Page 31 of The Crown's Awakening
"Fuck," he muttered.
"What was that, my lord?"
"Nothing."
He kicked his horse into a faster pace.
Time to return to the fucking palace. Time to save a fucking princess. Or whatever Alarna was calling her now.
"Fuck."
CHAPTER 11
Watermaker
Morning offers no relief. The darkness does not lift so much as thin, the sky losing its depth without ever finding light, leaving the horizon blurred into a dull, indistinct line where sea and air seem to merge. The ship has slowed, the water pressing back as though we have crossed into something that does not allow passage.
I step onto the deck and understand immediately why no one had called for me.
Everyone is already looking ahead. At first, I think the sea has frozen, the surface stretching outward in pale, fractured sheets that catch what little light exists and hold it there, broken only by narrow channels of dark water that force the ship into a path too precise to be natural. But the illusion does not hold for long. The closer we move, the more the stillness reveals itself to be something else entirely.
The frozen sections are not empty. They rise in uneven clusters, jagged patches of land or ice I cannot quite name, and along their edges stand figures that do not belong to the living world. They gather too tightly, as though drawn to the boundary ofsomething they cannot cross. Some stand upright, though even that feels wrong, their bodies held unevenly, out of alignment with themselves. Others crouch or collapse where they linger, limbs twisted, torsos incomplete, yet still they move when the ship passes close enough to draw their attention.
Their eyes find us first. Black, empty in a way that seems to consume the light around them until nothing remains. Some have no mouths at all, the lower halves of their faces smoothed into something unfinished. Others are missing eyes entirely, the hollow sockets left open and exposed, yet still they turn toward us, still they gather, still they follow our movement with a precision that does not require sight.
The air changes as we move deeper into it, pressing against my skin in a way I cannot place. It carries a cold that sinks into my bones, but beneath it there is warmth as well, faint and wrong, like heat trapped beneath a surface that refuses to release it. The two exist at once, layered in a way that leaves me unable to decide which one I am feeling more, only that neither belongs here.
Someone curses under their breath. Another follows.
The sound spreads quietly across the deck, enough to fracture the silence hanging there. No one looks away from what lies ahead for long, and even those who try remain caught on it.
I glance back without meaning to.
Teorin stands where he had been before, but something in him has shifted. The stillness he carries is no longer effortless. It is held, the tension drawn tighter beneath the surface in a way that is just visible enough to register. His color has drained slightly, just enough to suggest that whatever lies ahead is not somethinghe takes lightly. I have never seen him hesitate, and this is close enough to it that it unsettles me.
A sound carries across the water then, low and distant, stretching toward us in uneven waves that make it difficult to place at first. It does not belong to the sea. It does not belong to us. It rises again, longer this time, deep enough to settle somewhere beneath my ribs before I recognize it for what it is.
A horn, but it isn't ours.
“What is that?” I ask, though the question feels unnecessary the moment it leaves me.
No one answers. They are already turning. The vessel appears through the gray not long after, cutting across the water at an angle that brings it too close to ignore. At first it is only a shadow, something darker than the rest of the horizon, but as it draws nearer, its form begins to resolve into something far more distinct.
A ship, or what remains of one.
It lists heavily to one side, the hull torn open in places that should have sunk it already, the structure failing in slow, uneven shifts that make it unclear how it remains afloat. At first I cannot see the deck, only movement layered across it, but then the illusion breaks and the truth of it becomes clear.
They are covering it, climbing over it and clinging to every surface that still holds. The same bodies that gather along the frozen patches now fill the ship entirely, dragging themselves across its length in uneven waves, pulling at the wood, at one another, at anything that remains intact. The structure beneath them is already giving way, sinking not in a single motion but ina series of slow collapses, each one taking more of it beneath the surface.
“Please tell me that was not a Vaelor ship,” I say. My voice sounds calmer than I feel.
Teorin does not turn. “It was not,” he says, quietly. There is no hesitation in it.
I hold his words, watching as the ship lists further, the water beginning to claim it piece by piece, until there is no clear distinction between vessel and wreckage, only movement and decay.
Then I force myself to look away. “How do we enter the wards?”
He answers without delay. “There’s a connecting plank. It extends from the ship to the dock on the other side.”
