[Monster Hunting]

The wind held steady that afternoon, guiding the vessel along the currents, surprisingly tame this far into the deep blue. The sailcloth flapped in the wind with an almost lazy contentment while the hull glided through the glittering spray. Beyond the bow, a bank of dark clouds lurked, but even that ominous sight could not outdo the brightness of the sun on the water.

Luce stood ahead of the mast with a slouch. From behind, he looked like a spill of moonlit violet poured into the shape of a mantibab. Lithe but coiled with lean muscle that ached to be used.

“Almost too old for this,” the captain had said while thumbing through paperwork that had held Luce’s credentials. The pay had been good. It always had to be good or Luce didn’t bother. He fought for a living, and not for the romance of it. He fought because the apothecaries would only sell the mixtures that eased his sister’s ails for a steep price in coin.

He rolled his left foreleg to test it. It felt fine. The old injury, scar tissue braided deep around bone could decide on a whim to let pain unfurl like a hot iron. Today seemed a rare day of respite from it. He’d strapped it with a brace anyways. Pain had a way of smelling fear.

The crew of The Good Daughter did not bother Luce. They understood well the boundaries of hired strength. He had been told to watch the horizon for other vessels or anything that shimmered wrong beneath the swells. The islands’ rumor mills had been stirring up stories for months about beasts that rose like ink to tear apart keels and rip through nets. “Miasma,” the quartermaster had muttered like a curse. “Dark stuff. Sludge and crystal. Glows like corrupted gems.” Another had sworn he’d seen the insides of one. A glare of white like a star’s belly. The captain only spat. “If it shows jaws that bite and claws that catch then close it before it closes on you.”

Luce had nodded only once and tucked away the orders for later. He wore a harness hung with a knife shaped like a hook and a telescoping spear whose blade held an edge of glassy stone the color of oil streaked through water.

He held the rail with a paw, pads shockingly lime-green against the old wood, and let the easy pitch of the swell smooth the knots from his shoulders. Somewhere behind him, the crew laughed over a game of cat’s cradle. Another part of him, the one that had learned that calm was just another distraction if you let it, took a breath and held it.

At first, the sign was only an absence. The silence of the gulls, how they flew from the area as though sensing something wrong. The water directly off the starboard bow went a shade darker, a color that seemed to swallow sunlight. Something moved there, gliding under the crests of the sea with a patience that did not belong to any fish.

The helmsman didn’t notice. The captain was below, practicing a love letter for a landlocked lover that likely wouldn’t pan out. Luce’s left ear flicked toward the quiet patch as if it had been tugged by a string. He caught, just for a breath, a glimmer like polished metal catching sun at the wrong angle. He had heard about it in the stories recited in taverns. A glimmer just before the water breaks. The wink of miasma about to make itself known.

“Starboard!” he yelled, voice flat. He did not panic. He had learned there was power in calm, in not feeding panic before it turned brave men to fools. He pointed. “There.”

The helmsman followed his digit and saw it. The command “Brace!” erupted from a mouth that had not tasted that order in three peaceful weeks. Lines snapped through pulleys; the ship’s easy hum sharpened as if she too, were readying for battle.

The sea convulsed.

It did not break upward in a single surge but peeled itself back like a curtain dragged aside and seemed to unravel unnaturally. A mass of sludge and shining planes punched through. It rose thick as a tower, and then the light caught it and revealed its shape. Something that mimicked the shape of a sea-serpent, its body a sinuous column made of inky darkness around which shimmering crystal had bloomed in scale-like facets. Along its spine, fins like half-melted glass opened and closed, exhaling a smog that stank like tar and rotten fish. The outline of it glowed in violets and electric pinks that strobed along the edges of its bulk like lightning. Its head unfurled from the swell, long and blunt with a jaw shaped like a trapdoor. When it opened its mouth, inside it was the light of a star. Blinding white, so bright that even the outline of its jagged teeth vanished.

The first snap of jaws shattered a chunk of the forward rail long before anyone could react. The serpent’s head shot sideways, mouth yawning, and slammed into the wood. Ooze splashed and wherever it landed on the deck it skittered like living tar before hardening into glassy scabs that steamed. A deckhand went down swearing, his boot eaten away by ooze.

Luce’s expression did not change. He moved.

He pivoted on his good leg, letting the old injury take only a ghost of weight, and shot toward the shattered rail with a low coil of his body that would have looked like the start of a dance if not for the knife he had already grabbed with his paw. The spear extended to half its length in his other grip and placed himself between the creature and the baffled crew as naturally as he might have stepped between wind and candle.

