The Hunt

The last of the salt pork hissed in the pan with bitter accusation, its meagre fat rendering into something that might charitably be called sustenance if one possessed sufficient imagination and desperate hunger. Duggan Flint worked the iron skillet with the methodical care of one who had learned to make miracles from scraps, his weathered hands coaxing flavour from ingredients that had surrendered their dignity weeks ago. The galley of The Siren’s Revenge bore the scars of recent violence—splintered timber, hastily patched, and the ghost of cordite that clung to the air like a shroud.

“Last of it,” Dug announced around the stub of his ever-present cigar, the words carrying more weight than mere inventory. He divided the meagre portions, each plate receiving exactly what availability and conscience demanded. “After this, we’re down to hardtack and whatever courage we can scrape from the barrel.”

Cal Caldeaux accepted his portion with languid grace. He had never quite learned to take anything seriously, including his own mortality. His fingers—those same digits that could coax probability into dancing to his tune—drummed against the scarred wooden table in patterns that might have been random, were it not for the subtle way fortune seemed to orbit his presence like a faithful hound.

“Ah, mon ami,” he drawled, that familiar bayou warmth threading through his voice, smooth and dangerous, “but fortune is fickle, non? One day we’re dining on the Admiral’s own provisions, the next we’re making poetry from pig scraps.” His eyes found Fortuna with the particular gleam that preceded either charm or catastrophe. “Though I suppose luck has been running thin of late, chère.”

Captain Fortuna Silver’s laugh held the bitter edge of winter storms and broken promises. She sat measuring her words as though they were ammunition, each syllable weighed against the cost of speaking freely.

“Luck?” she repeated, her voice a peculiar mixture of affection and exasperation that marked their tempestuous partnership. “Jobs aren’t exactly flowing our way since our dance with the good Admiral Tidemire. Word travels fast, and apparently our reputation now includes ‘likely to attract Naval retribution.’”

The silence that followed carried the weight of recent memory—the burning cantina, the blood on sawdust floors, the way their world had shifted irrevocably in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The rescued women, safely deposited in Port Haven’s most reputable boarding house, had been their one genuine triumph in an otherwise pyrrhic victory. Yet even that victory had come at a cost they were still paying interest on.

Dug worked his cigar contemplatively, steel-grey eyes studying his companions. “Been thinking,” he announced finally, “there’s other ways to make coin than piracy and smuggling. Bounty work, for instance.”

Fortuna’s expression grew sceptical, her gaze sweeping the familiar confines of her ship’s galley. “The Siren’s Revenge was built for speed, not fighting. She’s a thoroughbred, not a brawler.”

“Depends on the quarry,” Dug replied, producing a folded paper from his coat. The parchment bore the official seal of the Crown, its edges gilt with a particular lustre reserved for documents of genuine importance. “Found this buried beneath the usual rabble on the bounties board. Seems there’s something out there worth ten-thousand gold crowns to the right hunters.”

The sum struck the galley like a physical blow. Ten thousand gold crowns represented more wealth than most saw in their entire lives—enough to buy ships, fund dozens of expeditions, or simply disappear into the kind of comfortable anonymity that money could purchase.

Cal’s fingers stilled their drumming. “Ten-thousand? Mon dieu, what manner of beast commands such a price?”

Dug spread the poster across the table, revealing an artist’s rendering that seemed to writhe with malevolent energy even in mere ink and parchment. The creature depicted bore only passing resemblance to anything found in nature’s conventional catalogue.

“Yærring,” he read aloud. “Small humanoid, amphibious, supernatural agility. Seven failed expeditions.” He tapped the parchment. “But this is the part that got my attention: Subject displays apparent ability to manipulate local weather patterns, creating isolated storm systems of unusual intensity. Accounts describe reality distortions in the creature’s immediate vicinity, including but not limited to: temporal displacement, gravitational anomalies, and manifestation of illusory duplicates.”

Cal whistled low. “It fights with ghosts and storms? No wonder the bounty is so high.”

