Aug 8, 1722. Aboard the ruined pirate barge off Port Royal, dueling for my life with a madman…
My alchemy worked as intended. That is to say, I vanished into the murky gray illusion, nothing more than a lethal puff of fog. It amplified my voice, lightly mesmerizing anyone who looked my way.
But it didn’t keep me from getting hurt.
I watched Lucas’s eyes dance in horror while I melted into mist. But it was my laugh that got him moving. Quickly, in a panic-driven rush, he closed the gap, and looked around. I backed away, but there wasn’t much room on the ship’s lower deck.
“Where are you?” he screamed, eyes bright with rage.
Lucas swung wildly. I slipped aside, but his staff still clipped me.
A sharp, stabbing pain tore into my left hand like a dozen needles. Despite the ache, I clenched my jaw, and kept quiet while I darted around behind the madman. Sebastian followed my lead.
What I know of a wood wraith, any wraith, I could put in a thimble. But I knew wraiths were infectious. A brief look at my hand told me everything. The skin around the red welt where I’d been hit had already cracked at the edges and hardened like bark.
I was infected, slowly turning to wood.
“You’re still here,” Lucas growled while he swatted the fog twice more. “I know you are! Show yourself!”
A part of me wondered how much more abuse I could take. Would I make it back in time to get the real cure that I had ironically invented?
The answer was obvious. I had to.
So, I shoved those thoughts aside and focused on staying alive.
Quick and quiet, I pulled the last two vials of my poisoned, half-working petrify cure from my belt. I poured one along my blade until it dripped a sickly green. The other? That one I drank down in one swallow followed by a healing elixir, then fought the urge to vomit.
I never lied about the tainted potion. It had a mild dose of the real cure. At least enough to work for a few minutes.
But the rum and scorpion peppers I mixed in made it burn off fast, then let the infection run wild. The concentrated bloodroot I added? That was just herbal revenge. I just never realized, it would be for me.
Lucas turned fast when the potion corks hit the deck, then jerked when I buried two inches of poisoned steel in his gut. The wraith sputtered, wide-eyed, then clawed at my face. I knocked his hand aside, careful to keep the sleeve of my long coat between his hand and my skin.
“Well, hello there, Señor,” I said with a devilish smirk that I didn’t quite feel. “I’m right here.”
I withdrew my sword and stabbed twice more in quick succession. Lucas sputtered and jerked with each hit. We separated, the wraith glaring raw hate as the alchemical fog swallowed me again. Amber-resin blood flowed in thick rivers down his midsection.
“Clever alchemy, Doctor,” Lucas wheezed. “Your own invention? Let me show you one of mine.”
His staff exploded in blue-white flames. Quick as a snake, he lashed out with his weapon. Spectral fire burned a line through my fog, parting it like a sharp knife. His staff slammed against the deck, and the barge shuddered in its death throes.
I darted back in shock, even as Sebastian spit hot tar into the wraith’s face. Lucas scraped the steaming mess from his face and swung twice at Sebastian. My gargoyle danced aside both times, then retreated through the withering fog.
It became a tango of death. He swung, I side-stepped, the fog thinned, then we warily circled each other. My only cover evaporated from the assault of the wraith’s enchantment.
Lucas healed each time I stabbed him. But, undead or not, the rules of enchantments remained the same. First, magical power can heal a wound, but the body remembers it should be in pain. Second?
Using the Etherwave Arcana, what some call magic? It always comes with a price. The Etherwave gives, but it also takes. Sunlight suddenly flashed overhead once, then twice, as the clouds parted overhead.
A desperate idea sprang to mind.
The last of my fog vanished, and I swapped glares with Lucas from ten feet away. All around us, the barge cracked and groaned, pounded to death by the sea, and unhinged power that bled from the Arcane Gate.
“You don’t look so good, Doctor,” Lucas sneered as he winced from another new stab I’d put in his side.
I dragged a shaking hand across my face to wipe away sweat. It stank of poison and death.
“That would make two of us, you lunatic.”
Lucas laughed. It sounded like wood grating against itself. But his withered face looked gray, as the tainted mixture started to take hold.
His eyes studied me for a moment, then he lunged. I dodged aside a bit too slow, as the bloodroot continued to torture me, even as the half-cure tried to help. But I still parried, turning aside the wraith’s flaming staff before it touched me.
“I see you’re petrifying, Doctor,” Lucas growled. “No cure, just a slow death.”
A cough rattled my chest, but I kept my sword on guard, pulling on a smirk. From the corner of my eye, I saw Sebastian stalk Lucas from behind on silent claws.
“Are you sure?” I asked in a raspy voice.
I raised the now-empty vial that had held the partial cure where he could see it. Then, I turned my left hand so he could see the wooden cracks in my skin slowly turning back to flesh.
“Maybe it’s just no cure for you, Señor.“
The wraith’s eyes went round and wide before he yelled in wordless rage. He charged, but Sebastian struck. First was a slash at the wraith’s coat that tripped him. Second was another spit of hot tar to the side of the face when Lucas looked back in alarm.
He tripped and fell to the deck. Even as he hit with a thud, Lucas yanked down more power from the Etherwave, then more still. Each time, he hurled spectral bolts of fire at either myself or Sebastian.
Sebastian, nimble as always, darted aside before he took to the air and shot towards me.
I used the Codex as a poor man’s buckler to slap and block the blasts of fire. Each one hit the Codex, and the book absorbed it like a sponge in a burst of yellow-white light.
