LoL Universe Indexing and Search

In ages past, the oceans of Runeterra were home to civilizations far older than those of the land. In the depths of what is now the Guardian’s Sea, a great city once stood—it was here that the yordle Fizz made his home. He lived alongside the artisans and warriors of that proud, noble race. Even though he was not one of them, they treated him as an equal, and his playful nature and tall tales of adventures in the open sea made him welcome at any gathering.

But the world was changing. The oceans were growing warmer, emboldening fierce predators to rise up from the deepest trenches. Other settlements had fallen silent, but the rulers of the great city could still not agree on how to deal with the threat. Fizz pledged to roam the seas in search of survivors, or anyone who knew what had happened.

Then, one dark day, the gigalodons came.

These huge dragon-sharks stunned their prey with fell shrieking, and the avenues of the great city were soon clouded red. Thousands died in a matter of hours, the immense bulk of their killers crushing towers and temples in a monstrous feeding frenzy. Scenting blood in the water, Fizz raced back, determined to join the fight and save the city.

He was too late. There was nothing left of the city to save. When the debris finally settled, not a single living creature remained, nor any stone upon another, and the ravenous shoal had moved on. Alone in the cold depths, Fizz sank into mournful despair. As his yordle magic began to fade, he let himself be carried by the currents, drifting in a catatonic torpor, dreaming away the millennia…

It was only chance that reawakened him. A handful of copper coins fell from above, scattered to the seabed in the wake of a huge, wooden fish that swam upon the surface. This was no gigalodon, but Fizz was alarmed nonetheless—he knew little of the world overhead, but surely no fish could survive up there? He ventured up and peered into the salty air for the first time.

There were people, people who lived outside of the water and sailed in wooden fish of all sizes. Fizz found the thought both frightening and exciting, but the curious gifts they cast into the water made it clear that they wanted to be his friends. In time, following their movements to and fro across the oceans, he came to the port city of Bilgewater.

To the inhabitants of that lawless place, this strange and slippery creature quickly became something of a legend—the Tidal Trickster, a spirit of the ocean itself. It is said that he can summon great beasts to do his bidding, hole a ship’s hull with his stone trident, and breathe air or water as it suits him. Many a misbehaving child has been warned on a moonless night: “Go quickly to sleep, or the Trickster will come and feed you to the fishes…”

Fizz is good-natured, but mischievous even for a yordle, and delights in confounding the people of Bilgewater. The most seasoned fishermen know, just as the ocean may rise and fall, the Tidal Trickster is as likely to lead them into windless doldrums as to an easy catch that would fill their nets. Even so, Fizz does not take kindly to the greedy or selfish, and more than one haughty sea captain hoping to make a quick pile of silver has found that her mysterious guide has led her crew not to safety, but to shipwreck.

In life, Kalista was a proud general, niece to the king of an empire that none now recall. She lived by a strict code of honor, serving the throne with utmost loyalty. The king had many enemies, and when they sent an assassin to slay him, it was Kalista’s vigilance that averted disaster.

But in saving the king, she damned the one he loved most—the assassin’s deflected blade was envenomed, and sliced the arm of the queen. The greatest priests and surgeons were summoned, but none could draw the poison from her body. Wracked with grief, the king dispatched Kalista in search of a cure, with Hecarim of the Iron Order taking her place at his side.

Kalista traveled far, consulting learned scholars, hermits and mystics… but to no avail. Finally, she learned of a place protected from the outside world by shimmering pale mists, whose inhabitants were rumored to know the secrets of eternal life. She set sail on one last voyage of hope, to the almost legendary Blessed Isles.

The guardians of the capital city Helia saw the purity of Kalista’s intent, and parted the mists to allow her safe passage. She begged them to heal the queen, and after much consideration, the masters of the city agreed. Time was of the essence. While the queen yet breathed, there was hope for her in the fabled Waters of Life. Kalista was given a talisman that would allow her to return to Helia unaided, but was warned against sharing this knowledge with any other.

However, by the time Kalista reached the shores of her homeland, the queen was already dead.

The king had descended into madness, locking himself in his tower with the queen’s festering corpse. When he learned of Kalista’s return, he demanded to know what she had found. With a heavy heart, for she had never before failed him, she admitted that the cure she had found would be of no use. The king would not believe this, and condemned Kalista as a traitor to the crown.

It was Hecarim who persuaded her to lead them to the Blessed Isles, where her uncle could hear the truth of it from the masters themselves. Then, perhaps, he would find peace—even if only in accepting that the queen was gone, and allowing her to be laid to rest. Hesitantly, Kalista agreed.

And so the king set out with a flotilla of his fastest ships, and cried out in joy as the glittering city of Helia was revealed to him. However, they were met by the stern masters, who would not allow them to pass. Death, they insisted, was final. To cheat it would be to break the natural order of the world.

The king flew into a fevered rage, and commanded Kalista to slay any who opposed them. She refused, and called on Hecarim to stand with her… but instead he drove his spear through her armored back.

The Iron Order joined him in this treachery, piercing Kalista’s body a dozen times more as she fell. A brutal melee erupted, with those devoted to Kalista fighting desperately against Hecarim’s knights, but their numbers were too few. As Kalista’s life faded, and she watched her warriors die, swearing vengeance with her final breath…

When next Kalista opened her eyes, they were filled with the dark power of unnatural magic. She had no idea what had transpired, but the city of Helia had been transformed into a twisted mockery of its former beauty—indeed, the entirety of the Blessed Isles was now a place of shadow and darkness, filled with howling spirits trapped for all eternity in the nightmare of undeath.

Though she tried to cling to those fragmented memories of Hecarim’s monstrous betrayal, they have slowly faded in all the centuries since, and all that now remains is a thirst for revenge burning in Kalista’s ruined chest. She has become a specter, a figure of macabre folklore, often invoked by those who have suffered similar treacheries.

These wretched spirits are subsumed into hers, to pay the ultimate price—becoming one with the Spear of Vengeance.

Raised in the wharf alleys of Bilgewater, Malcolm Graves quickly learned how to fight and how to steal, skills that would serve him very well in all the years ahead. He could always find work hauling contraband up from the smugglers’ skiffs that came into the bay each night—with a tidy side-gig as hired muscle for various other unsavory local characters, as they went about their business in the port.

But the alleys were small-time, and he craved more excitement than they could offer. Still little more than a youth, Graves stole a blunderbuss and smuggled himself aboard a ship headed out of Bilgewater to the Shuriman mainland, where he stole, lied, and gambled his way from place to place along the coast.

Across the table of a high-stakes—and highly illegal—card game in Mudtown, Graves met a man who would change the course of his life, and his career: the trickster now known to many as Twisted Fate.

Each immediately saw in the other the same reckless passion for danger and adventure, and together they formed a most lucrative partnership. Between Graves’ raw brawn and Twisted Fate’s ability to talk his way out of (and occasionally back into) almost any situation, they were an unusually effective team from the outset. Their mutual sense of roguish honor grew into genuine trust, and together they stole from the rich, swindled the foolish, handpicked skilled crews for specific jobs, and sold out their rivals whenever they could.

Though at times Twisted Fate would blow all their shares and leave them with nothing to show for it, Graves knew that the thrill of some new escapade was always just around the corner…

On the southern borderlands of Valoran, they set two renowned noble houses of Noxus at each other’s throats as cover for the rescue of a kidnapped heir. That they pocketed the reward money, only to ransom the vile young man to the highest bidder, should really have come as no surprise to their original employer. In Piltover, they still hold the distinction of being the only thieves ever to crack the supposedly impenetrable Clockwork Vault. Not only did the pair empty the vault of all its treasures, they also tricked the guards into loading the loot onto their hijacked schooner, for a quick getaway through the Sun Gates.

In almost every case, only once they and their accomplices were safely over the horizon were their crimes even discovered—usually along with one of Twisted Fate’s trademark calling cards left where it would be easily found.

But, eventually, their luck ran out.

During a heist that rapidly turned from complex to completely botched, Graves was taken by the local enforcers, while Twisted Fate merely turned tail and abandoned him.

Thrown into the infamous prison known as the Locker, Graves endured years of torture and solitary confinement, during which time he nursed his bitter anger toward his old partner. A lesser man would surely have been broken by all this, but not Malcolm Graves. He was determined to have his revenge.

When he finally clawed his way to freedom, with the prison warden’s brand new shotgun slung over his shoulder, Graves began his long-overdue pursuit of Twisted Fate.

The search led him back home to Bilgewater, where he found that the wily old cardsharp had acquired a few new bounties on his head—and Graves would be only too happy to claim them. However, just as he got Twisted Fate in his sights, they were forced to put aside their differences in order to escape almost certain death in the ongoing conflict between the reaver king Gangplank and his rival ship captains.

Once again, Graves found himself escaping his hometown… only this time, he had his old friend in tow. While both of them might have liked to pick up their partnership where they left off all those years ago, such resentment couldn't simply be forgotten overnight, and it would be a while before Graves could bring himself to trust Twisted Fate again.

Still, he feels Bilgewater calling to him once more. Maybe this time around, the pair of them will find their stride and be able to pull off the ultimate heist…

Matron of the Black Rose, LeBlanc’s identity is as intangible as the whispers that describe her, as ephemeral as the illusions that give her shape. Perhaps it is unknown even to herself, after so many centuries of mimicry and deception…

Remnants of an order that has existed far longer than Noxus itself, initiates of the Black Rose have schemed from the shadows for centuries, drawing the rich and powerful to their ranks. Though they do not often learn the origins of their matron, many have uncovered legends of a pale sorceress who aided the broken barbarian tribes, in their struggle against the infamous Iron Revenant subjugating lands already ravaged by the darkin. Even today, his name is whispered in fear: Mordekaiser.

Uniquely skilled among the revenant’s inner circle before she betrayed him, the sorceress pledged to neutralize the source of his power, the Immortal Bastion, cutting him off from the well of death that fueled his nightmarish empire. Yet, even as the barbarians built an empire of their own in the bastion’s shadow, they failed to realize that the arcane secrets it held had not completely been locked away. The pale sorceress had always been gifted at illusion, and her greatest trick was to make Noxus forget the dark power roiling in its own heart, before she was burned from the pages of history around the time of the Rune Wars.

The Black Rose exists now to further the clandestine interests of those who can wield such magic—with its rank-and-file composed of mundane nobles, drawn to rumors of miracles, kept in thrall and ruthlessly exploited. Even the most powerful military commander could only ever serve the cult’s true masters, as they fight one another for influence in games of intrigue and conquest, both in the Noxian capital and beyond its borders.

For centuries, LeBlanc has served in secret as an advisor to foreign dignitaries, appearing in many nations at once, her illusions driving order into chaos. Rumors of a new matron rising with each generation only raise further questions—which is the “true” version of herself? When she speaks, is it with her own voice? And what will the price be, for the favor she offers?

Boram Darkwill was but the latest to learn this last answer for himself. Though the Black Rose had aided his bid for the throne, he refused the counsel of their hand-picked advisors, requiring LeBlanc to take drastic measures. Manipulating a young nobleman named Jericho Swain into revealing the cult’s involvement, LeBlanc allowed herself to be executed along with the most prominent conspirators… or at least, so it appeared. In time, she reached out to Darkwill herself, and found an increasingly paranoid ruler, fearful of his own mortality.

After promising him the secrets to extend his life, LeBlanc slowly poisoned Darkwill’s mind, even as she empowered him. Under his rule, the Noxian reverence of strength became something far more sinister, and together they ensured Swain’s legend would end in disgrace on the battlefields of Ionia.

But Swain, emboldened by forbidden lore from within the Immortal Bastion, did something wholly unexpected, managing to drag Darkwill from the throne and seize Noxus for himself. This new Grand General was not interested in his own legacy, but the glory of the empire—and such a man could not so easily be corrupted. After countless centuries, LeBlanc wondered, had she finally found a worthy nemesis?

Her actions have pushed Runeterra to the brink of all-out war many times. In the wake of desperate campaigns across the Freljord, on Targon’s peaks, and deep in Shurima’s deserts, the darkest magic has begun to spread once more, circling closer and closer to Noxus. Whether LeBlanc is still the same pale sorceress who betrayed the Iron Revenant, or merely one of countless hollow reflections, her influence clearly stems from ancient roots.

The Black Rose has yet to truly bloom.

Ah, Bilgewater.

It’s a hateful, stinking cesspit of murder and treachery at the best of times… and damn, it’s good to be home.

My back’s to the open ocean as I row out across Bilgewater Bay, so I’m facing the lights of the port city, shining like fool’s gold in the distance.

We’d been running jobs in Valoran, in the City of Progress and its uglier, downtrodden sister, but things started getting hot. And besides, the Prince reached out to us with this contract, and the money was too good to ignore.

Far too good, really, for what looks to me like a wild-eel chase. There’s gotta be a catch—always is—but as I said, the coin on offer weren’t to be sniffed at.

Still can’t believe we’re back. Last time we were here, things got a little, well, explosive.

Sarah Fortune played us all like a fiddle—me, T.F., Gangplank. No one’d ever taken on that gods-damned psychopath like she did. Blew him and his ship to smithereens, with all Bilgewater watching. And T.F. and I, we got a close-up view. Just dumb luck we survived. Of course I hold a grudge against her, but I have to admit, it was mighty impressive what she pulled off. She’s running the place now, from what I hear. Just a few more captains to bring into line, or see to the bottom of Bilgewater Bay. Only a few left who still reckon they can make a play to claim the unofficial throne themselves. Like our old friend, the Prince…

“Can you at least try to keep your mind on the job? We’re drifting off course.”

I glower at T.F. While I’m working up a sweat, the smug bastard’s sitting back, absently flipping cards through his slippery fingers. He’s far too scrawny to be of use on an oar anyway, but him criticizing me while lounging like a fancy Demacian high lord rubs me the wrong way.

The fact that he’s right—current’s pulled us a couple hundred yards south, meaning I gotta row that extra bit harder to get us where we need to be—just riles me even more.

“Feel free to take over any time you want, m’lord,” I growl.

“Can’t,” he says, as he lays three cards face down on the upturned barrel in front of him. “Busy.”

Scowling, I glance over my shoulder to get my bearings. We’re passing through a forest of sharp rocks, jutting out of the ocean like knife blades. ’Course, it ain’t the ones above the surface that are the problem. Just like always, it’s the blades you can’t see that are the real killers.

They’re called the Widow Makers, and they’ve claimed scores of victims over the years. You can see the remnants of the ships that’ve smashed on ’em: broken masts wedged between rocks, shattered planks circling in eddies, rotted boarding nets strung up on razor-sharp pinnacles.

Most of those wrecks are caused by damned fool captains not wanting to pay a Buhru wave-whisperer to guide ’em into port. Not too clever, that choice.

Thankfully, we ain’t trying to navigate the Widow Makers in anything more than ten feet from bow to stern. The leaky rowboat’s name is Intrepid, and I must admit I’ve grown more than a little fond of her since we met an hour past. She’s not much to look at—a bit rusty around the edges, and she could use a lick of paint—but she hasn’t let us down yet, which is something. And she ain’t complained about my rowing.

T.F. turns over each of the three cards, one by one. He frowns, and shuffles ’em back up in his hands. He’s been doing this since we ghosted off the White Wharf. Something in the cards has got him spooked, but I don’t give it any more thought. Tonight’s little paddle into the harbor ain’t gonna amount to nothin’, but we gotta make a show of giving it a solid try. I’m just damn pleased we got half the gold Krakens up front.

Far as I’m concerned, that’s all we’ll be getting, and that’s fine by me. Easiest coin we’ve ever made.

A splash of seawater from my oars slaps T.F. in the face. He stops shuffling his cards and looks up, glaring. “Do you mind?” he says.

Nope, I don’t mind one bit.

“My bad.” I give him a shrug, and keep on rowing.

He takes off his hat and wipes his cheek. Once done, he gives me another glare and puts it back on. Pulls it down low in front, tryin’ to seem all mysterious. Looks like a damn fool to me.

I try to keep the smirk off my face as I dig one of my oars into the water again. Get him good this time, right in the side of the head. Smack.

“Oh, for Luck’s sake,” he snaps, glowering at me. Sticks one finger in his ear and gives it a good waggle. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

“Can’t help it,” I says. “It’s your own fault, tryin’ to look fancy, with your mighty fine coat and your having a bath once a week. Brings out somethin’ mean in me.”

I get him again, perhaps a little more than I intended to. Soaks him to the skin. Infuriated, he starts to stand up, leveling a finger at me, but that just sets Intrepid rocking wildly. He sits down in a hurry, clinging to the sides of the little rowboat, a hilariously terrified expression on his face. For all his show of fanciness, in that moment all T.F.’s cool just got thrown overboard.

I shake my head, chuckling. Still makes me laugh that he’s one of the river folk, one that lived half his life in Bilgewater, no less, and he still can’t swim.

He’s staring daggers at me, his perfumed and carefully oiled hair now hanging limp and dripping like seaweed. I try not to, but it sets me giggling again.

“You’re an imbecile,” he says.

I row on. After a time, the tolling of Third Bell reaches us, drifting across the harbor from Bilgewater.

“We’re here,” T.F. announces, finally, consulting his cards once more.

I look over my shoulder. A jagged rock big enough to be a small island is looming before us, but it doesn’t look much different from any of the others.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” he replies, sharply. Still annoyed about the water, I guess. “I’ve checked and re-checked. The cards keep telling me this is the one.”

There’s quite a few little tricks T.F. can do with those cards of his. He can use ’em to get in and out of places we’d otherwise never have access to, which is mighty handy when tryin’ to pull off a job. I’ve even seen him hurl a card to make a wagon explode like it was packed with gunpowder. But what he’s been doin’ tonight is proper old-blood river folk stuff. Must say it’s usually pretty accurate.

At T.F.’s direction, I pull Intrepid in close, rowing around to the leeward side of the sheer rock face. The swell rises and falls, threatening to smack us against it, but I keep her steady and drop anchor when T.F. tells me we’re at the right spot.

The rock towers overhead.

“So… How do we get up there?” I ask.

“We don’t,” he says. “The cards tell me the shrine’s inside.”

“I don’t see no cave entrance.”

Then I see T.F.’s grin, and my heart sinks. He points overboard, down into the water.

“You ain’t serious,” I mutter.

Last time we were in Bilgewater, I thought I was gonna drown, chained to a cannon kicked overboard. T.F. saved me, but it was a close thing, and I ain’t too keen to relive the experience.

“’Fraid so, partner,” he says. “Unless you want me going in by my lonesome…”

“So you make off with the loot and claim the rest of those Krakens without me? I don’t think so.”

I ain’t forgotten that this son of a dung-worm has left me high and dry before, running off with the coin and leaving me to face the consequences. Those years locked up ain’t ones I’m getting back.

“I thought you didn’t believe the shrine existed,” says T.F. “If I recall correctly, you described it as a ‘wild-eel chase’, right?”

“Yeah, well, I still think it’s a load of superstitious horse manure, but on the off chance it ain’t, I want my cut.”

He’s the one smirking now, as I start taking off my coat and boots. I make sure my shells and cigars are secured and watertight. Then check and re-check that my big double-barreled shotgun, Destiny—newly forged in Piltover, to my own specifications—is tightly wrapped in oilskins, and strapped snugly across my back. I roll up my sleeves.

“So where’s this tunnel, then?”

I dive in. Hope I ain’t jumping right into a school of frenzied razorfish.

It’s bastard cold and bastard dark, but I kick down, going deeper. Fish and gods-know-what-else dart in front of me, flickering at the edge of my vision.

There. While it’s all dark down here, there’s a patch that’s, well, darker, further below. A tunnel entrance. Guess T.F.’s cards were right. I swim into it, and soon realize the water outside weren’t dark at all, not compared to this. I can’t even see my own hands in front of me. It ain’t too wide, neither—my fingertips scrape the smooth stone on either side with every pull.

Glancing back, I see the little circle of blue marking the tunnel entrance. I reckon I’ve got just enough air to turn around and make for the surface. I go on any further, and I ain’t getting back out that way.

T.F. better be right about this. If I drown down here, I swear, next Harrowing I’ll be back to haunt the bastard.

There’s light up ahead, and I kick off the tunnel floor toward it, thinking I’ve found a way out… but no. It’s just a bastard glowing jellyfish, tentacles drifting like deadly towlines. Ain’t going near that thing.

