Moon and Star

Interlude: The Dying Sea

The sea bellowed in fury, lashing winds drawing its waves higher and higher as they came crashing down over and over again in the gale.

The rain fell sideways, blown off course by powerful winds, stinging the panicked sailors in their unprotected eyes and sea-chill eaten faces. The ship lurched from side to side, groaning in displeasure all the time like the great sea beast that it was. Occasionally an unlucky deckhand with nothing to grab hold of was flung aside, to be battered and drowned in the frothing waters below.

No one even bothered trying to save them anymore, not for years.

Had they tried, their imperious captain would have intervened. He stood at the helm even now, eyes set on the way ahead, barely sparing the struggling men a single glance in the maelstrom.

Clyburn Skreel hadn't always been a man of the sea, in fact he had lived in constant fear of it in that little life he once held amongst the landlocked endless plains and hills of Yakun.

His obsession with avoiding the sea, born of fear, and weakness, could not last. The great migratory Warlords of Yakun turned their insatiable lust for conquest and warfare towards his patch of land, his small country, and turned it into a blood-drenched battlefield with their rampaging slave armies of Bak-Taj bird-apes, like great baboons with colorful plumage and a scythe-like beak, and the warlords themselves swinging their liquid metal star-water swords.

He had to charter a crossing of the Dying Sea, he realized, if his family were ever to have a chance to survive the slaughter. He would have to cross the water.

A useless fear, for the sea held no dangers of its own, it was only a mirror of those who looked into it. He had seen nothing at all.

The passage to the Dragon Continent --as the people of Yakun called it-- was a dangerous proposition for all but an armed fleet of trade ships, which he could not afford, even with the wealth his status as an astrologer provided him. He believed that to migrate his family to the wealth and safety of the lands far to the North-West was their best chance at peace and prosperity.

In the end the ship had been taken.

Pirates boarded the vessels with grappling hooks and boarding planks in the midst of a great storm, making quick work of any armed resistance with harpoon and sickle and sword. Fighting practically in rags, and wielding scavenged weapons and sharpened tools, they fought as though their lives were worth nothing, and killed the armed guards to a man. 

They stripped everyone of their belongings, gathering gold and jewels, and anything else they thought they might be able to sell. The pirates lined everyone up, passengers and crew, along the sides of the ship in rows, fronts pressed to the railing, heads turned away from their captors and towards the raging sea.

When anyone tried to flee, or squirmed even a little, they cut that prisoner down with a ruthlessness Clyburn had never seen before. 

The Dying Sea pirates began interviewing the assembled host. The captain, then a man called Red-Eye who they said could make men boil alive with a look, was searching for experienced sailors who were willing and able to work aboard one of the many ships in Red-Eye's fleet of corsairs.

In the end, they found 6 suitable candidates out of 48 to fill the openings, and began to slit the remaining prisoners' throats one by one, pushing their hemorrhaging bodies over the railing and into the hungry water for waiting sharks to reduce to bloody chum. 

The prisoners began to panic, screaming, fighting, but the pirates were at their backs now and there was little they could do but make noise and wait for their turn.

He had watched his wife and son still thrashing in a spray of crimson as they hit the water, disappearing in the next instant in a tide of frenzied, impatient hunger.