Epilogue One Day
One Year Later
Exploration is not merely the act of venturing into unknown waters, but the relentless human insistence that wonder is worth the risk. The sea changes all who touch it—yet those who return do so carrying new worlds within them.
— The Mysterious Deep: A Comprehensive Understanding
The Wraith no longer cut through the waves like a blade—she glided.
Her black hull had been scrubbed, tarred, and reinforced, her sails repaired and dyed a storm-grey that caught the light like iron.
What once had been gun ports now held brass-capped instruments: sounding tubes, barometers, telescopes, and an ungainly device Emille insisted on calling the bathymetric chamber, though it was really a glorified weighted bucket.
The figurehead Bash carved years ago—a snarling wraith with a kraken’s tentacles—remained, but someone, Dilly, had added a garland of dried kelp around its neck “for luck.”
No one on board had objected.
We were no longer pirates.
We were… something else. Something harder to define. Explorers. Scholars. Sailors. Survivors.
And if you asked London society?
Menaces.
Oddities.
A cautionary tale.
I breathed in the salt-bright morning air, leaning against the railing as the Azores faded behind us. The horizon ahead was a vast, shimmering promise. The kind of blue that made a person believe in second chances.
And the Wraith—our wild, impossible girl—was taking hers.
It was evident in the lightness of her crew and the spark of excitement that followed everywhere she went.
More than that, the flag that flew ahead.
No longer black, it was a stark white that blew in the salt air, showcasing the long sword with a jagged scar through it, offset by a spyglass crossing over it.
Our tribute to Inu and Val, while also recognizing that we were more explorers, hellbent on new discoveries of the deep.
“Adjusting two degrees starboard!” Dilly shouted from the quarterdeck, her hair a frizzy halo of wind-tossed curls.
After she got too close to a barnacle she shouldn’t have, Emille diagnoses her with some vision loss.
Now, she wore custom-made lenses Bash found in Funchal and repaired himself—large, round, and thoroughly magnifying her eyes.
She looked like an inquisitive owl. An owl who might accidentally blow herself up with algae.
“Two degrees starboard,” Kit echoed, handling the tiller.
A year older, he was no longer the terrified child who clung to Val’s coat.
He stood straight, steady, and sun-browned, with arms and legs that finally seemed to coordinate.
He wore a knife at his hip—Oscar had given it to him on the anniversary of Val’s death.
“Don’t let her talk you into testing anything live on deck,” Bash said behind me, sliding an arm around my waist. “The last thing we need is another repeat of the ‘Exploding Barnacle Incident.’”
“That was only slightly my fault,” Dilly yelled back, having absolutely overheard him.
“Yes, and you nearly blew a hole in my ship,” Bash called.
Kit stifled a snort. “It was impressive though!”
Oscar, tightening the rigging nearby, shook his head but smiled—the genuine kind that softened the grief carved into him.
This was our life now.
Strange. Loud. Messy. Bright.
Alive.
The British government called it The Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy, though no one outside of Parliament bothered with the formal name. Newspapers simply called it The King’s Pardon of 1717.
Some credited the success of the bill to shifting politics. Others to naval exhaustion. A few whispered that the seas themselves had become too dangerous—too many monsters stirring where once there were few.
But among sailors, among the men and women who once flew black flags with pride, the truth was known:
A single member of Parliament had stood and argued passionately, fervently, for weeks.
Oliver Bailey.
My brother.
He had spoken of mercy, of second chances, of usefulness instead of destruction. He had spoken, too, of the value of men who understood the sea better than any admiral. Of sailors who had been driven to piracy not by greed, but by survival.
In the official list of pardons, only two names drew ink thick enough to overshadow the rest:
Captain Sebastian Flynn
Hellcat Smith
London had reeled.
Ballrooms gossiped.
Newspapers speculated.
Lady Pettigrew fainted at the idea of pirates strolling through Kensington Gardens “beside respectable persons.”
As for respectable persons… Bash and I had never once been mistaken for such.
We were rarely in London long enough for anyone to remember our latest scandal anyway.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Bash murmured, pressing a kiss into my hair.
“I’m not thinking,” I lied.
“You are. You’ve got that face.”
“What face?”
“The worried face. The one that usually precedes you telling me you want to chase a sea monster, or adopt another stray child.”
“That was one time,” I said defensively.
“Rose, when you saw Kit, you said—and I quote—‘He looks small, we should keep him.’”
Kit glanced over his shoulder. “I was small.”
“You still are,” Bash said.
“Not for long,” Kit grinned.
He was probably right. He’d begun eating like two sailors and a kraken combined.
“Then there’s also Sebastian Jr.” Dilly offered unhelpfully.
“Well, I ruined his home, so I thought best to keep him after that,” I said, eyeing our cabin where the custacean was probably sleeping.