I swim on, now completely blind. Panic’s slowly rising like a Blood Moon tide. I hit a wall in front, and for a horrible moment I think I’m at a dead end. Instinct kicks in, and I push straight up, searching for air, but all I achieve is smacking my head on the rock above. Hard. The cold numbs the pain, but I reckon there’s blood in the water. Not exactly ideal to be bleeding. Berserker sharks can smell that miles away…

I feel trapped, like a rat in a water-filled barrel. I might drown for real this time.

There’s gotta be a way through. I scrabble around desperately, feeling blindly at the walls. Seems like there’re curving spirals carved in the stone, but that ain’t too interesting right now. The air in my lungs feels like poison, and my strength’s starting to fade when I find the opening.

Kicking through, I suddenly see moonlight overhead. I swim up. Break the surface. Suck in a deep, ragged breath. I’m alive!

Treading water, I take stock of my surroundings. I’m inside a cave, partially open to the sky, with the moon shining down.

I paddle over to a rocky ledge and clamber out. Crabs the size of my head skitter out of my way. They’ve each got one overgrown blue claw, and they’re waving ’em at me like they begrudge my presence here. Well, that’s fine with me. Never liked crabs. Make my skin crawl, they do. Too many legs.

First things first. I unsling Destiny and unwrap her oilskins. In the moonlight I give her a quick inspection, checking the loading mechanism and trigger. Looks good. I load a couple of shells, and suddenly things feel a whole lot brighter. Not much that gives me the fear when I’ve got the good lady Destiny locked and loaded in my hands.

“Took you long enough,” says a voice.

I almost unleash both barrels before I realize it’s just T.F. He’s leaning against a rock, trying to look all detached and suave since he took the easy way in with his cards.

“Damn near shat myself, you stupid bastard,” I growl.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

I touch my scalp. My hand comes away red. “I’ll live.” Hope I’m right about that.

He might try to play it cool, but T.F.’s still looking at me, and I can tell he’s concerned. I won’t admit it, but I appreciate that.

“Don’t get all excited. I’m fine!” I look around, noting that every inch of the walls is inscribed with curving patterns. Buhru carvings. Takes me a moment to realize what they are.

“That’s a lot of serpents,” I say, stating the obvious.

Huh. Maybe there’s something to this wild-eel chase after all.

“Still think this is nothing but a myth?” T.F. asks.

I just grunt in reply. Even if I am startin’ to come around, I ain’t giving him the satisfaction yet.

See, the thing we’ve been hired to find is a Bilgewater legend, something any sane individual would dismiss as no more real than the Tidal Trickster, or the legends of the Summoners.

The Abyssal Crown.

It’s said that whoever wears the crown commands the Beasts Below. And whoever commands the Beasts Below would control the waters around the Serpent Isles. Control them, and, well, you’d naturally control Bilgewater.

That’s why the Prince is so desperate to get his golden hands on it. Not much Missy Fortune could do to dispute his claim if he was wearing the Abyssal Crown.

“So, where’s the shrine?” I say.

“There’s a passage leading farther in, back over there,” T.F. says, gesturing deeper into the cave. “Perhaps it’s through there.”

“No more swimmin’, I hope,” I mutter.

The “passage” T.F. found ain’t much more than a crack in the rocks. He’s got no meat on his bones and slips through like a flounder. Mine is the more robust—and I daresay, more admirable—physique, and I lose a few buttons tryin’ to squeeze through.

I’m grumblin’ and swearin’ under my breath, cursing that double helping of chowder I scarfed down earlier in the night, when T.F. shushes me, forefinger tapping pointedly on his lips.

With a final grunt I’m through, almost falling flat on my face. Then the smell hits me like a fist. It’s a stink not dissimilar to the vile offal-and-fish-guts reek of the slaughter docks. Makes the eyes water. Brings back bad memories, too.

Moonlight filters down through a gap in the cave ceiling, but it’s still dark. Takes me a moment to register the sheer amount of flotsam and jetsam piled up around the place. It looks like a hoarder’s paradise, with all manner of junk and refuse filling every nook and cranny.

This cavern’s larger than the last, and every part of it—well, every part that doesn’t have random crap heaped up against it—is also covered in Buhru carvings. More serpents. I’m sensing a theme here…

There’s a big old pool of black water to one side, probably connected to the same bastard tunnel that tried to drown me, but there’s no way all this refuse and junk got washed in here. Nah, this was brought here by someone. In truth, there’s a strange kinda order to it, even if it’s the kinda order imposed by a mind twisted like a sailor’s knot.

There’re barrels and boxes, chests, and nets. Fishing tackle and rusted harpoons, lengths of long-rotted rope. Piles of shells and stones are arranged in strange stacks, and jars of fetid liquid and gods-know-what-else are lined up on crude shelves made from driftwood.

A rusted anchor leans against a wall, and a ship’s barnacle-covered figurehead—a buxom lass with a fish tail—is wedged between a couple of boulders. Her flaking paint makes it look like her skin is coming off.

Broken masts criss-cross overhead like crooked rafters. Seaweed hangs from them in long strands, alongside little bundles of slowly spinning fishbones and twigs, tied with twine and hair, and torn ribbons of rotting sails.

And there, in the shadows toward the far wall, half hidden among the bric-a-brac, there’s something that looks an awful lot like…

“You think that’s it?” I whisper.

It’s an altar of sorts, carved straight outta the stone wall. Made to look like a swarming mass of sea serpents—red fins, bile belchers, ebony spine-throats, the lot of ’em. It’s surrounded by hundreds of unlit candles, melted wax everywhere, as well as dozens of skulls from all manner of beasties. More than a few human skulls in there, too.

“The Abyssal Shrine.” There’s awe in T.F.’s voice. He’s always been a superstitious type, being river folk and all. “Yeah, that’s it, all right.”

T.F. starts picking his way over to the shrine. I follow a little more slowly, eyeing the shadows. Feels like about now is when something bad would usually happen. That tends to be the way these things go for us. ’Course, I’m also watching T.F.

“You better not be tryin’ to pocket that crown on the sly,” I growl. He gives me a dirty look, but doesn’t bother replying.

Something catches my eye, then, and I think my heart stops for a second.

There’s an elderly woman lying on a knee-high rock shelf nearby. I almost missed her, scanning right over her before I realized what I was seeing.

“Ah hells,” I breathe. Now my heart’s going again, beating like a Noxian war drum.

She’s on her back, hands clasped in front of her, like a statue of the dead. Actually, by the looks of her, she might well be dead, or damn close. Her clothes are half rotten, and she’s the color of a week-dead fish. Might be the light, or lack thereof, but it also looks mighty like the veins in her see-through skin are ink black.

“There’s, ah, an old lady over here,” I hiss.

T.F.’s at the shrine, giving it the once over. “Huh?” he says absently.

“I said there’s an old lady over here,” I repeat, a little louder, glancing over at her to see if she wakes up. She doesn’t.

T.F. glances back. “What’s she doing?”

“Sleepin’,” I whisper. “Or being dead. I dunno which.” I give her a sniff and almost retch. “But she stinks somethin’ fierce. So probably dead.”

T.F. is making his concerned face, his brows meeting in the middle. He usually reserves that for a really bad hand of cards, or finding a fresh stain on the ridiculously overpriced tailored jacket he got in Piltover.

“I guess… just leave her be, then?” he says.

Brilliant. I change the subject. “Any sign of the crown?”

“No.” He turns back to the shrine. “It should be here…”

I move toward him, to help with the search, when the woman gives a rasping snort behind me. I turn fast, shotgun leveled, but she doesn’t stir. Alive, then.

I look at what I’m doing, and shift my aim toward the sky. What was I gonna do, shoot a sleeping old grandma? No matter how bad she smells, that seems like it would just be inviting a whole shipload of bad luck down upon us.

Turning back, I keep a wary eye on the old bat, just in case. Then I step on something. Something that moves. Something that gives out a muffled shriek.

There’s another person in here, completely buried beneath a pile of rotting sailcloth.

He scrabbles away from me like a cornered dog, panicked eyes wild. By the cut of his clothes and the gold earring, he has the look of a sailor, but one that ain’t had a good feed in a while. It’s then that I see the rusted shackle around his leg, connected to a chain, which in turn is bolted to the wall nearby.

Seeing he’s no threat, I ease Destiny’s barrels up. I nod to T.F., who’d spun around, glowing cards at the ready.

“Easy now,” I say to the captive, holding up a hand. “Ain’t here to do you no harm.”

“Get me out of here,” he whispers, eyes dartin’ between me and the sleeping old woman. “I don’t want to be no sacrifice. Was just sent to look for the crown! Get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out—”

His voice is gettin’ louder as his panic builds. Who knows how long the poor fella’s been chained to a wall down here? Or why?

“Now then, son, keep it down,” I say, trying to be all calm like.

“—get me out of here, get me—”

“Shut him up,” hisses T.F.

“Why you always got to order me around, huh?” I snap, makin’ a show of turning toward my partner in crime and jabbing a finger at him. “I got this, alright? It’s just like when—”

It’s a simple misdirection technique, one I learned from T.F., actually. Get your mark’s attention with a sudden movement, direct their focus where you want ’em to look, and they won’t see the thing you don’t want ’em to see.

Case in point: the prisoner’s frantic gaze shifts to T.F., and he don’t notice me stepping in close ’til it’s too late. I slam the butt of Destiny square into his face. I ain’t tryin’ to kill him, but I want him to have a good long sleep.

I throw a glance over my shoulder, but it seems the old bird didn’t hear anything. Probably stone deaf. Still, the sailor seemed pretty worked up. I’m startin’ to get the feelin’ there’s somethin’ mighty wrong about her…

“Nicely done,” T.F. says.

I give him a nod, and kneel down beside the unconscious captive. He looks a bit familiar… “Think I recognize him,” I say. I yank down his collar, popping a few buttons. Yep, there it is—a small tattoo, a pair of crossed hand cannons. “Yeah, this is one of Missy Fortune’s boys. High-ranking one, too. Reckon she’d pay handsomely to have him back.”

T.F. grunts in amusement. “Seems the Prince isn’t the only one after the crown.”

“Looks like. Wonder if she’d pay better?”

“Need to find it first,” he says.

“What did he say about being a sacrifice?”

Far as I’m concerned, if that old woman is strong enough to overpower Miss Fortune’s man, she’s either got help—which could be close by—or there’s much more to her than it seems. Either way, I ain’t keen to stick around.

“Let’s just get out of here,” I mutter. “This don’t feel good.”

“But we’re so close!” T.F. says. “It’s right here, I know it! Give me a little longer.”

Feels strange, me wanting to cut and run and him wanting to stay. That ain’t the way these things usually play out.

I cast another uneasy glance at the old lady, but give a reluctant nod. “Alright. But be quick.”

T.F. seats himself on the floor, and starts dealing out cards before him, face down, in a symmetrical pattern. I leave him to it, and start poking around, prodding into dark spaces with Destiny’s barrels, and being a bit more cautious of where I plant my feet. I find some old, tarnished coins, and am more than a little surprised to see a few gold Krakens among ’em. I pocket those, sliding a glance over at T.F. to make sure he doesn’t notice.

“You certain it’s here?” I say.

T.F. lifts up a card so I can see it. The picture looks like… well, it looks like a gold crown in the shape of a serpent.

“Don’t think I’ve seen that card before,” I say.

“Nor have I,” says T.F. “It’s never existed, ’til now. The crown’s here. Somewhere.”

I’ll never really understand those cards of his.

I keep searching, but after a while, I get the sense we’re being watched. Can’t say I much like the feeling. I turn around in place, looking into the darkness. There’re flickers of movement at the corners of my vision, but it all goes still when I focus on them. I try to shake it off. Probably just more crabs. Still, it seems like getting out of here would be a good idea, sooner rather than later.

T.F. mutters to himself, then scoops up his cards. He looks around, frowning. “You get the feeling we’re being watched?”

Not just me, then. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I catch another glimpse of movement, and find my eye drawn to an upturned bucket on the floor.

Did it—did it just move?

I keep focused on it, and after a moment, the bucket does indeed inch along the floor, just a smidge, before stopping again. I reckon I’ve seen a few odd things in my life, but can’t say I’ve ever seen a bucket acting sneaky before.

I take a step closer, leaning down toward it. There’s a hole in the side of it, and it looks like… yep, there’s an eye staring out, right back at me. A big, yellow, staring eye.

“Got you now, you little—” I say, leveling Destiny at it.

Seeing its ruse is up, whatever’s within flips over the bucket and makes a break for it. I almost shoot, before I see it’s nothing but a damn octopus. I hear T.F. chortle as the rubbery thing goes squelching across the cave floor, hauling itself along with a surprising turn of speed.

It’s only got a single eye, and it’s still staring at me as it scoots backward.

“That’s… not something you see every day,” T.F. says.

The gangly green thing flops along to the base of the rock shelf where the old woman sleeps. It reaches up with a pair of tentacles and starts climbing.

“Well, don’t let it wake her up!” hisses T.F.

“What d’you want me to do, shoot it? Don’t you think that might just wake her up?”

T.F. has a card at the ready, but doesn’t throw, probably on account of not wanting to risk hitting the old woman. “I don’t know. Grab it or something!”

“I ain’t touchin’ no one-eyed octopus, Tobias.”

He gives me a look at the use of his real name. “I’ve told you not to call me that,” he says. “It’s Twisted Fate now, all right?”

I roll my eyes. “I ain’t callin’ you that. It’s stupid an’ pretentious an’—”

The old woman gives a shuddering snort, and we cease our bickering instantly. We look over to see the slimy beastie wrapping its tentacles around her face. There’s an unpleasant squelching sound as it pulls itself onto her head, like a grotesque bonnet, and attaches. Its big yellow eye blinks.

“That ain’t right,” I murmur.

Then the old woman sits bolt upright.

Now, I’m secure enough in myself to admit the sound I made when the old lady sat up was perhaps a little more shrill than I’m proud of. But to be fair, T.F.’s cry was even less dignified than mine.

The old woman’s eyes snap open. They’re as white as serpent milk. Blind she might be, but she turns toward us all the same.

“More little rats, sneaking and thieving?” she says. Her voice sounds like, well, exactly how you’d imagine an old sea witch with an octopus on her head would sound. “Naughty rats, nothing here for you, oh no…”

“Now hold on just one moment, lady,” I say, as she swings her legs around and plants her bare feet on the cave floor. I’ve got Destiny leveled at her, but she don’t seem to care. “We ain’t no rats, and we ain’t no thieves. Well, we are thieves, but, well—”

I look over at T.F.

“Help me out, would you?” I hiss.

“We’re looking for the Abyssal Crown,” T.F. says. “If you’d be so kind as to hand it over, there doesn’t need to be any trouble.”

The old witch stands up with the aid of a serpent-headed staff. Didn’t notice that earlier. She turns her blank, cloudy eyes toward us, and gives a toothless smile. “Silly, silly rats,” she says, drooling. “Already drowned. Promised to the Beasts Below, and don’t even know it.”

She slams her staff down on the floor. Reverberations shudder through the cave, and ripples spread across the black water. There’s a clicking sound, like lots of sticks and twigs breaking, and the walls come alive with movement.

Things detach from the surrounding darkness.

Big things.

“Crabs,” I mutter. “’Course it had to be crabs.”

These ain’t normal crabs, though—not that I’d describe anything with that many legs as normal under regular circumstances, but these things are something else. They’re about the size of small wagons, for starters, and they seem mighty intent on ripping us limb from limb.

They come skittering toward us, each waving a giant blue claw. Gotta say, it looks a whole lot more threatening when that claw’s big enough to snip a man in two. More of them break the surface of the water, chittering and snapping, scuttling sideward up into the cave.

“Eat this, you leggy son of a…!” I roar, and unleash both barrels into the first to come at us.

The blast is deafening, and hurls the giant crab backward with satisfying violence. A flash of red, and T.F. sends one of his cards slicing into the middle of a cluster of them. It explodes, catching the lot of ’em in a burst of sorcerous flames.

I reload just in time to pump a shot into another of the skittering beasts, blasting its overgrown claw to pieces. Shards of crab shell and wet meat splatter outward, and the behemoth staggers. My second shell disintegrates its eyestalks and clacking mandibles, and it’s thrown onto its back. Kicks like a damn mule, does Destiny.

One tries to flank T.F., and I give a shout of warning. He dives, sliding underneath a snapping claw, and flicks another card. It hits the creature with a golden flash. The crab goes instantly still, frozen in place. Freshly reloaded, I step up and blast it back into the water in a shower of crab bits.

“We gotta get out of here!” I holler.

“Not without the crown!” T.F. calls back, dodging a claw.

Feels to me like he’s trying to make a point. See, T.F.’s got a history of taking off as soon as things start to look dicey, leaving me to pick up the pieces. But he swears that’s not his way anymore, and I guess he’s willing to die to prove it. Well, that’s just damn stupid. Admirable, but stupid.

“Ain’t no good to us if we’re dead!” I shout.

I take another shot, but one of the damn crabs grabs Destiny in its claw as I squeeze the trigger. It drags my aim off, and I hit the Abyssal Shrine, blasting it apart.

The sea witch—who, I might add, has been cackling away like a fiend this whole time—screeches in fury.

I’m wrestlin’ with the crab that’s got Destiny in its claw. I ain’t releasing my grip, and the crab don’t seem inclined to, neither.

I snarl. “That’s mine, you scuttling—”

A pair of cards slices through the air, taking off each of the crab’s eye stalks. That makes it let go, and it staggers off blindly, bumping into walls and other scuttlers.

I nod my thanks, but T.F. ain’t lookin’. He’s starin’ over at the shrine. Well, where the shrine was. Now it’s mostly a pile of rocks. Seems it was hollow the whole time, and that my wayward shot bust it wide open.

“Well, would you look at that,” I say.

Seems someone was entombed inside. They’re nothing more than dried bones now, sticking out of the rubble. There’s a tarnished crown circling their skull, too, a crown that glints like gold, and is fashioned in the form of a hissing serpent…

I cast a glance over at the witch. She looks mighty displeased with this turn of events. Scowling, she starts to rise up off the floor. For a second I wonder if I hit my head harder than I first thought, and I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m seeing things right.

But I’m not imagining it. She’s now hovering a good two feet off the ground.

“Huh,” I say.

With a snarl, the witch jabs her staff toward us, and a hole opens up in the air. Now, admittedly that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s the best I got to describe it. The hole’s about the size of a cannonball, at least to start with, but it quickly expands, like a rip in a ship’s hull. A torrent of frigid seawater spills through it, and I go down to one knee as I lose my footing.

There’s movement in the hole as well, and a massive yellow eye appears, iris contracting sharply as it peers through. Looks just like the eye of the octopus thing latched atop the witch’s head, only a hundred, no, a thousand times bigger. I get the feelin’ it’s somewhere deep, deep down in the darkest ocean depths, but here it is, eye-balling us like we’re bait on the end of a line.

Next I know, the eye pulls away, and two giant tentacles lash through the hole. I unleash both barrels, and blow one of those tentacles clean off. It flops to the cave floor, spraying blue blood all over as it thrashes and wriggles. The other one wraps around a giant crab, lifting it easily, and whips it back into the hole.

The old sea witch remains floating in place, with an evil grin. Seems she’s happy to hang back and watch her beast finish us off.

“Get the damn crown!” I bark, pushing back to my feet and fumbling with a pair of fresh shells.

Again the yellow eye races up to the hole, peering through. It looks at T.F., but I shout and wave my arms, and its giant pupil snaps toward me.

A tentacle darts through and wraps around me. Damn near crushes my ribcage as it squeezes and lifts me off my feet. It starts pulling me in, but before I’m dragged through the hole to gods-know-where, I manage to get Destiny up, and level it at the eye.

Seems to me there’s a certain level of intelligence in that gaze, more than one’d expect of a big ol’ sea monster. It sees Destiny and has an inkling of what’s coming, ’cause the eye pulls back, fast. Not fast enough, mind. Destiny roars, barking fire and brimstone, and I hear—and feel—the great beast’s roar of pain.

I’m dropped abruptly to the floor. Water continues to pour into the cave, sending me tumbling head over arse before I’m slammed against the wall. Thankfully, I’ve still got a hold of Destiny—I’m none too eager to head back to Piltover to get another made just yet—but she likely took some water during my little spill.

I come up spluttering. Feels like I’ve swallowed half of Bilgewater Bay. I see T.F. lift the crown off the skeleton, and he gives me a quick nod.

“Now we go,” he says.

I scramble to my feet. Seems like, for the moment at least, the beast behind the hole has backed off, though water keeps pouring through. The whole cave’s knee deep, and refuse and junk are floating around. The giant crabs—those few still here—are milling around, confused as to what’s going on.