“Signed by the King’s own hand,” Dug added, indicating the elaborate signature that transformed the poster from mere bounty notice to royal decree. “Whatever this thing is, it’s got the Crown’s attention in a way that suggests genuine desperation.”

Fortuna studied the rendering with the calculating gaze of a predator assessing prey, her mind already working through the practical considerations that separated successful hunters from ambitious corpses. “Seven expeditions,” she murmured. “That’s not random misfortune—that’s systematic elimination. What makes us think we’d fare better than proper monster hunting crews?”

“Magic luck,” Cal interjected with his customary grin, fingers dancing over an imaginary deck of cards, “a savvy captain, and some well-placed buckshot. Besides, chère, what choice do we have? Our reputation won’t improve by staying docked, and our purse certainly won’t grow any fatter. All aside, a beast such as this might garner the King’s favour regarding past misdemeanors.”

They needed money, and money required risk. The only question was whether they possessed sufficient skill—or luck—to claim the prize without joining the ranks of those seven failed expeditions.

“The ship’s stores are nearly empty,” Dug observed, his practical nature cutting through romantic notions of glory and gold. “We need provisions, ammunition, proper hunting gear. That bag of yours,” pointedly implicating Cal’s recent gambling winnings, “might just cover what we need.”

“Ce qui est à moi est à vous, mes amis,” Cal sighed with theatrical resignation, producing a leather pouch that clinked with the satisfying weight of accumulated victories. He set it on the table with a flourish, though sharp-eyed observers might have noted its slightly diminished heft—a testament to his belief that even partnerships required personal insurances.

Fortuna examined the poster once more, her expression cycling through various iterations that commanded a successful captain’s attention.

“Well,” she said finally, her voice filled with resignation, “it’s a creature of trickery, not brute force. If this thing is as slippery as the reports suggest, then speed, not firepower, is our advantage. We’ll hunt it on our terms.”

Within hours, they had provisioned the ship with what supplies their limited funds could purchase, studied what charts they had of the Straights, and set course for waters that had swallowed seven previous expeditions.

-----

The Straits of Taraneth stretched before them like the pages of an unwritten book, each wave carrying stories of prosperity and catastrophe in equal measure. These were waters that had seen the rise and fall of empires, where a prince had once raised his queen from the dead, and the world still felt the devastating effects of the Gravetide even 400 years later. Now, beneath the dying light of afternoon, they seemed possessed of an expectant stillness that made veterans check their weapons and pray to whatever gods governed the heavens and the deep.

The Siren’s Revenge cut through the gentle swells with the grace of a predator, every line of her hull speaking to a marriage of speed and beauty. Now her sails hung slack in the dying breeze, the canvas barely stirring despite Fortuna’s muttered invocations to wind spirits.

“Becalmed,” she announced with the particular disgust reserved for circumstances beyond even a captain’s control to remedy. “Without a wind-channeller aboard, we’re now at the mercy of weather and chance.”

What remained of the crew after their encounter with Admiral Tidemire moved about their duties with mechanical efficiency, men who had learned to trust routine when instinct failed them.

Cal lounged against the mainmast with studied nonchalance. Cards appeared in his hands as though summoned by thought alone, and he began a seamless one-handed shuffle. For a moment, a single card—the Jack of Squids—seemed to resist, a brief, stubborn friction against his thumb before falling into line. He didn’t break rhythm, but his eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. The rest of the deck continued its fluid, silent dance.

“Patience, mes amis,” he mused, though his own fingers betrayed a restless energy that spoke to concerns deeper than his casual manner suggested. “The wind will come, and with it, our quarry.”

Dug moved through the ship methodically inspecting everything for the umpteenth time. All the weapons were cleaned and loaded, equipment checked and rechecked, his mind cataloguing every detail that might mean the difference between success and catastrophic failure.

