Threshing Floor

Welcome Mistress

     Sarah Fortune sat on the bench, staring out the windows at the Bilgewater harbor. A single Hextech lamp swayed slowly as the Syren bobbed slightly with the swells. Despite her efforts to clear her mind, her thoughts kept snapping back to the night before and the completely unexpected loss of her First Mate. She knew it wasn't her fault and there was absolutely nothing she could have done to change the course of events. Since she was very young, she had taken a iron grip on her own destiny and enforced her will on everyone and everything that stood between her and the results she wanted. Now she was realizing how much her crew, and particularly her second in command, had insulated her from the day-to-day details and allowed her to focus on the intricate plans that kept the chaos of Bilgewater from becoming a unmanageable, bloody storm of violence and death.
     "Will Nonce, you will be missed," she muttered under her breath, "And nearly impossible to replace."
     With a sigh, the stunning but brutally cunning redhead turned back to the massive desk that was the centerpiece of her captain's quarters and let her eyes drift over the three items that sat alone on her desk.

     "I would much rather face ten Gangplanks with a pair of my mother's worse pistols than resort to mystical forces," she thought, but there were precious few people she could trust in her life and almost none of them were men.
     Unfortunately, that's what she needed now. Her crew feared and respected her in equal degrees, but they were mostly men. Somewhere in the small reptilian brains of every single one of them, they each harbored a mostly hidden but brightly burning hope that someday, somehow, the opportunity to perform some insanely brave and impossible feat would present itself, they would face it, vanquish it, and be instantly transformed from a lowly crewman to a dashing hero worthy of the romantic attention of their captain.
     If she was completely honest, she had to admit that, on more than one occasion, she had leveraged those delusions to motivate the more cowardly crewmen to do what she needed them to do. Her First Mate had been the firewall that kept her from having to kill too many of them. That's what she needed now, a man who could command the crew and run the daily operations that kept the Syren in fighting trim. A man who was, if not immune to the gravity of a beautiful woman in power, at least smart enough to know his place and wily enough to ride herd on 150 psychotic killers.

                                                             Welcoming the Unwelcome


     He could feel the presence of his stolen property maddeningly close by. Just across the churning, bracken waters of the Bloodharbor. Bits and pieces of chum floated between him and the three cursed items that he very much wanted back. He had learned of the one who currently held the trio and intended to claw them back at the very first opportunity. The chance to charm and ultimately torment his newly acquired nemesis, Captain Sarah Fortune, was looking to be the most delicious project he had embarked on in decades. 

     It would require patience, Mistress Fortune, had met him before, would recognize him and would not be taken by a bold frontal assault. But that was fine, better than fine. He enjoyed pain, even his own pain, and the slow play out of a cunning, inventive plan was the sweetest torture. He was methodical, he was a flaming darkness, he was excruciating madness. He was Thresh.... And he had a new toy.

     Actually, he had several new toys, but the one that currently pleased him the most was a soul mistakenly collected for him by Pyke. His madness had returned just in time for Thresh to move one of the names on his list nearer to the top. Captain Fortune, master of the Syren, the list read, and Pyke was nothing if not relentless in tracking his targets. But madness is always unpredictable and as dark was falling the night before, The Doxy Ripper struck, only his addled wits had fallen back into the prejudices of his living mind, and assumed the captain would be a man. William Nonce was on the quayside, giving orders to the crew, and thus befell the vengeance of Pyke. Even so, Thresh reminded himself, the mad squirrel finds an acorn every once in a while, staring into the swirling depths of his Lantern.
     "Master Will, come to me," he called, and the spirit obeyed, as it must. "You are the key player in my new tragedy. Can you deceive your former captain?"
     The captive soul writhed in torment and tried to shake its incorporeal head, but the master of the lantern was the master of all its inmates. The head quickly stopped shaking and bowed in resignation. Thresh laughed, relishing not only the thought of coming victory but the agony that it would cause this thrall in the process.