A Clean Shave

Faith’s bare feet slap against rotting planks, each step echoing down the warped dock. The old pier groans under her weight, years of storms and neglect having eaten through the support beams like ship-worm through hull. The stench of low tide and dead fish fills her nostrils as she flees, her breath ragged, tearing at her throat like splinters. Salt spray has made the wood treacherous, slick as seal skin, and she can hear the water churning angrily at the barnacle-crusted posts below. Behind her, death moves through the mist with unhurried purpose, boots squelching against the wet planks with the patience of the eternal tide.

Gaff follows at his own pace. He has all the time in the world. His waterlogged boots squelch against the planks with each deliberate step, leaving dark prints that steam in the cold air. The cutthroat razor feels perfect in his hand, balanced and familiar as an old friend. He’d sharpened it on whetstone and hatred for two decades. The blade singing with anticipated violence.

“No!” Faith’s scream cuts through the fog as she stumbles over a coil of abandoned rope, the hemp thick as a man’s wrist and slick-green with algae. He watches as she falls hard, sliding across the wood, her palms scraping against splinters that draws beaded blood. She scrambles to her feet, but there’s nowhere to run—the pier ends in churning black water, and behind her waits vengeance.

Gaff steps into the moonlight, and Faith’s face goes pale as bleached bone. The silver light catches the cruel edge of his jagged smile, the glow of his supernatural eye burning like a lighthouse beacon. She knows that face, even changed as it is by time and the deep beneath the waves: the man who used to serve the Captain’s morning meals with steady hands and eager smile, the man they threw overboard twenty years ago, screaming his innocence to deaf ears.

“You can’t be here! I watched you die!” Her words crack with terrorised disbelief, Gaff can smell the guilt on her like rotten fish. She remembers. They all remember, even though they’ve spent two decades trying to forget.

Deny all you like, it doesn’t change anything.

“They keelhauled you! You drowned!”

Drowned—the word washes over him, sour and damp, bringing with it the memory of that final moment before his reawakening:

Darkness. Cold beyond cold, the weight of the ocean pressing down like the hand of a God. Then awareness creeps back like a tide, slow and inexorable. The ruins deep and black, older than memory,. Wet stones carved with symbols speaking of forces that ruled when the planet was young and the seas ran red.

No memories of before, just overwhelming hatred burning in his chest like swallowed coals. A tattered list clutched in his dead fingers, names written in careful script. His handwriting, but how long had it been there?

“Your vengeance is inevitable,” a voice whispers like the sound of continents shifting. Green light floods his vision. Power flows into him—dark authority of the crushing depths. “Go. Hunt. The sea forgets nothing, and neither shall you.”

The memory fades, but the hatred remains, a living thing coiled in his chest desperate to be released. A harpoon materialises in his hand—not summoned, but remembered into existence, every detail perfect from the iron point to the rope wrapped around the shaft. It splits the air taking Faith in the chest with a wet crunch that echoes off the water, the iron point punching through ribs and lung and emerging through her back in a spray of blood that steams in the cold air.

“No you bastard!” her voice chokes with defiance, blood frothing from her lips as he begins to reel her back like a landed shark. Her hands claw at the harpoon shaft, but the iron is cold as winter seas and just as merciless. “I watched you die! I don't deserve this!”

Anger achieves nothing.

Gaff’s voice is grinding coral, a sound that belongs to no living throat.

Death is inevitable.

The cutthroat razor appears in his other hand, the steel singing as it parts flesh and windpipe in one smooth motion. Her life ebbs between deck boards like wine through seams, pooling and dripping into the hungry water below.

Gaff nudges the body with his boot until she reaches the edge. One more kick, and Faith is floating face down, her hair spreading like seaweed in the dark water. The sharks are quick to feast, always circling just beyond sight. The ocean never wastes anything.

He pulls out his weathered list, the parchment stained with salt and blood and years of patient hunting. Red ink flows from somewhere—he never know where. He finds ‘Faith - Able Seaman’ written in his own careful hand and crosses it off with a single decisive stroke.

-----

Around him, Port Esperanza comes alive with evening trade—merchants hawking wares, sailors looking for work or drink, sometimes both, fishmongers selling the catch of the day to anyone with coin to spare. The smell of roasting meat and pipe smoke drifts from the tavern’s open windows, mixing with the eternal tang of the sea.

Cole never sees him coming.

The money-changer sits at his table outside the Brass Monkey tavern, ledgers spread before him like a general’s battle plans, stacks of currency gleaming in the lamplight.

But in his mind, Gaff is already there—has been for hours, watching, waiting, remembering. He moves through Cole’s thoughts like a ghost ship through fog, invisible but undeniably present.

Young Gaff’s confusion as he was dragged from below decks, his hands dirty from scrubbing the galley floors. “What necklace? I don’t understand—why are you doing this?”