The serpent turned its attention to the new creature standing in its way. For a heartbeat it mimed curiosity, head tilting, fin-ears vibrating with a crystalline chime. Then the glow along its outline seemed to vibrate. It meant to cut through the ship next, to rip and tear and bite until The Good Daughter became little more than splinters.

Luce’s horns hummed softly. He did not call it magic. Calling it that felt like dressing a working tool in ceremony. The currents of Crederia thrummed through his skin the way water slid through a net, and he tightened his grip on select threads. It felt like trying to catch an undertow with your paws. He ran that harnessed energy down through the glass-edged spearhead until it sang with power.

The creature lunged. Luce met it with a jab directly between two crystal plates under its jaw. The spearpoint bit and hissed and the miasma there charred, then flashed color. Pinks turning briefly to blue. The serpent recoiled in insult more than pain, fins folding and releasing a cloud of smog as it slid back and circled, filling the air with acrid scents that could have suffocated a skunk.

“Lines!” the helmsman shouted, finally breathing again though the scrunch in his face betrayed exactly what he thought of the smell. Two sailors snatched harpoon ropes from their racks and threw them. Inexperienced throws, but brave ones. The harpoons struck. One skidded along a crystal facet and spun into the water. The other stuck in a patch of sludge-like flesh and held. The serpent whipped its head and the rope went taut. The sailor holding it went airborne, and only the quartermaster’s quick thinking by grabbing the sailor’s belt with a steely grip and hauling him back to the deck, prevented a new, wet vacancy.

The sky darkened. Not the stormbank yet, but a shadow thrown by the beast’s own tainted glow. Luce watched the smear of darkness shiver and thought, with an old mercenary’s instinct, there will be more. Miasma rarely came alone. It called to itself. It colonized dread and despair within the hearts of those either brave enough or fool enough to face it.

As if in answer to his thought, the water to port burbled and a different shape rose. A thing resembling a crab reassembled by a drunk god, too many legs and a carapace that looked like a broken mirror floating in tar. Where its eyes should have been, holes showed that same star-white shine.

“Two,” Luce said, as if checking inventory. “Maybe three before we’re done.”

The crew swore as one. The helmsman dragged at the wheel, trying to give the ship some angle of escape. The wind did what it could but whatever current the miasma moved with was faster than the breeze and the water around them began to slow unnaturally, as if it had been thickened with glue.

“Captain!” someone bellowed from down the companionway.

Luce did not look. He was an instrument of chaos and the world fell into measures. The serpent cut another arc toward the bow, and this time he met it with the knife, slashing clean across a cluster of glowing nodes along its lower lip. The knife had been woven with threads in a pattern a smithy had crafted for him. A pattern from before he’d decided the word magic irritated him. The blade flashed and the nodes popped like balls of sap thrown into a fire. The serpent made its first sound. A warping moan that vibrated the bolts in the deck. It slammed its head sideways to crush its assailant. Luce leapt, the move light, but his old injury reminded him of its existence the moment his weight bit into landing. A shiver of pain laced above his ankle, bright and mean. He swallowed it whole, because there was nothing else to do, and funneled its heat into the spearhead.

The crab-thing to port found the hull and began to devour it with a flurry of chittering bites. Bits of teeth stuck like barnacles. One of the sailors, young, with a face that had not yet decided whether it wanted to harden or stay soft, rushed at it with a boarding axe. The axe sank in and then the crab’s slime swallowed it as if swallowing a spoon into pudding.

The captain burst onto the deck like a cannonball. She was a woman with arms knotted by ropework and eyes as pale as a winter sky. She took in the situation in seconds, quickly and deciding in an instant the list of priorities. “Keep the high one off the mast!” she snapped. “If it takes the rigging we’ll be dead in the water. Mercenary!”

Luce tilted his head to acknowledge without losing focus to distraction.

“You’re paid double if we live,” she said. “Triple if the hull’s not a sieve.”

He did not smile but nodded once. The promise of more coin lining his pocket incentivized like little else.

Three more shapes broke the surface. Smaller and pup-sized. Shells had formed around them from debris. A cracked slate roof, a tangle of coral, a ship’s figurehead with its eyes chewed out and scuttled with malice toward the scuppers.

Luce moved to meet the nearest. It sprang with shocking speed. He used his tail as an improvised blade, the tufted fur at its end snapping across the pup’s carapace. He had stitched blades into the hair there as well. It sliced. The shell split and the creature inside was a little sack of ooze. It shrieked as the air touched it and shrieked again when the spear came down and skewered it. Light flashed from the wound. Sudden, blinding and then gone. The pup wasted away into a smear that tried to crawl back together and failed. 

