The storm clouds are gathered just to starboard, forcing us further and further west. The sun, lurking around the horizon and casting golden and amber hues, hasn’t set in what feels like eleven hundred days, although it’s tough to tell. We’ve given up counting, after the crude marks we’d scratched into the deck mysteriously vanished.
Time hasn’t frozen, so much as slowed to a crawl. The fluttering and rustling of the sails proves there’s still a tailwind; the creaks and groans of wood as waves lap around us, and the swells of the waves we ride, are enough to evidence that. Our crew, fractious at the best of times, had initially turned on each other, tensions increasing until it spilled to violence. Men were thrown overboard, beaten, and blades drawn. It had only stopped after a voice had cut across the melee, singing; pure, clean, and melodious.
All had stopped to listen, transfixed, although it had been too late for the cabin boy, who’d bled out, albeit with a rapturous look on his face. That sound was her again, the one who has damned us.
Of course she’d interrupted, she wouldn’t want anyone’s suffering cut short by the merciful escape of death. She was the one who had condemned us to this, cursing us to Hell and back as we left her to die on the beach. We’d laughed, naturally – did she think the tattered flag we fly meant we’re a charity ship? One of us, though, as we left, had looked back and there she was, floating above the sand, radiant in ethereal grace. He’d caught her eye as she’d opened her mouth and had voiced a single note, beams of light slashing from her eyes and mouth to spotlight our vessel.
Since then, we’ve been on this course, always trying to get ahead of the storm, and the things that lurk within the clouds and waves. Promises of vengeance, they are, of roiling seas filled with beasts that could make the Kraken itself shy away. Shapes swirl in the darkness that pursues us, breaking up and reforming into ever more horrific demons and nightmares. You can’t look at it for more than a few seconds, lest you fall mad. And, in the midst of this chaos, floating six feet above the waves, she follows us, bright, brilliant, beautiful… deadly.
We ran out of food a few weeks ago, and most of us are down to mere bones. Couldn’t keep anything down even if we’d wanted to though. Maybe this is what we’re doomed to become – a harbinger, a warning to others not to lose their humanity. I’d like to grin at the fear we could spread, skeletal warriors stalking the seas, but that would involve more muscle and skin than I have left.
So instead, I cast this message overboard in a bottle and implore anyone who finds it: Spare others, spare yourself, lest she follow you too. God save us from this eternity, no one else can.
