And behold, the curse on mankind, imperfectly and grotesquely embodied for all to see. The prey turns against the predator, the order of nature and life itself is disrupted! One would rather die than spend another minute looking at such a vile image! The judge from a time long forgotten will feast on all it sees, beautiful and ugly, innocent and guilty, women and children, no one is exempt! Our heroes must surely be blind. Justice is dead, and we have defiled her holy corpse even further.
Perhaps we had three heads too many, perhaps we had three heads too little.
…
He hummed something that may have been a song, if you were to hear his hum two years earlier, and swung a bloody cutlass around in the air.
He kicks down the door to the captains quarters with confidence. There, two survivors lay holding each other, shivering. One of them is a woman, with a dangerous amount of blood pouring out of her head. Good as dead. The other is a man, but he seems a bit scrawny. No injuries.
Perfect. Should be easy pickings.
The raider grins.
“Just you two, huh? Surely there ain’t any heroes laying around here, waiting to slit my throat?”
Their eyes lock on his cutlass.
“Perhaps not. Today must be my lucky day.”
The man speaks up. “…D-Did you… did you kill them? Those things? Were you sent by… oh.”, he began to finish, but his sentence trails off.
More valuable information. There were atlanteans on this ship, but it seems they left before he came. Although, he wouldn’t have came to pillage if even one atlantean was left here.
He wipes his nose.
“Yeah, I did. But you know, all that monster slaying left me hungry. Any food around here? We could hold a banquet, haha.”
The two survivors awkwardly smile. The raider laughs for a bit, but his face quickly turns serious.
“Give me all your valuables, and I won’t skewer you through the stomach with a stake and turn you into human fish bait. You’ll have to settle for atlanteans, after all, the birds and the fish and all the beautiful animals have definitely made themselves scarce. I’m a man of my word.”
In response, the woman begins to cry. This conflicts the raider. These ones might not have anything worthwhile after all.
“Do you have anything valuable here? Like gold. Or jewels.”
The smaller man shakes his head, and the raider scoffs. “In that case, I’ll just kill you all- besides, I’d be doing you a favor. It’s a living hell out there.”
As the raider raises his sword, preparing to behead the man, but the women raspily speaks up.
“Elena! Don’t spea-”, the man says, but the raider kicks him in the gut, leaving him on the ground as he struggles for air.
The raider crouches over the bleeding woman.
“Good choice. Speak up.”
She does not look up towards him or say any more, instead pointing at a painting near the door of the captains quarters.
The raiders face contorts in a confusing way, as if he’s holding back a laugh or doesn’t want to show his anger. “So you lied to me?”
He raises his fist, but begins to feel prideful, and stops himself.
“Ha… I’ll let it slide until later. But just know you have further ruined your chances of surviving this encounter.”
He moves towards the painting and first stabs through it using his cutlass. A muffled clank is heard in response. He rips through the hole made with his blade and reveals a hidden cupboard, and inside of that cupboard lies a metal box. It’s damp and smelly, with rust completely covering it’s bottom. But where there’s a safe, there are riches.
“Lo and behold, good fella.”, the raider says, putting the safe on the ground.
The scrawny man on the other side of the wound tends to the bleeding woman, watching the raider out of the corner of his eye.
The raider attempts to slide his sword into one of the openings of the box. No luck. He tries smashing it open by stomping on it. Nothing.
None of his pre-prepared lockpicks make a dent in the safes lock, which means that it has a special key that would be used to open it. Wasting no time, the raider grabs his cutlass and holds the scrawny man by the neck.
“Where’s the key to open the box?!”, he says, raising his voice- but not too much. The scrawny man taps the raiders arm- signalling for a looser grip. The raider loosens his grip.
“…I don’t know- but please listen to me! I think I may know where it could be… but first, wouldn’t you answer me this one question? Even if you spare me and this woman here, we’ll surely be devoured by monsters soon. You know the Grand Navy hardly does rescues anymore.”
What the small man says is reasonable. Why not?
“Spit it out.”
