Swimming In The Dark

The Atlantic Ocean at night bore no shade of blue. It was a dead, suffocating abyss—thick and cold as the tip of a dagger fresh from the snow.

Ixara lay curled in the bow of the narrow wooden dugout canoe, her fingers gripping the gunwale carved from an ancient mahogany trunk. With every surging wave, the craft was pitched high into the air before crashing down into the deep trough of the sea, spraying salt foam sharply across her face.

"Relax your body, Ixara," Daro’s raspy voice called from the stern, nearly torn away by the howling wind. "If you fight the waves with brute force, the sea will snap your ribs before you ever reach the hull of the white men’s ship."

Daro—the oldest warrior of the Ahtelan tribe, half his face bearing the twisted, ropy scars of a burn from a clash with Spanish slave traders ten years ago—strained his sinewy, heavily veined arms to hold the paddle steady. Beneath the cruel waning moon following the Blood Moon, his deep chestnut skin glistened wet with sweat and seawater.

Ixara drew a deep breath, suppressing the spasm in her chest. She raised her head to look ahead.

Less than two hundred yards from the canoe, the titan of oak and iron rested at anchor in the Straits of Corvane: the Sable Albatross.

In the gloom, the British Viscount’s three-masted ship loomed like a colossal spectre. Her entire hull was coated in a matte black finish that reflected no light, her sails stowed neatly against the yards like the folded wings of a raven preparing to soar. She lacked the ornate gilded carvings of Portuguese vessels and the rugged coarseness of pirate ships. The Sable Albatross possessed a cold, terrifyingly precise beauty—the ultimate product spawned from the foundries and ironworks of Northern England.

A ruthless contrast to her homeland.

Ixara raised a trembling hand to push back the long, thin braided locks sticking wet against her forehead. Her fingers touched her skin—smooth cocoa-brown, once praised by the elders as a gift from the Smoke Spirit.

Before tonight, that skin had never needed to hide in the shadows. She remembered the golden-brick afternoons on Corvane, when the southwesterly monsoon blew through vast stretches of ashbloom forest. Back then, as a maiden of nineteen, and later twenty-four, she would wear dresses woven from bark fibers dyed the color of red earth, her neck adorned with glowing stone beads gathered from the base of the meteorite mountain.

She remembered the clear laughter of the Ahtelan children dancing around campfires, their bare feet pounding the soft sand, while mothers ground maize in wooden mortars and sang ancient songs about the origin of the sun. Corvane had no towering stone edifices, no grinding metal gears, no soul-shattering gunfire. The island lived by the pulse of the Aurelith. When the meteorite radiated its warm energy from the central temple, the river flowing past the village remained sweet, fruit trees bore fruit year-round, and the people knew nothing of wasting diseases or the decay of old age.

Now, all of it had sunk into memory.

Looking back through the thin haze, Ixara saw only a withered black silhouette of Corvane. The familiar deep-blue light atop the mountain was gone. The trees were shedding their leaves in the night. The river water had already turned a murky, clotted brown.

"We are close," Daro whispered, lowering his paddle near the surface to avoid making a sound. "Her ship has six lookouts. Four sentries are pacing the main deck."

Ixara squeezed the small goatskin pouch slung across her chest. Inside was her sole inheritance from the ruined temple: a small quantity of processed, dried ashbloom leaves, three small flint stones, and an intoxicating root wrapped in burlap.

"Turn back, Daro," Ixara said, her voice hardening despite the bitter sorrow within. "Tell the elders... the prophecy has begun. Twelve moons will pass swiftly."

Daro looked at her, his aging eyes bloodshot with tears mingled with brine. He reached out a rough, scarred hand and squeezed her shoulder hard.

"Do the gods truly require this of you, Ixara?" he whispered, his voice shaking with helpless rage. "To surrender the pure body of a priestess to the white devil who stole our Heart? To carry the blood of our enemy within you?"

Ixara closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her eyelids, the purple ashbloom smoke from last night's divination rose again, seductive and cruel.

A half-blood child. A new pulse to replace the lost beat of the Aurelith.

"It is not a surrender, Daro," she said, opening her eyes—her deep black irises radiating a cold, resolute light. "It is a hunt. I go not to serve him as a slave. I go to reclaim what belongs to us."

Without waiting for Daro’s reply, Ixara slipped quietly into the water.

Splash.

