Chapter 10: Adrift on a Silent Sea

Chapter 10: Adrift on a Silent Sea

Time ceased to be a line. It became a circle, a brutal, repeating loop of sun and salt. Day was a white-hot hammer that beat down from a cloudless sky, blistering his skin and boiling his thoughts. Night was a cold, black void that offered no comfort, only a different kind of emptiness, pricked with the light of indifferent stars. Leo Vance was the last man alive, adrift on a vast, silent sea in a bright yellow coffin.

The emergency life raft, their last, desperate hope, was now his personal hell. Its cheerful, artificial color was a mockery in the endless, profound blue of the Pacific. He’d lost the paddle—or had he thrown it away in a fit of delirium? He couldn’t remember. He was a passenger, subject to the whims of the current and the wind.

His body was a map of his ordeal. His lips were cracked and bleeding. His tongue was a swollen, useless thing in his mouth, and thirst was a constant, sandpaper rasp at the back of his throat. The sun had burned his skin through his torn shirt, raising angry welts that felt unnervingly like the beginning of the shaman’s work. He would find himself clawing at his own flesh, a phantom itch that mimicked the feeling of a blade, trying to stop the priest from peeling him as he had peeled Aris.

But the worst of it was his leg. During his frantic leap and slide down the rope bridge, a splintered piece of wood had gouged a deep, ragged wound in his calf. In the cavern's filth and the ocean's brine, it had festered. Now it was a fiery knot of pain, the skin around it an ugly collage of angry red and purple, with sickly yellow veins of pus tracing paths toward his knee. The infection had entered his blood, and with it came the fever.

The fever was the real enemy. It blurred the edges of the world, dissolving the barrier between memory and the present moment. His dead crewmates became his constant companions.

Captain Harlock would often sit opposite him, his uniform immaculate, though his eye sockets were dark, scorched pits. He’d stare out at the horizon with those terrible, empty holes and offer advice in his old, gravelly voice.

"You need to maintain discipline, Vance," the phantom would rasp, his voice mingling with the hiss of the waves. "Log your position. Check the rations. A captain's first duty is to his crew."

"The crew is dead, Elias," Leo would whisper back, his own voice a dry crackle. "You're dead."

The captain would just shake his head, a look of profound disappointment on his burnt face. "Excuses. A poor surveyor always blames his tools."

Aris was more ephemeral. He wouldn't speak. He would simply manifest as a feeling—the sensation of skin peeling away from muscle, the coppery taste of blood in Leo’s mouth. Sometimes, Leo would look down at his own hands and see them not as his own, but as raw, skinless claws of twitching sinew. He would scream then, a sound that was immediately swallowed by the immensity of the ocean.

But the tribe… they were always there, just beneath the surface. He’d stare into the hypnotic, sun-dappled water, and the shifting light would resolve into their faces. Painted white spirals would twist and dance on the waves, their black, soulless eyes watching him from the depths. He could hear their guttural chants on the wind, a low chorus of clicks and whispers promising him to the Ossuary Tree.

And sometimes, in the dead quiet, he could hear the drum. Thump… thump-thump. A faint, phantom pulse that was not carried on the air but vibrated deep within his own skull. The oppressive silence of the island's jungle had been replaced by the vast, empty silence of the sea, yet the beat remained, the rhythm of his own execution.

Days bled together. Two? Four? A week? He had no way of knowing. His world was pain, thirst, and ghosts.

Then the sharks came.

He saw the first one at dawn, a gray fin cutting a clean, purposeful line through the water about fifty yards out. It was a patient, circling presence, a silent promise of the ocean's final claim. Soon, it was joined by another. They never attacked. They didn't need to. They were simply waiting for the fever and the sun to do their work, waiting for him to fall into the water, or for his heart to simply give out. They were the cleanup crew, the sea's equivalent of the bone-carvers in the cavern.

The sight of them should have terrified him, but he felt a strange, detached kinship. They were predators, honest in their intent, unlike the smiling corporate logos of Aethelred Geospatial that had sent him here. They were a part of this world, a world he had only just discovered, ancient and ruled by simple, brutal truths.

The turning point came during a sunset that set the sky on fire. The fever was at its peak. He saw the entire tribe rise from the water, their bodies slick and shimmering. The shaman stood on the waves before him, holding the shell knife, its edge catching the last rays of light. Harlock sat beside him, pointing with a broken arm toward the horizon. Aris’s flayed spirit shimmered in the air, a red haze against the orange sky.

They were all here to claim him. The pain in his leg was a blazing fire. His thirst was an agony that had surpassed all other sensations. The sharks circled, their fins like the hands of a clock ticking down his final seconds.

He was done.

The cornered-animal rage that had saved him in the cavern was gone, burned away by the sun, poisoned by infection. There was nothing left to fight with. There was nothing left to fight for.

"Alright," he croaked, the word tearing at his throat. He spoke to the ghosts, to the sharks, to the dying sun. "You win."

He lay back against the hot rubber of the raft, the fight finally leaving him. He closed his eyes, inviting the end. He felt a sense of profound peace wash over him, the weary calm of total surrender. He would let the fever take him, or he would simply roll over the side and let the sharks have their due. It no longer mattered. He was just another skull for the collection, whether it hung from a tree or rested on the ocean floor. His life, a quiet existence of maps and solitude, would end here, an unwritten footnote in a corporate report. He was ready.

He lay there for a long time, drifting between a burning consciousness and a dark, welcoming oblivion. The sun disappeared, and the cool of the evening began to settle over him. He was tired. So very tired. He let himself sink into the darkness, a final, grateful release.

It was then that he saw it.

Through his slitted, weary eyelids, something cut through the deepening twilight. It was small, distant, and perfectly regular.

Blink.

A pause.

Blink.

It was a light. A steady, mechanical, artificial light. It wasn't the shimmering, malevolent glint of a mother-of-pearl eye or the ghostly glow of cavern fungus. It was the clean, crisp, unmistakable pulse of technology. Of his world.

A ship.

He stared, not daring to believe it, certain it was one last, cruel trick of his fevered mind. He waited for it to resolve into the face of the shaman, or to fade into a hallucination. But it remained.

Blink.

Steady. Real.

Blink.

A single, hot tear carved a clean path through the grime and salt on his cheek. The rage was gone, the despair was gone, but something else, something he hadn't felt in an eternity, flickered to life in the deepest, most exhausted corner of his soul. It was a tiny, fragile spark in the overwhelming darkness.

Hope.