Six days aboard the Seaman’s Revenge were six days too many. The ship was a floating testament to brine, body odor, and borderline tyranny. The Captain’s mood, foul to begin with, had curdled into something truly rancid the closer we got to the Dragon’s Tooth. Everyone could feel the tension building, and it made him twitchier than a man on a hot griddle.

  We kept our heads down. Nolan swabbed decks until his hands were raw and permanently pruned. Kaelen took on any heavy lifting duty offered, his stoic silence and knightly bearing earning him a grudging, wary respect from the crew. I made myself useful in the galley, chopping questionable salted meat and stirring vats of gruel, all while offering a running, internal commentary that would have gotten me thrown overboard had I said it outloud.

  Bartholomew, of course, had the best deal. He had been ‘adopted’ by the crew as a sort of ship’s mascot, a role he played with insufferable haughtiness. He would lounge on coils of rope in a sunbeam, accepting scraps of fish from burly, tattooed sailors who cooed at him in voices better suited to infants.

  “The quality of the tuna on this vessel is simply abysmal,” he remarked one afternoon, meticulously cleaning a paw after deigning to eat a morsel offered by the ship’s cook. “One can only assume it was caught before the cataclysm and has been pickled in despair ever since.”

  Griz was the real problem. The mountain of a man had been thoroughly chewed out because of me, and he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t know what exactly I’d done, but he knew he had been used. His eyes, small and sharp in his broad face, followed me everywhere. It was a constant, low-grade hum of anxiety under the relentless sun and the ship’s roll.

  So, two days after the heist, I decided to bite the bullet. I caught him alone near the portside railing, mending a net with hands that could easily twist the mast into a pretzel.

  “Hey, Griz,” I said, leaning against the rail beside him. He grunted, not looking up from his work. “I believe this is yours.” I held up the heavy iron key, letting it catch the sunlight.

  His hands stilled. He slowly raised his head, his eyes narrowing to suspicious slits. He said nothing, just stared from the key to my face.

  “You must have dropped it the other day,” I said, my voice dripping with a sincerity so false it was practically synthetic. “Right before the Captain started his whole… motivational speech. Found it near the ropes.”

  His expression didn’t change. He knew I was lying. I knew he knew. It was a beautiful, tense little dance of mutual understanding and plausible deniability. After a long, pregnant pause, he reached out and plucked the key from my fingers, his own calloused digits brushing mine.

  “Thanks,” he rumbled, his voice like stones grinding together.

  “No problem,” I said with a breezy smile I didn’t feel. “Wouldn’t want you getting in any more trouble.”

  A flicker of something—amusement? annoyance?—passed behind his eyes. He gave a single, slow nod and went back to his mending. The unspoken message was clear: We’re even. Now stay out of my way. I’d just handed a loaded gun back to its owner and hoped he remembered I was the one who’d unloaded it first.

  The rest of the journey passed in a grueling monotony of labor and salt-crusted exhaustion. The stone orb became my secret obsession. Every night, when the watch changed and our corner of the ship was shrouded in darkness, I would take it out. It was always cold, a deep, soul-sucking chill that seemed to leach the warmth from my hands. It was perfectly smooth, devoid of any mark or seam, yet it felt undeniably worked, shaped by an intelligence far older than the Captain’s gaudy sea chest.

  My Identify skill remained stubbornly useless.

  [Identify: Object] [Name: ???] [Class: Artifact]

  [An item of worked stone of unknown use or purpose.]

  “Wow, thanks, super helpful,” I muttered to the empty air after the tenth failed attempt. “Any other stunning insights? Perhaps it’s ‘hard’? Or ‘round’?”

  “Talking to inanimate objects is often the first sign of madness, or prolonged exposure to Nolan’s company,” Bartholomew mused from his nest of rags. He had refused to sleep anywhere that wasn’t lined with at least some semblance of comfort.

  “It’s not telling me anything,” I complained, rolling the cold sphere in my palms. “It’s just a rock. A stupid, quest-giving, captain-enraging rock.”

  Kaelen, who was sharpening his sword with a methodical shhhink-shhhink sound, paused.

  “Ancient magic is rarely obvious, Paige. It does not wish to be known. It must be… invited.”

  “Great. So I should ask it if it wants a cup of tea and a biscuit?”

  “Sarcasm is a shield for the bewildered,” Bartholomew intoned.

  “And you’re a cat who talks like a walking thesaurus. We all have our flaws.”

  On the afternoon of the sixth day, the cry came from the crow’s nest. “Storm, cap’n! Starboard bow!”