The witch’s captive is awake now. He’s climbed up onto a rock, and is staring around him, terrified. Can’t say I blame him. He’s still chained up as well, which ain’t ideal for him with the rising water.

I aim Destiny at the chain and pull the trigger—least I can do is give the fella a fighting chance—but nothing happens. Seems water did get into her workings.

“Sorry, friend,” I say with a shrug.

The witch sees T.F. with the crown, and hisses in fury. She starts floating over toward us, toes dragging in the frigid brine.

T.F. tosses the crown to me, and I awkwardly catch it.

“Why you givin’ it to me?” I have to yell to be heard over the sound of the roaring water.

“Figured you wouldn’t want to let it out of your sight,” he shouts back. “That you wouldn’t trust me to shift out with it.”

I consider that for half a second. Gotta say, I’m a little surprised, and a little impressed. If T.F. keeps this up, I might just have to reassess my opinion of him.

Still, the witch is now focused on me, and it looks like she’s mouthing a curse. As I said, I ain’t the superstitious type, but I ain’t stupid, neither. I toss the crown back to him.

“I trust ya,” I shout. “More or less.”

I take another glance at the witch. Behind her, the big old yellow eye is peeking through the hole again. I feel a moment of satisfaction to see an angry red mark where Destiny bit.

T.F. flicks out a trio of cards, each trailing sorcerous flame, but the witch makes a dismissive gesture. An invisible force knocks them off course, and they fail to hit home. On she comes, floating closer.

She’s smiling her toothless grin now, exposing rotting gums. Seems to reason she thinks she’s got us dead to rights.

“Go, get out of here!” I shout to T.F., even as I swing Destiny over my shoulders. No time to see her wrapped and watertight. If I get out of this mess, she’ll need some tending.

“See you on the other side,” T.F. says with a wink. I believe him, too. Who would have thought?

“Take them, now!” shrieks the witch.

She points her staff at us, and the giant behemoth hurls itself forward, trying to push itself through the hole. A mass of tentacles squeeze out, reaching for us.

Time to leave. T.F. starts doing his thing, cards dancing, focusing on making his exit. Then he and the crown are gone.

My turn. I take a running jump into the dark pool even as tentacles whip toward me. Really hope this does connect to the tunnel I swam through, else that heroic leap’s gonna seem mighty daft.

I hit the water, diving deep, and start swimming. Can’t see anything worth a damn, but the time for caution is long past. If I smack straight into a wall, so be it. Right now that’s the least of my problems.

Thankfully, seems my hunch was right. I swim under a dark rock, blind, and come up on the other side. Back in the first cavern. I can hear the sea witch screeching in rage, echoing around the cave. Any moment, I expect some big damn tentacles to snake through and pull me back.

Sucking in a deep breath, I dive again.

I surface with a gasp. Shoulda been easier coming back, knowing where I was going, but it damn near killed me.

Hands grab me and haul me up. After more than a little swearing and grunting, both T.F. and I flop into the boat, Intrepid.

“Why you gotta be so damn heavy?” he groans.

“Why you gotta be so damn scrawny?” I throw back.

I have no idea if the sea witch or her pets are coming after us, but it don’t seem like a good idea to stick around and find out. I grab hold of the oars and start pulling.

There’s a ship waiting for us, just beyond the Widow Makers. It’s a sleek cutter, built for speed—the Ascended Empress. It’s a gaudy thing, decked out with gold leaf and a cat-headed woman for a figurehead, presumably the aforementioned empress.

“Guess the Prince’s eager to get a hold of his prize, eh?” says T.F, as the cutter turns toward us.

“Seems like.”

Within minutes, the Empress is alongside us. A net’s thrown down, and eager hands haul us aboard once we clamber to the top.

The Prince and his crew are there to greet us. He’s an odd one, the Prince, always has been. Claims to be descended from the lost rulers of the Shuriman sandlands, and waltzes around wearing gold paint caked on his face. Always pays well, though.

“You have it?” asks the Prince. He’s so eager, he’s practically licking his golden lips.

“You got our coin?” I say.

A pair of purses, bulging with Krakens, are thrown at our feet. I stoop down to inspect them. Got a good heft. Like I said, the Prince’s always been one to pay well.

T.F. hands over the crown, and the Prince takes it, full of reverence. “The Abyssal Crown,” he breathes. He stares at it a moment longer, then places it atop his smooth, golden head.

A broad smile creeps across his face. He gives us an appreciative nod, and strides onto the foredeck. He steps up to the bow and leans out, facing the open ocean, and lifts his arms high.

“Rise!” he bellows, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hear my command, oh dwellers of the deep! Rise and come to me!”

The Prince’s crew are watching expectantly. I catch T.F.’s eye, and nod down toward Intrepid.

I really didn’t expect the crown to work—and part of me figured we’d best not be around when I was proved right—but after everything else I’d seen tonight, I wasn’t dismissing the chance that it might. And if it did, well, that seemed like an even better reason to be far, far away. Besides, that old sea witch probably ain’t gonna be too impressed with someone messin’ with her property.

Still, it’s more than a little surprising when the biggest damn creature I’ve ever seen breaches some hundred feet or so off the Ascended Empress’ starboard.

T.F. and I, we’re already half a league away, heading madly for port, but even from here, the scale of the thing is almost impossible to comprehend.

“Huh,” I grunt.

T.F. can’t even manage that. He stands, all fear of tipping overboard momentarily forgotten, and stares, mouth agape, at the distant sea monster.

I can just make out the tiny figure of the Prince, standing on the Ascended Empress’ deck, arms still lifted to the sky.

The beast continues to rise. It could be mistaken for a small island, though to be fair, not many islands have bloody great glowing lures atop their heads, or teeth the length of a ship’s keel, or masses of coiling tentacles, or pallid dead eyes the size of the moon.

Almost lazily, the gargantuan beast reaches out and wraps the Ascended Empress in its tentacles. The cutter lists to the side, cannons and crew falling into the sea. I can still see the Prince, clinging to the foredeck. Then the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw snaps, biting off the front half of the ship, swallowing it whole—along with the Prince.

It’s over in moments. Before Fifth Bell tolls, all evidence of the Ascended Empress is gone, and the great beast has disappeared beneath the surface.

“Huh,” I say again. Don’t think either of us expected that.

After a while, I start rowing. It’s only once we’re tied up at the White Wharf, and are back on solid ground, that we speak.

“Well, that was really… somethin’,” I say.

“It was.”

“Reckon that sea witch is gonna be comin’ after us?”

“I reckon so.”

I grunt, and we both stand in silence, staring back out across the bay.

“Drink?” says T.F., finally.

I suddenly remember those extra Krakens I pocketed in the witch’s cave. Might not be a bad idea to be rid of them sooner than later.

“Drink,” I agree, with a nod. “And it’s on me.”

Sarah Fortune reclines, boots up on the table. She sips from an ornate goblet, making a show of being casual… though hidden unseen in one of her deep coat pockets, she clasps a loaded hand cannon.

A veritable mother lode of old coins, artifacts, and precious gemstones are piled upon the table before her. Even encrusted in verdigris, barnacles, and dried seaweed, it’s clearly enough to buy up half the Slaughter Fleets. Nevertheless, Sarah Fortune pretends to be unimpressed. No need to seem too eager.

“So, in return for my man, and this lot,” she says, gesturing languidly at the treasure, “what exactly is it you want?”

The sea witch stares at her with her blank, milky gaze. The golden eye of the creature affixed to her head, however, blinks.

“Two rats, promised to the Beasts Below,” the witch hisses. “Find them for me, and all this, and more, shall be yours…”

The child slowly makes her way into the forest. And sometimes beneath the forest as the canopy of leaves weaves a green blanket against the clouds. Oh! And sometimes over the forest when there are roots! Don’t trip, little girl, don’t trip. And now… she’s going through it.

Toward me.

Eep!

I stand in the shadows beyond the path leading away from the girl’s village where countless humans have gathered. The small bud on my head peeks out from behind a bush. My hooves dig nervous furrows into the ground, and I hug the branch from Mother Tree tightly to my chest, comforted by the familiar, swirly feeling of the bark.

It’s safe here, in the trees. Or maybe a few more steps behind them.

J-just a few more…

Even with so many humans in the village filling the hillside with life, the girl is alone.

I hold my branch tighter, reminding myself of what I have to do. It’s time to move forward, Lillia. Just one step. You can do this—Mother Tree is sick. She needs the girl’s dream. I take the step. Or, at least, my hoof shifts a little. Oh. That didn’t go very far. Okay, Lillia, another one. This time I lift one shaky hoof up, and before I can get too afraid, I slam it back down.

Whoopsie. That was backward.

The girl stops to sit beneath a tree not far from where I’m watching, just close enough that I can hear her crying softly into a ragged doll cradled in her arms.

There’s no one to wipe away her tears… but she’s not entirely alone. Beneath everything, vibrating with potential in my branch… I can feel it—her dream.

The bud dangling from the tip of the bough shudders to radiant life now that it senses the child and her dream. Like the small flower on my head, the glowing bud and branch are also from Mother Tree—drawn to dreams just as much as the slumbering magic is drawn to them. Glittering pollen drifts from between its petals, and the shadows around me recede, fleeing the light before I can.

My— My hoof is showing? Eep!

I sprawl and contort all four of my legs to fit in the shrinking shadow, wobbling as my balance threatens to give. The glimmering bud swings wildly as the bough sways with me, casting clouds of dust-like pollen that drift toward the girl through the leaves. And then, as the shadows move again, I stumble into the clearing where she awaits.

All I can do is peer at her from behind my branch, too afraid to blink.

But she doesn’t see me. She presses her face into the doll, hiding her tears. Her sobs turn into whimpers, her whimpers into sighs. The pollen from the bud gradually settles around her, twinkling as the girl’s eyes slowly flutter closed. She slumps against the tree, the doll sliding from her grasp.

I’m still afraid to move. Something twirls out of the bough’s bud and dances above my head. It’s my old friend, a little dream that’s traveled with me since I first left Mother Tree’s mystical garden. As if sensing the other dream still snuggled inside the girl, my glittering friend dances through the air toward her.

“That was a close one,” I say as the dream flits back and forth.

It skims above the girl and leaves a trail of sparkles that tickle her skin until she smacks her lips and wrinkles her nose. She snorts so loudly that I leap again, landing with a blush. I touch the petals of the small bud on my head, wondering if they’re flushing as red as my cheeks. The child remains fast asleep.

Why isn’t her dream coming out?

My friend continues to spin around the girl, trying to summon the other dream. But my eyes are drawn to the doll on the ground instead, the girl’s hand hanging as if she still reaches for it, her fingers squeezing tight.

Before I left the garden—the place that was my home—I used to think that dreams were the things people wanted most every time they closed their eyes. But now, I see that the things they want, that they reach for and hold on to… only make them sad. The thing I wanted most, which was to meet the dreamers, hurt Mother Tree.

What if dreams aren’t the things we want?

I put down my branch. This time you can do it, Lillia. Just close your eyes, like you’re sleeping. Stumbling forward, I kneel beside the girl and take up her doll.

What if dreams are the things we need?

I start to hand the doll back to the girl, wary of getting this close, even to such a small human. Instinctively, she rolls over as she feels it against her chest, sitting up to pull the doll into a hug. Her tiny arms are just long enough to wrap around me as well. As she hugs the doll, she pulls me in closer, and closer.

And in that moment, we both find what we need to bloom.

The girl’s dream finally emerges in a luminous swirl, spiraling and dancing alongside my old friend, and filling the forest with so much wonder that I can feel it all the way down to my hooves.

I want to prance!

Like a color that has no name, each dream is so hard to describe. Is this dream the girl’s sister, wrapping her in its arms although the sisters have already said goodbye? Is it the doll she pretends is her sister before she put on armor and left everything else behind? Or are these only the things the child grasped too hard while hugging her doll, and her dream is something deeper—something truer?

“You miss your sister, don’t you?” I whisper into her ear. “You need her love.”

Giving her that love, seeing it and feeling it, is what I need, too. I melt into the hug, and send dream dust spiraling as the small bud on my head twirls open.

Both dreams curl into the large bud on my branch. “I’ll whisper your dream to the tree. I’ll remember,” I tell the girl. “I’m glad I got to meet you,” I add.

I hope her dream hears me, too.

I let go of the girl and lay her down gently. With her sighs, she releases all that’s been trapping her dream.

Like so many mortals, her sister may never come back to give her the love she desires. That’s why she needs to dream. That’s why it will always be there, and she’ll never be alone, as long as she remembers to close her eyes.

That’s why dreams are magical… and the little girl is, too.

I sneeze, and the dust-pollen in the bud on my head swirls away, carrying the magic of the child’s dream into a wind that blows toward Mother Tree.

“Whoopsie,” I blush, realizing I’m in the open. And before the feeling of wonder completely fades, I prance back into the forest.

The girl opens her eyes with a well-rested yawn. The sun is shining through the leaves above her. She’s surprised to find herself still in the forest, and drops her doll in shock. Then, slowly, she remembers what it means to her—who gave it to her—and picks it back up.

She holds the doll tight and starts to run through the clearing.

“O-Ma, O-Ma! Has sister returned?” she cries to her grandmother. “I just saw her. I saw her!”

The girl’s small outline disappears, but in her wake, following the path where she ran, dream blossoms sprout from sparkling pollen.

Perhaps when the child returns, she will pick one of these flowers. And know that in her heart—though it can’t be held—the love of her sister will always bloom.

My, that’s quite the haul ye have, there! Won at the tables, was it? Well, here’s to your very good health. Cheers.

Oh, no, I’ll not be rollin’ the dice with ye. Not a gamblin’ man no more, or so I tells me self. There were a time, though... What happened? The River King happened, that’s what. Aye, Two-Coats, that old devil Tahm Kench. He’s what happened.

I was bilge-poor, beg your pardon, and livin’ in a flophouse. Had nothin’ to me name, not ‘til a single gold Krakenaye, this one ‘erecome into my possession. I could tell you how, but you’d call me a liar, heh.

So, with this one coin, what I oughta done was pay me debts, and find a new crew to join. I was a harpooner, see. Shoulda put aside whatever was left for the future. Been responsible, like. Harpoonin’s a harsh life, even for a younger man.

But that’s when the River King found me. “Why work someone else’s ship,” he says, “slavin’ away, riskin’ your life for next t’ nothin’, when ye might ‘ave a ship o’ your own?” I just had to think bigger, like. O’ course, one Kraken won’t buy a ship, but ‘e had an answer to that, didn’t he.

Dice. One good throw o’ the bones, an’ I’d ‘ave enough to start me own little operation. Others could do the danger work, while I sits back, nice and plum, enjoyin’ the profits. An’ after a few more drinks, you understand, that crooked devil’s advice starts to make a lot o’ sense to my ears. So, blinded by greed and possibility, I went along wi’ it.

That night were a blur. I awoke well after noon the next day, me head fairly poundin’! Had no idea where I wassome fancy bawdy-house, as it turns outbut on the dresser were me previous night’s winnings... more than enough to purchase me self a ship! Ah, but the River King, ‘e’d given me a taste for somethin’ more. Why should young Lars content his self with a single ship, when he could ‘ave a fleet? Just needed to chance me hand a few more times...

That’s Bilgewater. There’s riches to be had, if you’re willin’ to risk everything, over and over.

With old Two-Coat’s arm around me, I was led from the dice tables to other halls of avaricefrom backroom card games to gamblin’ and bettin’ parlors, high and low. I spent a fortune, lost a fortune, then made it all back again. Around and around in that allurin’ spiral I went. I was feelin’ the hunger, the yearning, and it was pullin’ me down like a whirlpool.

Years passed, an’ somewhere along the way, I’m ashamed to say I forgot what I was doing all this for. I forgot who I was. I had it all, but it never were enough. I wanted more.

And then I started losin’ big. That made me double-down, go for broke, all-or-nothin’, looking for the big stakes to put me back on top. Pretty soon, I was in a worse state than I’d been to start with. Sleepin’ in the gutter, catching rats to eat if I were lucky. I begged, borrowed and stole from everyone who’d ever shown me any kindness. Lost all me mates, chasing the dream.

‘E feeds on misery, see, does Tahm Kench. As old as sin, ‘e is, and older than Bilgewater by far. Been ‘round from the start of things, gorgin’ his self on the desperation what comes with the greed and sorrow in men’s hearts. I mean, I’d done it to me self, but it were him what give me the means. Ye might say, ‘e took me to the cliff’s edge, but I were the numpty what threw me self off, beg your pardon, and that old glutton revelled in me despair.

Came to me once more, ‘e did, when I was at me very lowest, drinkin’ from puddles, havin’ sold me own leg to be used for chum. In the darkest night, whisperin’ an’ cajolin’, ‘e pressed this gold Kraken back into me hand, with a knowin’ wink.

‘Twere the same one I’d ‘ad back at the start! It were this damn coin what started me on that wretched path! Eh, ‘e opened his mouth up wide, and says, “It’s not too late, Lars. Never too late. Come with me, an’ we’ll find you a fortune again...”

Even after everythin’, I was tempted. ‘Course I was! But no. I resistedMother Serpent knows how. Two-Coats only laughed. Said he’d be there when I changed me mind.

And, sure enough, the temptation’s still there, now, every day.

So here I am. Friendless. Broke. All the best years of me life behind me, wasted in those lost decades. Can’t remember most of it, neither, so I’ve no idea if I even enjoyed me self.

Anyways. Enough o’ my ramblin’. There’s a lesson to be learned, ‘erekeep your purse strings tight, and never, ever make a deal wi’ the River King. Ye’ve always got more to lose...

In Ionia, magic is woven into the land. Forests spread vibrantly, and trees often boast nearly as many colors as leaves, touched by the wonders of the spirit realm.

But there is one forest, hidden away, that draws on a different kind of magic—a garden with a tree at its heart that gathers humanity’s dreams in its blooms.

The Dreaming Tree grew from a seed of the God-Willow, which towered over the ancient grove of Omikayalan. Cast loose when the God-Willow was tragically felled, the seed took root in what came to be known as the Garden of Forgetting. Nurtured by the Green Father, Ivern—as many of the descendants of Omikayalan were—the Dreaming Tree spiraled up, spreading the magic of humanity’s desires each time the dream-laden buds bloomed.

Lillia was born when one of the tree’s own dreams was captured in a bud that fell to the ground before it could bloom—something that had never happened before. Sprouting into an awkward fawn creature with the flower bud still on her head, Lillia’s only company was her mother tree, and the dreams that drifted to the garden each night.

Lillia helped tend the buds, and learned about humanity through them. Enchanted by the people and places she glimpsed, she spent every waking moment experiencing a swirl of emotions and desires that mortals could only see when they closed their eyes.

In caring for the dreams, Lillia also cared for the dreamers. She came to consider each of them a new friend, wanting nothing more than to one day greet the people who imagined such wonders. Lillia wanted it so badly that her own desires eventually gathered in a bud on the tree.

But when Lillia finally did meet humans, it wasn’t like remembering a familiar dream. It was more like waking up.

Something was happening in the world outside Lillia’s forest. War blazed like a fire through the land, and in time, fewer dreams began to reach the garden. The tree itself grew sick, and became infected with burls—writhing tangles in its trunk, which oozed darkness.

Lillia did her best to nurture her mother tree and the dreams that remained in its buds, but it was not long before the garden became so weak that the violence of the world spilled in. One night, warriors entered the forest and chased a lone figure all the way to the Dreaming Tree. With a single errant blade’s slash, the branch containing Lillia’s unrealized dream came thudding to the ground.

Lillia panicked and forced them all to sleep, shocked at the difference between the mortals she thought she knew, and the ones she had found.

They were so afraid—more tangle than sparkle. They were like the burls…

But as the warriors slept and Lillia wept, a dream emerged from the lone figure the others had been chasing. Weakly, it floated toward the broken branch on the ground and moved into the bough’s bud.

Lillia picked it up. She could feel the dream. As she whispered to it and soothed it, it glowed ever brighter—and so did she. The bud upon her head unfurled, and magic swirled around like sparkling pollen. In that moment, swept up in possibility and wonder, Lillia herself bloomed… until, with a sneeze, she sent the magic curling into the surrounding forest.

The humans awoke one by one, unable to remember what had brought them to the forest, or what they had done. None noticed the timid fawn behind the tree. With relief, Lillia watched the humans go, still seeing only confusing tangles—but knowing now that there was still a sparkle beneath it all.

And if their dreams wouldn’t come to the tree, she would have to bring the tree to them.

Taking up her branch, Lillia left the garden and entered the world of humans—a world she had always wanted to know, but one that frightened her now more than anything. It was so unlike what she understood.

