Nearby, three Dougs rushed to the wheel, helping Salay heave to the side, bending hundreds of tons of wood to her will. The Crow’s Song veered right to the side of the line of rain, skirting so close to the wall of aether that a few of the crimson spears scraped the hull. Salay called for the sailors to steady and slow, for a reason Tress didn’t understand—until she saw that the giant snarls of interlocking spikes were sinking.
The aethers emerging from their spores had set the sea rippling, and their retreat doubled that, making it billow and quake. You don’t normally get true waves on the spore seas—not like you do on liquid oceans—but when you do, they’re extremely dangerous.
The Crow’s Song shook like the ice in a good cocktail, then tipped to the side like the person who’s enjoyed too many. Tress immediately felt sick to her stomach, then panicked at the thought of what vomit would do on a deck in the middle of the spores. She managed to find a bucket, her first job on the ship proving useful in an unexpected way.
Through it all, Salay kept shouting orders. It was almost as if she kept the ship from capsizing through sheer force of will. She moved the vessel at times against the waves, but at others she spun the wheel to flow with the pattern. In those few moments, the ship was a giant musical instrument, and she played it as a master, steering us to safety.
Unfortunately, right at the end, one final wave broke against the side of the ship. This spilled spores across the deck. Violent. Scarlet. Thirsty. Enough to overwhelm the silver protections for a few seconds. And Tress wasn’t the only one who had been ill.
It happened with a burst of red on red. A flash of spikes on the main deck, near the steps up to the quarterdeck. In the blink of an eye, one of the Dougs had been nailed to the wood outside the captain’s cabin. I’ll leave off crass comparisons to pincushions and just say this: I’ve never seen a man bleed out so quickly. But I’ve also never seen a man with so many places for the blood to escape.
Everyone stared at the terrible scene, and Tress groaned, turning back to her bucket for a second unmealing. Then the Dougs—remembering their training—scrambled for the emergency towels to sop up the blood and prevent any from leaking over the side of the ship. In the Verdant, a stream of blood over the side could have immobilized them. Here it would rip the ship to pieces.
Fortunately, ships on the spore seas are built to prevent this, with all seams pitched and sealed. The silver eventually did its job—and everyone walked across dead grey spores, grinding them against the wood.
In the midst of this dreary scene, the ship ground to a halt. The stilling had arrived.
I’ll admit to feeling uneasy, even now, about those days crossing the Crimson. I know the cosmology and arcanum of Tress’s planet quite well, and I’m confident that no entity directs its storms.
And yet. Knowing is not always believing.
The two dozen of us on deck turned, as one, to watch the rains veer and inexplicably bear down on us again. Relentless. Water in front leading a charge of violent aethers behind, wide as three ships beside one another.
A storm is a living thing, even when not specifically Invested. Because “life,” as a concept, is a human construct. We define it. Nature doesn’t care; it sees everything as a chemical process. It couldn’t care in the slightest that a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen one day decided it would really prefer to sit on a sofa rather than a bench.
Therefore, something lives if we decide it does. To us on that ship, that day, the rains were alive. They had to be. And I know for a fact Tress was shaken not only physically, but emotionally as she looked up from her bucket to see the rain coming again. Captain Crow was powerless to do anything. Not even Salay could save the ship during the stilling.
The line of water missed us by a few hundred yards.
What had seemed, in our horrified eyes, a direct attempt to kill us had instead been random chance. So we watched as the rain vanished into the distance, leaving a persistent wall of red thorns. They towered high, a barricade that would only sink once the seethe began again.
The rain danced around in circles in the distance, then vanished. A capricious god taunting us? A natural process, given autonomy only by our brains as they searched for patterns, meaning, and volition?
I know what I believed that day.
THE FALLEN
I implied that I didn’t remember the names of the Dougs. That was a lie—I wanted to keep your focus on the main players of this particular story.
But every person has a story, Dougs included. The one who died was named Pakson; both he and his sister were Dougs on the Crow’s Song. Pakson was tall and awkward on land—the type of man who seemed to have been born with legs a size too large for his torso. He was bald, despite his relative youth, and his neck kind of merged with his chin—to the point that after meeting him, you’d inexplicably get a hankering for a baguette.
He was also unaccountably kind. He was the man who had kept checking on Tress as she clung to the side of the ship. He’d held the rope with several others as Fort pulled her up.
He’d always laughed at meals and thanked Fort for the food, no matter how bad it had tasted. He loved music, but couldn’t play, and had always secretly regretted never learning. I wish I’d been in a state of mind to give him lessons.
Now he had fallen. We gave his corpse to the spores and sailed onward.
Tress felt responsible. Maybe if the ship had waited a few more months out in the Verdant, they wouldn’t have encountered the rains that day. She was terrified that Pakson wouldn’t be the only casualty of her recklessness. So she sought her room—and the distracting comfort of her spores.
As always, Huck was there. Talking to her about life as a rat. His voice distracted her from her problems. The ratty tales were relaxing; even when he spoke of fears and challenges among the rat community, she found herself soothed. Because those events had happened far away. They were personal, yet somehow abstract at the same time
“It’s really interesting,” he was telling her, “how much we can smell of the world that you don’t seem to be able to. Everyone’s shoes smell different. Did you know that?”
“I’d have thought they all smelled the same.”
“Not to a rat!” Huck said, sitting on the table next to where she was working. He launched into a story about how he’d been able to follow a human through a crowd by sniffing for the distinctive scent of his boots.
Tress half listened, half worked. She was tinkering with the other flares for her augmented flare gun. In each, she adjusted the amounts of the various types of spores, then recorded them in a notebook so she could see which experiment worked the best.
Up above, gulls called in the air. The Dougs, perhaps needing something to take their own minds off what had happened to Pakson, were fishing the air to catch meat for upcoming meals. Plus, birds were very rare on the Crimson, so you moved when you had the chance.
Tress soon had four different flares alongside four different charges. Each flare would theoretically release verdant aether upon hitting, but how much each released was different, which would help her iterate the design. And the charges each had differing amounts of zephyr spores.
She told herself this work would help the other crewmembers. The sooner she found a way to disable Crow, the sooner they could all point the prow out of the Crimson. Regrettably, this argument found a hostile audience, even though she made it only to herself. She was planning, after all, on trying to get the crew to sail the Midnight next—and it was said to be even more dangerous.