The serpent had learned from its first lunges. It dove, turned, and came up behind the rudder. It meant to take the ship’s spine in its jaws and break it. Luce bolted for the stern, but a snipe of pain caught his left foreleg and forced a hitch into his sprint. He forced his stride to swallow it. He shouted over his shoulder: “Hold her steady!”

“She’s steadier than we are.” The helmsman said through grit teeth. 

Luce leapt onto the gallows frame with the practiced ease of a cat taking a windowsill. The serpent’s head broke the surface not six yards away. He could smell it now, oil and the cooked stench of something long dead. It jerked to strike.

“Now!” Luce shouted.

The young sailor dove with a boathook and thrust for the serpent’s inner mouth. The hook caught and snagged. The serpent reeled, mouth yawning. Luce slipped to the side and drove his spear up under its palate. He felt the tip grate on something that was both bone and crystal and not exactly either. He dragged the spear along, carving a channel. The smell burned his nose. The serpent flailed and fled, passing back under the stern in a boil of bubbles.

“Good!” the captain crowed, exultation filling her voice. “Do it again!”

Luce did not answer. He knew better than to believe victory was theirs after a single skirmish.

Another pup scrambled over the rail and launched itself at his thigh. He kicked without looking. It burst like a split gourd and became unpleasant stinking confetti that tried, for a stubborn half-second, to reassemble itself.

The crab-thing had not been idle. It had chewed a dinner-plate divot from the hull and was working on a second. If left alone, it would make a symphony of holes. He followed with the spearpoint, sliding the glass edge into one of those star-white-holes and drove to the hilt. Light geysered as he dragged the spear sideways, opening a rent that bled neon. The crab spasmed and then sagged back into the sea, taking a young man’s whoop with it. The sailor whooped, the crab did not.

“Mercenary!” the captain called again. “What will it take to make you smile?”

“An invoice,” Luce said evenly, his voice filled with mirth.

The sky’s dark bank drew closer while they fought, but that was a concern for another time. Here, the storm mattered less than what thumped along the belly of the boat. The serpent reappeared, this time farther off the starboard beam. It had shed the last harpoon that now likely laid on the bed of the sea. It seemed subtler now. Instead of direct attacks, it glided in wide arcs, releasing curls of ooze that spread on the water’s surface like oil slicks which did something to the sea’s texture. Thickening it and making the ship’s forward labor cut to a crawl.

“Feels like wading through pitch,” someone said. “I hate it.”

“You hate everything,” the quartermaster reminded him amid the chaos.

Two more shapes surfaced from within those slicks. They were not beasts in any ordinary sense and more like inky blobs. They rose as lumps that promptly sprouted limbs. As if trying to decide on a form, each tested, sloughed and shifted. One shifted to an octopus shape but forgot three legs while the other became a long eel with wings. The glow along their edges intensified, and they came with a bullet’s speed, not big enough to sink a ship but more than enough to complicate a fight already prone to failure.

The crew fell into a rhythm. Long-handled tools to shove while Luce let himself be the arrow. The old injury snarled a couple of times, forcing him to lift his left foreleg a hair higher than natural. He ignored the odd hitch it put in his gait. Pain would find its quiet later. It always did, even if that quiet had teeth.

Despite their success, the serpent was learning. It lowered itself to half its bulk and skimmed the surface like a knife through butter. It approached the midship unseen except for a ripple that looked, to untrained eyes, like little more than a shadow. Luce was already there, because he’d been listening with other senses and sensed the ripples where the thing passed. He crouched on the rail as it came up.

For a breath, it was only the gleam of steel again, the shine at a wrong angle. Then it broke through. Its mouth yawned and made the world into an inside-out flare.

Luce leapt into that light.

He did it because sometimes offense is a better defense. The spear had a catch partway down the shaft. He thumbed it open in midair and the halves telescoped into twin short-blades, each with that glass-honed edge. One he drove into the seam of the serpent’s jaw and with the other he slashed at the membranes linking the jagged teeth. The monster howled. Its mouth slammed shut. Luce slid aside, taking the momentum on his shoulder. He hit the deck in a roll born of practice on less forgiving surfaces than plank and came up in a three-point crouch.