Hiding just out of sight, Lillia now helps people’s dreams be born, drawn forward by glimpses of who they could be, and by what may be trapped beneath their tangles. By helping humans realize their deepest wishes, Lillia realizes her own, the bud on her head blooming as she is filled with joy.

Though darkness may be encroaching on Ionia once more, it is but a mask, and beneath it lies the familiar sparkle of hope. Only by braving the world, and braving herself, can Lillia hope to untangle its burls.

It was the stench of Bloodharbor that hit you first.

Like a gut-punch that took the wind right out of your sails.

The stink always got inside you, making you feel like you’d never get it out.

A noisome reek of opened leviathan bellies, dripping entrails you could crawl through, and weeks-old offal sticking to the cobbles like gory mortar left to rot in the sun. Mix that with the shit of ten thousand scavenging seabirds and the piss of the Slaughter Docks’ bloodied workers, and it was a smell strong enough to turn even the strongest stomach inside out.

You could wear a bandanna soaked in enough rum to souse the Bearded Lady herself, and it’d still get you.

Yes, it was awful, but Sarah Fortune loved what it represented.

It was the smell of prosperity, of a plentiful catch, and monster bounties earned.

A red tide meant people with coins in their pockets, ready to spend them all in the quayside taverns, gambling dens, and fleshpots, all of which paid a cut of their takings to Sarah.

Prosperity, yes—by the Bearded Lady, it was just the worst smell in the world.

Her small landing boat eased out into the sludgy water, its passage through the deepening evening lit by a storm lantern swaying from a wrought-iron tentacle at its bow.

Seated in the back of the boat, Sarah draped her hand over the gunwale and let her fingertips carve a path through the fatty layers on the water’s surface, drawing undulant spirals that rose and fell with the red tide.

“Even for you, that’s pretty damn reckless,” grunted Rafen, sweating as he leaned back and forth on the oars. Rafen was an old salt of the islands, with a craggy face weathered by ocean spray and hard winds, and a keen mind the rum hadn’t managed to take the edge off. He was, by turns, her conscience and right-hand man, and had seen pretty much every dark nook and cranny Bilgewater had to offer.

“How so?” asked Sarah.

“There’s ripper fish and flaying lampreys lurking just under the surface.”

“Scared I’ll get my fingers bitten off?” replied Sarah.

“Can’t pull a trigger without your fingers.”

“You worry too much, Rafen.”

“That’s my job, to worry about the things you don’t worry enough about.”

“Like this boat ride out to the Moon Serpent?”

“Exactly,” said Rafen. “I have a saying, and it ain’t steered me wrong none since I heard it at my papa’s knee. If it smells bad, leave it damn well alone, you idiot!”

Sarah shrugged. “Pretty much everything smells bad out here.”

“Maybe so, but that don’t change the truth of it,” said Rafen, glancing over his shoulder into the mist rising up from the water, where the Moon Serpent lurked like a dark secret. “The sea has an evil cast to it this night. Feels like hungry eyes are looking up from the deep.”

“Your bones talking to you again?”

“You mock, but I been listening to ’em for more’n forty years now, and I’m still alive, ain’t I?”

“Let it go, old man,” said Miss Fortune. “It’s a Captain’s Requiem, I have to be there. And if I have to be there in this ridiculous getup, then my second in command has to be there too.”

Said ridiculous getup consisted of a—literally—breathtaking whalebone corset of cobalt blue and golden lace beneath a gloriously long-tailed scarlet frock coat. In addition, she wore linen breeches of pale cream tucked into heeled boots of polished black leather with silver kraken buckles running from ankle to knee.

An absurdly impractical outfit, but in a gathering of captains it didn’t do to look anything less than obscenely wealthy. A poor captain was a weak captain, and like every kind of predator, Bilgewater reavers would ruthlessly prey on the weak.

Rafen hadn’t escaped the need to smarten up, either, and—under duress and threat of a demotion—wore a borrowed suit of sealskin leather, a scaled waistcoat whose buttons threatened to split from the fabric with every pull of the oars, and a stovepipe hat with a pressed tentacle headband.

“I might have to be there, but that don’t mean I got to like it,” said Rafen.

“True, but I need you to watch my back,” said Sarah. “Aligh had a large crew, and with him dead every captain will be circling like a wharf rat in heat. Last thing I need is his old crew going over to a rival captain or falling in with the likes of the Jackdaws or Butcher Blades.”

“Aye, there’s that,” begrudged Rafen. “Lot of powerful captains’ll likely be here to see Aligh off to the Bearded Lady, but do you really trust all of them to abide by the Truce?”

“Not even a little bit,” said Sarah, opening her coat to reveal a pair of exquisite ivory-handled pistols holstered under each armpit. “But it’s not like I’m going in unarmed.”

“They’ll take those off you, sure as eggs is eggs.”

“Please, you think they’re the only weapons I have?” she said, tapping the side of her head.

“Fair enough, but this still feels like a risk.”

“It surely is, but what’s life without a little risk?”

“I’ll remind you of that if this all goes under fast.”

Sarah grinned. “If it does, I promise you can haunt me from our watery grave.”

Rafen made a quick sign of the horns over his heart and shook his head, but returned his effort to rowing. He’d made his point, and Sarah had made sure he knew better than to press her when her mind was made up. Besides, she knew he was right, and there was nothing more irritating than a man who believed he was right.

But in deference to Rafen’s words, Sarah lifted her hand from the surface of the water and flicked the scum from her fingertips. Something toothy broke the surface where it landed and the old man raised his eyes in a told ya fashion.

Behind her, the ramshackle crags of Bilgewater shimmered in the fog, flickering anthills where people—her people—lived upon the flotsam and jetsam the ocean provided. Its structures clung to the rocks and mountains of the island chain like persistent barnacles that neither storm, Harrowing, nor the occasional probes of Noxian war-barques could ever entirely dislodge.

Like Sarah Fortune, Bilgewater was a survivor.

Since Gangplank’s death, she’d fought the unquiet spirits of the Shadow Isles and survived countless attempts on her life. Consolidating her rule over Bilgewater had been a messy, bloody affair, and her grip was still as shaky as an apprentice rigger on their first climb of the ropes. But she was still alive despite the venom—and firearms—aimed at her for putting her head above the parapet.

“Ship ahoy,” said Rafen.

Sarah looked past him to see a looming shape emerging from the rising mist.

Much like its former captain, the Moon Serpent was an old, unsubtle ship; broad in the beam and glowing with the dim light of dozens of hooded lanterns hanging from its many masts. The brigantine’s reinforced timbers were thickly caulked and carved with scales like a snake. Crusted salt in the grooves shone silver in the moonlight, and though its sails were still furled, Sarah knew they were woven from shimmering white cloth that must have cost Aligh a small fortune. Its ramming prow figurehead was a fanged serpent forged from the melted-down cannons of his enemies.

“By the Bearded Lady, I always forget how big it is…”

“She’s a beast sure enough,” said Rafen as the brigantine’s cold shadow fell across them.

“How in the world did a tight-fisted miser like Aligh pay for this?” said Sarah. “That cheapskate bastard never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat. I heard he skipped out on his dues to the ocean, never so much as a drop of rum or a copper coin for the lords and ladies of the deep.”

“And ain’t that yet another reason for me to turn us around and not set foot on its deck,” said Rafen. “If even a bit of that’s true, then this here’s a doomed ship. The ocean needs its due, any captain worthy of the name knows that.”

“I gave a hex-carbine to the waters off White Wharf after claiming Jakmunt Zyglos’s bounty.”

“I remember,” said Rafen with a resigned shake of his head. “You promised that weapon to me.”

“Decent craftsmanship too. Wasn’t a Fortune Manstopper, but it was pretty nice.”

“Now you’re just being cruel.”

“A queen must be cruel only to be kind,” said Sarah with mock affectation, as Rafen eased the boat up to half a dozen others moored beneath a wide cargo net strung from the gunwale. The glossy hull of the Moon Serpent rose up like a black cliff and dark silhouettes moved through the lamplight high above.

“She’s sitting high in the water for such a big ship,” said Rafen, nodding toward the mottled green tide lines on the ship’s black hull as he tied the boat up with a loose slipknot.

“Her holds will be empty and most of the crew will be ashore getting three sheets to the wind on whatever cheap rotgut Aligh left them for his wake,” said Sarah.

“Lucky them,” said Rafen, pulling the oars in from the rowlocks and securing them along the gunwale. “You sure about this?”

Sarah rose and took hold of the cargo net, tipping her head back.

“Not really,” she said. “But when given the choice of going forward or back, a strong woman once told me that it’s always better to go forward, so let’s go.”

Hand over hand, Sarah and Rafen climbed to the Moon Serpent’s deck.

A pair of unsmiling twins in leather breeches and scaled shirts took Sarah’s guns and Rafen’s marlinspike dagger as soon as they clambered over the gunwale. Both women were heavily muscled and angrily sober, no doubt wishing they were ashore partaking in Aligh’s wake-rum instead of forming a skeleton crew for a bunch of captains who would, like as not, dance a jig to see one another dead.

One of the twins wore a helmet made from the skull of a scuttle-crab and matching patchwork armor of boiled shells, while the other had a face covered with tattoos of unblinking eyes. When the latter grinned at the sight of the gun-dame forged pistols, Sarah saw her mouth was filled with teeth prized from a razorscale’s jawbone.

Sarah followed them as they made their way to the raised foredeck, and marked which of the three chests they put the confiscated weapons into—cannonball dent in the right side.

An enormous bronze cannon sat on a carved ebony gun carriage just in front of the chests. The weapon’s flared muzzle was sealed with wax, and the sail-shrouded body of Captain Aligh would be entombed within, pickled in rum, vinegar, and camphor for its journey to the bottom of the sea.

“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said Sarah. “The cannon, I mean.”

“Aye,” agreed Rafen. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see, but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”

“Right…” said Sarah, turning her attention to the broad-shouldered figure standing immobile next to the ship-wrecker. “Lady help us if we ever buck tradition, eh?”

He was swathed in a robe of iridescent scales with a wide-mouthed fish-head hood ringed in razor teeth. He carried a tentacle-wrapped billhook, and Sarah immediately knew him for what he was.

“A rare honor to have a serpent caller at a Captain’s Requiem,” she said.

“Amazing what enough gold krakens can buy you, eh?” replied Rafen.

Within the jagged hood, the serpent caller wore a mask of perforated coral over the lower half of his face, while his eyes and forehead were obscured by a dried-out squid’s body with crudely cut eye-holes through which the priest surveyed the gathered captains.

The wide deck was thronged with a host of Bilgewater reavers in all their finery: long coats, polished boots, tall hats, and archaic pieces of armor that would drag them straight to the ocean floor if they fell overboard. Sarah saw a wealth of gold and silver sigils and medals, Buhru fishhook amulets, and lucky talismans to honor the lords and ladies of the deeps.

Some captains she knew from fighting or drinking—often both—and some she knew only by reputation.

They, of course, all knew her.

With her blood-red hair, creamy skin, and confident swagger, Sarah Fortune would be a hard woman to miss in any circumstance, but on this ship she was a wild rose among poisoned thorns.

“Quite the gathering, eh?” said Rafen.

“Nothing like death to really bring people together,” said Sarah.

Rafen nodded and said, “Now I know how a fat waverider feels when it finds itself surrounded by a pack of hungry longtooths.”

Sarah shook her head. “You have it backward, old man. I’m the longtooth here.”

Rafen didn’t reply as Sarah marched to the ship’s centerline and back, adjusting each stride for the motion of the ship’s deck. Just as every pistol had its own unique character, so too did every ship; its own way to crest the tides and heed the wind. She moved with the anchored ship’s roll and sway, letting the creak and groan of seasoned timbers tell their secrets from her boots on up.

“A shallow-riding wallower,” she said. “Surprising for such a wide-beamed vessel.”

“I like ’em broad in the beam,” said Rafen, instinctively adjusting the width of his stance.

“So I heard.”

“Not as nimble as a cutter,” said Rafen, ignoring her jibe, “but I’ll wager a bottle of Myron’s Dark she’ll hold you tight to her bosom in rough seas.”

“That she will, Rafen,” said a slender woman dressed in a long coat of pale blue, with gold edging at the cuffs and bronze fringed epaulettes. “She’s a grand old dame, right sure. Sank Darkwill’s Glory and even poked a few holes in the Red Noxtoraa before the Mudtown fogs closed in and saved its cursed hide.”

A salt-stiffened bicorn flopped at a rakish angle on the woman’s shaven head, and the state of her eyes—two poached eggs wobbling in a bowl of fish soup—told Sarah she’d been hitting the rum hard already. Her skin had the waxy, yellowish complexion of someone only recently returned from a long sea voyage.

“Captain Blaxton,” said Rafen. “I heard you were dead.”

“Rumors of my death fly around Bilgewater with every sunset,” said the woman. “And with them, men weep, and their wives curse the morn of their disproving. I assure you, I am in the rudest of health.”

She turned to Sarah and gave her an elaborate bow before offering her a hand.

Sarah took it and was instantly on guard. Despite Blaxton’s drunken appearance and feather-light grip, she felt hard-earned calluses and powder burn ridges on the heel of her palm.

“Marla Blaxton, at your service, Captain Fortune,” she said, releasing Sarah’s hand. “Recently returned from a year of raiding the Amarantine Coast, where the sea is clear, the sky blue, and the coastal settlements fat with more gold than a captain could spend in ten lifetimes.”

“How wonderful,” said Sarah. “Why would you ever choose to return from that?”

“Good times can only last so long, you know. The inhabitants of said settlements had some strange ideas about ‘ownership’ and ‘not being dead’. Also, they were able to summon some curious mage-types who turned the sea and sky against me in ways I’d never seen before.”

“Ah, so you lost all your ships,” said Rafen.

“A few,” allowed Blaxton, waving her hand dismissively. “A temporary setback, Rafen. One from which I expect to bounce back any day now.”

“Perhaps with a new crew and a shallow-riding wallower of a brigantine?” suggested Sarah.

Blaxton laughed and said, “Anything is possible,” before giving her another bow and rejoining a group of captains gathered around a leaking barrel of rum by the foremast.

And Sarah’s heart skipped a beat as she saw a face she recognised, an enemy face.

Rafen saw him too and gripped her arm.

“Remember the Truce,” he hissed urgently.

Sarah didn’t answer, too focused on the man before her.

She pulled her arm free and strode toward him, keeping her face expressionless.

Blond hair, tied back in a rough ponytail, a loose strand hanging, just so, over his handsome, clean-shaven features. He looked up and met her gaze, the ice in his eyes frosting at her approach.

“Sarah,” he said, opening his arms to her. “Look, I know we—”

She didn’t let him finish, hammering her fist into his gut without breaking stride.

He buckled like he’d been hit by one of the twenty-four pounder balls, and his handsome face met her rising knee with a sickening crunch of bone.

He flew back and Sarah pounced on him before he could rise, straddling him and reaching for her pistol before remembering it was locked in a chest next to the mainmast.

Cannonball dent in the right side.

Instead of shooting him, she hauled his head up by his collar and cocked her fist back for another punch. He coughed blood, and lifted a forge-crafted hand of whirring bronze cogs, leather straps, and clicking mechanics out in front him.

“Please,” he wheezed through a broken nose and a mouthful of blood.

“Hello, Petyr,” she said. “I told you what would happen if I saw you again, didn’t I?”

Captain Petyr Harker.

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been cradling the splintered, bloody ruin of his hand, the hand he’d always boasted killed the Crimson Blade.

Petyr, along with Captains Crow and Bragg, had conspired to strip her of her hard-won gains in the wake of her killing Gangplank. Both Crow and Bragg were now dead, one from a pistol ball to the head, the other with one lodged in his liver.

Her pistol balls.

Walking out of the gunfight at MacGregan’s Killhouse, she’d promised to take more than Petyr’s other hand if she ever saw him again.

The Truce of the Sinking Soul was a long-standing tradition in Bilgewater.

More of an unwritten rule than a strictly enforced custom, but it allowed rival crews to gather without bloodshed when their captains attended the all too frequent funerals of old sea-legends.

That violent men and women would abide by such an archaic custom always struck Sarah as somewhat quaint, and until now she’d always kept it in the if it ain’t broken… part of her mind.

An iron grip seized her right elbow and pulled her clenched fist back.

Rafen appeared on her left, dragging her off Petyr.

“Easy, captain,” he said. “Easy now…”

Part of her wanted to land another punch, but by the time Rafen had her back on her feet, the anger had gone out of Sarah. She’d made her point, and so let herself be pulled away.

“Upon our last descent,” said a rum-sodden voice in her ear. “All gathered heed this oath.”

“Peace be upon us all,” she repeated automatically. “No harm to body or soul.”

“No shot nor blade, no serpent nor spell,” added Rafen.

“Observe the Truce of the Sinking Soul!” finished Petyr, scrambling away from her.

Sarah let out a long breath, and turned to see who, along with Rafen, had pulled her off.

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat, fresh octopus-tentacle tie, and glistening stingray flat-cap that was well above the tattered sackcloth she normally saw him wearing.

“Thorne?” she said, shrugging off Rafen’s touch.

“It’s Captain Thorne these days,” he said, spitting a wad of expensive dried-seaweed tobacco to the deck and missing the polished toe of her boot by a finger’s breadth.

Sarah laughed. “You? A captain? Since when?”

Thorne preened, looking like a powder monkey with a freshly stolen mango. “Got me a ship now, and a crew of hearty sea-rats off the back of what you done to Crow and Bragg.”

His breath was like a bucket of rotten clams. Thorne could parade in expensive clothes, but he could never change who he truly was.

“You always were a bottom feeder, weren’t you?” said Sarah. “Now get out of my way.”

Thorne stood aside, and said, “Mark my words, Sarah Fortune, you’ll get what’s comin’ to ya.”

“Promises, promises,” said Sarah, and in two quick steps she was standing over Petyr Harker.

She held her arm out and rippled her fingers, like she was flipping a coin along her knuckles.

“Can I give you a hand?” she said with a grin.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“It is funny,” said Sarah. “Look how I’m smiling.”

Petyr looked at her gloved hand through an eye that was already swollen and purple. Despite the obvious pain of his bleeding nose and winded gut, he grinned.

“If I give you my good hand, are you going to shoot it off?” he asked.

“I’m not planning to, but the day’s yet young.”

He took her hand, and Sarah hauled him to his feet.

“Why are you here, Petyr?” she asked.

“There might not be a Corsair’s Conclave anymore, but traditions need to be upheld, yes?”

“So I keep hearing,” said Sarah, glancing at Rafen.

She pulled a handkerchief from her coat and handed it to Petyr. He nodded gratefully and wiped the blood from his lips and chin before handing it back.

“Keep it,” she said, then nodded admiringly at his new hand. “Nice work. Doesn’t look like Bilgewater craft.”

“It’s not,” said Petyr. “Well, it is and it isn’t. A new apprentice down at Bitterbelt’s forge made it for me. Zaunite lad named Gysbert.”

“Looks expensive.”

“It was.”

Sarah looked him up and down, taking in his tailored clothing, the well-fed cheeks, and the empty scabbard that looked like it might hold a fine blade. Whatever had become of Petyr after losing his hand, he’d clearly bounced back well enough.

“I keep wondering if I should have killed you back at MacGregan’s,” said Sarah.

“I’ve often wondered why you let me live,” said Petyr. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you didn’t kill me, but let’s be honest, I’m just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme.”

Despite herself, Sarah laughed. “That you are, Petyr, that you are. But if you want the truth, I didn’t kill you because killing you would have been Gangplank’s way of doing things, and I always try to be better than he was.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“It’s a work in progress,” admitted Sarah as Rafen stepped between them, holding tin mugs hooked over his fingers in one hand, and a large bottle of rum in the other.

“Here,” he said. “If the Truce is holding, and we’re not going to start killing each other, then we might as well have a swig of Aligh’s rum, eh?”

Sarah passed a mug to Petyr before taking one for herself as Rafen poured them all two fingers of the syrupy brown liquid.

“Keep your powder dry and your cutlass sharp,” said Rafen.

“And the world will turn,” finished Sarah, and the three of them touched mugs.

Sarah tipped her head back and took a mouthful, wincing at the gritty, overly sweet taste.

“Oh, that’s bad. That’s really bad,” she said. “You sure they didn’t put Aligh’s body in the rum barrel instead of the cannon barrel?”

“Aligh was known for many things—being a cruel old bastard, a ruthless captain, and a seasoned killer—but one thing he wasn’t known for was his largesse in vittles,” said Petyr, pouring the remains of his rum onto the deck.

