###Chapter 5: Year of Salt and Blood*
Ai’s first year at sea was a slow drowning. Not in water, but in hunger, exhaustion, and pain. It began in Kaiju Bay, the wind pushing the ship out of Sakana Cove like a reluctant offering to the waves. She stood at the rail, gripping the splintered wood, watching the land shrink into a jagged line before the mist swallowed it whole. No way back. No shore to run to. Just the heaving body of the Charybdis Sea, stretching out in every direction like a hungry god.
The ship was a rotting beast, stitched together with rusted nails and prayers. Ai’s place was deep in its belly, wedged between sweating bodies in the dark. Her bed was a sagging hammock strung between beams crawling with salt rot. The air stank—of mold, unwashed flesh, and the rank ghost of old meals. She learned to sleep in shifts, curling around her knife, listening to the creaks in the wood, to the muttered curses and snores of men who could turn violent in the dark.
Work started before the sun rose and ended long after it fell. She scrubbed the deck until her knuckles bled, hauled ropes until her fingers blistered, climbed the mast with arms that trembled from lack of food. The first weeks, her body rejected the sea. She vomited until there was nothing left, then dry-heaved until she thought she’d tear apart. The others laughed. The sea didn’t care.
Roderic ran the galley like a king of filth. He was fat and yellow-toothed, with hands that never stopped reaching. He doled out food as punishment or reward, giving her the worst scraps. The hardtack was riddled with weevils. The salted fish stank of something long dead. The stew was a grease-slicked slurry of bone and cartilage, thick with an aftertaste of rot. “Eat or starve,” Roderic would sneer, watching her gag it down.
She learned the ship first by pain. By rope burns and split nails, by the whip of the wind and the crack of a bosun’s fist. But she learned the sea through wonder.
They skirted Kelpies Bay. The water there was restless, boiling in places where no wind touched it. Shapes moved beneath the surface—long, sleek bodies, the glint of something too clever to be fish. The sailors muttered prayers, spit into the sea. Ai saw a head rise from the depths—long, equine, black as oil, eyes like twin lanterns. The thing watched the ship for too long, then sank beneath the waves without a sound.
By the time they reached the Salt Sea, Ai had found her balance. Her sea legs were steady. She climbed the mast like she was born to it, relishing the burn in her limbs, the wild bite of the wind. From the crow’s nest, the world was nothing but water and sky, endless and free. Up there, she could breathe. Up there, Roderic’s hands couldn’t reach her.
They passed the Alchemist Archipelago, where the islands clawed at the sky like blackened ribs. The air there shimmered, thick with fumes from unseen potions, turning the mist strange colors—green one day, deep violet the next. The crew whispered of men who could transmute flesh, of hidden labs where failed experiments screamed in the dark. Ai stood at the rail, watching the islands burn with their eerie glow, wondering what kind of magic could turn stone into gold, wondering if there was magic to turn weakness into strength.
But below, he waited. He was patient. And he always found her.
The first time, it was just a grab, a squeeze. A lesson in fear. The next, it was worse. And worse again. She fought. She tried. She failed. No one stopped him. No one cared. Hideo, the captain, saw and said nothing. His authority was an illusion, rotting away like the ship’s hull.
They sailed north, into the cold, where the sea turned black as ink and the air cut like a knife. The Ice Mage Bay was a graveyard of frozen wrecks. Icebergs the size of temples drifted in the fog, their surfaces carved with runes that glowed blue in the dark. The mages who lived there were ghosts in white robes, their breath curling like smoke as they walked the frozen shores. The cold burned Ai’s fingers, her lungs. It made her sharper. Made her remember that she was still alive.
And then she knew.
She wouldn’t endure. She wouldn’t wait for rescue. She wouldn’t pray for Roderic to stop.
She would stop him.
The sea had carved her from something soft into something hard. The work had shaped her, the hunger had sharpened her, the cold had steeled her. She could climb the mast in a storm. She could tie a knot in the dark. She could kill a man.
The knife in her sack was small, but it would do the job.
