Chapter 1
Prologue
“Some say death comes in the cold, others say in the heat. Most say it comes in old age, and a few in youth. All stupid ideas! Death comes on a whim when it wants to and when it pleases,” exclaims the captain of the ship minutes before setting sail for deeper waters. If you follow me, you must know that where we are going, caprice and death are the gods of everything.
The captain, a man tanned by the sun and seawater, looked down at the deck with the only eye that served him. In the eyes of young Jason Argon he seemed to enjoy the fear in the innocent eyes.
“This man is mad!”
“I am only here for my wife.”
“If I die, who will tell my mother?”
“Who gave me the idea that I have to work here?”
Jason listens to the whispers around him and knows that this is probably the last time he will see some of them land. But it has happened many times before and will continue to happen. Some cannot escape death.
And just as Jason predicted, and the one-eyed captain had said. When only deep water surrounded them for hundreds of miles and the waves were as big as mountains, many perished at the whim of death; some in ridiculous fights, most in stupid accidents. In the end, they were all trapped in a land without graves, to be eaten by fish. Jason preferred not to think too much about that. Especially at night, on deck, when it was just him and the captain.
“Do you believe in ghosts, boy?”
It was late at night when the old man broke the silence of the night.
Jason Argon watches as the old man smokes from a pipe enjoyably, as if each inhalation is part of him and each exhalation another breath of life. His one eye has a mischievous, youthful gleam. Jason, wanting it to be time to sleep, just sighs fully reclined on his seat with his gaze lost in the seemingly calm ocean.
“It depends on the day…”
The old man lets out a laugh that seems to fill the silence. “Do you get to see that red dot in the distance?” He asks, and Jason looks up. He had heard some things the last few days about that distant dot that never disappeared. Many around him said it was a monster waiting to eat them, he had heard bets on whether it was a giant crab or the angry gods; some said it was the lost palace of the mermaids. Only the older ones remained silent.
“Yes... What’s in it?”
The captain smiles with few teeth, and Jason doesn’t understand why he smiles. “Do you know what’s in there?”
“What I hear seems like a lie, so I don’t know…”
“What youth is! It is fire. A fire so immense that it can be seen for hundreds of miles. I am old, boy; but when I was your age the fire was there, when my master and his master before him were your age the fire was still there. A fire doomed to keep spreading.”
Jason didn’t understand a word the old man was saying with a blank stare, still smoking his pipe. “Fire?” he asked incredulously. He had never believed the nonsense of malevolent beings. But a fire? Fire is doomed to die out, they never last too long.
“I understand you, boy. But this is a cursed fire. They say among the sailors that this fire is from the old continent, the continent from which we men were expelled. The gods gambled, and a chip went out of place, that chip ended up burning everything in its path. I have never been there, but those who have told me that even being miles away you can hear screams and howls, the smell of burning human flesh penetrates the nose and floods everything. But the strangest thing is that outside the horrible screams, smell and sight, voices overtake everything. I’m told they sound like a woman and a man wailing and vowing revenge.” The captain tells everything slowly, just watching that red dot in the distance. “Shall I tell you what those voices are saying? They repeat the same thing over and over and over again the same thing <<What they did to us, we will do to them, that is our promise>>. They say nothing else, and they never tire of it.”
Mockingly, Jason began to laugh at the nonsense coming out of the old captain.
Fire? As if a fire lasted more than eight hundred years, as if there were still bodies to burn after eight hundred years.
Jason did not believe any of his words, all the old men believed any story they heard.
“Impossible,” he replies with sarcastic laughter.
The old captain simply looks at him with his one eye sardonically, still smoking his pipe. “You say that now, but the time will come when you will want to know, see, hear and feel with your own eyes what seemed impossible to make possible. Just as in the four realms there are gifts and prophecies to be fulfilled, in Arannova there are deities that get bored and end up destroying a continent like the one before your eyes. Do not be careless, boy. May your youth and whimsy not attract death himself” the captain’s eyes return to the red dot that does not move with anything. His shoulders seem to slouch more, and his grayish-whitish beard dances in the breeze.
Jason stops laughing as soon as his captain begins to speak harshly. He swallows silently, digesting his words. In a whisper, he asks, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I was once your age and someone told me so. That’s why I got to the age I am, because I listened,” the old man smiles in the distance.
Jason Argon does not understand why this captain had approached him and started talking. Nevertheless, intrigue had set in, and the day would come when he would probably visit this supposed fire.