The serpent thrashed, more from anger than damage. It reared and the glow along its fins burned brighter, the outlines so vivid they turned the surrounding air into sheer color. Luce realized with a flash that it meant to throw itself across the deck, to crash its bulk in a way that would shatter masts and ribs both. Not a bite, but a body slam.

“Down!” he shouted, because even if they were not his crew by love, they were his by contract.

The creature fell.

When you throw a body long as a barge across a deck, gravity becomes more a danger than an ally. The ship bucked. The mast cracked. Lines snapped and the clamor of voices of men trying to pretend they were not screaming filled the air. The hull took the weight and rang back with a groan that made Luce’s skin itch. The serpent slid, leaving a smear of something that steamed and crystallized in the same second.

Luce found himself pinned against the bulwark by part of that smear. It clung to his hip, burning and then cooling into a brittle plate that tried to glue him to the wood. He sliced it off with a string of curses that would have made a priest reexamine his vocation. The slice took fur, flesh and left blood a bright accent against the rest of him. The wound would scar, but scars were an old familiar companion by now.

The crew scrambled. The captain stood rooted amid the chaos, braced and unsentimental. “Cut it loose!” she howled, meaning the serpent where it lay draped over the rail and deck both. “Push!”

They shoved. Pikes and boathooks found leverage between slime and wood and pried. The serpent had begun to ooze through the scuppers and if it decided to stop being a single shape and melt into several, they would be undone. Luce’s mind sharpened. He needed to make the serpent choose a single form. He needed to give it a target big enough to focus on in which several shapes would be a worse option than a single whole.

He climbed the pile it made, using crystal plates as steps, ignoring the heat that radiated off it like a foundry. He found the line of nodes he’d slashed earlier along its lower lip. He drove one short-blade into the first, then the next, then the next in a metronome of violence.

“Come on,” he murmured through grit teeth, “Stay whole. Stay mad.”

The serpent stayed whole, and it stayed beautifully, stupidly mad. It surged back into one piece, the portion of it that had been melting through the scuppers slurping back up like a snake’s tongue. It shook itself, flinging a shower of ooze particles that stung wherever they touched. Luce locked his legs around a ridge and rode the bucking. A droplet hit his face, and singed his cheek. The fur there went crisp and he smelled himself burning and did not allow the panic that smell carried to take him hostage.

Then the serpent did something new. It arched, bent until its head and tail almost met above him, and from the seam of its belly, a seam he had not noticed, another mouth opened. Not large, not bright. A smaller mouth, meant for tearing. It lunged for his leg, his left leg, as if it had read his old injuries with a predator’s intuition.

He moved, but he did not move quite fast enough. The mouth crunched him along the calf and through his brace where the old scar nested. Pain lanced so fiercely he tasted pennies as blood filled his maw. His grip wavered. He slid a palm across the crystal to catch himself and cut open the pads of his paws and lime-green pads flashed with blood. He almost went off the creature’s side into the sea. The thought of the water below him, thickened with slick, glittering with fallen shards, crawling with pups he could not see, did more to fetch his wits than any mantra. He hauled himself back up with a snarl and stabbed the mouth twice, once for each of the ways he wanted to curse. It retreated, wounded, released his leg and sealed itself shut.

“Hold her!” the captain called from somewhere below him. “Hold her, I said!”

The serpent tried to roll. The crew had jammed pikes in clever places between deck coamings so that wherever it rolled it would find pain. It frustrated the beast better than any direct attack might have and it piled on mistakes. More pups clambered up from the slicks, and one deckhand, the young one, took a bite to the arm but kept moving. The crab-thing tried again to return to the hull and found Luce’s thrown short-blade instead, the throw putting the blade into the thing’s carapace with a thunk.

The purple serpent groaned and Luce felt its breath on his teeth.

He reached for the seam between crystal facets on the serpent’s throat and slid the remaining blade into that seam and twisted. The blade bit and hung. He leaned into it with his whole weight. The injury in his leg screamed white hot. Some part of the pain went to the blade because he gave it no other place to go. The seam opened, the first clear rip from throat to chest. The air blared white, its insides brighter than any ray of sun. He was blinded but did not need his sight now.

“Now!” he yelled.

The crew did not hesitate. They shoved and prised even as their palms blistered. The serpent lurched and momentum took it. It rolled toward the rail, took the rail with it, and then, with a sound like a tower falling, sloughed back into the sea and the sea closed in over it.

Silence happened very quickly if you didn’t count the crew’s panting. There was a breath where even the pups forgot to be born. Then the sea around them bubbled. The slicks did not vanish. They regrouped. The serpent's head surfaced again, smaller than before, as if it had left part of itself behind. Its glow was dimmer. It spat ooze at them with malice and then dove, leaving trails of inky blackness.

