The Atlantic night had been a familiar shroud, the kind Darius "Grey" Mallory had worn for forty of his sixty-five years. The rhythmic creak of the Aeternus, his four-masted war-barque, was a lullaby he knew better than his own heartbeat.
He stood his watch on the quarterback as the salt-laced wind was a cool caress on his weathered face, a face etched with the cartography of a thousand voyages. His eyes were still sharp, though, as he scanned the horizon where the inky black of the sea met the star-dusted velvet of the sky.
A routine crossing, Dakar to Recife. Or so it should have been.
He remembered the shift, subtle at first. Like a prickling on his skin, the kind that usually indicated a storm, but this felt… different.
The air became thickened with an oppressive heaviness that felt strangely unnatural, as if invisible weights were pressing down from unseen heights above, and the stars?
The stars that had always served as his steadfast celestial guides began to flicker, not like distant flames dancing gently in turbulent breezes, but like faulty electric bulbs. One by one, they blinked out.
"Odd," he'd muttered, his hand instinctively going to the worn brass of the ship's barometer.
It was plummeting, dropping to a level that defied any known meteorological phenomenon. The compass within its binnacle trembled slightly at first, then abruptly began spinning wildly in frantic circles, its needle nothing more than a dizzying, indistinct blur.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to pierce through decades of ingrained discipline. He'd seen hurricanes that could tear a ship to splinters, rogue waves that could swallow a vessel whole, but this… this was an abomination against nature itself.
The sea was sometimes cruel but it was always an understandable companion now began to squirm.
Impossible waves, taller than any he'd witnessed, rose not from wind or current, but as if the ocean itself were shaking.
And they glowed. A sickly, ethereal blue light pulsed from within their monstrous, curling crests.
With the unnatural luminescence came a sound, a chorus of echoes that seemed to vibrate in his very bones. Ancient chants in languages no human tongue had ever formed, no human ear was meant to comprehend.
He barked orders, his voice hoarse against the rising racket. "All hands! Secure the rigging! Batten hatches! Steer her into the… into whatever this damn thing is!"
But the Aeternus, usually so responsive to his will and the skill of his crew, felt sluggish, her timbers groaning in a way he'd never heard, a sound of pure, structural agony.
Then, in the heart of the swirling, luminescent chaos, as the deck bucked beneath him like a wild stallion, Mallory saw it.
A silhouette, vast and horrifying, beneath their hull.
It wasn't a whale, not any creature known to man. It was a shape of pure nightmare, a colossal, spiraling eye with countless, undulating fins. A Leviathan. Or something far, far worse.
The image burned itself onto his retinas, a brand of cosmic terror. Lightning, not from the sky but from the roiling smoke that had replaced it, arced downwards, illuminating the spiraling eye in a flash of blinding, terrifying clarity.
Then, mercifully, blackness consumed him.
Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a brutal, disorienting slap. He lay sprawled on wooden planks, the familiar scent of salt and tar filling his nostrils, but something was profoundly wrong.
The ship was… quiet. Too quiet.
The violent motion had ceased, replaced by a gentle, almost serene rocking. He pushed himself up, but his limbs were protesting. Or rather, they should have protested.
The chronic ache in his left knee, a souvenir from a fall during a boarding action in his younger USCG days, was gone. The stiffness in his knuckles, a constant companion for the last decade, had vanished?
He looked at his hands. They were… smooth. The liver spots, the calluses built over a lifetime of hauling ropes and gripping the helm, the network of fine wrinkles – all gone.
These were the hands of a man in his prime, strong, unblemished. A jolt, colder than the deepest Atlantic trench, shot through him. He scrambled to his feet, his movements surprisingly agile, and staggered towards the small, salt-stained mirror in his cabin, a space he knew as well as his own skin.
The face that stared back was not his.
Or rather, it was his, but a version he hadn't seen in forty years. The silver in his hair and beard had retreated, leaving behind the dark brown of his youth. The deep lines around his eyes and mouth were softened, almost erased.
He was… young. Perhaps twenty-five, the age he'd been when he first took command of a much smaller, far less storied vessel.
He stumbled out onto the quarterdeck, his mind reeling. The sky above was not the familiar canvas of constellations he'd navigated by his entire life.
These were alien stars arranged in bizarre and unsettling patterns. Their light was a strange, cold silver.
The ocean stretched out in every direction, a vast, unbroken expanse of deep, sapphire blue, but it felt… larger. Wider. The air itself was different, denser, pressing against him with a subtle but noticeable weight. It was almost like breathing water
And the Aeternus. His beloved war-barque. She was still a four-masted vessel, her lines familiar, yet subtly altered. The aged oak of her hull seemed… newer, yet also impossibly ancient.
There was a sheen to the wood, a resonance in her timbers that hummed with a barely suppressed power.
He ran a hand along the rail – it was smooth, yes, but beneath the familiar grain, he felt something else. Something like steel, cold and unyielding, hidden beneath the veneer of old wood.
The very cannons seemed different, their muzzles darker, their forms somehow more menacing, though he couldn't yet articulate why.
His gaze fell upon the figurehead, a fierce sea eagle that had always been his pride. It too seemed changed as its carved eyes held a new, almost predatory gleam.
As he stared, a faint, almost imperceptible blue light pulsed within its depths, just for a moment, then vanished. Had he imagined it?
Before he could process the whirl of impossibilities, a soft chime echoed in his mind, a sound that was not a sound, and text, crisp and impossibly clear, scrolled across his vision, as if projected onto the inside of his eyeballs.
***
Biological Age: 25 Standard Years.>
***
Mallory swayed, gripping the rail, his knuckles white. The world had not just changed; it had been rewritten by something mad or this whimsical System.
His ship, his body, the very stars themselves were alien. He was a captain without a chart, a navigator without a familiar star, adrift on a sea of impossible realities.
The weight of fifty souls, his crew, pressed down on him. They too, would be awakening to this nightmare made glorious. His first duty, now more than ever, was to them. Survive. That was the first order of this new, terrifying existence.
Survive, and then, somehow, understand.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, the heavy air filling his newly youthful lungs. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but the iron discipline of a lifetime at sea began to assert itself.
He was Captain Darius "Grey" Mallory. And this was his ship.
Whatever this new world, this "System," had in store, he would face it. For his crew. For the Aeternus.
"Report!" he bellowed, his voice, now deeper, stronger than it had been mere hours ago, echoing across the strangely silent deck. "All hands, report to stations! Damage report! Now!"
The nightmare had begun. And Captain Mallory, a man reborn into a younger, stronger form, aboard a ship that was both familiar and terrifyingly new, would meet it head-on.