A Captain swelled below the depths of his ship.

        Amber swirled within the crystal clutched in hand, entrailed by greed, desire, avarice. It's unseen remains fleet against the confines; toying with fault, entertaining the desire to fall. He can only watch.

        Beyond the walls, far from his constricting thoughts, his crew's cheers and hollers press against the oak door as a byproduct of their ecstasy, a skin of their golden lust, same as he. The muffled tempo upticks and drops. Upticks and drops. It never mellows for long.

        A hand, marred with the rigging of slow age, anchored by golden rings and sea-foam jewels, passed over his head, peppered white. His sigh weights the calcium in his bones – replaces it with the baseless riches beneath his vessel.

        The sea — the beauty, cursing her lovers with the crests of her ire, spilling over, bubbling in sea foam to grace the grains of the earth with only a fraction of her lamentation — was alive and incandescent against the fragility of the languished docks. A leviathan long kept caged.

        His head inclined to the hisses within her vastness; intaking, locking the addiction of allowing his mind to quieten, allowing his lungs to crystalise with salt, deep within the hollows of his ribs. Allowing her to take him as he was; the lamb between her jaws.

         The errand of a fool. The vices of a pirate.

        His neck catches a chill from the porthole at his back, unbolted and neglected, brine clinging to the brass and sticking within each crevice of the bolts. It was familiar, welcomed. The scent clung to his skin, to his clothes, forging him as a vessel, no more man than his ship. Simply a drop in the ocean. Insignificant.

        The ebbing salt settles his muscles, allowing them to hang, to untense. His eyes fell, eyelashes fluttering along the crest of his weathered cheek, glass barely slipping from his fingertips.

        They popped wide as a chill seared across his throat. Thin and argentine, halting on his carotid. His mouth contracts, as if to scream.

        "Don't." He stilled; rooted, grimy fingernails gripping the leather of the seat holding his weight. Beholding his fear. Ice crawled between his vertebrae. Stuck them together as his jaw hardened, lifting defiantly against the blade at his neck. A low voice, quiet, a writhing reverberation. A shadow that needed no face to pull fear from flesh – a shadow that's timbre, roughened iron, bore the edge of his sword within his throat.

        Blood rushed through his ears as if familiarising with the waves outside, taking their crescendo, melding their likeness. His words choked out of his lungs, heaving. "How the hell did you—"

        "With ease." The pirate shifts imperceptibly, testing his shadow's limitations, his perception. The silver gleamed closer, pressing to flesh, beading crimson red in an undeviating line. "I wouldn't test my courtesy. I'm not inclined to keep you alive."

        His pride permeated through his skin, prickling it with fury. "What d'you want, boy?" He spat.

        "Your ship embargoed from the harbour before sundown." The shadow's offer was clear, precise, quiescent — without room for retraction. His words did not waver.

        "Oh, that's grand. Who says I give a damn about what you're demandin', kid?"

        "It isn't optional."

        "We've got business here! Money to be made, I'm not—"

        Gold clattered onto the weathered table before him, muted greed by a leather pouch. Demanding to be heard. His eyes were drawn to it immediately; a captain's vice. "I'm sure this will sweeten your interest."

        There was a pause then. A stillness within the air — a precipice to fall.

        "Who are you?" The captain muttered quietly, barely twisting his head within his pointless aim to catch his shadow's face, crested by the last dregs of day.

        Words recollected, spilled ink and angered words forging bones and tendons and loins of the cadaver barely resting against his spine. Danger was no stranger to piracy — rather a crewmate who drowned in their inhibitions and their lunacy at their sides. But a killer such as this, a silent ghost, those were the kind that built themselves from the ruins of what they left behind.

        The shadow did not answer him. He didn't expect him to. "You leave the harbour by sundown. No later. If I find you here—"
his canines scraped at the shell of the captain's ear. His flinch rattled his bones together like the cacophony of the damned. "I will use your spine to cut the lines myself."

        The hound was alight upon the bow of his boat, bleached sails fluttering like butterfly wings in the sky, absent of stars. His silence was an abnormality to the wrathful winds, seeking to cohere with the scourging of the tide. The salt climbed the vessel's flanks, licking at his hands, paled when bathed in the moonlight, steeled from his hard grip. His fingers opened barely — seeking to grab that which he could not claim. Seeking to grab that which called him home.

        His breath escaped to the open air, and his eyes fluttered barely. The deck was barren; it would not remain so.

        The wind stilled, his feet finding their equilibrium. The waves, under behest, quietened their woes.

        He was nearby. Perhaps he had never left at all.

        "Well?"

        The Captain enquired to the open air softly, his voice carried in lilts and rivulets. His own ears strained to acquire a target of sorts, a grasp on the shadow lurking behind him; a wayward footfall, a heavy breath, the clink of the dagger handle at his hip.
He heard nothing at all. He was talking to the shadows.

        They sought to speak back.

        "It's done."

        The Captain turned, then — satiating his wanton desire to lay his eyes on the spectre himself. A shadow that he was not entirely sure drew breath within their space. A shadow who seemed to blur, to drift within inconsistency, who lacked definition like the crest of the waters.

