pirate king (pirate!au) ➵ ateez ✔️

witch

It's cold here.

The second you step into the tunnel before you, the stone wall rises behind you once more, plunging you and your captain into darkness, the only light that reaches you is at what you presume to be the end of the tunnel. It's far dryer than you expected for the lair of a sea witch, but you're definitely not complaining.

Hongjoong takes your hand and moves in front of you, armed with his cutlass. You think about drawing yours as well, but wielding a blade with your non-dominant hand is probably going to do more damage than any actual help, so you refrain from doing so.

Every step you take sends echoes bouncing eerily off the walls around you, so you hold on tighter to your captain's hand and stick to his side, shying away from the walls. Hongjoong's grip on your hand is firm and warm, pulling you with him as the two of you finally reach the end of the cave and step into the light.

To your surprise, you're not in a cave anymore.

It's a beach.

After joining a pirate crew, you had been on the sea for most of your time since awakening. And when you hadn't, you had often been at docks or beaches, and yes, you would like to say you had seen many beautiful beaches in your short "life" here so far.

But this beach is like none other you've seen before.

Tall, jagged cliffs rise around you like fingers stretching for the grey, stormy sky above you. No water touches your skin yet, but you can taste it in the air you breathe that a torrential downpour is on the brink of falling. The white, foaming sea ploughs forward and would have crashed down upon the beach you are on if it weren't for the rocky reef barriers breaking them apart, sea spray flying into the air.

"I hope this is symbolism for something bad coming in the near future." You mutter grimly, but before your captain can reply, there's someone standing before you.

You don't know how she got here. One second she wasn't there and one second she simply was, looking completely calm and unruffled as if she had been there the whole time and you two merely hadn't noticed her.

You nearly leap out of your skin in fright, Hongjoong handling this surprise a lot better than you are. He pulls you behind him in one smooth motion, tip of his cutlass pointed right towards the woman.

"Who are you?"

The first thought that registers in your mind is that she's beautiful.

No, beautiful is actually too tame of a word to describe her. When the fortune teller on Tortuga had spoken of a sea witch, you had expected for someone that looked much like her, an old hag draped in rags with occult symbols and beads, perhaps missing several teeth and smelling like she hadn't known a bar of soap her whole life. But you're almost guilty that you thought about her that way, because this woman is completely different from what you expected.

Her lovely, slender figure is adorned in a sheer golden dress that brushes the sand behind her and flies with the wind like a bird in the sky, woven from a material that for some reason you recognise even though you've never seen it before. Sea silk, you realise in shock, a textile so valuable it is actually worth more than its weight in gold.

In stark contrast to her gown, her hair is a midnight black, flowing over her shoulders in waves and plunging down her back to her waist like a inky waterfall, the strands gently brushing soft, petal lips.

Then you meet her eyes.

People say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. If that statement holds true, then the woman before you must have an eternal one, because her eyes are a bottomless blue that remind you of the deepest, most mysterious depths of the ocean. There doesn't seem to be an end to the infinite wisdom and grace of her, and when you look at her, face to face, she merely gives you a gentle smile.