“What use do you have for valuables, especially in these times? What’s the point of growing wealth when not even the lowliest merchant would even sell you a single grape for thousands of galleons? Currency is useless! So why?”
The raider thinks his answer over.
“I guess I’m just doing it for fun. I doubt really think this whole Atlantean Invasion thing will last for that long, and if it does, I’ll just hitch a ride to other Seas when the opportunity presents itself. Eventually the Atlanteans will run out of people to infect.”
An extremely unreasonable and logically stupid answer. Nobody will ever know whether he was serious or not. But the man has no power to argue.
“We have a crew bank in the ship’s storage. It’s likely the captain left the key somewhere down there, maybe in one of the lockers, than for it to be hidden out here in one of the lockers.”
The raider drags the man along with him, holding his mouth shut to prevent any screams from attracting Atlanteans. The scrawny man points to a hidden latch near the storage room which opens up a compartment filled with treasures.
Excited by the hoard, the raider whistles in anticipation.
“Well, I suppose this is where our partnership comes to a close. Goodbye, friend. A shame I don’t have the room to take this all along with me, but greed kills good men. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. A brave man like you might have a chance at Elysium, perhaps.”
But the scrawny man shakes his head and says, “Please sir, don’t kill me here. Anywhere but here! Don’t you have a heart? Let me see a warm smile before you end it for me.”
The raider slams the scrawny man into the ground. “You challenging me, runt?”, he snarls. But he catches himself.
“…Ha. I suppose I could spare the time. It’s not so much to do, I’ll just kill you a little while later. Since you’re still alive, make yourself useful and help me find the key.”
And so the two rummaged through the glistening gold treasure storage, for about forty minutes, until finally the scrawny man pulled open one of the floorboards and found a case containing an odd key. The key had an ominous look about it, with a faint glow coming from a small rat skull on it’s handle. The key itself seemed to be crudely made out of human and animal teeth- and it looked as if it could be used as a weapon.
Strange.
The raider eagerly took the key out of the small mans hands, and led him back to the captains quarters, thinking nothing of it.
The woman seemed to be half dead.
The scrawny man mutters under his breath, kneeling on the ground. There is nothing left to be said.
And so the raider took the metal box and opened it with his key. In the box there was a handsome flute adorned with an assortment of beautiful gems, making him grin. He knew a bit about playing flute, and back then, he was surely proud of it. At least, he was proud of it, until he saw the neighborhood boys playing a banjo in front of a group of girls.
In the very farthest corner of the box lied a folded piece of paper. The raider gladly took it, hoping it could be an ancient treasure chart.
Instead, it was a ripped song sheet meant to go along with the flute. It was written in a foreign language, but the music notes were familiar. Maybe a translation from a different Sea.
He turned back to the scrawny man, who gazed at the woman’s dead body with a blank expression, and beheaded him without thinking once or twice or thrice about it.
“Must have spent a bit too long out here. I’m feeling a bit dizzy.”
He swung the flute around in his hands with enthusiasm, joyously skipping along the ship, before descending back in his sailboat. He untied the hooks that he used to attach his boat to the ship, and let the sailboat drift along the sea, the rocking waves and splashing waters acting as a lullaby to him. And as his sailboat, he drifted to sleep.
…
One of the multitude said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” But He said to him, “Who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you?” He said to them, “Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man’s life doesn’t consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses.”
He awoke in an awkward position, with his head upside down and his feet hanging out the side of the ship. Today- or perhaps yesterday, has been particularly lucky. It’s hard to tell the time, when the sky is usually always purple.
Not a single Atlantean nearby. He was lucky enough to not have been awoken by the presence of such a beast. Despite the raiders Classlessness, he had “special gifts” laid upon him that made him particularly handy in times like these. Some could say he really just won the genetic lottery, though.
A strong sense of smell- which can be a blessing and a curse at times. This is the most useful out of his genetical blessings, granting him the ability to smell the scent of magic energy on people, animals, and things. Meaning he can smell Atlanteans- a priceless gift in times like these.
