Once upon a time, I had loved these seas. It may have taken me my entire life to discover it, but sometimes I think I was born to experience this freedom. My first experience on a ship, all those months ago, had opened my eyes to the wonders of the vast blue expanse that defied imagination. Of clear skies, strong wind, a shining sun above, and companions with which to share in the sheer joy of sail. Fond memories of drinks shared under bright nights so tranquil it would make a grown man cry lingered in the back of my mind.

  Once.

  Now…that had all been stolen from me. From all of us.

  Those clear blue skies were gone, now. In their place was a rolling expanse of never-ending dark grey clouds, shot through with sickly-looking magenta lightning bolts frozen in place. They streaked across the sky in lines that never ended, disappearing over the horizon like the bars of a monstrously large cage. The crisp wind that had once filled the sails of every seaman upon Vereden was now weaker as well. Once strong gusts had been reduced to nothing more than faint breezes, only barely ruffling sails that had once billowed proudly. The very air was now dangerous to simply exist within, a strange, soul-deep corruption lingering within it that could kill a person within mere hours of exposure.

  Even the sea life was harder to find. I remembered schools of glittering fish and strange, beautiful creatures such as I had never seen before in the seas of this once verdant planet. Now, although the corruption didn’t touch the ocean this far from the shores, they still avoided the surface. Those water-borne guests and denizens that had once been so thick around me were now lurking deeper, as if they were afraid of the foul sky that had replaced what they knew and loved. It was still possible to catch a meal from the hidden bounty of the ocean, but it was harder now.

  And that was the key word, wasn’t it?

  Everything was harder now.

  Harder to eat. Harder to breathe.

  Harder to live.

  I hated it.

  I hated it so much that I found it difficult to think sometimes.

  Good thing I had a multi-part mind to do the thinking for me.

  I sighed, crossing my arms as I stared out at the grey waters my beloved ocean had become. It had been two weeks now since our desperate expedition had set out from the city of Blutstein. Five ships meant to save the world from the strange, horrific phenomenon known to us as ‘the Skyfall’. Five ships mean to assault the former Gem City known as ‘Smaragd’ in the heart of the Barren Forest, home of the animalistic Elves.

  Five ships meant to slay a god.

  Fynneas, the Mad God.

  If there was ever a longer shot than this…

  In those weeks since we’d set out from our homes and families in Blutstein, I’d tried not to dwell on the ultimate goal of the expedition. It was too much, sometimes. Instead, I focused on just ensuring our immediate survival.

  Despite my expectations, the mere journey north was proving more difficult than I’d expected. It was taking every ounce of not just my navigational skill, but of the captains from all five vessels in our flotilla. This far from the shore, we didn’t need to stay in tight formation so the other four could benefit from the wards that my own ship, the Astray, possessed. We were still maintaining our loose configuration, of course, but we weren’t close enough to toss a line to each other. My ship was still in the centre, while my mentor’s massive warship, the White Gull, was taking up the rear. I dearly wished Greycton was actually with us, but the man was still lost somewhere out on the continent, isolated by the corruption of the Skyfall.

  Along with the majority of the independent Order forces of Herztal, where most true Classers could be found. Including half of my officers and many of my friends.

  Instead, the third in command of Grey’s Order of the Eclipsed Dawn was in command of the ship, backed up by my friend and lover, Grey’s Sculpted daughter Sylvia. She was another Sculpted woman going by the name of Nyx, hewn from a dark black stone. I’d found her a no-nonsense kind of woman, very to the point and frankly a bit grim. Aboard her borrowed vessel were the remnants of the Order forces left behind when the rest of them left on an expedition of their own, hunting down a rogue horde of monsters.

  To my left in the formation was always the Steel Resolve, a ship on loan to us from the Navy of Herztal. It was…a fairly bog-standard warship, much smaller than the custom-built, personal vessel of Grey. She was captained by a young man by the name of Gustave Wersk, the nephew of old High Lord Wersk himself. His appointment was pretty blatantly nepotistic, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. We’d really needed the additional tonnage if we hoped to field enough troops on the campaign. The worst part was that I’d found the guy fairly tolerable, all things considered. He was very eager to please, and didn’t act much in the way of most spoiled lordlings I’d met in my time.