“Tried to make a deal with me, split the profit,” Cole’s testimony echoes through the ship’s hold during Young Gaffs’ court martial. The air thick with tar and the sweat of frightened men. Officers sitting in judgment, their faces grave as tombstones. Cole’s voice never wavering, each word a nail in the coffin: “I saw him take it with my own eyes, wrapped it careful-like and hid it away. Been planning this theft for weeks, I’d wager. Looking a the piece I’d say it would fetch four hundred gold crowns.”

“The evidence speaks for itself, mon petit,” the Captain’s lazy drawl cutting through Gaff’s protests. “Four hundred crowns… more than you’d see in ten lifetimes of honest service.”

In the market square, Cole’s quill scratches across parchment with mechanical precision. “Copper dragons from the eastern provinces, three to one silver crown. Silver to gold, fifteen to one, minus the port tax…” His voice trails off as an impossible frost spreads on his half drunk tankard.

Only then does he look up slowly, his instincts screaming danger even before his eyes find the source. When he sees death standing there—pale and dripping, seawater running from his clothes in steady streams, that burning eye fixed on him—his face goes white as sailcloth.

The market bustles around them, but no one else can see what stands before Cole’s table. They see only a successful merchant conducting his evening business, unaware that judgment has finally come calling.

“Wait!” The chair topples like a broken mast as Cole scrambles backward, coins scattering across the cobblestones. His hands shake as he holds them up in supplication, rings catching the light. “We can make a deal!”

Deal. The word hangs in the air like smoke from a funeral pyre.

But Gaff has been making this deal for years in his mind, calculating the interest on betrayal, compounding the debt of false witness. The knife that takes form in his hand is no ordinary blade—verdict made manifest. It stabs through Cole’s left eye with a wet pop that sends blood and foul fluid coursing down his cheek.

Cole’s scream is the sound of ledgers closing forever, of accounts finally balanced. He staggers through the market square, hand clutching his ruined eye, bumping into stalls and sending pottery crashing in a symphony of destruction. But no one moves to help him. They see only a merchant who’s had too much wine, stumbling and raving.

“I can give you gold!” Cole shrieks to the uncaring crowd, blood pouring between his fingers. “Silver! Anything! Name your price!”

There is no bargain to be struck between the dead and the living.

The blade plunges again, clean through the second eye, snuffing out the last light from a man who saw too much and said too little. Gaff places two gold pieces over the empty sockets—payment for a ferryman who’ll never come.

Cole - Quartermaster

-----

The rope creaks in the alley behind El Corazón Dorado like a ship’s rigging in a gentle breeze.

The rope—The Bosun secures the rope around Gaff's neck, checking the knots with professional pride. Maritime execution was an art, and Marcus had always been particular about his work. The crew had gathered on deck, some faces showing pity, others disgust, all of them watching as the Bosun prepared Gaff to be dragged beneath the ship’s barnacle-crusted hull. Once secure Gaff was shoved from the fore of the ship into the churning waters of the Cursed Islands. The rope tight around his throat as the waters dragged him beneath the hull, barnacles like razors tearing his flesh away in long strips. Salt water filling his lungs as he screamed bubbles.

The rope finally snapping from his weight and the ship’s momentum, his broken body sinking into the deep.

The memory fades, leaving only rage and the satisfying weight of rope in his hands.

Asher swings slowly in the salt air, a crude noose around his neck, his feet just brushing the cobblestones. Above him, Marcus hangs motionless, the hemp around his throat professionally knotted—maritime execution done with a Bosun’s pride. The rope is ship’s hemp, stolen from the docks, and the knots are perfect despite the trembling hands that tied them.

They found each other, once the thrill of always winning was lost. An emptiness from perpetually knowing the outcome of any event. These two depressed men. Guilt had driven them to the same bottle, the same alley, the same reckoning with what they’d done. They’d been drinking together for hours when Gaff finally walked through the mist.

They’d seen Gaff’s approach as deliverance rather than damnation. When he appears from between the shadows like sea-foam given shape, they barely struggled. Marcus even tied the nooses himself, muscle memory taking over where conscious thought failed.

Accepting fate.

They’d stood on crates side by side, sailors preparing to climb rigging, hands steady despite what they were about to do.

“Together,” Marcus nodded at Asher, “Together we sailed, together we die.”

Die—“Does the boy really have to die?” Asher’s voice, younger then, troubled by conscience not yet drowned in liquor.

“Dead men tell no tales, mon ami,” the Captain’s lazy drawl wedged in between their protests. “Think about what we stand to gain—with those dice, we’ll never lose again. What’s one boy’s life against a lifetime of fortune?”

Marcus, practical as always: “Someone has to take the fall for this. Might as well be the new recruit.”

A resigned sigh: “Poor kid… but orders are orders.”

Now they swing together in the darkness, their bodies turning slowly like grotesque wind chimes in the dead air. The guilt had hollowed them out, left them shells of the men they’d once been. When judgment finally came, they welcomed it with the relief of sailors sighting land after months at sea. Gaff ties off the loose ends and draws his list out. Crossing off two names with two strokes of red ink, the parchment drinking the ink with insatiable thirst. The rope continues to creak above him, a maritime lullaby for the damned.