  We crowded the rail with the rest of the crew, the previous tensions momentarily forgotten. There, on the horizon, lay a smudge of purple and gray that slowly grew taller. The sight was not of a natural storm. It was a wall. A churning, bruise-colored monstrosity that clawed at the sky, its top hidden in a roiling ceiling of fog that seemed to suck the very light from the world. The wind, which a moment before had been a steady, salt-laced companion, turned sharp and spiteful, whipping my hair across my face and tearing at my clothes.

  “By the bloody deep,” a grizzled sailor spat, making a warding sign with his tar-stained fingers. “She’s a hungry one.”

  Captain Crispin roared orders, his voice cutting through the sudden din. “All hands! Reef the mainsail! Batten down everything that ain’t nailed tight! You there, Odd One!” he bellowed, pointing a meaty finger at Nolan, who was already turning a queasy shade of green. “Get below if you value the contents of your stomach!”

  Nolan didn’t need telling twice. He scrambled for the hatch, his face a mask of pure terror.

  Kaelen stood firm, one hand on the railing, his knuckles white.

  “Captain! Is this the storm you spoke of?”

  Crispin gave a grim, humorless smile, his eyes gleaming with a mix of fear and wild excitement.

  “Aye, Ser Knight. This is the gatekeeper. The storm that never sleeps, the fog that never lifts. This is what guards the Dragon’s Tooth.” She gestured to the maelstrom ahead. “The water’s a graveyard down there. Hulks from a hundred kingdoms, picked clean by sirens and things with too many teeth. But first, you have to survive the rocks. They’ll tear the belly out of this ship quicker than you can say ‘shipwreck’.”

  The Seaman’s Race began to buck and shudder as the first of the massive waves lifted her stern. Cold spray, thick as a blanket, drenched us all. I gripped the rail, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. This wasn’t a storm; it was an elemental fury.

  “Well, this is a decidedly unpleasant turn of events,” Bartholomew declared from inside the leather satchel I had slung across my chest. He had insisted on the arrangement, claiming the deck was ‘unacceptably damp and turbulent’ for a creature of his refinement. “I do hope the captain’s nautical bravado is matched by her competence.”

  “Shut up, Bart,” I muttered, my focus entirely on not being swept overboard.

  The world dissolved into a roaring, chaotic nightmare. The sky vanished, replaced by a swirling gloom pierced by the frantic shouts of the crew. The ship groaned in protest, every timber screaming as we climbed mountainous waves only to plummet into deep, terrifying troughs. Rain and seawater, stinging my eyes and filling my mouth with the taste of salt and copper.

  Through the howling wind, another sound began to filter in. A low, resonant hum that seemed to vibrate through the deck and up into my bones. It was a song, but not one made for human ears. It was a melody of longing and despair, so beautiful it made my chest ache, and so profoundly sad it made me want to weep. It promised warmth, safety, and an end to the struggle.

  Sirens.

  I saw a young deckhand, his eyes glazed over, take a stumbling step toward the port railing.

  “Grab him!” Kaelen roared, his voice barely audible. He lunged, grabbing the boy’s arm and yanking him back, slamming him onto the deck. “Stuff your ears with wax! Now!”

  But it was too late for some. I saw another figure, silhouetted against a flash of lightning, calmly step over the side and vanish into the churning black water without a sound. A cold deeper than the stone orb’s chill settled in my stomach.

  And then, a new sound. A grinding, splintering CRUNCH that jarred my teeth. The ship lurched violently, throwing me from my feet. I slid across the rain-slick deck, my hands scrambling for purchase. My satchel flew open.

  The stone orb, freed from its confinement, rolled across the tilting deck, its dull gray surface seeming to drink the scant light.

  “The artifact!” Bartholomew yowled, his voice sharp with an alarm I’d never heard from him before.

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  I scrambled after it on my hands and knees, the world pitching wildly. My fingertips brushed its icy surface just as the ship heaved again, sending it skittering toward the starboard scuppers. With a final, desperate lunge, I trapped it against my chest, the impact knocking the wind from me.

  And in that moment of contact, my world exploded.

  [Identify: Object] [Name: The Heart of Graund] [Class: Artifact (Bound)]

  [The Crystallized will of an ancient dragon, dormant. It does not wish to be known. It must be… invited.]

  The message was the same, yet utterly different. The name flashed in my mind’s eye, searing itself into my consciousness. The Heart of Graund.

  But that wasn’t all. As my skin made contact with the stone, the world didn’t just go dark; it inverted. The roaring storm, the shouting crew, the groaning ship—it all faded into a muffled whisper. I was no longer on the deck. I was adrift in a silent, starless expanse.

  And in the center of that expanse hung a complex, three-dimensional web of light. Thick, pulsing cords of silver and gold intersected with thinner, brilliant threads of blue and emerald green. It was breathtakingly beautiful, a map of cosmic energy.