  On my right, I could see the strange, barge-like hull of the Ashen Bride, the ship that the Gnolls of the Throng had contributed to the cause. Despite my initial reservations about the design of the vessel, she’d kept up admirably with the rest of the flotilla. Part of it, I think, had to do with the oddly efficient water wheels helping to propel it. I’d never heard of such a thing being effective out on the open ocean, and I was positive that it was only possible through some heavy enchantment. Why the Gnolls had gone with the design, they wouldn’t tell me. But that was far from the worst part about the ship, really.

  What was, was that one of my personal friends’ Father was the Captain of the vessel.

  Commandant Marcel of the Mother’s Claw was the very estranged progenitor of Renauld, both the Captain of the Healing Division in my Order, and my personal Healer in general. The two of them had a, shall we say, adversarial relationship at the best of times. Thankfully, Renauld was here with me on the Astray, while Marcel rarely left his own ship. They were very deliberately avoiding each other, and I couldn’t blame them after I’d learned the history between the two. Even beyond that, my own relationship with the Commandant was best defined as icy. There had been a bit of a mild confrontation between the two of us when he had first arrived in Blutstein. The result was that we only tolerated each other for professional reasons.

  Finally, taking the front position of the entire flotilla was a vessel I still had mixed feelings about.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The Thorny Reef. A pirate ship that I was very familiar with, for multiple reasons. That ship…she’d actually been my first exposure to life out on the sea, and for that, I would always have fond memories of my time upon her.

  It was a shame that her Captain tainted those memories for me these days.

  Captain Isabella the Blue of the Thorny Reef, once of Marrowmist, and now in service to the naval intelligence service known as the ‘Bluebacks’, was once someone I had been very…close to. Those days were past, though, and the relationship had ended in a particularly abrupt manner. I was trying not to be petty about things with Bella, considering our history. But it was hard, I’d admit it. Typically, whenever the Captains met up to discuss our next move, I kept whatever I had to say to the woman short and to the point. On her end, Bella tended to keep an almost wary eye on me, as if I were a wild animal likely to assault her at any point. I think the other Captains sensed there was something between us, but thankfully kept their noses out of it, since it wasn’t impeding the expedition.

  Which was advancing…satisfactorily, I suppose. Our supplies were holding up well; there hadn’t been any serious disagreements among the various crews that couldn’t be dealt with easily, and morale was holding, barring a few incidents. Our pace was slower than we had initially hoped, partly because of the strangely dead wind we’d been experiencing since setting out. We weren’t quite mouldering in the doldrums, but it was slow going.

  Still, we were succeeding in one of our side objectives well enough.

  For the most part.

  The APD’s, or Aetherial Pressure Dampeners, were the crown jewel of the research project I had headed back in Blutstein. Just after the Skyfall, all available staff and students of the Academy of Mystic Arts had gathered together into groups to try and research the phenomenon. Our hopes had been to discover the source of it, how it had happened, or even how to end it.

  I had chosen to research the practicalities of how to survive it.

  Thus, the APD’s were born, a small, personal device capable of creating a relay to a ward schemata that would protect from the corruption of the wilds. I’d based the design on the strange ward stone that existed at the peak of my personal lighthouse home, partially reverse-engineered with the help of an odd half-Orc student who had joined the expedition.

  Sometimes, most of the time, I didn’t know what to make of Meia Itzelan.

  Before leaving Blutstein, I and the research team had taken an extra two weeks, working around the clock, to create a surplus of APD’s. Not only had I made the decision that all of the fifteen hundred odd members of the expedition were to be supplied with a personal APD-

  (And hadn’t that been quite the endeavour.)

  But that we needed crates more of them to hand out to every single village, town, and city we could find along the western coast of Herztal. Every one of the five ships had a section of their hold dedicated to APD’s.

  And we’d sure been giving them out. A large reason we’d been going so slowly was because we’d stopped at close to a dozen different settlements by now. Just approaching shore under the Skyfall was an involved process. The Astray always had to be part of the process, because it was my ship that had the protective wards. Then, we had to decide which ships wished to accompany me to shore, and then they had to actually fall into formation close to us. That wasn’t even considering just how tense an experience it was to navigate through the corrupted shallows. While the wards may protect against the deadly effects, that didn’t mean you couldn’t tell when you entered into that area. There was an almost hint of pressure against the wards as they were tested, and they became visible within the radius that they covered. Something I had discovered was that while, yes, the Astray also had strong enough wards to protect everyone, they weren’t as capable as those of the Gigant, the Throng’s monstrously huge lead vehicle. From what I’d seen, those divinely crafted wards didn’t become visible under the weight of the Skyfall the way those crafted by the Kawamarans did.