Exhausted, sweating my life out, I backed away until I was directly under the hole to the deck above. I risked taking my eyes off Lucas to glance at the storm-tossed sky.
Wall clouds swirled like a foul soup overhead, but a break had formed. Sunlight glimmered down in sharp beams like fingers reaching for the sea.
The Arcane Gate that towered over us, shook like a mountain ready to shed an avalanche. Raw, white power fell in bright rivers of light while smoldering, broken stones tumbled into the sea.
Suddenly, my vision went blurry as the world seemed to slide sideways.
“What in…?”
Above and outside, I watched the Arcane Gate split in two.
The massive, abused archway remained where it was, but now it looked like a second Gate was trying to push out of the first. Cracked, gray-granite rock split open like overripe melons. Dark obsidian spikes speared through the stone, framed by what could only be countless bones.
Those cracked, white bones framed every crack, crevasse, and fissure. In between was dark packed soil, smeared with greasy stains that seemed to pulse with their own heartbeat.
It was like watching the mismatched skeleton of a mythical titan push itself out of a grave all at once. All the while, a tattered veil of mist stretched between the two, like pale spiderwebs pulled too thin.
Then, in the middle of the archway, I saw a bleak landscape.
It was cast in shades of black, gray, and deep sea blue that mirrored the world. Ragged, ruined ships crewed by bloated dead crews, floated on greasy waves. In the distance, along a broken, gray shore, shadowy specters of half-people silently gathered.
A fleet of the dead moving to flood the world of the living.
Lucas slammed into me when mysterious golden lines of power wrapped around the split Arcane Gate. I hit the deck, air knocked out of my lungs as Lucas pinned me down with a shaking, withered hand.
“You have a cure, don’t you? Not this sewage you tried to poison me with! A formula you’ve written somewhere!” he screamed. “I’ll go through you, your friends, your loved ones, until I get what I want!”
He hammered at my face. I managed to block the blows, but it was a near thing. Before he could try again, I fought back with a quick right jab. I was rewarded with a sharp, wet crack, and a line of amber resin trickled from his broken nose.
“You’ll never get that!” I snapped back. “You’ve murdered more than enough people!”
Lucas yelped in pain as mystic flames from my hand tried to turn the wraith into a flaming pyre. It didn’t take, and before I could get off the deck, he grabbed me by the collar, then bashed my head backwards against the wood.
Sebastian clawed and bit Lucas, but only ripped away chunks of rotten cloth. It earned him a kick to the muzzle that sent him tumbling across the deck.
“Sebastian!” I coughed.
Stars exploded in my eyes as my vision swam in sickly waves. My stomach churned in reply between the pain in my head and the tainted cure I drank a moment ago.
Then the sun split through the clouds over us. Golden beams of light speared down, even as the storm rotated in the sky like a gray whirlpool of destruction. Lucas had me by the throat then, slowly choking the air from me.
What little I knew of wraiths was as much rumor as truth. But all the tall tales mentioned wraiths despite the sun. Memories flashed across my eyes of seeing Lucas in a long coat, skin mostly covered. The only time he didn’t care was when the clouds were so thick, they blotted out the sun.
Except now, a few fingers of sunlight had broken through the storm to brush the lower deck of the dying barge.
I grabbed Lucas by the collar and neck, then shoved with everything I had. He was still weak from the poison, which cost him both his balance and leverage against me. We rolled across the deck while he drew on the Etherwave to craft another spell.
Wraith or not, the strain in his body was obvious. His hands shook as he stole power from the Etherwave, more spectral fire curling around his fingers. But a strange glow filled his eyes, like an out-of-control forest fire.
The Etherwave Arcana was about to collect its price for everything it had given Lucas. Take it all at once.
He clawed at my face with burning fingers, but I rolled us into the sun a second before he touched me. The instant that the golden light touched him, Lucas let go of my collar. His screams could’ve shattered glass.
I scrambled away on all fours, then scooped up an angry and snarling Sebastian in my arms. By the time we reached the nearest bulkhead, Lucas had stopped screaming. I curled around Sebastian to protect both of us as best I could.
No more than ten feet away, the wraith had frozen into a driftwood statue. Then with a quick shudder, he exploded as the Etherwave Arcana shattered him like glass.
A foul stench of burned rot held onto the air with a death grip while wood rained around us. The barge lurched heavily. Abused planks snapped, then pulled back from the keel. Seawater rushed in like a dozen fountains underneath us.
“Come on, Sebastian, time to go.”
I set him down and located the Codex. It had fallen nearby and, miraculously, survived the fight. Part of me wanted to leave it, let the sea take it. But something whispered I still needed that book.
We scaled a ragged ladder to what remained of the upper deck. I saw Ari, Skaldi, and Lysander were bloody, bruised, but alive. None of them looked infected, but we had a larger problem to deal with.
Lysander had used his skills with the Arcana to connect with the Arcane Gate. Sweat poured over his dark face while he struggled to force the broken Gate together. But right then and there on the barge, he lacked a portal platform to ground him against that power. So he was failing, starting to die.
My stomach churned, but I fought back the nausea, looking around for a way to help my friend. I didn’t see a portal platform, but I saw something else more important. The last piece of this evil puzzle.
There nestled at the foot of the Arcane Gate, sat an Arcane Engine. A rare, pulsing device made of bone, wood, and metal that was attached to the Gate like a foul blister. I could feel it churn. That was the source of the curse that wanted to break the Arcane Gate apart.
“No. I didn’t come this far to watch it all sink now.”
I drank down my last healing elixir, then stumbled off the barge toward the Arcane Engine and the heart of the storm.