        Shoulders leant against the mast, the man was predominantly shrouded by the sail's flailing, inkeeping with his lean frame. A man who withered himself down to a voice in the dark rather than the behemoth he could be forged to be. The monster in skin. The man who could only see the boy.

        His eyes, however, were lay bare by a streak of whitened luminescence that flickered with the erratics of the wind; his eyes, in the dark, glinting amber acuity, filmed over by a stiff reservation. Tendrils of black paused their beguilement in their movement, and his hand did not move to shake them from his forehead.

        Easily, his arms were slung across his chest, but the muscles in his forearms were pulled taut. His blade glinted like a magpie's glassy iris; steel, hardly possible to miss so easily. The tips of his fingers reached for its familiarity, a comfort the captain bore witness to, and said nothing.

        "A man of few words, Khaaral. I admire the resilience. I, for one, find such restraint strenuous."

        His lips upturned; canines gleaming. "An obvious trait, captain."

        "Such formality." Nikolai teased, letting his hands fall from the ship's side and finding home at his sides. "We are friends, no? Crewmates, certainly, but surely after working nefariously side by side for over a year, surely our relationship has grown."

        A vagrant wave cracked against the ship's hull warningly.

        "You're unnerving him." A voice called out beyond the vessel, and Tolya's large frame pushed into their eyesight, followed, steadily, by his sister. His voice was easy, teasing, but his eyes were snagged like a fisherman's bloodied hook on Khaaral's whitened knuckles. The kind of grip could shatter bone without an exhale.

        They tightened indistinctly at Tolya's withheld apprehension, gripping his forearms. The purple staining Khaaral's arms tomorrow, fleets of orchid bleeding putrid and wild on his flesh, would remind him of his place on this ship. Recall him to his shadows, retain him to his silence.

        "Apologies. Flirtations with those prettier than me is strictly against my morals, but they're certainly known to be malleable, at times." Nikolai's lips upturned at the corners, flashing pearly whites, bound by gaiety and his unceasing charm. A prize to be plucked, if his caution didn't exceed.

        Snakeroot is pretty, no? The sildroher of Fjerda? The Sikurzoi? Many things hold beauty, boy. They also hold blades. The malformation of his mother's voice rang through his head, rattling along her skull like her nails catching upon his hair. He shook it off easily — casting aside his ghosts.

        Tamaar pushed through Nikolai's honeyed words, deafened to them; Odysseus with waxened ears. "What's next?"

        "We wait." Nikolai said simply, his shoulder uplifting. At her disbelief, he continued. "That's the beauty of this plan, isn't it? With the Volkovny the only available vessel to take refuge on, the sun summoner will have no options left." The captain paused, as if his theatrics had gripped him by his red hair and woven strings about his wrists. "We let her walk into it herself."

        The sun summoner's face had been adorned across continents, her likeness etched in withering bark, in stone, in the faith and the flesh of the people. She was young, Khaaral had noticed; far too young. A pretty girl who's spine saw fit to crack under the weight of every act of war dealt from the capital. The erase of Novokribirsk. The tearing of the fold. The death of the Darkling. How was a child supposed to bear the weight of a continent's problems that exceeded her years by generations?

        This gift, this curse — it was their liability. It was a disease that they had allowed to congeal within their systems, and Alina Starkov and Khaaral were simply their vessels for a wider opportunity. A host for the ordinary's condemnation.

        Kharaal contemplated allowing it to bleed from him, soaking into the planks of the Volkovny as he was stolen, by his own willing hand, from the heart of the world.

        He had tried before. He was assured that he would try again.

        Tolya weighted himself as the devil's advocate. "And if she doesn't?"

        "She will." Khaaral murmured simply, but his conviction was undeniable.

        Weighting the surety that settled within the cracks of amber, the sturdiness of his chorded shoulders, Tamar shifted her weight. "You're talking about the soldiers."

        He hesitated — his tongue leaden in his mouth. His skin shifted, a monster hidden, serpentine beneath, at the prickle of eyes upon his unseen skin. He found the will to continue, refusing to allow his voice to waver.

        "First army, docked before dawn. They're searching for a deserter, the man she's with."

        "You think she cares for him enough to try and save him?"

        Khaaral wouldn't pretend to know the culminations of such harsh affection. His years, despite their minority, had aged him beyond visible comprehension, beyond lifetimes; his bones too frail, his heart too dessicated to attempt to beat for another. He had lost the meaning of love before he could truly learn its nature, and now, it could only exist to him as a diction.

        This crew, this group of able-bodied criminals that existed within the same space was the closest semblance to affection he could grace with his scarred fingertips. His silent care, to them, was not enough.

        "Love is feeble." He said finally, as if that was enough. "It inspires stupidity."

        Tolya clicked his tongue, his face twisted in counter action — his sister's fingers came to massage her forehead, anticipating the words next to drop from his lips. "Well, I wouldn't say feeble is the right word. Sartaq's sonnets—"

"Tolya, for saints sake, just shut up."

———————

AUTHORS NOTE!

Not that anyone gives a shit, but Khaaral is heavily hozier coded (I listened to him for ab 3 weeks before coming up w this plot fyi).

The buildup to him meeting Zoya is gonna be the most tedious thing but when they meet?! You bet I'm dragging that shit out I'm desperate to write their romance omg.

Thank you for reading!