The storm had been hunting him for days. It wasn't a natural thing, not a gathering of clouds and chance, but a conscious, malevolent force that seemed to breathe against the back of his neck. Kaelen for that was his name, though the wind had long since torn it from his lips and he hadn't spoken it in what felt like an age knew this in the marrow of his bones. This knowledge was a cold, hard certainty, more real than the splintered wood he clung to. The waves that had devoured his ship, The Dawn Chaser, were not water but liquid darkness, a churning ink that stole the light and the warmth, cold enough to still a heart mid-beat. Each time he was plunged beneath the surface, the silence was not that of the sea, but of a tomb, a deliberate, smothering quiet.
The things in the sky were the storm's heralds. They were not mere shrieking shadows; they were jagged, living tempests of tooth and talon, their cries the sound of tearing metal. They had descended upon The Dawn Chaser not like predators, but like reapers, with a chilling efficiency. Sails that had caught the winds of a dozen worlds were rendered to threads in moments. The crew, good men and women lured by his coin and his desperate conviction, had been plucked from the deck or shredded where they stood. Their screams were swallowed by the gale almost before they were born. Kaelen had fought, of course, his mapmaker's hands gripping a sword with unfamiliar desperation, but the creatures did not engage. They simply… harvested. And he realized, with a dawning horror, that they were not trying to kill him. They were herding him, driving the wreckage of his vessel and the last vestiges of his hope toward a specific, terrible destination.
He had clung to the splintered mast for an eternity, his fingers numb and raw, the salt crusting his lips and stinging his eyes. The Blood Sea, a name he now understood with visceral intimacy, tried ceaselessly to pull him under. It reeked of copper and salt, a metallic tang that suggested an ocean of blood diluted by tears. The abominations circled above, their dark forms occasionally blotting out the bruised, purplish hue of the sky, waiting for him to weaken, to surrender to the cold. He'd survived by becoming still, by forcing his panicked heart to slow, by letting the current take him. He played dead in a sea that seemed to prefer its victims alive with fear. He became a piece of flotsam, his mind retreating into the only warmth he had left: memory.
When the jagged, black cliffs finally rose from the churning water like the broken teeth of some leviathan, it was no accident of currents. It was a delivery. The storm, as if finally tiring of its game, gathered its remaining fury and threw him forward in one last, violent surge. His body was slammed onto a shale-strewn shore, the impact knocking the air from his lungs and scraping the skin from his arms and chest. He lay there, half in the grasping water, half on the unforgiving stone, as the waves retreated with a sound like a disappointed sigh.
Agony was a symphony, and every nerve in his body was an instrument playing a different, discordant note. He dragged himself up, each movement a monumental effort. His clothes were heavy, frozen boards against his skin. The air he gasped down was thick, unnaturally so, heavy with the cloying smell of wet earth, rotting pine, and something else… something old and sorrowful, like the dust of forgotten tombs. The forest that greeted him was a wall of gnarled, weeping trees, their bark slick with a moisture that wasn't quite rain, their branches twisted into agonized shapes, as if they had frozen while trying to writhe away from some unseen terror.
This was Lostgrove. It had to be. The description from the wild-eyed man in the port-side tavern in Veridia—a man whose stench of madness and cheap ale had made Kaelen want to dismiss him—was now terrifyingly, precisely accurate. The man had babbled of a sky with a single, terrible eye, of a town with no escape, of grey watchers in the woods. Kaelen had paid him in silver just to leave him alone, but the words had stuck, festering in his mind after Lana's trail had gone cold and every logical lead had evaporated. The madman's ravings had become the only map he had left.
Kaelen pushed on, forcing his trembling legs to carry him inland, away from the predatory sea. The memory of his sister, Lana, was a small, warm ember in the freezing hollow of his chest. She had always been the brave one, the firebrand, the one who chased legends and whispered truths. He was just the mapmaker, the logical brother who charted known coasts and documented safe trade routes. But when she vanished, logic had failed, and the world of facts and figures had proven useless. Only the madman's tale remained, a thread of insanity he had been forced to clutch with both hands. He had sold their family's mapmaking business, their home, everything, to commission The Dawn Chaser and hire a crew desperate or foolish enough to sail the fabled, cursed Blood Sea.
Now, as thunder boomed overhead a sound that seemed not to come from the sky but to originate from the ground itself, vibrating up through the soles of his waterlogged boots he saw it. A flickering, orange light through the skeletal trees. A promise of warmth. A building. A tavern. The sign, hanging crooked from a single, rusted chain, groaned as it swung in the wind. The paint was flaked and faded, but he could just make out the image of a grey, amorphous shape, like a pile of ash given vague form, etched beneath the words: The Ashen Tavern. It was not a welcoming sight. It was a confession of surrender. But it was shelter from the storm, and for now, that was enough.