[Hailey Road Village]
Hailey Road Village was not built for war.
It was built for sunlight and salt, for cattle and grain, for the slow rhythm of tides and the chirp of gulls circling the shore. Farmers rose before dawn, stretching sore arms and picking mud from under their nails before their first words of the day. Fishers mended their nets with quiet fingers, old men smoked pipes by the well, and children ran between fences with dust in their teeth.
It was a soft life, but not unearned.
The village survived off trade. Barrels of dried meat, fish, wheat, and glass bottles filled with thick yellow oil were exchanged with passing merchants. Once every few weeks, a coastal patrol ship would stop by, collect taxes, issue half-hearted warnings about piracy, then sail off to more "strategically important" locations.
No one in Hailey expected the pirates to come for them.
Not again.
Not after last year.
The scars still marked the southern watchtower — a blackened foundation, the faint smell of burnt wood. Seven dead. A dozen wounded. Half the village livestock taken. For a village of less than a hundred inhabitants, this was a terrible blow
But that had been a mistake, they said. A warning raid. The real targets were always the merchant fleets, the bigger harbors, the ships with coin.
Surely, the pirates wouldn't return here. Not twice.
Tamsin Wells — the baker's daughter — stood knee-deep in a muddy irrigation channel just past the western fields. Her arms were soaked, sleeves rolled to her shoulders, hair tied in a quick braid.
She looked up.
Squinted.
Then frowned.
"...Mum?"
Her voice carried across the rows of barley, where her mother was inspecting the harvest.
"What?"
"There's a... there's a ship out there."
Her mother brushed off her hands, turned to look — then froze.
A dot.
No—a shadow.
It was distant, but it was too dark, too low. Its sails were blood red, a rare and unsettling color. It moved too fast for a trade ship, too wide for a patrol skiff.
The Leviathan.
The mother grabbed her daughter's arm. "Inside. Now."
By midday, the church bell rang twice — not for service, but for warning.
The mayor, an old man named Thorne, stood on a wooden stool with a spyglass in hand. Sweat dripped down his nose despite the sea breeze.
"They're flying no flag"; he murmured. "That's no merchant."
He handed the glass to the village guard captain — a woman with no military training but enough spine to organize pitchforks into formation. After the death of the previous guard captain who died in the last raid, she had stepped up. Her force of character and natural build from lumber jobs made her quite strong.
"Could be a patrol—" one man suggested.
"Then why no colors?"
Silence.
The ship was closer now.
Big enough to look alive. Like a beast. No other ships sailed with that shape, that color, that lean hull and monstrous masthead carved into the face of a grinning skull.
The Leviathan.
In the homes, shutters closed. Mothers clutched children. Men pulled out rusted swords they hadn't touched in years.
A few villagers tried to run toward the woods. They were not stopped. Not everyone wanted to die for wheat and water.
And in the growing silence, every soul that remained in Hailey Road felt it—
Not a storm.
Not a ship.
But a reckoning.