Chapter 59 #2
The clash was everywhere now. Steel rang against steel. Lanterns burst, fire hissing as it kissed saltwater. Smoke curled low, thick with brine and blood. I drove my blade through a poacher’s gut and ripped it free in a spray of red.
“Cut the lines!” I roared again, pointing toward the straining winches where ropes groaned under impossible weight. “Sink them with their own nets!”
Axes swung—
Until Veyrion’s voice cracked across the deck like thunder. “Hold the lines!” He cut a man down mid-step, movements precise and merciless, eyes locked on me across the chaos.
“Keep the haul alive!”
Confusion tore through the deck. My crew hesitated—hands frozen on blades, eyes darting between me and him. His warriors faltered too, momentum breaking as the order rippled outward, splintering the charge into fragments.
“Sink them!” I barked again, fury tearing my throat raw.
“Typical,” Veyrion snapped, kicking a man backward before splitting his skull clean down the middle. “Burn first, think later. It’s why you bury more men than you lead.”
The words lashed across me. I shoved another poacher off my blade and stalked toward him, fury fueling every step. “Is that why you abandoned me?”
He spun, parrying a hook strike, then twisted the steel from his enemy’s hands and drove it back into the man’s chest. His voice was cold as he turned to me. “I didn’t abandon you, Alaric. I refused to follow you into madness.”
“Madness?” The curse burned hot in my veins, the memory struck harder than any blade.
I snarled, cutting down a man who lunged at my side. “You left when I was fighting for her life—when I needed my brother.”
“You weren’t fighting for her,” he spat, voice low and cutting. His blade punched through a poacher’s sternum, his boot shoving the corpse free. He never broke my stare. “You were tearing the sea apart, chasing shadows and lies. She wouldn’t have wanted that.”
The words struck like a knife.
My chest twisted. Rage and grief collided until my grip shook on the hilt.
“Better damnation than desertion,” I hissed, stepping toward him, blood dripping from my blade. “You were supposed to be my brother.”
“And you,” he spat, slashing the tendon of a charging poacher before finishing him with a brutal thrust, “you were supposed to be more than your father’s son.”
The air between us tightened, crackling with years of venom. Around us, men faltered—torn between orders, between captains. The poachers pressed in, seizing the hesitation, steel flashing in the lantern light.
For one dangerous heartbeat, I didn’t know if I’d drive my sword into a poacher—
Or into him.
The world narrowed to his glacial eyes and my blade, blood dripping in rivulets between us.
Then Veyrion’s snarl cut through the haze. “There’s no time for this. Not here. Not now.”
Not now. But soon.
Another poacher rushed me, hook raised. I twisted, driving steel through his ribs, ripping it free as his body sagged against the rail. Around me, the deck was chaos—blades clashing, men screaming, fire licking where lanterns had shattered.
Veyrion was already carving a path through the throng, his axe cutting in cold, efficient arcs.
I forced my fury back into the fight, parrying, slashing, driving the poachers toward the stern. The curse thrummed hot in my blood, relentless. Every kill only fed its hunger.
Then—
A scream.
Not the ragged cries of men dying. Not the shrieks of beasts in cages. This one cut sharper. Purer. It carried across the water like a blade through silk. My chest seized. My grip went slack.
Nerina.
Another man lunged, and I split him open without thought, my eyes locked on the dark horizon beyond the poachers’ line.
I couldn’t see her. Couldn’t hear anything more than the chaos around me. But deep in my bones, I felt her.
Pressure seized behind my ribs, dragging me deeper. My chest convulsed as air became a memory. "Nerina…” I rasped, almost to myself, as the sea surged louder in my blood.
My mind was no longer whispering. It was screaming.
Go. Now.
The sea below was black. Endless. My lungs clenched just looking at it. I didn’t know where she was. I couldn’t breathe down there—couldn’t survive long enough to make a difference. Yet I couldn’t stop.
Something in me pulled hard as a chain, every beat of my heart screaming her name.
I seized one of the heavy chains the poachers used to drag their catch, the iron slick with salt, biting into my palms. My crew shouted behind me, their voices lost in the roar of blood in my ears.
“Careful,” I muttered, chest tight. “For once in your damned life.”
Cold spray slapped my face as wood scraped beneath my palms—And then there was nothing between me and open air.
The sea swallowed me whole, the chain dragging me into the deep. Cold tore across my skin, pressure crushing into my ears. My chest clenched, lungs already screaming, salt burning my throat as the dark folded around me.
Darkness pressed in from all sides. Silt and torn weed swirled where the battle above had shredded the water, clouding my vision until even the moonlight was gone.
Nothing.
I kicked harder, angling down, then up again when the pressure burned behind my eyes. Shapes slid past—wreckage, drifting rope, a body tumbling slow as a dream—
But never her.
Every second stretched thin, elastic, as the sea pulled at me, greedy and unrelenting.
I’d never pushed this far. Never forced myself this deep. The curse coiled tighter with every stroke, dragging pain through my veins, reminding me how close I was to the edge of what it would allow.
I felt her—an ember beneath my skin, a wrongness in the current, burning in my veins and hauling me lower like a second curse twined through the first.
I followed it blindly, lungs screaming, vision narrowing to pinpricks as the water grew colder, heavier. The sea closed around me, impatient, testing whether I would break.
I kicked anyway. I would find her.
Another convulsion tore through my chest, my throat spasming around nothing, salt stinging my tongue. Blackness licked the edges of my sight. My body thrashed in revolt, every muscle screaming to give up, to surrender.
The deeper I went, the darker it became—until even the moonlight above vanished.
I forced my eyes wide, scanning the black. I expected a glimmer. A flicker. Something—anything—to show me where she was.
No shimmer of starlight. No glowing crescents.
Just cold and silence.
The tether that had always tugged at my veins—the pull I’d cursed and fought—fell silent.
My chest felt carved hollow, ribs straining against the weight of the deep.
No Nerina. No light. No voice.
Only the press of the ocean, heavy and merciless, and the slow, creeping horror that I had been wrong—that this time I wouldn’t find her.
Couldn’t save her.
My lungs convulsed, a violent spasm ripping through me as salt stung my throat.
Panic flared bright. I’d pushed too far. Stayed too long. My body revolted.
I kicked, turning toward the surface, muscles burning as I forced myself back the way I’d come. The water resisted, heavy and punishing, each stroke slower than the last. My vision pulsed, narrowing, dark spots bursting behind my eyes.
I hadn’t found her.
The thought struck harder than the lack of air. I clawed upward anyway, driven by raw survival now instead of instinct or magic. The moon was somewhere above me—a pale promise through tons of water and shadow.
I was almost there.
That was when something between me and the surface moved first. It split around me, sudden and violent.
An iron grip seized my wrist. Another crushed my shoulder, yanking me sideways.
I slashed blind, a snarl ripping out of me—
But my blade was torn from my hand, vanishing into the abyss. Chains coiled.
Not nets. Not rope. Heavier. Unforgiving.
I fought them. Saints, I fought with everything left in me, feral rage boiling out of my chest, bubbles ripping from my mouth in a useless roar. The curse roared with me, wild and furious, burning through my veins like fire—
Until it sputtered. Faded.
My limbs slowed. My chest burned white-hot, then went cold. The dark pressed in, merciless.
I caught it then—faint, clinging to the water as the black closed in: A sickly sweetness.
Burnt sugar. Iron. Rot.
My lungs gave. The last thing I knew was the weight of the deep closing over me—heavier than chains, heavier than death—
And the certainty that the sea had finally decided to collect what I owed.