“I didn’t know you knew Aligh.”

Petyr shook his head vigorously. “I didn’t. I mean, I knew him by reputation, of course, but it’s not like I ever set foot on the Moon Serpent before today.”

“The man was an enigma,” said Thorne, sidling up to Rafen and holding out his own mug. “A regular man of mystery, but who cares about that? He’s dead, and we ain’t.”

Sarah shrugged and nodded to Rafen, who poured Thorne a generous measure.

“Aye,” continued Thorne. “There’s none here gathered who knows much of the man. They say he never came ashore neither. Always sent one of them vicious twins. So, did you hear how he died?”

“I heard he was stabbed in his sleep by a cabin boy who’d taken one too many beatings,” said Captain Blaxton, arriving mug in hand.

Rafen duly poured her a measure.

“May all your lookouts be sober,” she said, taking a drink. “Ah, some of the good stuff.”

“That’s what you heard?” said Sarah. “I heard he choked to death on a barb-squid that wasn’t quite dead in his dinner.”

Rafen shook his head. “No, that’s just what the cutters on the Slaughter Docks are saying. I heard it from one of the chandlers down the grottoes that he was so drunk he fell overboard. His pockets were so laden with gold that he sank all the way down, straight into the waiting grasp of the Bearded Lady.”

Instinctively, they all looked over the gunwale to the ocean far below.

The waters swirled around the ship, deep and black like a liquid mirror. She saw her wavering reflection, splintered by the water and lapping at the barnacled hull. Hard waves broke against the hull—the kind you saw when something large was coming up from below.

“Told you it had an evil cast to it tonight,” said Rafen.

Sarah let out a breath and tapped her left eye twice with her right thumb, an old sailor’s tradition to ward off evil influences.

“Ach, he was an old man, maybe he just died,” said Sarah. “That’s what old men do best.”

“Fog’s rolling in,” said Blaxton, nodding out to sea.

A chill passed through Sarah as she saw the fog was coming in from the southeast; cold, clammy, and freighted with the smell of the deepest ocean trenches.

“Don’t matter none how the old bastard died,” said Thorne. “All that matters is what happens to his ship and his crew. That’s why we’re all here, ain’t it? Every one of us wants to claim that big prize, don’t we?”

All four captains studied one another, each knowing that was exactly why they were here.

“No one ever found his serpent sigil, did they?” said Blaxton.

“His sigil?” scoffed Rafen. “Like as not, it’s sealed away in that cannon with him. Doesn’t matter anyway, no one pays any heed to a captain’s sigil these days.”

“Maybe they should,” said Sarah. “Maybe there’d be a lot less bloodshed if you could just claim a ship and crew with the previous captain’s sigil.”

“Scared of a little blood, are ya?” grinned Thorne. “Not got the stomach for it, eh?”

Sarah took a step toward him and said, “Truce or not, talk to me like that again and I’ll show you how much stomach I have for bloodshed.”

“Didn’t mean to go upsettin’ ya, Captain Fortune,” laughed Thorne, exposing black teeth and rotten gums. “Just wondering how many of ’em here gathered would have even the slightest hesitation of trying to claim Aligh’s crew if they could get their hands on that sigil…?”

Sarah looked past Thorne at the other captains gathered on the Moon Serpent’s deck, wondering the same thing. Most of them were small fry, with crews that were too green to make a serious play for Aligh’s ship, but the three drinking rum with her… Now that was a motley crew indeed, and any one of them might be a rival she needed to worry about sticking a knife in her back.

Before any of them could say anything in answer to Thorne’s question, Sarah felt the deck shift underfoot, a slow roll and dip.

She reached inside her coat and pulled out a silver coin, flicking it over the side of the ship.

Thorne watched it tumble end over end to the waters, and for a moment she wondered if he might dive in after it.

“Why’d ya do that?” he said. “This ain’t your ship.”

“Someone has to,” said Sarah, as the Moon Serpent’s white sails unfurled. “We’re getting underway.”

The ship sailed eastward out of Bilgewater Bay, taking a gently curving route to avoid the many jagged reefs, treacherous sandbanks, and jutting wrecks that could see a ship foundered. The fog Blaxton had spotted had fully enveloped them now, and the ship sailed in an almost dead silence, interrupted only by the occasional shout between the skeleton crew.

Despite the awfulness of the rum, Sarah, Rafen, Thorne, Petyr, and Blaxton worked their way through the rest of the bottle. After a couple of shots, the sweetness became bearable, and Sarah felt her mood loosening.

With the bottle empty, Rafen threw it overboard and Sarah sent him below deck to find another.

The Moon Serpent sailed onward, deeper into the fog.

More theories as to how Aligh had died were offered, each more ridiculous than the last, and Sarah found herself wiping tears of laughter from her eyes as Petyr finished a preposterous tale of Aligh falling afoul of the Trickster and being led out to sea in a golden narwhal costume only to be carved up by the Bloodharbor Ripper in a tragic case of mistaken identity.

A distant voice, muffled by the fog, called out from the crow’s nest.

“What did he say?” she asked, peering up through the rigging. She held on to the gunwale rail as her vision spun a tad. The rum was bad, but it was strong. Time to ease up.

“I think he said ‘Land ho!’ or possibly ‘Sand Lo!’” said Blaxton, bleary eyed from the rum.

Sarah blinked. “Sand Lo? Why would he say that?”

“I believe it’s a traditional Shuriman greeting,” giggled Petyr, taking another belt of rum.

Sarah fought the laughter bubbling up from her gut as she heard the clatter of iron chains spilling off the deck, swiftly followed by the heavy splash of an anchor hitting the water.

“We’re here,” said Thorne, spitting a viscous wad of tobacco into the sea.

Sarah peered through the mist, seeing a craggy spur of black rock rearing out of the water. Salt crystals glittered in the weak light of the stars.

“Moonshard Reef,” she said. “Why in the name of the Lady’s Beard are we here?”

“Aligh always claimed he was part Marai on his mother’s side,” said Petyr.

“Horse dung!” said Thorne. “The man’s never even seen a Marai, let alone been birthed from one.”

“Makes for an exotic tale though,” said Blaxton. “Mystic origins, magical blood, that sort of thing. Kind of backstory every captain wishes they had. Wish I’d thought of it.”

The thumping of wood on wood halted further discussions, and Sarah turned to see the serpent caller hammering the raised foredeck with his tentacle-wrapped billhook.

In his other hand, he held a flaming torch that burned with a brilliant silver light.

“The sea is this world’s cemetery, and its souls sleep best without monument,” said the serpent caller, his voice a grating hiss through the coral mask. “All other graveyards show symbols of distinction between great and small, rich and poor—but the king, the fool, the prince, and the peasant are all the same to the ocean. Now, fellow travelers of the Sea… heed my words, it is time to pay the ocean its due!”

“About damn time,” said Sarah. “Let’s get this done and go home.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Petyr.

Sarah and the other captains gathered before the wax-stoppered cannon as the serpent caller’s eyes swept over them all. She felt the potency of the rum swimming around her body, and saw a number of the other captains swaying with more than the motion of the ship.

Where in the eight seas is Rafen?

She didn’t want any more rum. She just wanted him here by her side.

The twins who’d met her and Rafen as they came aboard to confiscate their weapons worked a block and tackle over to the center of the deck. An enormous hook on a thick rope loop was lowered and secured to the lifting ring on the cannon just behind the oiled fuse.

“What a waste,” said Blaxton, tears streaming down her face.

“I didn’t realise you and Aligh were close,” said Sarah.

“What? Gods, no! I mean the cannon. That’s an Orban thirty pounder,” said Blaxton. “Probably one of only a handful left in existence. One hit from that would punch a hole clean through a Noxian warship from stem to stern. Crying shame to see it go to waste.”

Thanks to her mother’s teachings, Sarah knew more about pistols and rifles than she did about the intricacies of ship-borne weapons, but even she had to agree the bronze cannon was far too good for the likes of a miserly soul like Aligh. Was that a final insult to those left behind, that his most beautiful weapon would serve as his tomb and never belong to anyone else?

Something niggled about that, though—a nagging feeling she was missing something.

Crab Hat secured the hook to the cannon, then she and her twin stood back as the serpent caller began to speak.

“Captains of Bilgewater, it does my heart proud to see so many of you here today,” he said. “The best and the worst, the scum and the cream of our city’s reaver-kind.”

A few mutters went through the captains at so harsh an opening, but serpent callers were known to be touched by the Bearded Lady, and their ways were unknowable to most people.

“Our fair isles stand at a pivotal moment in their history, and many paths lead into the future, as tangled and inconstant as the many limbs of Nagakabouros, but I have seen the way forward! On many of these paths, I see the peaks and coves of the Serpent Isles ablaze, its people dying as our enemies close in. But on one path, one singular path, I see us proud, stronger than ever, a united people under a great leader!”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. Yes, the serpent callers were a strange bunch, but this was beyond anything she’d heard any of them say before.

“You have gathered here to see Captain Aligh down to the depths, a man whose boots none of you were fit to clean. A man of vision, a man who knew what needed to be done!”

The twins began hauling on the pulley ropes to lift the cannon, their muscles bunching and straining as the rear end of the cannon, gun carriage and all, began lifting from the deck. The barrel tilted downward, and were it not for the waxed stopper, Sarah felt she could have looked right down its length to see Aligh’s dead body.

“You all have failed Nagakabouros! You all have fought and betrayed one another, like Rat Town scum scrabbling over a copper sprat. None of you has the vision to raise a fleet like the ones of old and make Bilgewater ruler of the waves! You all throw your coins and your tributes into the water, and for what? For safety? A blessing? No, it’s a sacrifice you’re offering, a blood price for the ocean to lend you its wrath. But what does the ocean care for copper coins or the smallest fish of the catch? No, for Bilgewater to prosper, it needs a red tide of offerings!”

Sarah surreptitiously glanced around at the other captains to see what they were making of the serpent caller’s lunacy, but clearly the rum had numbed them to just how insane this was. She felt eyes upon her and saw Petyr looking right at her.

He gave her a terse smile, and her unease ratcheted up several notches.

She saw he was easing, half-step by half-step, toward the gunwale.

Sarah looked back down the cannon barrel.

And then she knew.

“Oh no…”

She ran toward the raised foredeck, tearing off her hat and reaching up to pull out twin stilettos masquerading as hairpins. Each was a slender needle of blackened steel with a rounded skull-pommel, and she knew just where to stick them to kill a man stone dead.

“So I offer the sea your blood, your sacrifice!” screamed the serpent caller, tearing off his mask and hood so everyone could see him. So everyone would know who had brought them here to die.

Sarah saw a grey-bearded face, furrowed by old age and aglow with madness. A long scar bisected his leathery face from right eyebrow to left cheek, and the wisps of his beard were twisted into thin braids entwined with pearls and fishhooks.

His eyes were the eyes of a man who never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat.

Who skipped out on the ocean’s tithe on every voyage.

A man she knew from reputation and decades of bloody legend.

“Aligh, you treacherous bastard!” she yelled.

The twins saw her coming, but couldn’t yet release the chains holding the cannon’s rear aloft.

Time slowed for Sarah, her heartbeat like the slow tolling of the bell upon the Widow’s Manse whenever a ship was lost to the ocean. It felt like she was running knee deep in sticky guts in the carving bays of the Slaughter Docks.

“You’re too late, Captain Fortune,” said Aligh.

He swept the torch down to the back of the cannon, and roared in triumph.

She pulled back her hand to throw one of her stilettos.

She knew she wouldn’t make it.

The silver flame lit the oiled touchpaper.

And the world exploded in a deafening blast of fire and thunder.

That she wasn’t dead was Sarah’s first surprise.

Her second was that the Moon Serpent was still afloat.

A cannon that big ought to have holed the ship all the way down to the ocean, and broken its keel.

She couldn’t hear anything, not really. Her ears were filled with a high-pitched whine, maddeningly shrill and muffled at the same time.

She rolled onto her side, wincing as she felt blood streaming down her arm.

A dull awareness of foggy, distant sounds coming from behind made Sarah turn her head.

A scene of utter carnage, worse than anything she’d seen in a long time.

And suddenly she knew why the ship wasn’t sinking. The cannon had been primed with canister shot.

It was a load designed to shred and maim flesh, but leave a vessel intact, and it had worked its lethal power with horrifying potency.

Sarah’s mad dash toward Aligh had carried her mostly clear of the wide fan of red-hot fragments, but the other captains weren’t so lucky.

Men and women lay sprawled on a deck slick with blood.

Those closest to the gun were almost unrecognisable, transformed from living, breathing human beings into scraps of bloody meat. Shorn arms and legs lay scattered in gory heaps, and it was all but impossible to tell which limb belonged to which body.

But not everyone was dead.

Those captains toward the rear of the throng writhed in agony, bleeding from scores of deep lacerations and screaming the name of the Bearded Lady. Sarah could still barely hear them.

She saw Blaxton lying in a lake of blood, her fine blue coat cut to pieces, as if someone had given her a hundred lashes from a barbed cat-o’-nine-tails. Sarah couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive, but she was lying very still. Thorne slithered out from beneath her, and with the luck typical of that lowlife, it looked like he’d escaped the worst of the blast using Blaxton as a human shield.

Rafen! Where’s Rafen?

She couldn’t see him, and could only hope that he’d found a way to survive.

He must have, he’s Rafen. He survives everything, doesn’t he?

Then her eyes settled on a figure lying sprawled against the railings, bloodied, but mostly unhurt.

Petyr Harker.

He grinned, and hate filled Sarah as she knew that somehow, in some way, that smug, conniving sea-slug had known about Aligh’s trap. He had to have been part of setting it up, a glittering, silver-tongued lure for captains who didn’t know him well enough to send him packing.

Sarah saw the deck hatch swing open, and the skeleton crew that had sailed them out to Moonshard Reef emerged with long gutting knives to finish what their vile captain had begun. They moved as if in a languid dream, skewering bellies and cutting throats with sadistic relish.

Anger surged through Sarah, and she sat upright, blinking through tears of pain.

You’re alive, damn it! Do something!

With that thought blazing in her mind, sounds rushed back and her vision cleared.

The screams of the dying drove her to her feet, and she swept up her stilettos once again.

Aligh stood far behind the smoking cannon, arms aloft and surveying his bloody handiwork with the eyes of a zealot. Sarah sprinted toward him again, but this time the twins rushed past their captain to intercept her.

She vaulted over the cannon, and hammered her boots into the face of the twin with the tattooed eyes all across her skull. Razorscale teeth splintered under Sarah’s iron hard boot-heels, and sent the woman flying backward.

Sarah landed lightly and leapt to the side as Crab Hat swung a monstrous, fang-toothed club at her head. It smashed the deck boards to splinters, and Sarah rolled to her feet hammering her daggered fist into the woman’s back. The crab-shell armor was hard and smooth and the stiletto slid clear without penetrating.

The woman wrenched the club from the deck and spun around, the weapon slashing just over Sarah’s head. Her tattooed twin was back up, blood streaming down her face of many eyes, turning it into a hideous grimace. She held a pair of long punch daggers with razor-toothed sawfish blades.

She came at Sarah in a flurry of blows, elbows, and high kicks.

Sarah tried to parry and dodge, only barely avoiding each killing blow. She could hold her own in a fight, but she’d take a pistol over a pair of thin daggers any day. By the time they’d backed up toward the cannon, Sarah’s shirt was soaked in blood and she was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of her plan to fight hand to hand.

From the corner of her eye she saw the armored twin winding up for another strike.

Two to one, this fight would only end badly for Sarah.

Tattooed Eyes slashed her dagger low, and Sarah grunted as it cut a line of fire across the side of her thigh. She dropped to one knee as a reverse stroke came for her throat.

She lifted her arm to parry, and the slashing blade cut straight through the fabric of her coat.

The impact sent searing bolts of pain up Sarah’s arm, but the iron rods specially woven into the back of the sleeve halted the blade before it bit flesh.

Her foe let out a “Ha!” of triumph, but the grin fell from her face as she realised Sarah was unhurt.

“Gedian and Sons, Battle Tailors and War Clothiers,” said Sarah, and hammered her stiletto up through the soft flesh on the underside of her foe’s jaw. Her eyes flew wide in shock, and Sarah saw the black needle of the blade behind her razor teeth as it punched up into her brain.

Sarah rose and kicked the dead body away as her twin screamed in anguish.

Stiletto versus war-club—bad odds. Really bad odds.

Sarah risked a glance behind her.

Cannonball dent in the right side…

This was her chance to even those odds.

The armored twin launched herself at Sarah in fury, her huge, toothed club rising up for a strike. The weapon slashed down in an executioner’s arc, and Sarah dived aside at the last instant.

The iron head of the club smashed the chest behind Sarah apart. She spun inside the twin’s guard and drove her blade into a gap between the plates of crab-shell armor.

The woman grunted and stumbled backward, tearing the weapon from Sarah’s hand.

Sarah turned and began frantically searching through the shattered ruin of the chest, sweeping aside damaged knives, brass-knuckles, and iron-tipped cudgels.

“Come on, come on, where are you…?” she hissed, hearing the scrape of a club being lifted from the deck. A broken handle, a bent blade.

Had one of the twins hidden them somewhere else, hoping to keep them for themselves…?

No, no, no…

And then her palm closed on the smooth, ivory-handled grips she knew better than anything.

Sarah spun the twin pistols into her grip, and snapped the firing mechanism into place.

She twisted and dived to the side, pulling the triggers in a storm of shot.

Crab-shell armor was proof against blades and hooks, but against gun-dame-forged weapons, the tattooed woman might as well have been naked.

Red-hot pistol balls blasted through her armor, and she toppled over the cannon, leaking vital fluids from more than a dozen neat holes.

Sarah rose to her feet and tensed as she felt the roll and sway of the deck change. It was a subtle change, almost unnoticeable, a change in the angle of the anchored ship’s prow as the swell of the ocean shifted…

“Oh, now that’s not good…” she said, as Aligh limped toward her, distraught at the sight of the dead twins.

“You killed them!” he cried.

Sarah fired a shot into each of his kneecaps. “That’s for all the captains you killed tonight.”

Aligh screamed, writhing on the deck. He wept and feebly tried to swing his billhook at her.

Sarah easily batted it aside and jammed a pistol under his chin.

“Any last words?” she asked. “Now this really is your funeral.”

The deck shifted again, and a deathly silence fell over the ship.

Even the wounded seemed to recognize the strange quality of the darkness closing in around them as a deep rumbling sound rose up from the water.

Sarah sensed fearful tremors running through the ship’s timbers.

“What’s happening?” she demanded, jabbing the pistol harder into Aligh’s throat. “What else did you have planned tonight?”

“This is none of my doing,” wept Aligh, and despite his obvious agony, he laughed with the hysteria of a man who knew his time had come. “My bill to the sea is due. And you’re going to pay it with me…”

Sarah had felt something like this in the bones of a ship once before.

Nine years ago, just north of Bilgewater and making the last, hooking sprint to the inner bay. They’d been returning from a bounty run up by Drakkengate and spotted a smuggler running a slimmed-down carrack out of the Ironwater coves, fleeing the Serpent Isles with treasures looted from a Buhru temple.

She still remembered the mournful rumble of the titanic serpent horns as they echoed over the ocean, and the terror as her crew watched an abyssal kraken rear up from the water to smash the carrack to matchwood and drag all aboard to their deaths.

The shift in the deck as the kraken had passed under their ship felt just like this.

She ran to the gunwale and searched the fog and ocean.

The sea swirled around the crags of Moonshard Reef, dark and keeping their secrets. No one knew just how deep it got around here, but any ship that sank out this way was never seen again, never washed up on the isles.

What’s out there…?

And then she saw it.

Two hundred yards out, huge and unyielding, a titan rising from the deep.

The vast dome of its helmeted head broke the water, twin eyes glowing with the orange light of a smelting furnace. The water boiled around it, frothed to madness by a dark miasma surrounding its wavering outline, and leaving an oily slick in its wake.

Its body was huge, encased in plates of corroded iron, looped with chains torn from countless sunken vessels. Across one shoulder it carried a colossal, hook-bladed anchor, dripping with black water and garlanded with rotten weeds from the deepest, darkest abyss.

Sarah’s mind refused to process what she was seeing.

This is impossible.

It was a dark legend come to life, a scare story told around the beer-soaked tables of the wharf-side taverns by drunken rakes hoping for a free drink. She knew its name, had even laughed at the impossibility of its existence.

But here it was, rising from the ocean with booming, ponderous strides.

