Winter 4986, Gasha
A small fleet of only three ships pointed their prows towards the oncoming storm. Damenik rushed about with the other sailors, securing the deck while his father and captain stood on the aft deck, his hands clasped behind his back and eyes on the horizon.
“It isn’t the season for such a squall…” one sailor muttered to another, both eyeing the approaching backness, occasionally streaked by lighting that did nothing to illuminate the darkness above. Damenik checked the line securing him to the ship again. He'd been born on the sea and now lived and breathed the water like his father before him. As such, Damenik and his family had weathered many storms before. But there was something about this one that set his hair on end.
“Silver Shannon signals secure captain!”
“Gold Gretchen signals secure!” two sailors announced, one after the other, then sent their own signals by flag to the sister ships.
Damenik approached his father on strangely wobbly legs. The sea was far too still, the deck almost level and unmoving. “It's not like you to be nervous, Damenik…” Captain Daimen called without looking away from the horizon.
“There's something-" Damenik was interrupted as a bolt of purple lighting arched overhead, followed by a crack of thunder that shook the deck beneath his feet.
The following flash of green illuminated a wall of black before them as the first swell of this sudden storm bore down on the three merchant vessels. “Helmsman! Prow to the swell!” Captain Daimen shouted over the following thunder.
Damenik grasped his line, walking himself hand over hand until it was pulled taught, then used it to pull himself towards the mainmast. A wall of wind and rain hit them as though they'd just walked from the safety of a building into a storm already in full bluster. In all his fourteen years sailing, no storm had come on so quickly. He could see nothing beyond the swell that rose like a wall before them, blocking even the boiling black clouds and sinister colored lightning. Sailors held on to anything they could get their hands on, and yet two still slid past Damenik as the ship tilted up and up.
With his hands wrapped around the mast, his feet left the deck and dangled out below him as the ship road into the wave. It was going to break. the wave would break, and they would be sent tumbling backward into the ocean. Damenik closed his eyes but could still see the red and blue flashes through his eyelids.
He was wrong. One moment he was dangling parallel to the deck; the next, he collapsed onto his belly as the ship crested the swell. He had barely managed to open his eyes before he was flung forward and dangled instead over the prow as it dipped down the mountain of water’s other side.
“We’ve lost sight of the Shannon Captain!” a sailor to Damenik's left bellowed at the top of his voice. Damenik could barely hear him only ten feet away. There was no way the Captain would be able to make out the call. Damenik’s fears hadn’t been wholly wrong after all. The Silver Shannon hadn't crested the swell.
He didn’t have time to think of the lost vessel or its crew as they climbed the next wave, and he slid back the way he'd come. He saw only sky before him, boiling like angry tar, red lightning streaking between bulbous bubbles in the clouds.
Damenik crashed down with the ship as it crested the wave, and a second call rang out from his right, “Waterspout!”
What?! Damenik squinted through the rain and saw the tornado illuminated as though with blue light from within. It bore towards them from the starboard side, cutting through the trough between the waves. Damenik watched, transfixed, as the Golden Gretchen began its ascent of the next swell only to be pulled from the water like a child lifting a toy boat from the bath.
He had to arch his neck painfully to keep the ship in view as his own vessel rode the oncoming swell. No waterspout should have been strong enough to lift an entire ship from the water. Yet, the Golden Gretchen sailed through the air and around the tornado, circling back within view, upside down. It disappeared into the furious clouds as Damenik slammed into the deck again.
They started their descent, and Damenik slid forward on the deck once more, giving him a perfect view of his father, alight with a strobe of varying colors. The Captain held on to the railing of the aft deck, his arms intertwined with the wood and eyes squeezed shut. He didn’t see the shock of green lightning that struck the mast and caused Damenik to let go with a scream of shock and terror. He didn’t hear the wood crack or the lines snap. And he didn’t know what hit him when the mast crashed into the deck in a spray of blood and rain.
“Father!” Damenik called into the roaring abyss of the storm as he fell towards the prow. He hit the forward railing in free fall but could hardly feel the pain as he tumbled over the side before his line snapped taught. Grabbing to the line for dear life, he couldn’t even climb it as the ship crashed into the trough of the swell, pinning him to the wood beneath the water.
The calm of the sea below the storm enveloped him. For a blissful moment, Damenik wasn’t in the middle of the strongest, strangest, and most deadly storm he or any other sailor had ever experienced. For that one moment, he floated free and could almost pretend that it wasn’t happening, that he was dreaming.
Survive... The voice nearly split his skull, and his line pulled tight as he was wrenched from beneath the waves. Rain stung his cheeks, and pain shot through his hips and legs from where he'd hit the banister.
The sailors pulled him over the side in time for all of them to slide back down the deck as the ship rose again. How many more swells? How much longer could a storm of such fury blow? Would it matter if they rode it out? Without the mainmast, they would be dead in the water anyway.
Damenik caught the jagged remnants of the mast as he passed and held on. He would survive. He swore it to himself, his eyes shut tight to the rain and reality.
The storm blew on.
