Private Tales Through the Red Mist

[Brandar the Burned]

"Oh, we don't need to look dangerous." He says simply, "We are dangerous."

His smiled widened as he leaned against the rail, eyeing that vibrant red as Hastings coaxed their behemoth of a ship into the winds. A few hours, that's all they needed.

"What I need is for whoever finds this ship to be scared witless. I want them to question every ship on the horizon, and I want their friends to question them, too. Pirating is about profit, not bloodshed. I'll trade a haul to make the next ones pushovers."

 

[Gal]

“Fer,” she conceded with a tilt of the head – and the bottle. Drained that grog to its last, with nary a thought spared for the rest of the crew.

Ghosts, the lot of them.

She’d be sober long before they caught up with their unfortunate victim. The drink was just to make the hunt pass by a touch faster. Wasn’t much to do when you were that far away. They’d braced the yards and hauled the jibs. All that was left now was to wait out the inevitable, hook their gunwale, and storm the deck.

By the time they got close enough to see one another ship to ship, darkness had fallen over the open sea. Black as ink the water lapped below her feet as she dangled her legs off the chainwale, and blue as the peaks of the Spine did the smoke crawl out between her teeth.

Torn canvas snapped with the rising wind. The shrouds around her creaked and groaned like old bones. The few lamps shied in the face of the night, tiny specks of light far too meek to lend any courage to the men scrambling o’er the merchant.

Gal just grinned, ashing her poison into the greedy waves before she swung back on deck.

It was time.

 

[Brandar the Burned]

With night falling, it was impossible to see the black flag they hoisted. But they didn’t need to now - once they’d caught sight of it and realized they couldn’t run, they’d surrendered easily enough.

Standing at midship with the van around him, lead by their Dark Elf Corsair, Brandar hoisted his lantern a little higher. Grapples were thrown across to pull them in snug, and then gangplanks were brought up to be lowered across.

It was painfully clear, now, to the merchants, that they were facing a superstition in the flesh. The ephemeral blue glow from Brandar’s lantern only reinforced it, and he waited until the gangplanks thudded down to smile and brush his palm over the pommel of his cutlass.

The Captain didn’t cross until the van were sure it wasn’t a trap. “The Gilded Sail... what an awful name.” He mutters, frowning deeply.

 

[Gal]

Despite her earlier complaints, Gal took to the role of shepherding hapless deckhands onto the ghost ship quite keenly. Her sharp smile certainly betrayed the sentiment, and the frightened sailors plodded along all the quicker for it.

She hankered for a fight, still. Perhaps she’d cajole Brandar into a spar through the rigging – later. For now, the two Captains had their own debts to settle, bloody as they might’ve been.

One of the men soiled himself as they went below. It stank something fierce as it mixed with the odor of rotting planks and seaweed. Gal backhanded him with an empty bottle for the trespass, and chained him to the steel rod that was permanently sunken into the bilge as punishment.

A host of specters remained to watch over the first batch as she returned topside for the next lot of miserable souls. One after the other, they would all be dragged to the depths.

 

[Brandar the Burned]

They gathered the lost and ferried them back aboard in chains. The depths that Gal would find herself in were likely not what was to be expected.

A ghostly howl, distant like wind at the mouth of a cave, seemed to echo up from the depths. Beyond that, there wasn’t much that seemed out of place, and yet, it seemed as though the hold was out of sync with reality. The proportions were wrong in undefinable ways.

Brandar knew, though. He knew what their new slaves would be feeling - their souls being pulled below.

Him, though? He went straight to the Captain’s cabin, a hunch to his shoulders as he pulled a curved dagger from his belt. It was moments like this he no longer felt like himself - he couldn’t even call it ‘seeing red.’ He simply ceased to be, and vengeance took over.

 

[Gal]

They say three quarters of war was waiting.

Gal didn’t know much about war, nor did she know who said that, but she knew enough about ships to judge it true.

Once the enemy crew were all chained in the hold like miserable, oversized rats, the Nazrani had returned topside. The Capo didn’t want anyone on the merchant ship no more, and so she didn’t follow again – merely wove her limbs through the ratlines on the mainmast top. And smoked.

And waited.

There was a scream. Then another. A gush of red painted the thick glass of the gallery.

Gal picked at her teeth and slid her gaze down at the quartermaster. “Does it always take this long?”

 

[Brandar the Burned]

Brandar never really remembered how things went down. There was a vague recollection of conversation, and inevitably screaming, but whenever his mind reoriented itself, the scene was always the same. The Captain was gutted, like a fish, and strung up in netting from the roof of his cabin.

The pool of red was slick at his feet, and he didn't need to look at his dagger to know it had been recently cleaned on some nearby piece of cloth.

Staring at the familiar mess, his agency once more his own, he huffed and unfurled the ephemeral list, watching as a black mark was struck through the name of Hermun Norranton. Moments later, it flaked away like paper turning to ash in a fire, and he rolled the magical scroll back up and it disappeared back from whence it came.

Stepping onto the deck, he closed the Captain's door behind him and looked to the crew, who were already rigging the ship once more. "Alright, let's get moving." He orders, in that characteristic sandpaper voice. "We've got a ship to find for Difficult."

 

[Gal]

With a majestic eyeroll, Gal flipped from the top and landed with a feline spring in her step. “If ah’m Difficult den wat’re ye? Impossible?”

Hastings bit back a snort at the helm. The quartermaster just laughed.

“Anyhoo,” she continued unfazed, “ah’m partial ta’ Mantessan brigantines. Dey got da fast built an’ da low draft fo’ catchin’ runnin’ merqants.”

 

[Brandar the Burned]

"I've met a fair few women who would agree with that assessment." The Quartermaster laughed only louder, and Karendal snorted from his position near the main mast.

Walking back over the boarding plank, a pair of crewmen pulled it up behind him, their ghostly hands easily gripping the very real wood. "We'll prowl the waters, then." He says simply, "We'll get underwear, and stick near the coast as we run north; that'll take us closer to Mantessa proper, and you can get your pretty little brig."