Venture to Uncertainty (#1)

Prologue

The scout will die in four minutes.

He taps the edge of the crow's nest, mindlessly scanning the obsidian sea as he fights exhaustion. His friends might dread these shifts, but he is no victim of night phobia. He understands that the ocean is not any more dangerous at night than it is during the day, and legends are just legends. Unfortunately, his unique lack of fear has him struggling to keep his eyes open for the remaining ten minutes of his shift.

Three minutes. He scans the water strategically, just like the Navy Academy taught him to. If he runs his eyes across the horizon at least every few minutes, it is logically impossible that he will miss anything.

He taps the bucket of the crow's nest, once, twice, three times. The sea goes through cycles at night, and he's memorized them. Right about now, it's the darkest and quietest it will get; the waves are relaxed and the world is silent. It will pick back up in about an hour when the sun rises, the daylight spreads, and the sea becomes dreamy again. This is the Cobalts, after all, a place people once gave everything they had to reside in. It may no longer be the ideal haven it once was, but that doesn't make it any less beautiful.

Two minutes. If he focuses, he can find that little blur where the black sky meets the black sea. There's a sudden cold wind, so he tugs his coat around him. The skin on his arm prickles, and the hairs on the back of his neck raise. He brushes off the creeping feeling of unease, for he is not scared of the dark. Legends are just legends.

Even so, his mind begins to turn against his will. Aren't all legends based on some sliver of truth? If the scout weren't such a stubborn man—if he trusted the minuscule part of his body that just knew more than him—maybe he would've already rung his warning bell, screamed out for help and jumped overboard. Maybe he would've lived. One minute.

Fear is coiling in his throat, but he still doesn't understand why. He sees nothing, but then again, while the night may not be something devilish itself, it does conceal whatever knows how to hide.

And this thing knows how to hide.

The scout cannot brush away the feeling any longer. He reaches for the warning bell and opens his mouth to scream for help, but his time is up before he gets a word out. He slumps against the basket of the crow's nest. Without his warning, the navy ship goes on unsuspecting.

Across the ship, the helmsman falls quietly to the deck, no blood or signs of gore to show that he's dead. One after the other, silent as ever, the waking navy sailors are disposed of.

Legends are just legends, but all legends have a sliver of truth, and those about the Avourienne are no exception. While she may not be an invisible ghost ship captained by the Devil and crewed by his monsters, she is most certainly real, and her truth is far more haunting: She's both crewed and captained by no more than good old human flesh and bone. After all, evil is nothing more than a construct, and a weak one at that. Anyone can be turned into anything given the right amount of pressure in the right places.

Take the navigator of the Avourienne. He's hardly a killer, but he does know what it's like to be prey. He's a predator now, and he stalks onto the navy ship with every intention of keeping it that way. Across from him, his best friend and strategist of the Avourienne twirls a knife, balances it on the back of his hand, and then catches it. He could choose to remember life before this, but he'd rather not. And their scout? She closes her eyes with every kill she makes. Every life she takes is a day longer she gets to live. Everyone always has a reason, an origin story, some context to force your sympathy.

Until he steps off the Avourienne, polished leather boots shining, smoke billowing from a cigarette. He's a legend in himself, and it's exhausting just how much he knows it. He doesn't know how it feels to slave away as a deckhand or fear a pirate raid, and he hardly harbours a tragic backstory to contextualize his evil. He is arguably the most corrupt and deadly of the newcomers, and that's why they call him captain. He may be the most famous and the most important, but he is certainly not the most interesting. We've seen him before, and we'll see him again.

But his other strategist—the one scaling the back of the navy ship's balcony with the grace of a dancer, not a killer—she's unique. Her mind is always turning, planning, concocting, and she'd tell you elegance and violence are pieces of the same puzzle. She's not our villain, but she's not our hero, either. She's something in the middle, just chasing the adventure.

The living navy crewmen are woken and dragged from belowdecks. They are thrown into a pile on the deck and turned into a pyre. Some of them fight, but most of them are far too familiar with this story to fight their way out of it. The navy captain comes last, dragged from his quarters. He is given a choice, as always. He chooses death, as always. He is tied up to the mast to die of exposure. One man is thrown overboard, alive. Somebody has to keep the legend alive, because none of this is about money or treasure; it's a statement.

The sun rises again, welcoming another beautiful day in the Cobalts. It doesn't care what gruesome scene it might be unveiling as it rises, but if anybody were to catch a glimpse of the navy ship before it falls, they'd see their leader high in the crow's nest, struggling in the wind like some sort of symbol.

The pirate flag.