Although, by the time an Atlantean is close enough for him to smell, they’re usually too close for comfort. Maybe a few meters away… with good wind, about twenty meters. But even the smallest warning can be the difference between life and death.
The raider chuckles, stretching on the ground.
It’ll be better to just float around on the sea instead of sailing. Atlanteans seem to be more receptive to fast moving objects at sea, so the more run down your ship looks the better. He’ll probably be floating for a long while, and so knowing this, the raider shuffles through his bounty.
A few golden objects and some diamonds- swiped a few trinkets for himself, and the shiny flute that was so securely locked inside that safe. It intrigued the raider. Before, he may have been able to hustle a bit and find someone who could decipher the message inscripted on to the flute, but for now it will forever be a wonder in his mind.
Putting those thoughts aside, the raider leans back onto the creaky hull of the sailboat, which croaks gently as he moves about on the sailboat. Soon he’ll have to steal another one… though, such concerns seem to have become a second priority at this moment.
He beheld the trinket up into the air. It truly was strange. There is some sort of uncertainty coming from the flute, and it fills the thrill seeking raider with anticipation.
Remembering the flute came with a song sheet, he takes out the crumpled up paper and does his best job of straightening it out. He hums a little tune before putting the flute to his mouth, and playing the first note.
It was a short, twenty second song. And yet it felt like an eternity.
Each note, high and low, short and long, was truly beautiful.
Such a sewer rat such as myself…, the raider thought, …should never be able to lay his wretched hands on to some beauty such as this…
Something like a guilty pride kept the raider playing.
Yes. It was strange. He found himself playing the same tune over and over again, letting his soul flow along the tunes, leading him into the abyss of death like a seductress does a rich man.
.
.
.
Humans have something like a built in alarm. to alert them of predators. You might feel something like this when viewing a particularly gnarly piece of art, or perhaps reading a foreboding chapter in a book, almost too worried to flip to the next page. The strong have had this sense dulled overtime, turning that fear into anticipation, and using it to continue getting stronger.
But we feel fear for a reason.
The raider stared face to face with a giant monstrosity, with three ugly human-like heads deformed beyond repair. Some sort of twisted abomination between snake and man. The sea around him turned red with blood, and a horrible stench wafted through out the air. The monstrosity uttered, with a forked tongue slipping out of its mouth. The raider could not respond, frozen together like a statue.
“A judgement awaits,” the monstrosity muttered. “I can see inside of your soul, and it is disgusting. Not unlike the others.”
The monster sighed, picking the raider up by the leg and holding him into the air.
“A rat like you doesn’t deserve to die by the sword. You are no scourge, you are a small and shrunken little thing, cowering on my finger. Even before we decided to break the barriers of your world and cast hell over the skies, you were always a scum- weren’t you? Confess to me what you have done.”
Coming to his wits, the man yelled and pleaded to a force he could not control.
“Wait! Wait, please, lord! I- I… I am as lowly as you’ve described me, sir! Spare my life and all these riches here are yours, I swear on it!”
It’s face contorted into a pleasurable crescent, a terrible and toothy smile, as if it was pretending to grin.
“Perhaps I should be glad. Your pride has killed you- don’t you know all the gold you have stolen, and even the flute you summoned me with, all of them belong to me? I will eat you. And you will reside in my stomach for eternity.”
So, the monster lifted the raider higher up into the air, opening its mouth almost too wide, dangling the scoundrel inches away from death. Inside of its mouth was an eerie darkness, that brought about a primal childlike fear within him- as if he were but a boy once again, begging his father to light the candles in his bedroom.
And the raider saw, within that abyss, a horror that couldn’t be explained simply with words. It was terrifying, it was cruel, it was wrong- down to the very concept of it. It was wrong… it was all wrong!
It filled the bandits mind with thoughts of calamity- calamity soon to come. A mass for the dead, a new humanity- where violence and blood ruled over love and reason. No more frolicking children, no more shiny trinkets, no joy. Only an abyss of endless hatred and relentless vengeance. Everyone will die, and be reborn in the land of Hades himself!