“It will come again,” Luce said matter-of-factly.

The captain wiped slime from her cheek with a sleeve that had already been eaten away. “Then we’ll send it back to the deep again.”

“It’s strong,” he said, “but not patient. If we can tire it–”

The sea answered with a new problem. From directly under the bow a tower of miasma rose, not a beast but a column like a twisted tree, studded with crystal buds. It leaned, broke, and became four smaller columns.

He did what he had always done when a fight had begun to become a list of impossible odds. He made himself into a weapon of anger and chaos and set his blades to work.

He moved along the deck like an arrow and barked short commands: “There,” when a pup assembled, “Here,” when two sailors needed to strike, “Duck,” when a cloud of smog blew backward, because inhaling the stench directly would set a throat to wanting to close.

The old injury ceased to be pain and became a metronome. He used its throbbing to mark his cuts. Step, bite, slash. Step, bite, stab.

Between the columns and pups and the sulking serpent, the battle eased into something more like the weather than war. It had eddies. They fought inside those eddies, sometimes side by side, sometimes each against a separate beast. The deck under Luce’s feet became a map of where not to step. Ooze hardened into slick plates and slid his paws out from under him twice, skidding him into a bulkhead once so hard he saw stars. He managed not to drop his remaining blade. The other he recovered at cost, diving to retrieve it from the crab-thing’s pulsing remains, pulling it free with a sucking sound that would take joy from any future soup.

At one point the young sailor’s attention lapsed from fatigue, and the quick darkness made a pup decide it belonged in the world again. It tore free and went for the boy’s throat. Luce did not think. He threw himself at the angle and took the bite on his forearm. The same scarred leg, because apparently fate loved patterns. The teeth closed and molten fresh pain blossomed anew. He slashed the thing away and kicked it for insult’s sake. The boy retrieved his weapon with a shaking hand and did not cry the way some would have. Another time, Luce would have found that admirable. Now, he only nodded once and turned away.

How long did it take? Five minutes? An hour? A lifetime? The storm reached them while they fought, puncturing the heat of combat with a sudden, cool drizzle. Rain hated the ooze and it dispersed the smog. It also made the deck slicker as the ooze began disintegrating under its weight. The serpent reappeared one last time, smashed itself against the midships then slid, wounded, to circle. Luce knew it was losing interest. Not losing hate, creatures like this had wells for hate the way mines had for ore. But losing the upper hand.

He gathered magic in his horns until they felt like they buzzed. He took that energy and twisted it into a shape that he flung at the serpent’s face. It struck like a net of white rope. The serpent flailed and each time it tried to dissolve or divide, the net tightened. It had to choose to be whole again or be strangled by the loop. It chose whole and rolled in a way that brought its belly seam to where he could reach it.

He leapt down onto the net itself, using it as a walkway. He hit the seam with both blades and drew them downward, sawing with the desperation of someone carving a door through a wall. The star-white light inside the creature stuttered. The glow along its outline sickened to a blue-gray.

The serpent screamed a familiar sound, big and defeated. For a breath it looked like a thinning mist with a spine. Then it came apart. The miasma releasing its insistence on being a serpent, and the sea took the rest of it away. A glitter of crystal plates hung in the water for a little while like a flotilla of stained glass. Then those too, sank.

The columns shuddered and subsided, slinking back into the depths of the sea as if embarrassed to have survived their parent. The pups flitted back into oily puddles and sulked into sameness, then nothing. Silence came in earnest now, rain ticking on the deck the only remaining sound.

Luce stood in the middle of the ruin and let himself shake, but only inside. Outside he was a quiet statue with lime-green paw pads bleeding and his left foreleg stained red, stark against the rest of him. His coat smelled of scorched fur and sea. His cheek had begun to scab where the droplet had touched it. New scars added themselves to his old ones. He took stock of himself: left leg clotted and aching, yes, but not useless yet. Paws cut. Tail tuft sticky with dead miasma that would later require a long scrubbing to cleanse. Horns still buzzing in his head like an insistent fly.

The captain squinted at the water. Nothing rose. The dark stormbank had become their immediate weather now. She turned to Luce. “I owe you for ship that didn’t sink,” she said. “And the lives of fools I pay too little.” Her mouth made something that tried to be a smile and failed because old habits die hard. “Triple pay, you said? You’ll have it.”

“I didn’t say,” he corrected. “You promised.”

