in around us. There were enemies on all sides. Danger was in every corner and we were but one ship. I’d been stripped of almost everything I held dear, and Lune saw fit to give me Vidar. I had Meridan… and I had him.
But still, I had to watch him die.
I was bound. I was always bound. The sense of helplessness was always the first horror I had to face.
I was stripped of my strength. My control.
I was forced to watch all that happened next as if my lids had been peeled away from my eyes.
I was forced to stare into the dark water beating the shores and the horrid creatures that uncurled from the waves.
Their whispers were needles in my skull.
Every sound they made was a violation and reached far deeper than any sound should.
It burrowed under my skin and into my lungs and deeper still until it was growing in my soul like mold.
“He will come for you,” a voice said, its malicious tones layered on top of one another. One and many at the same time. “He will always come for you.”
No.
I hung upside down, my arms dragging on the ground.
Above me, my tail was wrapped painfully tight in rough twine, but I could not find my legs.
They would not come. I was helpless. I struggled against my binds, tearing my flesh against ropes, but to no avail.
Across the muddy ground, I saw him cutting a bloody path through droves of wicked xhoth and sirens who’d gone feral at his presence.
His bronze cutlass sliced through one after the other.
There was madness in his movements. Desperation.
“Vidar,” was all I could muster with my weakened voice.
He pushed forward, a lone force against a hundred foes.
Blood painted my vision as he neared and a tiny spark of hope lit up inside me.
Just as quickly, it was extinguished as a wave of shadows closed in on him from all sides.
I wanted to yell out to him, but my voice was being held hostage by fear.
It was as if the ocean had swallowed him up and no matter how long I waited for him to surface, inside, I knew he was gone.
“Vidar,” I whispered, struggling against the ropes only to feel them tighten and cut into my tail.
The masses dispersed and on the muddy ground lay a pile of bones. Ribs protruded like a blossoming flower, flesh still attached. His face had been stripped of the features I adored so much. Ropes of intestines stretched out from his body, leaving him hollow.
“No,” I muttered. Sinister giggles and those horrid voices flooded my ears. The moon above was a red orb like a wound in the sky. “No. No!”
My voice returned, lending shrill volume to the word. It was laced with pain and tore at my throat like shards of glass. And all around me were those ghastly figures. Shadows with no faces. Glowing eyes watched me writhe and in those awful stares was pleasure.
But then I was no longer tied up. No, I was free and I was standing over Vidar’s ruins, my hands bloody.
A bone knife—my bone knife—was tightly wrapped in my grip, drenched in red.
Suddenly, all of the figures had gone and only one remained.
One tall, lanky figure in robes so thin they hung on him like liquid.
He stood in darkness, backlit by crimson, and though I could not see a face, I could feel him smiling.
“Look what you’ve done,” a voice whispered.
The sun was barely crowning on the horizon and the cool air of early morning gave me a familiar chill.
I dressed in a pair of britches and a cotton shirt too large for my frame.
There was no way I was going to put the dress back on.
I’d only done it because I knew how Vidar enjoyed the way the bodice hugged my waist, but now he’d torn the thing.
It had been a mere five days since we fled from Gilly Pine.
Vidar shared how much money had been taken from Whitton’s lifeless corpse.
It was enough to keep the crew sustained until they decided on a new direction.
People seemed at ease. Relieved. That included me.
Killing the sickening man from our shared nightmare relieved a weight from my shoulders that I didn’t know I was bearing.
Salty sea mist tickled my cheeks as I stood on the bow, staring out at the uncharacteristically gentle water.
What had once been my home was now a deadly playground for dark and violent monsters.
Things even more violent than myself. The Burning Rose was a hunter’s ship only months ago, her crew nothing but killers who slayed my kind. Now, it was my sanctuary.
But also, my prison. I was trapped, unable to go in the water for fear of finding myself blindly swimming to the depths or being dragged there.
A siren should not fear the water.