  Our ship was a tiny, fragile blot of darkness adrift in this web. And I could feel the storm—a violent, chaotic smear of angry red energy—pressing in on us. I could see the jagged, malevolent black streaks of submerged rocks waiting to tear into our hull. I could sense the sirens’ call as subtle, hypnotic pulses of violet light, trying to snag our little blot of darkness and pull it apart.

  My Identify skill hadn’t failed. The orb itself had been refusing me. But the storm, the raw, untamed magic saturating the air, the adrenaline, the direct contact—it had forced a connection. It had invited me in.

  “Paige!” Kaelen’s voice was a distant echo. I felt his strong hands hook under my arms, dragging me back from the edge and securing me to a nearby mast with a length of rope. “What are you doing?” he shouted, his face etched with concern. “Trying to die?”

  I blinked, the real world rushing back in a cacophony of noise and violence. The vision was gone, but the knowledge remained, burned into my mind like a tattoo. I could still feel the echo of that web, the position of the rocks, the path of the clearest energy.

  The Captain was at the ship’s wheel, muscles straining as he fought to keep us from broaching.

  “I need eyes!” she screamed. “I can’t see a damn thing in this muck!”

  I untied myself from the mast, stumbling toward her. The deck pitched, but my feet found purchase. I wasn’t seeing with my eyes anymore.

  “Captain!” I yelled, my voice raw.

  “Not now, girl!” he snarled, her gaze fixed on the impenetrable wall of fog and rain.

  “Thirty degrees to port! Now!” I shouted, the command leaving my lips before I even knew what I was saying.She glared at me, her expression one of pure fury.

  “What did you say to me?”

  “There’s a reef! Starboard side, just below the surface! You need to turn. Now!” I wasn’t asking. The certainty in my voice was absolute, chilling even to me.

  Another grinding shudder ran through the hull, this one fainter, a glancing blow. It was all the confirmation he needed. Swearing a blistering oath, he spun the wheel. The ship groaned, turning sluggishly into the wave.

  “How?” he barked at me, his eyes wide.

  I just shook my head, my hands clutching the Heart of Aethel to my chest. It was no longer cold. A faint, almost imperceptible warmth was bleeding into my palms, a silent, thrumming acknowledgment.

  Bartholomew poked his head from the satchel, his wide blue eyes fixed on the orb, then on me. He said nothing, but his whiskers twitched. For the first time since I’d known him, the cat looked genuinely astonished.

  The storm raged on, but a new, terrifying rhythm settled over me. I became the ship’s lone, unlikely lookout, calling out directions not based on sight, but on the ghostly map only I could feel.

  “Hard to starboard! A dead hulk, straight ahead!” “Ease back! A whirlpool forming off the bow!”

  Each command was met with a string of curses from the Captain, but he obeyed. Kaelen stood by my side, a silent, steadfast guardian, his presence a rock in the psychic tempest I was navigating.

  We were dancing with death in the dark, guided by a stolen stone and a sarcastic college grad who finally had something useful to say. The monotony was shattered.

  The storm didn’t break so much as it simply… stopped. One moment, we were in the heart of a roaring, salt-stinging chaos, the next, we sailed into an eerie, breathless calm. The wall of cloud and lightning remained, a churning, black cylinder that encircled us, but directly above, a perfect circle of deep violet evening sky emerged, and the first hesitant stars winked into existence.

  The silence was the most unnerving part. After hours of the storm’s deafening roar, the creak of the battered ship’s timbers and the slosh of dark water against the hull sounded like a funeral dirge.

  I sagged against the ship’s railing, my muscles screaming in protest. The ghostly map in my mind, which had been a searing, painful brand, faded to a dull, warm thrum against my breastbone—the stolen lodestone, its job done for now. My head pounded with a hangover I hadn’t earned.

  “Well,” I said, my voice hoarse from yelling over the gale. “That was a whole new tier of clusterfuck. I’d rate it a solid zero stars. Would not sail again.”

  Captain Croft stomped over. He looked from me to the impossible vista ahead, his one good eye wide with a mixture of fury and superstitious awe. He’d obeyed my every screamed command, but the experience had clearly chafed every last one of his pirate sensibilities.

  “You,” he growled, pointing a thick, calloused finger at my face. “Witch. Or demon. Or something my gods wouldn’t approve of. You saved my ship. I’ll not be rewarding you for it. Get off at the first scrap of land we see, and may the Deep take you if I ever lay eyes on you again.”

  “Not a witch, just spectacularly unlucky with real estate,” I muttered as he stalked away, bellowing at his crew to assess the damage.