  But it was worth it to see the bafflement of those who had survived the Skyfall as we came sailing into their port.

  That, and their undying gratitude as we dumped dozens of APD’s on them, once we explained their purpose. We may not be able to deliver more of them to the people who lived beyond the shore, but it was enough.

  For now.

  Still…not every place we visited had made it through the initial press. A few days ago, our flotilla had spotted a small village hiding at the mouth of a cove and changed course for it. Only, when we set foot on their dock…we’d discovered why it had looked so still through our far-eyes.

  It was the smell that tipped us off.

  Everyone in that small collection of homes… was dead. Their bodies were still lying in the street and in their homes. The month or so since the Skyfall had begun had rotted their bodies to a grim degree, and the smell lingered over the entire village like a pall. We…couldn’t even scavenge any possible supplies from the ruins. Everything was tainted by the stench of death.

  Perhaps it was callous of me…but I’d ordered the entire village put to the torch, with the bodies of everyone we could find piled in a bonfire to be cremated.

  Did these people, whose names I would never know, deserve better than such a fate?

  Yes. Undoubtedly, they did.

  But we couldn’t waste the days it would have taken to dig graves for everyone. And so, under the foul glare of the magenta-streaked heavens…we burned them.

  Morale took a small hit, after that.

  It was only as we were leaving that I discovered just how they had died. One of the former Nocturne members who had joined the Polaris Reach quietly informed me that they’d discovered the village’s ward stone shattered into a million shards. It didn’t look like foul play, so much as the ancient stone just couldn’t take the added weight of the corruption at the moment it all began.

  Such a thing didn’t hold great implications for the rest of the world. Who knew how many old, out-of-date ward stones were protecting small settlements like this? The services of an Abjurer specializing in wards weren’t exactly cheap to replace them.

  Which brought me to now. While the Captains had collectively raised morale with a strategic release of some liquor for the crew, I wasn’t quite as content. The view of the grey seas had left me in a foul mood.

  That and…other matters.

  I was knocked out of my brooding at the wheel by the feeling of a clawed hand abruptly clapping down on my shoulder. I’d known they were there thanks to my Middle Lattice informing me, since he was watching our blood sense. But I hadn’t expected the owner to lean on my shoulder like they were.

  I shifted my eyes to my left and met the grinning stare of a mildly inebriated Renauld. The Gnoll had changed out of his Healer's robes for a much breezier set of seaman’s vestments in black and tan. I blinked at the smug look on his face, but didn’t get the chance to ask him why.

  “Congratulations!” Renauld crowed in my long, tapered ear just a tad loudly.

  I winced, but decided to humour him anyway. “For what?”

  If possible, the Gnoll’s grin grew even wider. “Why, because I’m clearing you! It’s now six months from the day I benched you. You’re healed, Nate. Your brainy meats are all nice and firm again, no risk of any nasty strokes or massive haemorrhages or death. You can go out and fight and kill and stab whatever you want.”

  Ah.

  I…see. That was good, I suppose. That had been a private concern I’d held when putting together this expedition, but not one I took seriously. It had only been a few days away from when I would get ‘cleared’ by Renauld anyway.

  “Good,” I said quietly, turning around to stare back out over the wheel. The view didn’t improve my mood. “That’s…good.”

  Renauld didn’t leave, instead choosing to enter my field of view by leaning against the railing behind the wheel. He’d furrowed his brow as he stared at me in mild concern. “What’s got you in such a foul mood?”

  I sighed and decided to get it off my chest. I suppose it was better out than in, and I knew I could trust Renauld. Probably more than most, really. “It’s just…our next destination. Do you know where we are, Renauld? Where we’re headed?”

  The Gnoll reached up, scratched his cheek, and shrugged. “No, not really,” He admitted freely. “I wasn’t paying attention at the last briefing.”

  “…it’s Elderwyck,” I said quietly, causing the smile on Renauld’s furry face to finally slip off. “We’re heading straight for Elderwyck.”

  The city…where so much had gone wrong for me.

  I wasn’t looking forward to returning.

  big one, both in terms of the plot as well as length. I barely feel like I'm a third of the way through writing it over on the Patreon, and that's over 40 chapters. I don't expect to be done with this book for quite some time.