No one was out so early aside from whoever had the crow’s nest and whoever had the helm, so the silence was an eerie comfort. One I hadn’t been able to enjoy for a while.
“Bit early for you, isn’t it?” a gruff voice eased through the silence.
I knew Gus’s voice better than most. He had a specific rasp that worsened right after he smoked his pipe.
I wasn’t surprised he was up at that crisp hour, either.
He usually was. Like me, Gus did not have an easy time sleeping.
He was one for noise and chatter and the silence didn’t sit well with him.
He joined me at the railing, holding his pipe unlit between his teeth.
“Another dream, I’m guessing?” he said. I nodded once. “Does he know?”
“I don’t know. He has not said anything if he does.” I glanced over at him. “Should I tell him?”
The question was genuine. I wasn’t accustomed to being with someone like I was with Vidar.
I knew honesty was a cherished thing between two people who cared for each other, but honesty also terrified me.
Perhaps my dreams were nothing but my own fears taking form.
Perhaps they weren’t worth a second thought. Either way, they were unwelcome.
That recurring nightmare felt… different.
Gus groaned, leaning on the railing with his elbows.
“I think you should trust Vidar. He might be a hard man—a cruel man, many say—but he’s cruelest to our enemies. Almost everyone on this ship can attest to that. He’ll be cruel to yours, too.”
“What if my enemy is myself?”
“Hmf. I think he has a way of handling that, too. I may have hated the idea of you being aboard this ship, but you’ve proven to be a fierce member of this crew and an even fiercer lover to our captain.
You could have slaughtered us, one by one, in your days here, but you never did.
And now you killed the man that Vidar disliked the most. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
” He paused for a long moment, taking his pipe out of his mouth and staring off into the sunrise.
That word kept whispering through my thoughts like a taunting sprite and the more I heard it, the more it unnerved me.
“If you’re being haunted by something, Dahlia, don’t let it grow until it crushes you,” Gus continued.
“I’ll tell you this. Our captain can take the weight of the world on his shoulders and then some.
Does he deserve to? No. Do you want him to?
Probably not. But he would for any one of us, including you.
That’s why he’s our captain. I’m older. I’m more experienced, but I could never lead us.
I don’t want to. I’ve seen that boy—that man—shatter and put himself back together even stronger than before.
So, if you don’t want to tell him what’s keeping you up at night, that’s your choice, but I know that Vidar would choose to bear that weight with you if he knew there was weight to bear. ”
Another bout of silence grew between us as Gus enjoyed the sunrise and I mulled over his words.
He was right. I knew he was. It didn’t make it easier to tell Vidar.
Even in my head, I could not put the sentences together.
I wasn’t a mystic or a far-seer. My dreams were simply my mind playing tricks on me and trying to break me down.
I wanted so badly to endure it and be done with the matter. Weeks and weeks of the same, repetitive vision was tearing me apart, though, in a way I wasn’t used to.
“I’m going to go find some of that bitter tea Boil got from the last port,” Gus groaned, slapping a hand on the railing as he turned to leave.
“Gus,” I said over my shoulder, causing him to turn and raise his brow over his one remaining eye. “Thank you. I don’t know yet if I’ll take your advice, but I appreciate it nonetheless.”
He let out a raspy chuckle. “I’m old. Advice is about all I’m good for these days.”
I watched him limp away, a hand pressed to his hip.
His joints had begun deteriorating. All the action we’d seen in the past few months was taking its toll on him.
He’d survived my mother’s sadistic massacre on his old crew.
He survived her plucking out his eye and eating it in front of him.
And then he survived hunting sirens on the Burning Rose for years.
He was as vicious as the next man, but he deserved better.
A flicker of concern flashed across my thoughts as he disappeared below deck and I wondered how much more a man like him could take.
Turning back toward the open ocean, I found myself feeling weaker than I ever had. Worry did that to a person. My mother always told me that affection was the death of reason. She was right. The more people I had to worry about, the more vulnerable I felt.