Hours passed with leaden weight, each minute stretching into eternities while the sun traced its inexorable arc toward the horizon. The heat grew oppressive, that peculiar maritime stillness that pressed against the skull like cotton wool soaked in fever dreams. Men began to see shapes in the water that vanished when directly observed, movement in their peripheral vision that resolved into nothing more than the play of light on still water. The air shimmered with heat-haze despite the dying of the day.

“There,” whispered one of the crew, his voice carrying a hoarseness that comes from too little water and too much fear. “Something moving, port side.”

The water around the ship had begun to change. The still glass of the ocean subtly shifting in colours and textures speaking of undercurrents changing against standard logic. Ripples began to spread from points of apparent disturbance, though no cause could be discerned.

Then it appeared.

The creature rose from the depths with fluid grace, its form shifting and changing as though seen through water even in the open air. Small and humanoid as the poster had promised, yet possessing tentacles and fins suggestive of an entirely different relationship with the physical world than terrestrial life had ever negotiated. Its skin bore the blue-green hue of deep ocean currents, marked with patterns that writhed and changed as they watched. Most disturbing of all were its eyes—bulbous and unblinking, filled with an intelligence that regarded the ship with the calculating interest of a predator.

“Sacré bleu,” Cal breathed, his cards scattering from nerveless fingers. “That’s no ordinary yærring.”

The yærring moved through the water with impossible fluidity, circling their ship in patterns of reconnaissance and ritual. Where it passed, the sea itself seemed to respond, waves building and subsiding according to its whims, currents shifting to accommodate its passage. It was as though the ocean recognised a fundamental authority that transcended the normal relationships between creature and environment.

“Ready weapons!” Fortuna commanded, her voice cutting through the stillness. “Whatever happens, don’t let it get close to the hull!”

But the creature had already begun its true work.

The storm arrived without warning, manifesting around their ship with the wrath of vengeful gods. One moment they sailed on still-water beneath a dying sun; the next, towering waves crashed across their deck while winds howled with the voices of the damned. Lightning split the sky, illuminating the terrors beneath the surface. This was no ordinary tempest. The storm moved with intelligence, its fury focused and directed with surgical intensity. Lifting all manner of deep-sea creatures from their depths, harbouring ill-intent for the noble ship. Waves struck from impossible angles. The wind itself seemed possessed of malevolence, seeking to tear away their rigging.

“Wait!” Dug’s eyes tracked the creature’s movements with the attention of a lifetime hunter, tallying subtle inconsistencies. “The bastard’s showing us phantoms! Look at the water displacement—it’s not matching the creatures’ positions!”

Fortuna’s mind seized on the tactical advantage immediately. “Ignore the apparitions!” she commanded, her voice cutting through the supernatural chaos. “Watch the water, track the real disturbances! Fire only when you see genuine displacement!”

For one crystalline moment, their coordinated response seemed to work. Dug’s shots began finding their mark, forcing the creature to dodge rather than simply vanish. The yærring’s delighted laughter rang across the water, but now it carried a note of… appreciation.

“Clever humans,” a voice whispered from everywhere and nowhere, carrying the sound of tide pools and ancient mischief. “You see through the game. But what happens when the game… changes?”

The yærring paused its dance, stopping to float seemingly weightless above the prow. Its eyes flared, and reality twisted around them like heated glass. The phantoms they had so carefully ignored suddenly became solid, substantial, deadly. The leviathans that had circled their ship were no longer illusions, but genuine manifestations.

Fortuna called out a desperate series of manoeuvres, her expertise flawless as she attempted to use the ship’s speed against the multiplying threats. In any ordinary storm, against any conventional enemy, her commands would have been brilliant. However, the supernatural weather laughed at nautical logic, striking from impossible angles that defied every law of seamanship she had ever learned.

Dug positioned himself with the calculation of a master hunter, anticipating attack patterns, reading the subtle tells that had served him through decades of tracking dangerous prey. His instincts were perfect, his positioning exact—but the creature existed outside normal causality, appearing where it had no right to be, moving in ways that mocked his wisdom.