The drowned tallyman, come to claim the ocean’s due.

Even his name was said to be a curse.

“Nautilus…”

The water exploded as Nautilus hurled his anchor at the Moon Serpent.

A tidal wave made stagnant and rotten by its time in the darkness washed over the ship, as the anchor crashed into the deck. It smashed clear through the timbers, and the ship tilted wildly to port as the impossible weight of it pulled it over.

Sarah fell against the railing and jammed her pistols home in their shoulder holsters as the ship tilted downward. Crew screamed as they slid down the angled deck or were thrown overboard. The anchor ripped clear of the ship’s side, and the ship violently righted itself. Sarah looked up at the sound of splintering masts overhead. Silver sails billowed as the topmast and mizzen snapped like twigs, falling to the shattered deck to crush a dozen men or more.

She struggled to her feet, hearing the groan of a keel bending under stresses it had never been designed to endure. Caulked timbers split and geysers of black water erupted all along the length of the deck.

Sarah turned to Aligh, who clung to the bronze cannon that ought to have served as his tomb.

“You did this!” she yelled, as the looming shadow of Nautilus reared up from the water.

The carved wooden railing smashed to splinters as a massive hand, surely too large to have once been mortal, slammed down on the foredeck. Another swiftly followed, trailing a length of chain that slithered with a black, oily substance.

“He’s not real!” screamed Aligh, his mind undone by the sight of Nautilus. “It was just a story!”

“He looks pretty damn real to me!” shouted Sarah over the cacophony of smashing wood, tearing sails, and terrified screams. Fiery heat washed over her as Nautilus hauled his bulk over the gunwale, and turned his infernal gaze upon her.

She felt the deathly heat of it crawling over her skin, its touch loathsome and invasive, as if the titan of the deeps could see into her very soul.

His titanic weight heeled the ship over again, and Sarah grabbed hold of the looped pulley ropes as the deck tilted crazily. The front of the cannon slid sideways as the block and tackle swung wildly and its knotted end strained to bear its colossal weight. The wooden pegs securing the wheels of the gun carriage in place creaked ominously.

Aligh pulled his way along the cannon toward her.

“I won’t go alone!” he screamed. “If the ocean wants me, I’ll drag you down with me!”

The man was a lunatic, like the crippled sailors raving in Bilgewater’s alleys with a mind destroyed by the foulest rotgut. His fraudulent serpent caller robes had come loose, and dangling from his neck on a leather thong was a silver-and-brass sigil of three intertwined serpents.

Swinging on the pulley, Sarah tried to kick him away, but he had a madman’s strength, clawing at her throat with his free hand. Cracked fingernails drew blood, and she struggled to find purchase as the ship tipped over onto its side, its port side now completely underwater.

Far above them, Nautilus drew back his anchor once again and brought it down like a colossal woodsman’s axe.

Its unnatural mass sheared through the deck amidships, and Sarah heard the thunderous crack of the keel finally splitting. The vessel’s stern rose up sharply, and the sounds of Aligh’s screaming crew echoed in the mist.

On the ocean, we are all equal, went the old saying, but right now Sarah didn’t give a wharf-rat’s shit for those murderous, traitorous bastards.

Let them all drown.

The front half of the ship sprang up with the force of the blow, then slammed back down onto the ocean, tilting back upright as seawater poured into the bow section. The weight of it was dragging the prow deeper underwater with every passing second.

In moments, nothing would remain on the surface.

A body slammed into the deck next to her; Aligh’s tattooed daughter, the one with Sarah’s stiletto still jammed in her brain.

Slicks of black fluid spilled from her mouth and swirled in her eyes.

With a groan of screeching metal, Nautilus reached for Aligh with a massive, corroded gauntlet. His crushing grip fastened on the treacherous captain’s torso and pulled. Aligh held fast to Sarah with lunatic strength, as though they embraced like lovers.

She couldn’t shake him loose.

“All because you wouldn’t pay the damn tithe,” snarled Sarah, as Aligh fought to hold on to her.

“The ocean will take you as well as me!” he screamed.

“Not today,” said Sarah, reaching up and back to grip the skull-pommel of the stiletto wedged in the soft tissue under the tattooed twin’s jaw.

She pulled hard, and the blade slid free in a welter of fluids.

“You want him?” said Sarah, reversing her grip on the weapon. “He’s all yours!”

She rammed the blade into the side of Aligh’s neck, driving it hard through to the other side. His head snapped back and Sarah’s hand flashed out to catch a falling leather thong cut loose from around Aligh’s throat. His grip spasmed, and the metal titan wrenched him back just as the deck hook securing Sarah’s rope loop snapped.

The full weight of the cannon yanked on the block and tackle, lifting Sarah away from the weapon and Aligh. Swinging wildly above the sinking ship, she watched as Nautilus turned and sank back into the ocean, the screaming Aligh clutched in one iron fist.

The water closed over him, a trail of frantic bubbles following Aligh down as Nautilus returned to the darkness below with his bounty. As Aligh was dragged down, Sarah took grim pleasure in seeing the look of terror in his eyes at his fate; condemned to an eternity in darkness without so much as a pauper’s marker to his name.

The Moon Serpent’s prow rose almost vertically in the ocean, and Sarah swung on the rope to reach the jutting, serpent figurehead. Her booted feet caught the silver fangs, and she managed to remain upright as the ship slowly sank into the ocean.

With a moment’s pause, she saw the back half of the boat was almost entirely underwater, with only a few sailors crowded in around the upright stern, so close she could likely have swung over to reach them. One of the survivors was Petyr Harker, and she felt bilious hatred rise in her gorge.

“I did tell you I was just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme,” said Petyr. “Admittedly, I didn’t quite see it turning out like this, but at least—”

Sarah didn’t give him a chance to finish, throwing the rope loop toward him like a lasso, and no harpooner had ever cast so perfect a throw.

The loop settled around Petyr’s neck like a noose, but before he could lift it clear, Sarah drew her pistol and aimed upward.

“Say hello to Aligh on the way down, Petyr,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

The shot smashed the block and tackle straining to hold the cannon’s enormous weight, and it immediately fell into the ocean. Sarah had a fraction of a second to savor the look of horror in Petyr’s eyes before the rope snapped taut and wrenched him from his perch.

His scream was cut short as he hit the water and vanished into the depths as the cannon dragged him all the way down.

Standing atop the serpent figurehead, Sarah watched the Moon Serpent’s stern finally go under in a swirl of foaming water and cracking timbers. The few sailors still clinging to the wreckage paddled frantically on the surface before the suction of the wreck finally pulled them down with it.

Looking down, she reckoned she had a few seconds at best before the prow did the same to her.

“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said a voice behind her, and Sarah smiled.

She looked over her shoulder to see Rafen in their landing boat, soaked to the skin and covered in cuts, bruises, and bites. The storm lamp on the prow bobbed like a welcome beacon of safety.

“Thank you kindly, old man,” she said.

“I meant the cannon,” said Rafen, carefully rowing toward her. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see.”

“Aye,” agreed Sarah, “but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”

“Right indeed,” said Rafen.

“So where in the name of the Bearded Lady did you get to?” asked Sarah, “I needed you on the damn deck when everything went to shit.”

Rafen shrugged and said, “Went below to get another bottle of rum and ran into Aligh’s crew fixing to get a-murderin’. They didn’t take kindly to being discovered and tried to cut my damn head off. Managed to gut a couple with some borrowed steel, but had to jump out of a gunport before they shanked me good. Swam around to get our boat, getting feasted on by all that lives under the surface, thank you very much. But I’m here now, so do you want to get on board or are you planning to go down with the ship?”

“This ship’s captain’s already gone with her,” said Sarah, stepping casually from the figurehead to the landing boat.

With her safely aboard, Rafen rowed them away from the doomed Moon Serpent as the figurehead and its topmost mast finally went under in a swirl of bubbles, rope, and broken spars.

Sarah moved to the back of the landing boat, now seeing she wasn’t the only passenger Rafen had picked up. A bloodied body in a lacerated coat of pale blue, gold cuffs, and frayed bronze epaulettes lay slumped in the landing boat’s bilges.

“Blaxton?” said Sarah. “She’s still alive?”

“Just about,” said Rafen. “She’s a blowhard, but she didn’t deserve to go down with scum like Aligh. Didn’t feel right to leave her to drown, right?”

Sarah said nothing, too exhausted to do more than nod.

“So you going to tell me what in the eight seas happened up there?” asked Rafen.

“You’d never believe me,” said Sarah.

“I’m guessing it was you that sank the ship firing the damn cannon into the deck?” said Rafen.

“Wasn’t me. What happened up there was all Aligh’s doing,” said Sarah, with a look that told him not to ask more.

“Fair enough.”

“Though I did manage to get this.” She opened her palm to reveal a disc stamped with three intertwined serpents of silver and brass.

“Aligh’s sigil,” said Rafen.

“Might not mean much these days, but we’ll see what happens when I show it to the rest of his crew, once they’ve sobered up.”

Rafen grinned. “Well, at least this trip wasn’t a total waste of time.”

Sarah slumped in the back of the boat and watched as the rearing crag of Moonshard Reef began to fade into the mist. She narrowed her eyes as she saw a lone figure climb from the water and shake itself dry.

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat.

“Thorne,” she whispered. “It’s always the bloody rats that make it out.”

“What’s that?” said Rafen, mid-row. “Someone else made it out?”

“No,” said Sarah, turning away. “No one at all.”

Keelo always cried “Surprise!” when he attacked.

Kayn supposed it was the equivalent of Keelo pulling his punches out of respect, or perhaps some artifact of his ancient, preset protocols.

The warning cry was never necessary, nor was it especially amusing after all this time. And a three-quarter ton fightmek shouting “Surprise!” as it swung a hook-handled titanium halberd with a fifty centimeter blade edge at your head was still a three-quarter ton fightmek swinging a hook-handled titanium halberd with a fifty centimeter blade edge at your head.

“Not now,” Kayn sighed.

“But I have surprised you,” said Keelo dolefully. He looked down at Kayn’s onyx desk, now split cleanly in two pieces and lying on the floor. Then he looked at Shieda Kayn himself, who was still in his seat, reading an official communique.

And not even remotely split into two pieces.

Keelo narrowed his optics in confusion, and waved a huge metal paw through Kayn’s form. The image rippled. “A holo-lure?”

“Yes,” said Kayn from the other side of the chamber. “A holo-lure.”

“This was a trick?”

“Uh huh.”

“You have tricked me.”

“I heard you coming four decks away,” Kayn replied. He occupied the chamber’s window seat. Beyond the thick, tinted port, the hard neon lines of slingspace rasped by. Kayn was reading the document intently. His pose and activity exactly matched the hologram figure in the chair.

Keelo looked from one to the other.

“A holo-lure is clever,” he said. “But how did you hear me coming? I was stealth-moded.”

Kayn did not look up from his work. “Figure of speech. I put a tracer on you last week. I’ve been mapping your movements,” he said, distractedly.

The fightmek paused, then twisted awkwardly to look at himself, trying to find the tracer, like a dog trying to examine its own tail.

“That is not very sporting,” he grumbled.

“You win a fight by any means at your disposal,” said Kayn, rising to his feet. He was a tall man, lean and lithe, clad in the black suit of an imperial officer. But he wore no pins or insignia—just plain black, indicating the highest status of all. His long mane of hair was shaved away from the side of his head in the style of the coreworld nobility, and a polished gold interface of ornate design covered his left eye and cheek. He looked at the fightmek. “You taught me that. First lesson.”

Keelo shrugged. “I suppose.”

“So, the lure was entirely fair.”

“But,” said Keelo, “how will you learn if you cheat? Humans learn through action-response. If you know I am coming, you—”

Kayn looked the fightmek in the eyes.

“Keelo,” he said, “my old and good friend Keelo… Do you really think I have anything left to learn?”

Keelo’s huge, scarred bulk, heavy with green and orange ballistic plate, sagged slightly. “I suppose not. I suppose you are now a high lord of the empire, and proven in battle. I suppose you are now one of the emperor’s own Ordinals. I suppose there’s nothing a rusty old fightmek can teach you now. I suppose it’s the scrap heap for me, or grot-work in the Bedlam Mines.”

“Keelo…”

“I suppose I might get my servos melted down for transuranics, or they could donate parts of me to younger fightmeks—”

“Keelo!” Kayn strode up to the big machine. “No supposing. And no feeling sorry for yourself, okay? I still need to maintain my edge. I need you to keep me on my toes. A surprise here, a surprise there, just like always.”

Keelo’s optics swivelled up hopefully. “Yes?”

“Yes. How can an Ordinal keep in prime form without his loyal fightmek to test him?”

“So… you won this bout?” Keelo asked.

“Well, you did cut my desk in half, so we’ll call it even.”

Keelo nodded. He shuffled around and emitted a sub-sonic pulse that opened the arsenal suite built into the wall of Kayn’s quarters. The lacquered black panels slid aside, revealing racks of blade and projectile weapons bathed in a red glow. Every design under the many suns, and some so exotic they had never seen sunlight at all.

“We will spar now,” said Keelo. “Select your weapon.”

“Not today.”

“But it is the scheduled time.”

“Something’s come up that requires my attention,” said Kayn, gesturing with the communique in his hand.

“A message? You were reading that when I came in.”

“Which is why I really didn’t want the interruption,” said Kayn. “We’ll need to re-route.”

“Sling-course is set for—”

“I know. I’m changing that.”

“The emperor awaits your return to the Armada,” the fightmek said, “to report on the Kloa policing action.”

“This is too important. Nakuri’s found something on an edgeworld, out past the Raen Cluster.”

“I am sure Commander Nakuri can deal with it,” Keelo objected. “He is a first class officer of the Demaxian Empire. A decorated—”

“Commander Nakuri is an old friend and comrade in arms,” said Kayn. “I respect his judgement, and if he says something requires the direct attention of an Ordinal, then I trust him. Inform Captain Vassur I need her to reset our course.”

Keelo hesitated.

“Go on,” said Kayn.

The fightmek nodded, and began to clomp towards the exit.

“Wait,” Kayn called after him. He walked over to the big machine, and plucked a tech-fleck off the fightmek’s broad back. “That’s the tracer gone. See? All gone. You can surprise me again later.”

“Okay,” said Keelo. Renewed enthusiasm glowed in his optics. “I’ve got this special mallet I’ve been waiting to—”

“Shh! Shh!” Kayn silenced him. “It’s a surprise, remember?”

Alone again, Kayn woke the astral portolan unit built into the corner of his quarters. The console rose from the deck, opening its steel petals to project a tri-dimensional local system chart into the air. He reached out and rotated the image, moving through stars, selecting and enlarging. A swipe of his fingers brought Ionan into view. His golden ocular interface engaged with the projection, and augmented it to a real-time display of exquisite detail.

Ionan was an edgeworld. A nothing place. Unpromising.

Nakuri’s team had been out that way for months, hunting for ora, or for renegade Templars trying to steal that vital and precious power source from under imperial noses.

The Demaxian Empire, operating out of the vast Locus Armada, was the supreme authority in known space. Its power, influence and technological prowess were such that no one could stand against it. There were no more wars. In the name of the emperor, forces under the Ordinals and the generals maintained absolute control.

Except that space, however well pacified, was very, very large. Moreover, it was annoyingly full of species and rogues who fought on anyway, resisting that control. No matter the size and military might of the empire, which quite eclipsed any other power, subversive behavior was persistent.

The emperor, Jarvan IV, was a good man; indeed, his great-grandfather had been the first human to wear the crown. He and Kayn were close, in both age and friendship. In private, Jarvan had confided to his friend that he disliked the way imperial policy had been forced to become less tolerant in recent years. The empire was seen as a monolithic force, unyielding and authoritarian. It was, to many—especially the outliers, the subjugated, the Templars, and the notorious criminal wretches of the Syndicate—a domineering and oppressive thing to kick against.

This perception made Jarvan sad. He’d come to the crown with a heart full of progressive ideas and hopes. Instead, he’d been forced to implement tighter restrictions.

“I always thought,” Kayn had told him, “that holding on to this society would be harder than winning it. War is simple. Peace is harder.”

“It pains me, Shieda,” Jarvan had replied. “No one seems to respect the great work we are doing, the future we represent. There’s always someone squirming to evade us. To disobey.”

“Like herding cats.”

“Cats?”

Kayn smiled at the memory. “Cats, my emperor. A feline species. Infamously willful.”

Of course, the problem was ora. The substance, like liquid gold, was a source of vast, almost mythical power. Whoever wielded it successfully could have great influence, which meant it was essential that the empire controlled its sources, distribution and use. Especially illegal were the bio-hacking purposes it could be put to, techniques practiced by the damnable Templars. Such behavior was dangerous, as well as subversive. It was an ongoing struggle to contain their fringe activities and maintain order. It was an unending battle to keep ora in the hands of the empire, where it belonged.

Kayn had solutions for this problem, and—like all the Ordinals, the most singular beings in the emperor’s service—he had laid these out to Jarvan.

Jarvan had recoiled. Kayn’s proposals were ruthless and pragmatic. Hardline suppression, heavier penalties, military annexation of resistant worlds. Kayn knew that an empire organized under his philosophies would be much more aggressive and unforgiving than the society Jarvan supported. Still, it was his duty to suggest these things, his duty to offer the emperor alternatives. He was an Ordinal, Kayn reminded him. That was what Ordinals did.

He was not surprised when the emperor backpedaled, and almost chided Kayn for his brutal proposal. That’s why Jarvan was emperor and Kayn an Ordinal. Kayn was the attack dog that Jarvan kept on a leash. He only let him hunt when there were no other alternatives.

And Jarvan liked to keep testing his attack dog, to measure his loyalty and his aggression.

Ionan… edgeworld…

Kayn wondered just what it was his old comrade Nakuri had found there.

He felt a tremor run through the deck. Their warship, the mighty Fractal Shear, had altered course. Captain Vassur would have ordered its slingspace engines to re-shape the singularity sphere surrounding it, so that they could turn out to Ionan.

The streaks of light flashing past the window ports changed hue. Ora powered the ship’s sling-engines, creating the sphere that warped space-time around the hull, allowing it to skate through the upper layers of subspace at transluminal velocities, like a stone skipping across a lake, unencumbered by current or surface tension. The portolan display told him there was a six hour journey time.

Kayn heard a laugh behind him. A low chuckle.

He looked around, half-expecting to see Keelo bearing down on him. But there was no shout of “Surprise!”

There was no one there at all.

“What armament do you require?” asked Keelo. He had returned to find his master staring at the open arsenal suite.

Kayn shrugged. He’d trained with every one of the weapons a hundred times. They bored him. Only a few felt right in his hands... and even they had their limits.

“Discretion,” he replied.

“What?”

“Commander Nakuri recommended discretion,” said Kayn.

“Is that why we have coasted out of slingspeed short of the target world?”

“Yes. I’ll go down alone. Tell the captain to prep my ship, and hold station.”

“But a deployment squad has been assembled,” said Keelo. “Fifty seasoned slingtroopers. And I have cleaned my favorite axe.”

“I’m going alone,” said Kayn. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

He selected a chrome photann pistol and a sleekly decorated fighting lance—two weapons he knew well. Then he paused, and looked back to Keelo.

“Did you say something?”

“Me?” the fightmek replied. “No.”

“I thought I heard you laughing earlier, too.”

“No. Not me.”

With a brief flare of thruster light, Kayn’s craft left the carrier bay on the upper hull of the Fractal Shear. His craft was a DEMAX-3 Superiority, a small interceptor used for interdiction flights and border work. An Ordinal was supposed to use a more regal fleet transport, something that would impress the locals, something with ceremonial heft and a payload space that could carry trooper squads and combat vehicles.

But Kayn liked the speed and firepower of the little DEMAX-3. He had liked them since his rookie tours as a sub-commander in the Edge Squadrons.

He veered off from the stationary baseship with an unnecessary burst of acceleration. The arrowhead craft rotated its engine nacelles, tight-rolled through a threaded veil of asteroids, and planed down through a void of pink fog.

Distant stars shone like lamps and scattered fireflies. Tracking showed Ionan ahead.

Kayn rejected auto-helm, and took her down on manual, skimming the cold, thin vapor of the atmospheric edge as he followed Nakuri’s beacon. The beacon’s signal, along with all flight data, was channelled directly through his interface—a steady stream of information playing against his retina. Nakuri’s ship was the Gentle Reminder, a suppression cruiser half the size of the Fractal Shear. It held a high orbit on the far side of the edgeworld, like a ghost on Kayn’s range detector.

