It wasn't long before Shakale was back on the water. His time on île Sanguine was always short but, it was the closest thing to a home that he had. The sun was starting to rise and was casting rays of bright orange over the ocean's glassy surface. He met Paula on a day like this. He still remembers the first time he washed up on île Sanguine and she told him it's where "the ocean sends its lost things." It was at a time in which he'd never felt more lost. In his mind he was a villain, a coward. He alone had survived Tempest's "test" and been allowed to leave the Erie with his life. Sent adrift with a story that he could never forget and that no one would ever believe.
The storm had come without warning, just as it did with the Almsgiver decades later. Shakale could hear the crew panicking above him as he sat chained in the Erie's hold. He listened to the crew screaming for hours before the overhead panel opened and the captain, a fat old man with the whitest beard that Shakale had ever seen, fell from up above. Whatever he'd seen had terrified him so badly that the marks of fear had persisted even in death. His body was broken, twisted. His bones had been snapped in all directions, a leg was bent backward, an arm had broken sideways tearing his flesh and exposing a jagged piece of bone as white as his beard.
It was horrible, but Shakale had grown numb to horrors, trapped for weeks with the dead and dying had taken its toll on his young soul, and he would never be the same again. The others screamed, chains rattled as on emaciated bodies as the Erie's captives struggled in a futile effort to flee. Then, they saw her... a goddess, a witch, a monster... Tempest. She descended from the ceiling hatch, her fall slowed by a cone of strong wind she seemed to command with the gentle swaying of her fingers. She smelled like rain and candle flowers; after a few seconds, that was all he could smell, the wretched odor of death and human waste that he'd been enduring for weeks, was gone now, replaced by a fragrance that would plague his every waking thought . He could not see her face, only a moonlit silhouette that looked over the Erie's victims with cruel indifference. Shakalie wanted to believe that she was their savior, that she was a goddess who'd come to rescue them, but those eyes gave it away. They were devoid of sympathy devoid of compassion, they glowed with a brilliant blue light that shone in the darkness, but... her gaze was as cold and lifeless as the corpse on the floor.
"Olokun?", Shakale asked sheepishly. The word had escaped him before he could stop it, "Olokun", the name of some half-remembered sea goddess that his grandmother would pray too when his father was away. He'd hoped she hadn't heard him but... she had. Before he could blink she was in front of him, her body seeming to disappear and reappear in an instant. Before he could scream she took his face in both hands and pulled it close to hers.
"I've been called that", She said. "I've been called many things... but you can call me 'Tempest'"
Her voice was soft like a whisper but even with the storm... and the screams, vying to drown it out, he never lost a word.
"Are you here to help us?", he asked
"No", She said. "but maybe you can help me"
He felt a chill spread from her finger tips to, his cheeks and throughout his body, within seconds it became unbearable, like being frozen from the inside out. He tried to scream but no words escaped his lips. He tried to pull away but her grip on him was inhumanly strong. He felt something leaving him, something that he could not see or describe. He felt her dragging it through his veins, felt it passing from his toes and finger tips all the way to his core where it collected into a larger mass. It moved up through his throat, nearly choking him to death as she pulled it out of him. He only caught a glimpse of it, a smokey blue ethereal thing that seemed to writhe and pull away as she consumed it. It fought her, pushed against her, screamed a ghastly echoing scream as she choked it down. It begged without speaking, cried without tears, fought without fist and finally... it gave up.
"Most die when I do that", She said, wiping her mouth with her forearm. Then she lifted his drooping head, looked into his dreary eyes. "I knew you were special" she said.
Shakale shut is eye's and as he drifted off into a deep sleep he heard their screams, terrible, desperate screams that he can never unhear, screams that have robbed him of peace for the last forty years, that blended together into an awful chorus, the Erie's requiem. He washed up on the beaches of île Sanguine some time later, and some woman who he'd never met before took him in and gave him food and a place to sleep. He told the woman everything and she listened even though he knew she didn't believe him. Afterall, how could she? Still, she indulged him, let him work in her tavern to make some extra money told him that the Island could be his home.
"Paula", Shakale whispered as the memory of her smiling face popped into his mind and filled his eyes with a film of tears, "I'm sorry I wasn't there". he wiped his eyes quickly insuring that none of the three-hundred and fifty cut throats he shared the frigate with, caught a glimpse of his moment of weakness. He wished he could have stayed with her. He knew he would have been happier there, that he'd had enough of the sea to last a lifetime, but he also knew that was never an option. He was bound to Tempest, driven by a compulsion he could neither understand nor be free of. She invaded his nightmares, spoke to him when he was alone, infected him with a sickness that drove him to the sea no matter how much he wished to be rid of it. He did not want to see her again, he needed to see her again, and so... no matter how much he resisted, no matter how much he begged for her to leave his head, no matter how much he longed to stay in the tavern... it did not matter. He had a mission, to sow misery on the open sea, for the monster that feasted on it.
Today was a new day and he had a new target, the pirate Preacher's flagship frigate, "the Island Rose". The wind had picked up, it rustled through her spiderweb of ropes and cloths and caught her many bright red sails, propelling her two-hundred ton wooden body forward at a slow, steady pace. For over a decade the Rose had instilled fear in the hearts of every sailor on the Atlantic. Fifty, screaming, wooden faces had been painstakingly carved and affixed to the Rose's sides where fifty iron canons protruded from their gaping maws. Her flag bore the image of a bird's skull deeply tinged and red and holding a white rose in its beak. Shakale had heard stories of this flag. It was notorious even on île Sanguin, tiny and remote as it was. The rose's flag was the last flag many sailors had seen before vowing never to return to the open ocean and the last flag countless sailors saw before they perished. It was no accident that the rose had dropped anchor near his humble island. Shakale knew that It was Tempest's doing, and that she wanted him there.
YOU ARE READING
Indebted (working title)
FantasyA small vessel with human cargo passing through the Caribbean in the early 1700s is beset by supernatural forces in the form of a mysterious woman who arrives during a freak storm. She gives the ship's prisoners the power to escape their binds but i...