And when it was done, the sea would swallow his body like it swallowed everything else.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
Chapter 6: Red Tide
The ship groaned like a dying beast, its wooden bones straining against the ice’s merciless grip. For days, the sea had thickened around them, the water turning sluggish, then slushy, until one morning Ai awoke to silence. No waves lapping at the hull, no creak of timbers rolling with the tide—just the sound of breath, heavy and shivering in the darkness. They were trapped. The ice had closed in during the night, locking the ship in a vice of frozen steel.
The far north stretched endlessly in all directions, a world of white and blue, stark and unyielding. The wind howled through the frozen expanse, slicing through wool and flesh like a blade. The cold was alive, a creeping thing that sank into bone marrow, hollowing men out from the inside.
Then the deaths began.
The first to go was a deckhand, a boy no older than Ai. He had drawn the short lot, sent onto the ice to scout a path forward. He never returned. The second man was found curled in a corner of the hold, his fingers black with frostbite, his lips frozen in a half-muttered prayer. The third was Roderic’s assistant, a scrawny wretch who had collapsed beside the cooking fire and never gotten up. Each corpse was stripped of boots, coats, anything useful, and then heaved onto the ice, left for the cold to devour. The ship stank of sweat and fear.
Hideo, the cowardly captain, had retreated to his quarters, hoarding what warmth he could. He refused to leave, ignoring the whispers growing louder among the crew. Mutiny thickened in the air, the scent of it as sharp as blood in water.
Ai waited.
She had learned patience from the sea, from watching the way the waves wore down stone, the way the tides shifted and swallowed. She knew Roderic would slip, that one day he would not be surrounded by leering crewmates or the thick stench of the galley. She would not face him in the suffocating dark below deck, where the walls pressed in and escape was impossible. No, she would have the open sky above her, the ice beneath, the vast silence of the north swallowing his screams.
That day came when the first mate ordered the men onto the ice to hunt. There was nothing left in the stores—Roderic’s slop had run thin, and they had long since eaten through the last of the dried meat. Now, they scoured the frozen wasteland for seals, fish, anything that moved.
Roderic remained behind.
So did Ai.
She found him in the galley, his bulk hunched over a pot of sludgy broth, steam rising in feeble wisps. He didn’t see her at first.
“You think this is bad now?” he muttered, more to himself than anyone. “Wait ‘til we start eating each other.”
Ai stepped forward, her breath curling in the frozen air. He turned, and in that instant, he saw the truth in her eyes. No fear. No hesitation.
She moved fast.
The knife—a small, wicked thing she had stolen from the stores—sank into his gut before he could rise. He grunted, more in surprise than pain, his hands scrambling to grip her, but she was already twisting the blade, pulling it free in a wash of hot blood. He stumbled back, knocking over the pot, the broth spilling across the floor in a slick, steaming mess.
He ran.
She followed.
He made it out onto the ice, staggering across the frozen wasteland, leaving a crimson trail in his wake. Ai followed at a steady pace, the wind screaming around them. He slipped, fell to his knees, clawed forward.
“Please,” he rasped, blood bubbling at his lips. “Please.”
Ai said nothing.
She watched as the ice beneath him shifted, groaning under his weight. The sea was waiting.
The crack was sudden. A jagged wound split the ice, and Roderic slid forward, his body tipping into the freezing abyss. He caught himself on the edge, his fingers scrabbling for purchase, but Ai did not move to help him.
He met her gaze then, and for the first time, she saw fear. Not the cruel amusement he wore when he loomed over her in the galley, not the sneering dominance, but raw, naked terror.
The ice broke again.
And Roderic was gone.
His body was swallowed by the sea, his screams choked off in an instant. The water frothed red, then stilled, the ice sealing over as if he had never been.
Ai exhaled, her breath a ghost in the frozen air.
When she returned to the ship, the mutiny had begun. The first mate had dragged Hideo from his cabin, the captain’s once-pristine coat now stained with filth and fear. His pleas went unheard.
The knife that slit his throat was quick, merciful. The crew did not cheer—they were too hungry, too cold—but there was a grim satisfaction in watching his body hit the deck, in knowing they were free of his weakness.
The first mate took the ship.
They turned east, pushing past the ice, slipping around the great northern plateau and sailing south toward the Skeleton Mines, where veins of wealth ran deep in the stone and the promise of survival glittered like fool’s gold.
Ai stood at the prow, watching the ice fade behind them.
She had taken her first life.
It would not be her last.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