Down through the cloud level, he tore across the open flats of ochre deserts and salt plains that reflected the daylight with blinding radiance. He gunned so low, his craft kicked up a powder wake, sending small, malformed dust devils dancing haphazardly across the dry terrain.

Ahead, mountains. A long, low range. Pink and russet rock wind-carved into sharp crags and angular shapes, like a coral reef raised from the water.

The beacon signal was pinging wildly. He eased the nacelles around to braking attitude, brought the nose up, and swung in for landing.

Below him lay a high plateau beneath a block of pink cliff. An encampment. Two imperial transport shuttles, parked and anchored.

He extended the landing gear and descended vertically.

“Welcome to the buttcrack of nowhere,” said Nakuri.

Kayn jumped down from his open cockpit into the hard glare of the sun. He smiled. To Nakuri, the old dog, everywhere was the buttcrack of nowhere. They’d served together on many worlds, many tours, and that had been Nakuri’s estimation of every single outer planet and edgeworld.

“I don’t think that’s the proper form of address, commander,” Kayn growled.

Nakuri hesitated, his smile dropping. He hadn’t seen Kayn in a long time, and Kayn was now a high-and-mighty Ordinal. “I’m sorry…” he began.

“It’s ‘Welcome to the buttcrack of nowhere, sir!’”

They grinned, and embraced.

“It’s been too long,” said Kayn.

“Not long enough, Shie,” Nakuri laughed. The circular silver interface over his right eye caught the sun like a wink.

“So what sort of klagging mess have you gotten into this time?” Kayn asked him.

Nakuri turned. His squad—ten slingtroopers who, like him, were wearing full fightkit and weapon rigs—were standing rigidly to attention. Each one of them towered over Kayn in his simple black, form-fitting suit. They were hardy veterans all, and he knew most of them. Korla, Speeks, Rigo, the squad leader Vechid. He interfaced the names of the others quickly from the bio-tags on their breastplates.

It paid to know names. Soldiers responded better to Ordinals who treated them as equals.

“Let’s show him, people,” said Nakuri.

He brought Kayn up to speed as they crunched over the plateau. “It was Templars what brought us here. Two of them, and a whole pack of their believers. Chased them out of Kybol, and they fled here. We thought they might be looking for a get-out, but this is clearly where they wanted to be.”

“Why?” asked Kayn.

“Not clear. So, we got down here and rounded them all up. Well, most of them. A few wouldn’t go without a fight, so… shots fired, and all that.”

“How many?”

“Ten dead, all theirs, both Templars included. It was quite a fight.”

“And how many of their followers were taken?”

“Sixteen. Klag-sack hippy subversives. We’ve got them penned in the caves up ahead. Interrogations in progress.”

Kayn raised an eyebrow. “To find out…?”

“Anything. Templar strongholds. Ora dumps. Contacts. And of course, why they came here, hell-for-leather.”

“We know why,” said a voice behind them.

Kayn and Nakuri stopped and turned. The slingtroopers came to a halt.

“Something to say, Vechid?” asked Nakuri.

“No, commander,” replied the squad leader.

“Not so fast,” said Kayn. “I want to hear what Vechid has on her mind.”

The woman shrugged uncomfortably. “Sorry, sir. I mean, sorry, Ordinal. I spoke out of turn. Just, this heat.”

“You’re in cooled fightgear, Vechid,” replied Kayn. “Speak up.”

“Well… The thing we found. That’s what brought them. That’s what they were after.”

They ascended the gritty slope toward the caves that honeycombed the lower section of the cliffs. The glare of the sunlight was hard and intense, so it was more than a relief to step into the mauve shadows at the base of the cliff—it felt like stepping into a refrigerated cellar.

Nakuri’s interface beeped with an incoming message, and he excused himself by stepping aside. Kayn and the slingtroopers waited in the shade. The Ordinal looked up at the mouths of the caves, eroded out by millions of years of desert wind.

And, again, he heard something.

A voice. Not words, just a murmur. He edged away from the waiting troopers, toward the caves. Their darknesses yawned at him, silent.

Nothing.

Then he heard the murmur again. Half murmur, half chuckle. Something just inside the nearest opening, perhaps? Something watching him, amused, snickering in the dark.

He frowned, and took another step.

His own interface sounded. He opened the link. “This is Kayn,” he murmured.

A fuzzy image of Captain Vassur on the bridge of the Fractal Shear projected into his left eye. “Ordinal? Just an advisory. We detected a soft return moving into Ionan airspace at sub-sling.”

“Soft return, captain?”

“No solid data, and we can’t fix it. A ghost.”

“Show me.”

Vassur obliged. The retinal image switched to a live feed from ship’s main detection systems. Just a phantom track. No defined mass or density. In fact, the sort of data aberration that detection officers would usually dismiss as background distortion. But of course, Vassur was being very careful with an Ordinal on the ground.

“Various rogue agents use masking fields,” Kayn commented.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Vassur. “The Syndicate especially. We’ve seen a lot during anti-trafficking campaigns. If this is a masking field, it’s a good one.”

“Agreed. Very good.”

“Do you want me to intercept, Ordinal?”

“Negative.”

“Then should I bring us in closer? Get Ionan in battery range, in case—”

“Negative, captain. We appear to have a situation down here, subversive elements who might have come to retrieve something, maybe prior to an exchange. If this is the receiver come to collect, let’s not scare them off. Let’s have them unmask.”

“If you’re sure, Ordinal?”

“I am, captain. Let’s see who we meet. This could open deep veins of information.”

Kayn disengaged the link, and turned to see Nakuri walking over.

“Let me guess,” Kayn said. “A soft return?”

Nakuri nodded. “The Shear has it too?” he asked. “Between your ship and mine, we’ve got most of the inner system covered. And it’s probably nothing.”

“I trust you told the Gentle Reminder to hold position?”

“And take no action,” Nakuri replied with a laugh. “I remember the way you work, old friend. Bring the scoundrels in. You like to see their klagging faces.”

Nakuri turned and led him up the last stretch of slope to the largest cave mouth. The troopers followed them. Kayn felt relaxed and content. It felt good to be operating alongside someone as trustworthy and smart as Nakuri. They made a good team, and they always had.

He paid no attention to the odd sense of unease lurking at the back of his mind. That was simple, healthy trepidation, the tension of handling a potentially volatile situation.

He had no time for an encumbrance like that.

They were penned in the outer caves of the cliff system. Nakuri’s troopers had clapped the prisoners in force shackles, while a second squad under the command of an officer called Solipas was guarding them.

The prisoners were a maverick lot, with creatures of different species, their garments dirty and worn. Some had already been beaten in the hope of extracting answers, and Kayn could see that they had all been stripped of ora-derived bio-enhancements—a process that had left some ugly wounds.

As far as he was concerned, the Templars were a sect, and nothing more. A quasi-mystical affiliation of subversives who believed they were the true “guardians” of ora, that they understood the material better than anyone else, and were protecting it from the abuse of other parties. Kayn had interrogated many Templars in his long career. He found them generally ridiculous. Their manner was obnoxious and condescending, exhibiting the sort of tolerant sympathy one got from any religious order. They believed they were privy to some great existential truth locked within the ora, something too good and refined for the likes of the Demaxians, who actually got on with the business of keeping society running. They had naively mistaken a singular natural resource of undoubted value for something more spiritual, as if ora was somehow a manifestation of the gods, or of creation, or a universal soul.

Kayn had seen that kind of lunacy before. Primitives on edgeworlds worshipping trees or nature or ecosystems, or a cargo-cult so astounded by a standard fightmek that they hailed it as a god.

It was childish and ill-informed.

The Templars, however, were unusual in that they were well organized, often militant, and had somehow established a network of support across the galaxy. Their beliefs were deranged and laughable, yet their lowly followers pursued them with vigor, depriving the empire of valuable ora supplies, or actually striking at commercial holdings. They were subversives of the worst kind.

Kayn walked into the caves where they were being held, and saw the same old fierce, determined, devoted faces. People who had faith in what they fought for.

He also noticed, with some satisfaction, how the wretched prisoners looked aghast at the sight of an Ordinal. They knew this was the end of the line, and their pathetic beliefs could no longer protect them.

“I am Ordinal Shieda Kayn,” he told them. “You understand the authority I represent. I understand you have refused to answer the questions set to you.”

They cowered. He noted at least six alien species represented in their numbers. Who to pick? The skoldoi, perhaps? They were fragile creatures.

“You seem to have no fear of slingtroopers, who nevertheless outgun you, round you up, and put you in chains,” he continued. “I think that’s sad, because the experience should have demonstrated that you have no option but to comply. You will answer my questions.”

“We will tell you nothing,” snarled a large korobak.

“No?” asked Kayn. “And why is that?”

“Because what we know is not fit for the likes of you.”

Several others murmured in agreement. The korobak then, perhaps, Kayn mused. He was the biggest, the ringleader. Make an example of him, and the rest would fall into line.

No. Too easy.

Kayn smiled. “You just answered a question, korobak.”

“I…”

“I asked a question, and you answered it,” Kayn went on. “It wasn’t too difficult, was it? So it’s not questions generally you have an issue with? Just specific ones.”

“I won’t play your games, you klag,” snapped the korobak.

“Yet you expect me to play yours. I think something has to give here, sir, and I believe you’re in no position to dictate terms. So let’s begin. I want names. A list of your contacts and associates in the edgeworlds. The two Templars who led you here. The people they had dealings with before you all came to Ionan.”

The prisoner looked away.

“Let’s start with the first name,” Kayn said.

“We were not led here,” the korobak muttered. “I’ll give you nothing.”

“The first name, please.”

The creature would only glare at the cave floor. Kayn unclasped his holster and drew his photann pistol. Its long, chrome form glinted in the ruddy, twilight gloom. He thumbed the activator, and there was a whine as the cell rose to a discharge level.

“The first name,” Kayn said more forcefully.

The prisoner shook his head.

Kayn slowly raised the pistol and aimed it at the kneeling korobak’s forehead. Several of the others murmured in fear. “The first name,” he repeated.

“Shoot me if you want,” said the korobak, still glaring at the floor. “That’s the imperialist mentality. Threaten us. Brutalize us. So shoot me. Then you’ll definitely get nothing. I will pass through the Ora Gate with the blessing of all Templars, and the satisfaction of knowing you have been defied.”

“Yes,” said Kayn, “I’m sure you would. But that’s not exactly how the game works.”

He switched aim. Now the photann gun was pointing at the girl beside the korobak. She was an odd one, wide-eyed and solemn. Unlike the others, she chose to look directly at Kayn and his gun.

“Give me the first name, korobak, or it won’t be you passing through the gate to the hereafter. You’ll still be here, very alive, not blessed or satisfied at all, with her brains on your clothes.”

The korobak looked sharply at the girl, his eyes bulging in concern. “You wouldn’t,” he hissed.

“Oh, I would,” said Kayn. “I will. One by one, as many of you as it takes, until I have my list of names, and answers to all the other questions I have. It’s a very simple game. It really depends on how many dead bodies it takes for you to understand that answers are less important than lives. One? Three? Fifteen? A hundred?”

“How could you be so cruel to—”

“This is my job. I don’t like it. You think I enjoy killing people over something as simple as a question? You, and you alone, are making this necessary. You’re leaving me no choice. In fact, I don’t know how you could be that cruel. This poor girl doesn’t deserve to get her head vaporized, just because you’re slow to answer.”

The korobak swallowed hard. “I… I will not… betray…”

“Well, I suppose I admire a person with principles,” Kayn sighed. “Principles are magnificent, especially when you’re not the one dying for them.”

He looked at the girl. Her eyes were so huge, but there was oddly no fear in them. He’d never seen anyone quite so calm. It was unnerving. He felt he wanted to question her—her in particular—and learn all she knew.

But his intent was set now. He’d chosen her as the example. Backing down would be weakness, and that would simply bolster the resolve of the rest.

Still…

“You know, you can make up for your friend’s lack of cooperation,” he said directly to the girl. “I’ll give you that much. You speak. The first name. Show this fool how bloodshed can be avoided, and I’ll be lenient.”

She stared back at him, silently.

“Quickly,” Kayn said. “The first name. I don’t give such chances very often.”

“Sona can tell you nothing!” the korobak snapped, almost sobbing.

“Oh, I’m sure she can,” replied Kayn, staring into the girl’s eyes. “I’m sure she’s dying to. Sona? That’s your name? Sona, it’s very easy. One word. One name. That’s where we start. The first name.”

The girl made no response. Kayn felt his annoyance growing into outright anger, but he didn’t let it show. He’d been restrained, and given her a chance, and now she was making him look like an idiot. No one did that.

“Sona, you disappoint me,” Kayn said, and pulled the trigger.

The blastwave tore through the cave.

It took Kayn a moment to clamber back to his feet. Dust was fuming down the tunnel from outside, debris skittering from the ceiling. The concussion had lifted him off his feet, and his shot had gone wide, missing the girl’s head.

Two more loud blasts echoed from outside.

“Move it! Move!” Nakuri yelled. The slingtroopers, some of whom had been thrown aside too, scrambled toward the exit. The prisoners cowered in terror.

All except the girl.

“Keep watch on them!” Kayn yelled to Solipas. He ran for the exit, reaching the light in time to see the small fightship making its third pass. One of Nakuri’s carrier transports was already a burning mass of buckled metal. The fightship, a matt green dart, blinked in low over the plateau, and discharged its heavy cannons. Blades of light slashed down from the photann-annihilator pods, and the second carrier blew up, its bulk lifting on a column of fire that shredded it, flipped it and brought it down hard, crushing Kayn’s little DEMAX-3.

Nakuri was shouting commands, and his slingtroopers were forming a line around the cave mouth, weapons rigs engaged to fill the sky with a hail of fire.

“Wait!” Kayn shouted.

“What?” asked Nakuri.

“Hold fire. If they wanted us dead, they would’ve leveled the mountain. They want our attention.”

“Hold fire!” Nakuri ordered.

“Contact our ships,” Kayn told him. “Tell them to remain in standoff. No stupid attempts at rescue or relief.”

“You’re playing with fire, old friend.”

“Always. Now do it!”

Kayn heard Nakuri activate his interface. He walked forward. Black smoke was blowing horizontally off the mass of burning ship wreckage. Heat haze at ground level made the smoke ripple and twist. He could feel the warmth on his face.

“Come on,” he murmured. “Get on with it. Come on…”

The green fightship reappeared. It came up over the edge of the plateau at a stall-speed hover, its nacelles down-blasting to give it lift. Sunlight flashed off the tinted canopy. It edged through the churning smoke towards them. A second one appeared, gray, coming in from the left.

Then a third. This one was red, and came into view moving down the plateau’s centerline, directly towards them.

The three ships stopped at a low hover twenty meters away. “Ah, klag,” said Nakuri. “Syndicate.”

“Yes,” replied Kayn. He had recognized at once the hybrid, custom-fitted style of the aggressor craft: black market weapon systems, some illegal, some alien, disproportionately large compared to the small hulls they had been grafted to. The ships themselves were ex-imperial tech, old models undoubtedly salvaged from junkworlds, retrofitted by the Syndicate’s ingenious weaponeers.

The red ship, the largest, carried a pod on its belly. A masking field generator. More contraband. The soft return hadn’t been from one ship. It had been a vague sensor ghost generated by these three, moving in tight formation inside the mask field. No wonder there had been no hard data on mass or density—they’d made themselves fluid, probably in a tumble trajectory, and no doubt had split and separated as soon as they hit the atmosphere.

Clever, Kayn thought. Typical criminal activity, the kind that regularly got past smuggling blockades and interdiction fleets.

The red ship moved forward a little. Its tinted canopy popped and opened.

“I can take this klagger’s head off,” advised Nakuri.

“Let me talk,” Kayn replied. “But get all your troopers to lock now. When we take them down, it’s got to be instant, or they’ll cremate this whole area.”

Nakuri nodded. Kayn left the shadows, slithered down the slope and walked into the hard sunlight of the plateau top. Head high, he strode across the dust towards the lead machine.

“You have business here?” he called out.

The red fightship’s cockpit was a two-seat. A visored pilot occupied the front, staring down at Kayn through the gunsights. A figure stood up in the back seat and took off his respirator mask. “I do,” he said. “Didn’t think I’d be doing it with an Ordinal, but every day is new and exciting, right?”

It was Zago. Corun Zago. One of the chief players in Syndicate activities on the galactic edge.

Kayn’s interface identified him instantly by face and voice recognition, but Kayn knew him anyway. All Demaxian officers knew Zago’s face from a hundred thousand bounty postings. He’d remained alive and at liberty for a long time, because he so seldom showed up in person.

So what was so important about today?

“I’m honored, Zago,” said Kayn. “Seeing you face-to-face.”

Zago grinned. “Oh, the honor’s mine, Shieda Kayn. Heard so much about you.”

“Lot of damage to imperial equipment there,” said Kayn, gesturing to the burning wrecks.

“Just wanted to be emphatic.”

“You were successful. What’s the business, here? I take it you wanted the Templars and their followers? Some prearranged deal?”

Zago looked genuinely surprised. “Templars? What the klag do I want with Templars?”

“You hadn’t agreed to meet them here?”

“No, sir. Nothing to do with me.”

“What, then?”

“Same reason as you, I guess,” said Zago. “I mean, it’s not every day an Ordinal slings out to an edgeworld either. I take it it’s here?”

“It is,” said Kayn, calmly lying to cover his lack of knowledge. “How did you hear about it?”

Zago looked thoughtful. “The same way you did. I guess.”

Kayn was getting an odd read from the man. Corun Zago was infamously confident and full of swagger, but he seemed troubled. Uneasy.

“Well, I just…” Kayn shrugged, mirroring the man’s awkwardness. “You know.”

“I do,” Zago nodded, earnest. “Strangest thing, eh? It calling out like that. Like a voice in the stars. I just knew… I knew I had to come get it. Knew it had to be mine. With respect, Ordinal, you won’t stop me having it. Hand it over or stand aside, whatever. I’m taking it. Resist and… Well, we’ll cook the lot of you, snatch it, and be masked and gone before your capital ships can get within sniffing distance.”

“I have no doubt.”

This didn’t make any sense. Zago was dangerous, but not insane. His three fightships had Kayn’s small ground forces outclassed, but the Gentle Reminder and the Fractal Shear were the sort of Locus Armada vessels that Syndicate forces would go out of their way to avoid.

And Corun Zago had come in person. This wasn’t the typical bravura Kayn had read about. This was something else. A compulsion. Obsessive.

That made him vulnerable.

Kayn took a long, slow breath. Time to clear his mind. Time to do the sort of work that had made him an Ordinal.

“Well, you’ve got us tight, my good man,” he said, opening his arms in an elegant coreworld flourish—a ritual gesture that anyone would recognize as a formal submission. Then he turned that into the full bow of surrender, dropping to one knee, shoulders forward, his arms by his sides. His right hand braced the ornate lance at his side at a forty-five degree angle, base in the dirt, blade upwards, the angle of military honor. “We must give way to you, in these circumstances.”

Kayn could feel the prickle of the heat, smell the billowing smoke. He could feel Corun Zago’s gaze on him, perhaps surprised at the ease of his triumph.

Kayn was a strong man. His basic biology had been finessed by acute training disciplines, and further enhanced by science. Like all Ordinals, he was a significantly amplified being.

He waited until Zago began to speak. Just the first syllable of the reply.

“You—”

Still kneeling, Kayn cast the lance. An underarm throw with his right arm. No wind-up, just a straight pitch, hurling the lance along the angle it was already pointing in. He didn’t even look up. He was still kneeling, and bowing.

Propelled by the strength of his arm, the lance struck the underside of the hovering red fightship just in front of the mask array pod. The broad blade-head punctured the ship’s skin, and the lance kept going, through the condensers and attitude management systems contained in the belly. Through them, through the floor of the cockpit, through the base of the pilot’s flightseat, and on through Corun Zago.

When it came to rest, it was impaling the hovering ship like a meat skewer, the end of the haft poking from the underside, the head transfixing Zago, and emerging through his back.

He was pinned, upright, against his high-backed seat. There was a look of surprise on his very dead face.

Abruptly, everything was in motion. The red fightship began to wallow violently, its internal systems torn and ruptured. Its engines howled with uncorrected pressure. The Syndicate pilots took a moment to react—just a second while they processed what had happened.

And then it was too late. Nakuri had been waiting. The instant he saw Kayn hurl the lance, he had given the signal, his slingtroopers opening fire in perfect unison. Gunrigs kicked off, screaming streams of photann fire at the gray and green fightships. The first simply came apart where it was hovering, utterly disintegrated by the sustained, heavy fusillade. Its drive core exploded, and the fireball threw fragments of pockmarked, distorted hull in all directions.