The faint sound rose and was instantly swallowed by the lap of waves against the hull of the Sable Albatross. The freezing sea pierced her bare skin like thousands of needles. Ixara bit her lip, parting the water with silent strokes, swimming like a sea serpent toward the pitch-black hull.

The wood beneath the keel of the Sable Albatross was sheathed in a thin layer of copper to deter barnacles—an expensive British Admiralty technology. Ixara caught her fingers on a metal ridge, feeling the subtle vibration of the ship under the compression of the sea.

She worked her way along the heavy anchor chain hanging from the bow, deftly pulling herself up link by cold iron link. The physical strength of a woman raised among Corvane's rocky crags enabled her to swing herself up to the lip of a narrow cargo hold ventilation port—barely wide enough for a slender frame to squeeze through.

Leaning her back against the wooden hull, Ixara breathed heavily. Directly above her head, on the main deck, the hobnailed boots of two British sailors paced rhythmically: Thump... thump... thump...

"Tide's too dead tonight, Thomas," a low British voice grumbled directly above. "I hate lying at anchor near this cursed island. The air here makes me sick to my stomach."

"Hold your tongue and spark your pipe," a second voice replied with weary annoyance. "If Captain Wynmore catches you complaining, you'll feel ten lashes come morning. Just finish the three o'clock watch."

Ixara pulled a small pinch of ashbloom leaves from her leather pouch. Lacking a bronze censer, she tucked the dry leaves under her tongue and struck a spark from her flint against a piece of dry twine.

A tiny red ember caught. A faint thread of pale purple smoke began to seep through her teeth.

Unlike the heavy smoke she used for divination, this batch was blended with thousand-year sleep-root—an herb that lulled the human nervous system into a state of oblivious paralysis.

Ixara blew gently. The slender streamer of smoke rode the draft, creeping through the cracks in the deck planks to reach the watchmen above.

Five seconds. Ten seconds.

The footsteps above abruptly slowed.

"Eh... Thomas... my head feels... heavy..."

"Did you... drink too much rum..."

THUD.

The sound of two bodies collapsing onto the canvas-covered deck echoed dull and flat.

Ixara wasted not a second. Wriggling through the narrow vent, she dropped silently into the dark interior of the ship.

The cargo hold below the decks of the Sable Albatross was pitch black.

The scent changed instantly.

Gone was the crisp sea salt and the heady forest blossoms of Corvane. This place reeked of acrid gunpowder, whale-oil lubricant, damp oak, and spoiled rice. It was the odor of captivity, of the ruthless industrial civilization the Westerners carried on every conquest.

Ixara landed on her bare feet, dropping into a crouch on the oil-stained deck.

All around her were towering stacks of wooden crates lashed down with heavy coir ropes. Hundreds of barrels of black powder, sacks of grain piled like walls, and countless crates bearing the red wax seal of the British Empire.

She squeezed deep into the narrow gap between two rows of powder kegs and a sturdy oak bulkhead. It was pitch black, save for a few weak slivers of moonlight filtering through the ventilation slit.

Ixara curled up, pulling her knees tight against her chest. Her dress, soaked with seawater, clung to her brown skin, which shivered from the cold.

Thump... thump... thump...

She startled. It was not the pulse of the Aurelith. It was her own heart hammering against her ribs.

In the dead silence of the hold, fear began to gnaw at her mind. She had abandoned her homeland. She was lying beneath the feet of the men who had stripped her people of life. If discovered now, she would be branded a savage intruder, cast into a dark brig, or hanged from the yardarm before ever setting eyes on the Viscount.

To dispel the terror, Ixara closed her eyes, forcing herself to recall peaceful days.

She remembered her mother—the High Priestess before her. Her mother had taught her to listen to the voice of the green forest since she could first walk. Her mother used to hold her small hand, point to the warm brown tones of her skin, and say: "Our skin is the color of mother Corvane's earth, Ixara. No matter where you go, no matter how thick the dark becomes, the earth will always know you."

She remembered evenings spent on the grass beneath the Aurelith dais, listening to night birds mingling with the sound of the ocean waves. Back then, the world was simple and fair. No warships, no gunfire, no white men with cold, icy eyes and calipers in hand...

SCRATCH.

A tiny sound echoed from the aisle between two rows of crates.

Ixara held her breath. Her fingers instantly tightened around the handle of the fish-bone dagger tucked into her waist.

A faint orange speck of light appeared. A boy in a filthy coarse linen shirt, holding a small hurricane lantern, was tiptoeing carefully between the sacks of rice.