He regretted his choice. He should have closed his eyes. But he can’t smell the future.
What has happened and what he has seen was inevitable.
So, the monstrosity loosened its grip, and with a light splash, the bandit felt into the darkness. Never to return.
…
…
A young scavenger jumps down from a burning ship, into a sailboat- one of the smaller sizes.
“Sails down, Fern. This wreck is looted.”
He calls out again, louder.
“Fern…? You there? Hey!”
In a rushed panic, the young man runs through the sailboat searching for his ally, but trips over a lump on the boards. Adrenaline spiking in his blood, he loads a flintlock and whips his head around, aiming the gun at the lump… but shakily releases his grip on the weapon after hearing a light snore.
The scavenger scratches his neck with the bottom of the flintlock. “This stupid girl is going to get me killed one of these days.”
He kicks the lump on an area that looks somewhat like a torso, once, twice, and thrice- before the lump finally rises and reveals an even younger girl, tears falling down her face.
Surprised by her reaction, the young man flinches. “Ah- hey… don’t cry! No, seriously though, stop crying. Your wailing could attract Atlanteans.”
“You pointed a gun at me, Horace!”, Fern says, wiping the sad expression off her face and almost yelling at her ally.
Horace looks around the area, as a child might do if he planned to do something he knew was wrong.
With a blank expression, scavenger smacks the bottom of his pistol against the girls nose.
“Shut up. You’re an expendable companion, you know that, right? A little one like you hardly does anything around here, and so you’re in no position to be complaining- and you’re a girl, no less. Know your place, Fern. Who else will take you in?”
Fern gnashes her teeth, and remains silent- but only for a brief moment, seeing something that could save her the argument with her “ally”.
“Do you see that shining thing, over there?”, she says, pointing.
Horace looks in the direction Fern points to, and nods.
“Finally, something decent. If we’re lucky, the Grand Navy will trade us for that thing over there- if it’s worth anything. Sails down. We might be able to eat meat tonight.”
The sails unfurl, with calm winds gently pushing against the back of the cloth. The scavenger rolls the ship wheel, turning it in the direction of the shining glare the duo had spotted in the distance.
In a bit of time, they are close enough to inspect the area. A sailboat that is surprisingly still in tact- although tattered, with a man sitting with a dazed, dead expression on his face. He mutters unintelligible whispers under his breath, whispers that might only be heard if one pressed their ear against his mouth.
Insanity.
Fern glances at Horace, who was already headed for the gold and jewels stowed on the other side of the sailboat.
He grabs a bag full of trinkets, struggling to contain his joy at the mere sight of them. Fern leans over the sailboats railings, searching the waters close to it incase anything dangerous could be lurking about. Instead, her eyes lock onto a golden pole… no, a golden flute.
She fishes the flute out of the water using a homemade net, careful not to make any erratic movements, and grasps it in her hands. Someone taps her on the shoulder, and she flinches.
It’s Horace. “That man is dead. Or more like he should be dead. I don’t feel any heartbeat or pulse, and he looks quite dazed. Chances are, he’s infected. Let’s go.”, he says, glancing at the flute Fern holds in her hands.
“Looks like we struck gold. By the way, the dead man over there had something that looked like a music sheet. Not sure if it’s for a flute or not, but you could take it. Don’t even think about trying to play it, though. Everything goes to the Grand Navy, y’hear?”
Fern nods… but decides in her mind to not turn the flute in, feeling interested in it herself.
…The scoundrel gazes at them, through foggy eyes, and a misty sea. They sail into the darkness, leaving “him” there.
Never hearing his cries for mercy.
…
…
honestly this took way longer than it was supposed to… originally I planned on just procrastinating this for another week or two, but the ABSOLUTE PEAK LITERATURE that crimsonpants just posted motivated me to finish it. For people on the forums who WILL read allat, please at least give his book a try. The Crimsonpants glazing doesn’t stop.