Turning his kneeling crouch into an upward spring, Kayn leapt. The wildly wallowing red ship had almost lurched low enough to clip his head off, and his leap cleared the starboard wing. The craft was almost spinning as the pilot fought to regain control. The port wingtip bounced off the ground and scattered a spray of pebbles. The hover thrust was kicking up dust like a desert storm.

Kayn landed on the lurching hull, and clawed his way toward the open cockpit. Zago was still pinned in place, staring into the distance, each jolt of the ship shaking him against the flightseat. The pilot was too busy fighting with the controls to do anything else.

Nakuri’s troopers were still hosing fire, but the green fightship was proving harder to kill. It had some kind of custom shield that soaked up the photann energy. Flecks of light stippled off the greasy haze around its prow. It screamed forward, seeking retribution. Its weapon pods opened up, stitching detonations across the dust toward the slingtrooper formation.

Before Nakuri could order an immediate scatter, two of his men were incinerated where they stood. The ship leveled up, and began to pick off the others as they fled. Ground fire, even from stalwart slingtroopers, only worked against aircraft when the aircraft were unprepared.

They had lost the advantage of surprise.

Kayn grabbed the fightship’s pilot with one hand, and threw him from the cockpit. The man cried in surprise as he bounced off the dipping wing, and plunged to the ground below.

Gripping the canopy frame, Kayn dropped into the pilot position. His interface told him the stabilizer controls were utterly ruined—the lance had speared the guts of several principal systems. He made lightning-fast adjustments, compensating for overthrust and one nacelle port that had flamed out altogether. He slammed the red ship around with the cockpit still open, and limped it forward, accelerating at extremely low level, just kissing the ground.

The green fightship was strafing the slopes. Kayn could see it extending its main weapon pods to level the whole mountainside. Hauling on the stick, he activated the red ship’s fire control, armed the main battery, and locked the green fightship ahead of him.

He opened up with the primary photann array. The force of the unleashed fire rocked the destabilized craft so hard, it swung drunkenly out of true, and the last blaze of shots went wide, snaking off like lumo-tracers into the sky beyond the mountains.

But the first part of the barrage had been dead-on. The green fightship lost its rear end, and then one nacelle. Its pilot tried to steady it, but the whole thing was coming to pieces in the air, shredding from the tail forward. It began to lift, trailing a huge plume of fire and debris. Then, abruptly, as if the effort was too great, it plunged like a rock, and impacted nose first.

The detonation raised a shockwave across the sands, throwing out a large crater of heat-fused dirt.

Kayn struggled to keep his commandeered fightship airborne. Multiple fail warnings screamed from the control board. He cut power incrementally, nursing it down. The red ship hit the dust, bounced, and then slid, digging in with one lolling wing.

He killed all power. Grit was still pattering off the front screen and hull. He lifted himself out of the seat, took one last glance at Zago’s dismayed expression, and jumped back down to the ground.

As he walked away, something caught inside the hull, and fire began to flare out. By the time he reached Nakuri, the red fightship had become a blazing funeral pyre for the man skewered in its heart.

Nakuri was gathering his troops. He looked at Kayn with a mix of shock and admiration. “You’re a crazy fool,” he said flatly.

“I disagree,” Kayn replied. “But I think it’s long past time I saw what this whole mess was about.”

Beyond the caves where the prisoners were being held, there was a hole in the world. It was a rough shaft, thirty meters across, which cut straight down vertically for hundreds more.

Kayn stood at the lip, and looked down. The rock had been cut by… something, excised on a huge scale. Even the main batteries of an Armada sling-ship couldn’t have removed a slice of the planet so cleanly.

And just where was the removed mass? Had it been annihilated?

“Down there,” said Nakuri.

Kayn had begun to clamber down anyway, following the ragged contours of the shaft’s inner wall. Up close, it looked like heat had done this work. The exposed rock was glossy pink, and gleamed like a polished gemstone. But there was also a thick layer of dust on all the upper surfaces. This excision had been made a while ago, perhaps even thousands of years. Quite without warning, Kayn had the sudden impression of a red-hot metal ingot being dropped onto a glacier, melting its way swiftly downward, leaving a borehole with gleaming walls of refrozen ice…

But what could do that to rock?

He scanned for forensic traces via his interface as he made his descent. Coming down behind him, Nakuri clearly heard Kayn’s gasp of surprise.

“I know, right?” he said.

“Are these readings correct?” Kayn murmured.

“They seem to be.”

“This isn’t… here,” said Kayn, making his interface re-work the scan.

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s as if…” There was no easy way for Kayn to describe it. The quantum traces were bizarre. It was as though a piece of another reality, another spatial dimension altogether, had intersected briefly with this mountain on Ionan, negated it utterly, and left this void behind like an empty wound.

A wound that crackled with a residue of the otherness that had made it.

“You see now why I wanted an Ordinal on this?” asked Nakuri.

Kayn didn’t reply. He was speculating. Was this the result of an interspatial collision? Some quantum anomaly? Deliberate or accidental? Those phenomena were only theoretical, or the rare and catastrophic results of sling-drive failures. This could be evidentiary proof of the Multiversal Proposition…

Nakuri had done the right thing. This was Ordinal business, and Kayn’s already high standing would be greatly boosted by it. A ground-breaking discovery. It would make him the most famous man in the Demaxian Empire. Indeed, it was the sort of thing that could propel a man to the very top.

Kayn paused. He was shocked that he was thinking that way. There was work to be done here, an Ordinal’s duty. Assess, analyze, reflect, gather up everything for the good of the empire. Secure this discovery in the name of…

A new thought entered his mind, a burning thought that also disturbed him. He knew he should be consulting with Nakuri, planning the process of investigation.

But he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep it for himself. He didn’t want anyone in here, not even Nakuri. No one else was worthy—

Kayn caught himself again. It was no wonder that others had come here. The Syndicate, the Templars. This was an astonishing prize. Except…

“…how did they know?” Kayn asked.

“What?”

“I came here because you called me. You came because you were chasing the Templars. What brought the Templars here?”

“They’d heard about it too…?” Nakuri ventured.

“From who?”

“They deal in secrets, forbidden lore, all that nonsense. Maybe some legend or myth or… I don’t know, a treasure map?”

That rang false to Kayn. If anyone, anyone, at any point in time had found this, they would have used it. Used the data, the information it presented. It would have become a holy site, a shrine, or it would have gathered a culture around it, or made a man into an emperor… or been the cornerstone of a new empire altogether.

No. No one knew about this. The Templars had come here… instinctively.

“And the Syndicate?” he asked Nakuri.

“What about them?”

Zago knew, Kayn thought. That filthy opportunist hadn’t even been aware of the Templars’ presence. This was what he’d come for, and he’d come obsessively, risking everything—even a confrontation with superior imperial forces.

And he’d come because something had called him. Called out to him, across the gulf of space.

Kayn’s skin felt clammy. He skidded down the last few meters, his unease growing. There was something at the bottom of the pit. Something that looked as if it was fused into the bedrock.

“What the…”

“We think that’s what did it,” said Nakuri. “Like it fell here, and made the hole.”

His voice trailed off.

“Have you touched it?” Kayn asked.

“No, sir. None of us. None of us dared.”

Kayn crouched down. The object lay like a dark fossil embedded in the pale matrix of rock suspending it—like the bones of something impossibly ancient, now exposed to the light. He could make out a long, beautifully fashioned handle, slightly curved. A huge blade head. Handle and blade were both forged from some dark metal his interface couldn’t identify, and apparently proportioned for humanoid hands.

A scythe. A war weapon. A masterpiece that matched no known cultural template.

Kayn wondered how something could be so beautiful and yet so ugly at the same time.

He heard a low chuckle. “What?” he asked, looking at Nakuri.

“I didn’t say anything,” Nakuri replied.

Kayn tried his interface, but the signal was dead.

“We’re too deep,” said Nakuri. “Something down here is blocking communications.”

“Go back up,” said Kayn. “Signal the Fractal Shear. I want a science team assembled, with full monitor instruments. Get them down here in two hours. We’re going to take this place apart, piece by piece, and extract every last scrap of information.”

Nakuri nodded, but didn’t leave. “You’ve changed,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Now you’re an Ordinal. The tone of your—”

Kayn scoffed. “I don’t have time for this,” he said.

“That grandstanding against the Syndicate, what was that? I lost four men. Four men who didn’t need to die. Just so you could show off.”

“It was a delicate situation.”

“We could have called in the main ships. Just wiped them out. But, you had to play your show-off games. Sir.”

“We got the result I needed,” said Kayn.

“Four men dead.”

“Commander. Go and signal the ship. I will not ask you again.”

Nakuri faltered. “I brought you here because… Gods, I brought you here because I knew this wasn’t for me. Above my pay grade. I thought of you. That you’d know what to do. That you’d be worthy of it.”

“Worthy of it?”

“Of this prize! I mean, who am I? I’m not. Not worthy of…” He looked at Kayn. “But I thought you were. I thought I was doing my duty to the empire, and my friend. But I see you now. What you’re like. What you’ve become.”

Kill him for that.

Kayn looked around. Someone had spoken.

“Are we alone?” he whispered.

“What?” asked Nakuri, exasperated.

“Commander, did you post any guards down here?”

“No.”

“Then who just spoke?”

“No one spoke!” Nakuri snapped. “What’s wrong with you? I don’t know who you are any more!”

“Go and signal the ship. Now. Then come back and tell me you’ve done it.”

Nakuri glared at him, then turned and clambered away. Kayn remained crouched over the embedded weapon.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked.

You know it was. I call. Some hear. Some come. I’m only interested in the worthy ones.

“People keep using that word. Who’s worthy? And of what?”

Of me. I’ll know who’s worthy when they prove themselves. Maybe it’s you.

“I don’t know what you are.”

You don’t have to. I just need to know you. I’ll keep calling until I’ve found the one. Then I’ll stop, because I won’t need to call anymore.

“I’m an Ordinal of—”

I care little what you are. What interests me is who you are. Your ambitions. Your dreams. What you’re capable of. How you think about the cosmos. How you think the cosmos should work.

“I told you I’m an Ordinal, because that’s what matters,” said Kayn sharply. “I have a job to do. A duty.”

A duty you resent. A duty you find increasingly frustrating. Following a man you think is growing weak. Pledging to a cause you think is overcautious. Frustrated, day after day, that no one shares your clarity of thought. That no one dares to act the way you want to act. That no one has the strength.

“My duty is to secure this site for the Demaxian Empire. I don’t believe I’m actually having a conversation with some antique weapon. I believe I am being exposed to quantum variance. This is my mind, playing tricks.”

So I’m a hallucination now, am I?

“This site is an anomaly of great scientific value. You’re the principal artifact within it. I am… I am imagining voices because of the exotic trace energies in this location, and—”

Nakuri’s been gone a long time, wouldn’t you say?

Kayn rose. He checked his interface’s chronometer. Nakuri had been gone for nearly an hour. An hour? How had so much time passed…?

Time is another illusion you can soon dispense with.

“If I’m worthy?” Kayn spat. He turned, and began the climb back to the surface.

He ignored the chuckle that came after him.

There was no sign of anyone.

“Nakuri?”

The communication link was empty. Something must have happened. More Syndicate? More of Zago’s men? Surely Kayn would have heard shooting.

He drew his pistol, and stalked forward.

The prisoners were still in their cave, silent and terrified. They blinked at him as he entered. “Where are your guards?” he asked. No one answered.

He crossed to the girl, Sona, and lifted her to her feet.

“I’ve seen what drew you here. I’ve seen it. Tell me about it.”

She didn’t answer.

“Sona,” he said, “you need to speak. Now.”

She stared at him. He tightened his grip on the pistol.

Don’t waste her. She’s far too valuable. Haven’t you figured that out yet? You’ll need her.

Kayn pushed the girl back down. He walked to the mouth of the cave.

The slingtrooper’s blade nearly took his head off. Kayn ducked and let the sword strike rock. Two shots from his pistol took the trooper down, his body sliding down the wall and onto the ground.

Rigo. One of Nakuri’s. A good man.

None of them are good enough, though. Are you?

They came at him from all sides. Photann blasts lit the rocky hallway. He returned fire, dropped two more, then had to spin-kick to drive off another. The trooper staggered away, clutching his splintered visor. Kayn tore the glaive out of his hand, then cut him in half with it.

He wheeled. An up-strike with the glaive’s haft knocked another trooper onto his back. Reverse. The butt-end driving into the belly of man lunging from behind him. Spin. The blade slicing home.

Someone shot at him. Photann shots. Block, block, block. The glaive was whirling in his hands, its coated titanium absorbing the power and deflecting the shots away.

“What the klag is this?” he bellowed.

“You don’t deserve it!” a voice yelled back. “It shouldn’t be for you!”

It was Nakuri.

Kayn plunged forward. He kicked the legs out from under a charging slingtrooper, then pinned him to the ground.

Vechid slammed into them both from the side. The squad leader was all armored bulk and augmented strength. She swung a fist. Kayn tried to block, but her charged gauntlet snapped the glaive’s haft. Kayn snarled, spun back to evade the next swing, then plunged the broken ends of the weapon into Vechid’s chest.

Speeks came at him. Kayn killed him with a beak-fist to the nasal bone.

“Stand your men down, Nakuri!” he yelled, moving towards the light of the tunnel mouth. “This is lunacy!”

This is the test.

“Nakuri! We’re being toyed with! This isn’t you!”

“Oh, but it is!” A voice echoed back. “This is me, the real me! Me for the first time! I see it all now! How it should be!”

“Nakuri!”

Armored fists closed around his throat from behind, and Kayn started to choke as they throttled him.

“Nakuri’s right,” he heard Solipas say. “You’re just some jumped-up fool, Kayn! So pleased with your klagging self! It shouldn’t belong to you! You don’t deserve it!”

Kayn flexed, and threw Solipas right over him. The man landed hard.

“Who then?” he asked. “You?”

“Obviously!” Solipas was springing up, ripping out a blade. “It’s chosen me! It says I’m the one! I heard it say so!”

There was a photann flash, and Solipas’s head was vaporized. His body crumpled.

“That’s a lie!” stammered Korla, edging forward. His eyes were wide. His pistol was still aimed at Solipas. “Me! It called my name!”

“We’re all being played with,” said Kayn.

Korla snapped around, aiming his gun at the Ordinal.

“All of us, Korla. All of us. It’s in our heads. It’s making us do this.”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t lie,” said Korla. “Not to me!”

“We don’t know what it does. Put the gun down.”

Korla growled. “I know what it does. It makes you what you should be. I see that, clear as day. It claims you. Makes you… perfect. Makes you see sense. Makes you know who you can trust. Who needs to live or die.”

“That’s not right,” Kayn said.

“It is! It told me! It told me I was the one!”

He fired, but Kayn was already moving. The blast scorched his hip, just as he came in under Korla’s extended arm, and broke it.

Korla dropped to his knees, clutching his elbow. Kayn snatched the pistol away.

“It told me,” the trooper whimpered.

Kayn went to walk past him, but he grabbed at Kayn’s leg. Kayn put him out of his misery with a single shot.

He reached the cave mouth. “Nakuri?”

Nakuri was waiting for him, lance in hand.

“I admit,” the commander said, “I made a terrible mistake. Calling you. You? That was an error. I just wasn’t confident enough. Didn’t think I could handle it. That I could… That I could do it.”

“Do what?”

“Be what it needed. But I can. I see that now. It doesn’t need the likes of you. You won’t do it justice. But a veteran like me? Well, that’s a different story—I’ll be everything it ever wanted.”

“Nakuri,” said Kayn. “Toss the lance. Back off. You’re out of your mind.”

“It told me you’d say that.”

“We are all being influenced by interspatial—”

“No! No, we’re not! This only started when you arrived. I’ve been here for days!”

“That’s because I’m the one it wants,” said Kayn. “It was waiting for me. Now it’s testing me.”

“Testing you?”

“To see if I’m ruthless enough for its needs. And you… Nakuri, you’re my friend. It’s using you. Toss the lance. We can secure this entire—”

“No! It’s testing me. You’re not what it wants. You’re nothing. We’re not friends. Gods, you think we were ever friends? And you think you’re the special one? The chosen one? The worthy one? That’s just like you. So klagging arrogant! So full of your own importance!”

Nakuri took a step forward. Kayn fired, again and again, but the spinning staff spat the shots away, deflecting them into the cave walls. Two more steps, and the whirling blade cleaved the barrel off the photann pistol.

Kayn back-flipped away. The blade kissed the ground where he had been standing. He threw himself into Nakuri, delivering a gut-punch, then a blow to the neck. Nakuri staggered backwards, before Kayn’s spin-kick broke his jaw, and dropped him.

“If… not me…” Nakuri bubbled, broken, “…not you either. Others… are coming…”

“Others? Just hold still. I need to get you a medivac.”

Kill him.

“Shut up.”

Prove what you are. Kill him.

“Shut. Up.”

Kayn walked clear of the cave, and into the sunlight.

You’re running out of time. Make your choice.

He could see the Gentle Reminder. Nakuri had called it in after all. It was on low approach from the west, six kilometers distant, filling the sky, skimming the mountains.

Immense. Gun ports opening for surface decimation. A whole warship full of men and women, all of them answering the call. Men and women who thought they were worthy. Men and women who had each been told that, by the same voice.

Kayn opened his communication link.

“Fractal Shear, give me Captain Vassur.”

“Speaking, sir.”

“We have a situation, captain. Priority one. A mutiny. Lock the Gentle Reminder immediately.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. Lock and fire. Full batteries.”

“Sir, she’s one of ours—”

“Do as I tell you immediately, or you’ll be letting an Ordinal die. Lock and fire. Priority one. Mutiny situation.”

“Yes, sir. We’re on approach. Engines engaged. We’ll be in firing range in eight minutes.”

Too slow. Nakuri’s ship will obliterate you long before that.

“And you,” Kayn muttered.

I’ll survive. I’ll wait. I’ll call again and see who comes next time. Unless you are worthy…

“Once you’re claimed, the call stops?”

That’s what I told you.

Kayn turned and ran back into the cave system. The Gentle Reminder was so close. How long did he have? Three minutes?

He reached the shaft and hurried down between the gleaming pink ledges. Twice, he almost fell. Stones skittered out under his feet. He jumped the last of the way.

The scythe was where he had left it.

Change of heart? Time to reflect?

“Shut up,” Kayn said, and grabbed it.

It took him a second to pull it free. As it came into his grasp, he saw it blink. An eye opened at the base of the blade, a pink fire that burned his retinas and gazed into his heart, like—

He saw silence. He saw the vast well of time. He saw a moment stretched into an eternity. He saw lingering stillness and glacial quiet. He saw dark stars and black suns frozen in a void of endless shadow. He saw monstrous, silent deities lurking in a corrupted cosmos.

He heard a name, breathed like a sigh.

Rhaast.

And he knew it was his name now, too.

“The emperor will demand a report,” said Captain Vassur, nervously. “A detailed report. I… I’m not sure what to say…”

Kayn looked up from his window seat. The rasping light of slingspace beyond the window ports cast strange shadows in the chamber around them.

“I’m compiling it now, captain. It will be full and frank. But confidential. The mutiny on Ionan, and the subsequent destruction of the Gentle Reminder, must be kept quiet. For reasons of morale. I am sure you understand.”

“Yes, sir,” said Vassur.

“Anything else?”

Vassur shook her head. “We are en route back to the Locus Armada as ordered. Maximum slingspeed.”

“And the prisoners?”

“Secure. Ready for transport to detention and interrogation as soon as we arrive. I’m sure we can get a lot out of them. Useful information on covert Templar activity across the sector.”

“Take particular care of the girl,” Kayn replied. “The one named Sona. I will deal with her personally. She is, I believe, especially valuable.”

“Yes, sir,” said Vassur. The captain saluted and left Kayn’s quarters.

What will you tell them?

“What I want to tell them.”

Good.

“What will you tell me?”

Everything.

“Good. What do you want?”

Well, perhaps I won’t tell you that… No, I will. Trust is the essential foundation of any relationship, Kayn, and I want—

Kayn flung himself to the side. Even by the standards of his agility, he was a blur. No longer anything that might be described as human.

Keelo’s axe splintered through the empty window seat.

The scythe flashed. The severed halves of the old, battered fightmek crashed to the deck and lay there, sparking and twitching, as the light in his optics died.

“Surprise…” said Kayn.