It was Jory—the fourteen-year-old cabin boy of the Sable Albatross.

The boy was checking the rope lashing. The lantern in his hand cast light through the gap between two powder barrels, illuminating the dark corner where Ixara hid.

The yellow glow hit Ixara’s dark irises.

Both froze.

Jory’s mouth fell open, his eyes round with terror. He saw a strange girl with dark brown skin, lips slick with seawater, and curly hair matted with sea foam. She looked like a siren risen from the ocean deep.

The boy raised a trembling finger to cry out: "In... intruder—"

"Do not call out, Jory," Ixara whispered in English—a halting, accented tongue she had picked up from traders washed ashore on Corvane years ago.

Jory faltered, the lantern swaying in his hand. "How... how do you know my name?"

Ixara did not move. She looked straight into the boy's eyes. In the dim ember of the lantern, through the thin trace of ashbloom smoke still lingering in the air, she saw a fragment of memory drift through the child's innocent mind.

A fair-haired woman with a gaunt face and a gentle smile was holding the boy’s hand in front of a small wooden cottage in the English countryside.

"Your mother... the woman with the leaf-shaped birthmark on her left wrist," Ixara said, her voice soft as the night waves, carrying an irresistible, mystic weight. "Her name was Martha. She used to sing you the song of the bluebells before she closed her eyes three winters ago."

The color drained from Jory’s face. The lantern nearly slipped from his grasp.

"You... you are a witch..." the boy whispered, tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. "No one on this ship knows my mother's name... Not even the Captain..."

"She still walks beside you, Jory," Ixara lied—or rather, spoke what the smoke revealed from his subconscious. "She does not wish for your hands to be stained tonight. If you raise the alarm, the men above will kill me, and this ship will be swallowed by the ocean's curse."

Jory stared at the brown-skinned girl before him. He sensed a threat, but far more than that, he saw a profound sorrow echoing the pain he had felt when he lost his mother.

Slowly, the boy lowered his lantern, blocking the light with his coarse sleeve.

"You... stay hidden here," Jory whispered, his voice trembling. "Do not step out. The night watch is coming down to inspect soon."

The boy turned and hurried up the wooden ladder, leaving Ixara alone in the deep darkness.

An hour later.

BOOM!

A violent tremor shuddered along the keel of the Sable Albatross. The sound of heavy iron chains scraping against the hull rattled loudly.

The sharp commands of officers echoed down from the main deck:

"Weigh anchor! Hoist the mainsail!"

"Catch the southeasterly breeze! Set course north—latitude twelve degrees!"

The five-hundred-ton vessel began to pitch, surging forward through the waves. Through the narrow vent, Ixara watched the scenery outside shift.

Corvane Island—her home, holding her childhood, her family, and her roots—began to recede. The ocean darkness rapidly swallowed the withered strip of land. The sacred forest, the stone peaks, the ancient temple... all shrank to a faint speck before vanishing entirely into nothingness.

Ixara’s tears fell, bitter and salty, mingling with the taste of sea salt on her lips.

She had officially lost her homeland. From this moment on, she was an exile, a drifting soul aboard the enemy’s ship.

Just then, heavy footsteps sounded directly on the wooden ceiling above her head.

Not the chaotic steps of common sailors, nor the steady tread of Silas Brandt.

It was a slow, ruthless, and commanding stride. The heels of high-grade leather boots struck the oak planks like the tick of a countdown clock.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The atmospheric pressure around Ixara abruptly shifted. The lead box holding the Aurelith in the captain’s cabin above radiated invisible vibrations, causing sharp aches in her wrist joints.

And then, a cold, sharp voice—hard as steel—echoed through the gaps in the floorboards:

"Brandt, report the wind. We need to clear these savage waters before dawn."

Ixara froze.

That voice.

Though her ears had never heard it directly, its frequency... that icy, ruthless, commanding aura... had appeared a hundred times in her ashbloom visions over the past three months.

It was him.

Garrick Wynmore. Seventh Viscount Wynmore. The man who had stolen the Heart of the Great Forest.

The man the gods had decreed she must seduce, surrender to, and bear a half-blood child with.

Ixara looked up at the dark wooden ceiling, her dark eyes flashing with a dangerous, shadowy fire. Her fingers dug tightly into the wall of the powder keg, feeling the ship speed across the vast ocean.

The game has begun, my rational Viscount.