Chapter One
They were finally ready to set sail, the weather was nice and the wind was with them. Bidding farewell to land and stepping onto the Albutrae, Talli said a final goodbye to shore and crossed her fingers they’d find land soon, and come back rich.
The next few days were uneventful, and business went as usual around the ship. The cook, Becka Sanddune, was quite a good one, and she managed to create fairly good-tasting food with what was onboard.
5 days after they set off, a storm hit them in the middle of the night. A few kegs of beer and a lot of sleep was all that was lost, though they were blown off-course slightly. Seilrite didn’t seem very worried, and tried to keep the crew happy with a few words whenever someone asked if they thought they’d have missed anything.
“It’s what you’ll expect out at sea, nothing more. Sure we could’ve missed an island or what have you, but we weren’t set off-course as much as you’d think.”
Talli was convinced, but the crew were still a little disappointed and sulky. The chance of them missing anything important was, as the captain had said, very, very low, and Talli thought it a bit silly of everyone to be worrying about a small storm.
Everyone cheered up, however, when Briar Wright, one of the crew who was friends with Talli, spotted land.
“Land! Land! To the East of us!” He shouted down to the crew from the Crow’s nest.
“Aye, you’re right. Good eye!” Captain Seilrite said up to him, running to the bow of the ship and quickly shouting out orders to all the crew as they adjusted course.
After several hours of work and running around on deck, and several more hours of waiting, they were nearly to the small part of land the crew had been calling The Other Side of Shrae. Everyone was excited and restless, pacing around. Though Talli took a break to study the land ahead of them.
The island they were approaching was big, with tall, grey, slate cliffs to either side of a small, sandy beach. There was a small slate jetty on one end -- the perfect place to land the ship. Talli could see long, knife-like pieces of slate on the seafloor below, presumably knocked off of the slate cliffs and the dock-like peninsula they were heading for. Peering into the clear water below, she could make out clearly the many jagged rocks and slate chips resting on the sandy floor. And… was that movement? Something caught her eye, and she thought she could see something that looked like a skull tumbling down into a small rock crevasse, leaving a cloud of silt. No, it’s just my imagination, she tried to convinced herself, though she wasn’t so sure. She shook her head, but Sielrite interrupted her doubtfulness.
“Land, ho!” The captain yelled, as the Albutrae bumped up against the long slate jetty they were using as a dock, sending long slices of slate crashing down to the seafloor below, distorted cracking and smashing sounds drifting up from the water. Talli would have celebrated with the rest of the crew, but suddenly she wasn’t sure this was the best idea at all.
Below, a huge, armor-plated creature hissed to it’s comrades, drawing back into it’s small underwater cave.
Something intruding on their territory?
They knew how to sink a ship, they’d sunk quite a few in their day.
But hopefully the Skrass wouldn’t find out…
Everyone would be in trouble then.
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