  Kaelen stepped closer, his shoulder brushing mine. He hadn’t moved from his guardian post the entire time. “You did it, Paige,” he said, his voice low and steady. The simple faith in it was a balm. “I have never seen the like.”

  “Yeah, well, add it to the list of ‘Things Paige Never Wanted to See or Do,’ right between getting dysentery and being an unpaid psychic navigator for a bunch of nautical ne’er-do-wells.”A smooth, disdainful voice sounded from a coil of rope nearby.

  “The cacophony has ceased. Might one inquire if we have arrived at our destination, or are we merely adrift in some preternatural purgatory designed specifically to inconvenience me?”

  Bartholomew, my verbose Victorian feline Gandalf, uncurled himself and began meticulously licking a paw, as if the recent battle for survival had been a minor disruption to his grooming schedule. His grey fur was impeccably pristine, not a single hair out of place. It was infuriating.

  “We’re here, Bart,” I said, gesturing weakly ahead. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

  We all turned to look. The sight stole what little breath I had left.

  Before us lay an island, stark and dead under the strange twilight. It was a place of jagged, charcoal-grey rock, as if some angry god had taken a hammer to the world here. At its northern edge, a solitary mountain dominated the skyline, its peak vomiting a continuous, sluggish plume of black smoke that stained the pristine circle of sky above us.

  But it was the southern coast that truly held our attention. Clustered against the shore was a city. Or rather, the ghost of one. Its buildings were carved from pale, bleached stone, forming terraces and towers that climbed the cliffs. It was beautiful, in a stark, skeletal way. And it was utterly, completely deserted. No lights flickered in the windows. No movement stirred in the streets. Nothing grew—no vines on the walls, no weeds in the cracks of the stone quay we were slowly drifting toward. It was a corpse of a city.

  Nolan stumbled up from below decks, his face the color of old cheese. He’d spent the entire storm retching into a bucket. He pushed his greasy glasses up his nose, his jaw slack.

  “Whoa,” he breathed. “It’s like… Minas Tirith, if everyone just decided to peace out after a really bad smog warning.” He squinted at the smoking mountain. “Is that… a volcano? Please tell me that’s not a volcano. My life insurance doesn’t cover Mordor.”

  “It is the source of the blight,” Kaelen said, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. His face was grim, his knightly training overriding any awe. “The shadow seeps from that peak. It has scoured this land of life.”

  “Swell,” I said. “So it’s a dead, cursed, volcanic island. The vacation brochures really oversold this place.”

  Captain Croft made good on his promise. He refused to dock properly, instead ordering a skiff lowered. He wanted us off his ship before we could curse it further. As he seemed to have forgotten our deal for another magical item, we didn’t argue. The creaking silence of the white city was preferable to the hostile glares of the crew.

  As we rowed toward the abandoned quay, the stillness pressed in on us. The only sounds were the dip of the oars and the lap of the black water against the pale stone. The air was cold and carried a faint, acrid tang of sulphur from the mountain.

  We climbed onto the dock, our footsteps echoing with a terrifying loudness in the absolute quiet. The Seaman’s Race was already turning, its crew scrambling to get back into the wall of the storm, to anywhere but here.

  We were alone.

  Nolan shivered, wrapping his arms around himself.

  “So, this is the Dragon’s Tooth? The place with the thing we need to find the thing to beat the other thing?”

  “The very same,” Bartholomew stated, leaping gracefully onto a nearby stone post and surveying the dead city with imperial disdain. “A repository of forgotten lore, if the legends hold a shred of truth.”

  Kaelen drew his sword. The ring of steel was a shock to the silence.

  “Legends also say the knowledge here was guarded. Nothing this potent is ever left truly unguarded.”

  A cold knot tightened in my stomach. He was right. The ghostly map in the lodestone had gone completely cold, inert. But a new sensation was pricking at the edge of my awareness, a feeling of being watched from a thousand empty windows.

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, my sass faltering for the first time. I pointed a shaky finger toward a wide, grand avenue that led up from the docks into the heart of the city. “I think the welcome wagon is here.”

  In the deepening twilight, figures emerged from the shadows between the buildings. They were not men. They were constructs of the same bleached, featureless stone as the city itself, moving with a low, grating sound that set my teeth on edge. They had no faces, no weapons, only the vague shapes of men, and they were shuffling toward us. Dozens of them. Blocking our only way forward.

  Nolan made a small, pathetic sound.

  “Are those… golems?”

  “Statistically, and based on classic fantasy tropes, yes,” I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. “And I’m pretty sure they’re not here to give us a tour.”

  Kaelen stepped in front of us, his sword held ready, a lone spot of silver and determination in the dead, white city. The dance with death in the sea was over. A new one was about to begin on grinding, stone feet.