“I did.” She held out a paw bare of glove. He took it. Her squeeze made his cuts complain, but he did not flinch. She released him. “You’re welcome on The Good Daughter again, if you want. We can always use a bastard who slays gods and calls it routine.”

He did not answer. He only nodded once and moved to the rail, watching the place where the serpent had dissolved. The water looked like water again. The rain had washed away the last of the slick. A gull, newly returned and greedy for food, flew over the ship and screamed about fish.

“Mercenary,” the young sailor said, coming to stand carefully beside him, cradling his bitten arm. “What do you call yourself? So I can tell the next tavern the story of how the cold one with the pretty pelt kept me breathing.”

Luce almost refused. But the boy had not cried when he might have. “Luce,” he said. “And you?”

“Emry,” the boy answered. He stuck out his good paw, then seemed to remember that Luce might not be the handshake type and began to retract it. Luce took it anyway. The boy’s grip was firm but wary. Good. Wariness kept you alive out at sea. “Thank you,” Emry said.

Luce nodded once. Then, because some ghost of his sister's words from their youth had evidently taken up residence in his bones at that moment, he touched his cheek to the boy’s very lightly. Emry blinked, startled and a little honored, and did not embarrass either of them by speaking about it.

They set to work. The ship would not fix herself. The crew hauled tarps tainted with dead miasma into barrels of brine and washed them. The holes the crab-thing had chewed got filled with emergency plugs. Cunning wooden wedges that swelled when wet and a section of rail beyond repair was surrendered to the sea. The captain’s ledger emerged to take stock of casualties and repair costs. Money, at least, obeyed logic better than monsters.

Luce cleaned his blades in a bucket of rainwater and then oiled their joints before folding them back into the spear, which he then collapsed and re-holstered. He scrubbed his tail until the last hint of miasma slid away and examined his leg. The bite had punctured the old scar and would leave a new one like a map of his victories above the old. He wrapped it tight. It would hurt later in ways that would demand a locked jaw. For now it had the decency to be only another part of him.

The storm eventually passed and evening teased at the horizon. The sea, perhaps out of contrition, put on its most gentle face and glimmered as if trying to win back favor with the crew. The ship moved forward with renewed steadiness, though the crew’s eyes kept cutting to the water’s surface with the suspicion of those who had seen what the ocean kept as pets.

That night, Luce took first watch. Sleep would come later. It usually did, and when it didn’t he counted the boards in whatever ceiling was available until his mind agreed to forget itself for an hour. He sat near the prow with his back against the curve of it, his spear within reach of his paws. Emry dozed nearby, within reach but not touching.

He let himself look at the stars. He thought of his sister, whose laughter sounded like bells. He would send her jars that smelled like lemon and cloves and write to tell her about a fight on the sea with a serpent made of miasma. He would omit the worst and would give the story’s end the ring of triumph.

Near dawn, the sea returned to its usual tricks of bribing the eye with beauty and the illusion of safety, the horizon smudged with the pinks and yellows of sunrise. The island ahead crept nearer and The Good Daughter held her pace with a little sway of satisfaction. No dark masses followed. If any miasmic thing watched from below, it lacked the will to test them again.

Luce stood as the first gulls announced the good news of land. His left foreleg ached, but the ache had gentled into a negotiation he knew how to keep until he could find the comfort of his own solitude. He looked down at the water not to hunt for signs of danger but to admire how the sunrise made a mosaic of the waves, how each ripple of the sea reflected the light.

He saw his reflection in that mosaic. Ears ragged with old fights, horns proud and eyes that had learned to be cold but had not managed to be dead.

When the island’s harbor finally welcomed them, he felt something in his chest unclench. Not peace, but the calmer cousin of it. He had steered a vessel through a field of nightmares and come out with enough of himself intact to keep living.

As the crew made fast to the dock, the captain pressed a purse into his paw. It clinked with the sweet sound of coin. She did not make a speech. She met his gaze with respect and nodded.

When they finally parted, Emry touched his cheek to Luce’s and nodded. Luce nodded in answer, then turned and disappeared into the city where doors creaked and the world smelled of bread and salt and the relief of being alive.

The sea kept its secrets behind him. Somewhere deeo beneath its surface, miasma stitched with crystal plates skulked on the sand in waiting. Maybe the miasma would remember him. Maybe there would be other battles, other invoices, other scars. The world could try to trick him with its beauty all it wanted. But he’d long since learned that you could take a moment to admire the scenery and still keep your knife sharp. Next time, and every time after that, he would be ready.