Asher - Petty Officer

Marcus - Bosun

-----

Will sits calmly at his desk when Gaff materialises in the ship’s cabin—from fine mist to a fine man. Charts clutter the desk showing shipping routes across half the known world. A glass of brown liquor sits half-empty beside an oil lamp, flickering in the supernatural wind that follows death wherever it goes. The cabin is richly appointed—mahogany and brass fittings, leather-bound books, an officer’s sword hanging from the wall. Twenty years of careful investment have served him well.

He doesn’t look surprised to see his executioner—if anything, he seems relieved, as if a weight he’s carried for decades is finally about to be lifted from his shoulders.

“I knew you’d come, mon ami,” Will says, setting down his glass with steady hands despite the supernatural presence filling his cabin. The liquor doesn’t slosh, doesn’t tremble—the hands of a man who’s made peace with his fate. “The sea don’t forget, and it sure as hell don’t forgive. Been waiting a long time for this visit.”

Have you now?

Gaff moves into the lamplight, and the flame gutters as if in a gale. Water drips from his clothes in a steady patter, pooling on the polished deck.

“Found out the truth about five years after we killed you,” Will continues, meeting Gaff’s burning gaze without flinching. His voice carries that familiar bayou warmth, the accent that once comforted a homesick boy far from shore. “Go on then, I’ve known this day was coming, I won’t fight.”

Fight—the word triggers a cascade of memory:

“FIGHT! Fight in the name of the King!” Screams from the deck as HMS King’s Hand closes with the pirate vessel Blacktide. The battle quick and brutal, cannon fire and cold steel deciding the day in minutes. Young Gaff kills his first man fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Captain, his cutlass parrying a pirate’s blade before sliding between ribs. Pride swelling in his chest at the Captain’s approving nod.

Afterward, in the captured ship’s hold, chests full of artifacts gleaming in the lamplight. Each piece worth more than a common sailor’s lifetime wages—golden chalices encrusted with rubies, jeweled daggers that hummed with enchantment, rings that could turn base metal to gold.

“Careful lad,” the Cole warned as they catalogue the treasure. “His Majesty’s Navy holds to a higher standard. Anything goes missing, it’ll be our heads on the block.”

Among the magnificent treasure, three simple carved dice looking worthless by comparison. Plain white bone with symbols carved deep into their faces.

“What about these?” young Gaff asking, holding up the dice with innocent curiosity.

“Magic dice,” the quartermaster muttering as he made his notations. “The holder can manipulate chance itself—never lose a game, never miss a shot, never choose wrong. Cursed things, more like. Magic’ll only get you killed in the end.”

But the Captain’s eyes had lit up like signal fires when he heard that. Fortune guaranteed. What was one boy’s life against that kind of power?

The blade comes to Gaff’s hand like a prayer answered, deliverance made steel. It crosses Will’s throat in one clean stroke, a thin red line draining life with casual ease. Will dies with a quiet choke, his last vision the spectre of his well-earned demise.

The last name on the ‘King’s Hand’ crew list, crossed off with Will’s own blood.

Will - [illegible]

But something gnaws at Gaff, a restless hunger that won’t be satisfied. He looks at the list again, studying the water-damaged parchment in the lamplight. All names crossed off except one

Must have folded the list wrong

The Captain… C…aldeaux…

The final memory rises like the tide, bringing with it all the pain and betrayal of that first day:

“Captain Caldeaux! This is the new recruit!” The executive officer leading young Gaff forward on his first morning aboard HMS King’s Hand, hands steady despite nervous excitement. The Captain’s charm radiating like warmth from a forge, that easy smile that could make anyone trust him completely.

“Mon dieu, you’re huge, garçon! What’ve they been feeding you in the enlisted quarters—whale meat and gunpowder?” Good-natured laughter from the crew, welcoming and warm. Young Gaff blushing with pride at being noticed by the great Captain Caldeaux himself.

“Welcome to the King’s Navy. Steady hands too,” the Captain said, shaking Gaff’s hand. “How would you like to do my morning shave? Keep you off swabbing duty and give you a chance to learn from watching an officer work.”

The first shave, nervous hands holding steel to an officer’s throat, trust absolute on both sides—or so it seemed. Then the ship lurched, the blade slipped, the Captain’s blood on Gaff’s fingers as that crescent scar was born.

Angry eyes flashing for just a moment before the smile returned, twice as bright as before: “Ah, mon petit crochet, you’ve given me some character! No to worry, we’ll practice until you’re perfect.”

Gaff’s laughter echoes across the water like breaking waves against a fatal shore, a sound that carries for miles across the dark sea. He has one last bit of shopping to do, one final name to cross off his list.

Trust built on lies, destined for betrayal from the very first day. The foundation of that relationship was always meant to crumble, constructed on false affection and designed for destruction.

Captain C…deaux…

Time for your final shave, Captain.

Dead men tell ALL the tales, and I have so many to share.