It took many months for him to find a shell that was deemed acceptable for him, but living in my hair was not an option forever. Now he mostly lived in Bash, and his cabin was sleeping all day and all night. He was undoubtedly a lazy creature.
Oscar stepped beside us, eyes on the horizon. “Currents are shifting,” he said quietly. “She says we’ll have good weather.”
I didn’t ask who she was. Oscar still felt Inu like a ghost sewn into his ribs. Not painfully… not anymore. More like a presence. A promise. Sometimes he dreamed of her voice guiding him through storms. Sometimes he simply looked at the waves as though listening.
Healing wasn’t linear. Or quick. Or tidy.
But he was healing.
And we loved him through it.
“What’s our heading?” he asked.
“Southwest,” I said.
“By how much?” Bash asked.
“Enough to annoy you.”
“Then southwest it is.”
We spent the morning cataloging specimens—algae samples, strange gelatinous eggs Emille insisted were harmless (they were not), and a barnacle Dilly insisted was winking at her. Bash claimed it was just the breeze, but I’d seen it wink, too.
At midday, Kit found a map folded into a library book someone had gifted us in Lisbon. It was water-stained, old, and poorly drawn.
Naturally, we decided to follow it immediately.
Oscar glared at all of us. “Do we not remember what happened last time we followed a bad map?”
“Yes,” I said brightly. “Adventure.”
“Yes,” Kit echoed, even brighter. “Treasure.”
“Yes,” Dilly said, brightest of all. “Scientific discovery of unparalleled magnitude.”
Oscar groaned. “Death. Death is what happened. To multiple people.”
His voice wavered only slightly on people.
I squeezed his arm, and he leaned into the touch.
“But we lived,” I reminded him softly.
He exhaled. “We lived.”
“And we keep living,” Bash said. “Preferably with fewer exploding barnacles.”
Dilly threw a piece of dried fruit at him.
By sunset, the sea was a burnished sheet of copper. The wind softened. The Wraith hummed beneath our feet like she knew she had become something more than a pirate ship—something remembered, something whispered about in coastal villages as the vessel that sailed beyond maps.
A ship that chased knowledge instead of plunder.
Light instead of shadows.
Hope instead of blood.
“Do you ever… miss it?” I asked quietly.
“The piracy?” Bash clarified.
I shrugged. “The running. The danger. The wildness of it.”
He took my hand. “We’re still wild,” he said. “Just differently.”
“In a scientific way,” Dilly offered helpfully, appearing beside us with a jar that contained—somehow—a glowing purple tadpole.
Bash grimaced. “Is that safe?”
“Oh, absolutely not.”
I sighed. “Fine. New rule: dangerous specimens stay below deck.”
Kit raised a hand. “What about mildly dangerous specimens?”
Bash answered, “Those stay near Emille.”
“Moderately dangerous specimens?”
“Those stay near Dilly.”
“And horribly dangerous specimens?” Kit asked.
Oscar pointed at me. “Those stay with Rose.”
“That seems fair,” I said.
We laughed. All of us. Even Oscar.
The kind of laughter that rises only after surviving the worst storms of your life.
Night settled. Stars bloomed overhead. The sea glowed faintly with bioluminescence, as if applauding our ridiculousness.
Bash wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into the solid warmth of him.
“Rosamund Smith,” he said quietly, using the name London never quite knew what to do with. “Did you ever imagine this would be our life?”
I smiled. “I imagined the sea. I imagined freedom. I imagined… something more.”
“Am I the something more?” he asked with mock offense.
I rose on my toes and kissed him. “You’re everything more.”
Beside us, a gray ball of fluff jumped up, running up against Bash and me.
“Hello, Beasty,” Bash said.
“I’ll never get used to him liking you. It makes me jealous.” I said.
All the same, I scratched behind Blackbeard’s ear, earning a deep purr.
Below deck, Kit was arguing with Dilly about whether jellyfish counted as “monsters.”
Above us, Oscar traced constellations that Inu had once taught him.
Emille muttered at his instruments like they were sentient.
We were a family.
Messy. Scarred. Strange.
But a family.
Below us, in the waves, sang our Koinu. A beautiful song that followed us wherever we went.
And the Wraith, once a nightmare, was now a legend of a different sort.
A ship that sought truth in the deep.
A ship with a future.
Our future.
I placed my palm against the warm wood of the railing. The water pulsed beneath it—gentle, steady, welcoming.
The sea had chosen me once.
And now?
Now I chose her back. Over and over.
“Ready?” Bash asked.
“For what?”
“For whatever comes next.”
The Wraith turned her prow toward the open, endless deep.
And together—
laughing, healed, forgiven, reborn—
We sailed into the horizon,carrying our dead with us, carrying our hope with us, carrying each other.
The sea was vast.
The future is vaster still.
And we were finally free to explore it.