Chapter 1
Brave warriors looked on waters roiling with blood, seething with gore.
Time and again, the horn sounded a song eager for battle, as the war-band rested.
— Beowulf
There is a particular shade of green that has nothing to do with envy.
Kaelin had worn it since the ship left port, and she wore it still — a deeper, more committed green now, the kind that comes not from fear of what lies ahead but from the very real possibility of losing one’s last meal to the sea. She clutched an empty bowl to her chest like a shield and breathed through her nose and watched the other four.
This was, she had found, the most useful thing she could do in almost any situation: watch.
The ship crested a wave and plunged. Someone swore. Someone else prayed, or at least produced sounds in the general direction of prayer. The boy with the pointed ears had gone the color of old parchment. The gnome — she had not learned his name yet — sat with his knees drawn up and his jaw set, committed to dignity in the way that small people sometimes are, as though the universe is always watching and waiting for them to flinch first.
She did not know yet that she would come to trust these people with her life. She did not know much of anything, at that moment, except that the water outside the hull sounded wrong.
Too loud. Too deliberate.
Like something listening back.
✦
It was clear the other four had focuses of their own. The ship, having crested another wave, rushed from the high wave’s lip only to immediately face another wall of water looking to consume the moderately-sized schooner. Kaelin was more worried about the last meal of mush about to move past her lips than the reason for the sudden chop. She clutched the empty bowl closer to her chest and hoped the nausea would pass.
The cell across from them housed three other humanoids — potential men, or at least something approximating men in their worst moods. Kaelin had thought them three sheets to the wind when they first boarded, given their mix of incoherent speech, creative swearing, and general lack of decorum. A day of travel had revised her opinion: they were not drunk. They were simply assholes.
The shortest of the three had appointed himself head of grievances and continued to shout remarks at the increasingly annoyed guards. The guards, however, were being called away one by one to help manage the turbulence above decks. Emboldened by their departure, the complainer bellowed loudly enough for the entire hold to hear: “It’s not fair that we’re caged with the animals,” his gaze landing pointedly on their cell.
The gnome was on his feet before the sentence was finished. “Watch your mouth, pal.”
The complainer’s answer was to tip his shit bucket toward their shared cell. The thick sludge of horrendous-smelling excrement traveled the length of the aisle with enthusiastic speed, assisted by the severe tilt of the ship on the crest of a wave. There was nowhere to go. The foul tide covered their feet. The group groaned and shouted in protest as the last of the guards retreated above decks, calling back over his shoulder something about a kraken maintaining its season.
Kaelin — greener and now paler than before — noticed the tiefling blanch as well. The others seemed unaware of what a dangerous position being on the open water truly put them in. She had not forgotten.
“What does that mean for us?” Ragnar asked, his voice carrying even over the hull’s protest against the waves.
The guard reappeared long enough to swing open the storage closet that held the prisoners’ possessions. “It means if you want to survive, you’ll help secure the boat,” he said flatly, and set about unlocking the cells.
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The tall, pointed-eared woman stepped out of the cell looking as though she had never been imprisoned at all. She turned a full slow circle, taking in the manic scene around her with narrowed eyes, then appeared to reach some quiet conclusion and began to move with purpose. The others — guards, prisoners who had agreed to try their luck — were fumbling forward toward the tentacles, many losing their footing in the attempt to hack the boat free from the kraken’s grasp.
Before the kraken could further fracture the body of the schooner, Kaelin jumped.
What remained above water was splinters. A large section of the wooden keel — the size of a small boat in its own right — lay in the now calm water while the last of the kraken’s wake was slowly quelled, its violence settling into an uneasy peace as it retreated into unknown depths.
The survivors did not speak much in the beginning. They worked. They used the great keel as a base and lashed other timber to it, building a raft large enough that all could sit above the waterline. They positioned themselves almost as though sitting at a table — except that instead of cards, each secured their wooden portions and checked what possessions remained. The drow, for her part, audited what possessions were now hers.
The druid and the gnome sat close together, speaking in low voices at the edge of Kaelin’s hearing. She looked back toward the horizon, trying to make out land, when she felt it — her ears popped, and a soft crackling warmth rolled over her, like the edge of a campfire’s reach. An owl was now perched on Vallen’s shoulder. Kaelin glanced around hopefully for a shoreline or another ship. Vallen simply said, as though it were nothing: “If there’s land nearby, Gregor will find it.”
They drifted. Time passed the way it does on open water — slowly, then all at once. They eventually, some begrudgingly, shared names.
Gregor returned with a single leaf and twig between his talons. The species was unfamiliar to Kaelin, though it reminded her of a duller version of the carnivorous spruce from the enchanted forests of home. They began to direct their raft with Gregor as a guide. Shortly after, a shoreline came into view. The relief was short-lived. Below the surface, coral formations rose in dense thickets — buttresses of living rock nearly breaching the surface at low tide, all angled like spikes awaiting them.
Zilla, the druid, moved without hesitation. She began casting in steady repetitions, sending thick, stout vines , all stemming from the one leaf Gregor dropped, down through the water to wrap the raft, slowing their approach, guiding them over the coral until the raft moved like a misshapen silkworm gliding cautiously over a bed of thorns. The cliffs at the beach were impassable. They moved forward into the brush, pressing into a marsh and wetland beyond.