Cal tried to impose his will upon the chaos, his probability manipulation reaching out to establish some semblance of order. He successfully tilted the odds in their favour—hapoons successfully striking sea-monsters at critical moments, a favourable sway of the deck throwing a crewman out of harms way—though whatever forces governed the yærring’s existence operated in a subspace where probability held no meaning. His gift, so reliable in dealing with ordinary fortune, found no purchase against entities that treated reality as a mere suggestion.

“C’est impossible,” he gasped, his skin smoking as the blood beneath boiled, forcing his powers to their limit. “It’s like… like it’s not entirely here.”

The ship groaned under the assault, her timber protesting stresses that she had not been built to endure. A kraken seized the aft of the ship, choking the rudder and ripping at the planks with sticky tentacles. The rigging split apart like spider’s silk, sails shredded in razor wind, the deck buckling beneath their feet.

Through it all, the yærring danced.

Delighting in the chaos it created with the vindictive innocence of a child pulling wings from flies. Each impossible manoeuvre, each reality-bending leap, each manifestation of illusions —all were performed with an artist’s attention to dramatic effect.

“Brace!” Fortuna screamed over the howling wind, pointing to where the creature had materialised atop their mainmast. “It’s going right for us!”

But even as she spoke, the yærring dissolved into spray and mist, reforming an instant later at the ship’s bow with that same mischievous tooth-filled smirk.

The end, when it came, arrived with the sudden finality of dice clicking against wood.

Cal produced three dice from his coat—not his ordinary gilded playing pieces, but simple carved bone. They gleamed with an inner light, spectral symbols that shifted as reality bent around them. The artifact of his power, the anchor of his curse.

“Forgive me, mes amis,” he whispered as he cast the die.

Silence.

The world paused, space folded in on itself, origami made from storm and starlight. The last thing any of them remembered was the sensation of falling upward.

-----

Consciousness returned in fragments, each piece arriving with its own particular variety of pain.

Duggan Flint found himself washed up on a beach of black sand, the midday sun blazing overhead. His buckshot-rifle lay beside him, its barrel twisted beyond recognition of its original purpose. Pieces of The Siren’s Revenge dotted the shoreline in scattered fragments, each piece bearing witness to forces that had torn her apart.

He sat up slowly, cataloguing injuries that would heal in time, if time proved willing to grant such mercy. Of his companions, he could see no sign. The beach stretched away in both directions, empty save for the debris of their shared disaster and the peculiar black sand that seemed to absorb sound as well as light. Reaching into a secret pocket, Dug withdrew a new, impossibly still-dry cigar. Lighting up, taking a long drag. “I suppose I should start walking.”

Far away on a different isle, Captain Fortuna Silver pulled herself from the surf onto a rocky promontory that jutted from the sea. Her ship—her beautiful, swift, irreplaceable ship—was gone. Her hand closed around a piece of wreckage wedged between the rocks—a single, curved spoke from the ship's wheel, salt-bleached and splintered. She gripped it until her knuckles were white, the familiar shape a phantom limb in her palm. The bitter taste of defeat and salt water stained her mouth.

She was utterly alone.

Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Meddian, Cal Caldeaux floated in water that maintained a perfect temperature. The artifact that had saved them—or at least given them the illusion of salvation—had extracted its price. His memory felt thick and hazy, unsure if the events just passed were reality or dream.

The yærring was gone as well, vanished into the depths, no doubt pleased with the chaos it had wrought. The storm had passed, leaving behind only the gentle slap of waves against scattered debris and the weight of consequences that would echo across the remainder of their lives.

They had survived, after a fashion. But survival, as any of them could have testified, was rarely the same thing as victory. The sea had claimed their ship, their crew, their certainty about the fundamental nature of reality itself. In return, it had granted them the dubious gift of continued existence.

In the gathering dusk, three survivors began the long work of learning to live with what the hunt had cost them, each alone with their portion of the price that ambition demands from those who dare to chase legends across the corpse-grey seas of a world where magic and madness were separated by margins thinner than hope.