Ardaik 8th - Central Ocean

As quickly as the storm had come upon them, it passed, and by morning the skies were clear once more. All that was left in its wake was a gentle morning breeze and calm serenity. For those unlucky few who had spent the night on duty, the shift change at dawn couldn't have come too soon. The weather-worn night shift headed below deck to get food and some well-deserved rest while the morning shift took over to assess the damage.

The aft mast had a crack, though it was nothing new. She'd had the thin hairline for several months now, though the storm had lengthened it. The rig lines had also been tossed into knots, which were now being straightened out after a handful of the shipmates began passing the word along to the captain. Such a buzz could only mean one thing.

"Admiral?"

"Yes, captain?"

"La'Trest is on the horizon."

Laurent grabbed his jacket, shrugging it on as he made his way up to the helm from his office. One of the helmsmen immediately offered his telescope once he'd spotted the admiral, who thanked him for it before taking the device to have a look for himself. Sure enough, the high, white stone walls of the port city and the vague shape of the eastern portion of the castle were there, but a deep frown settled onto his face as he began to inspect the expanse of water between them.

"Ready to drop sails!" a sailor hollered from the deck.

"Excellent work, gentlemen!" the captain replied. "Full sail!"

"No," Laurent snipped.

The captain raised a brow. "Admiral?"

"...There's wreckage in the water." Laurent's own murmured statement raised the hairs on the back of his neck. "And a considerable amount of it."

The captain pulled out his own telescope so quickly that he might have nearly given himself a black eye as he raised it to his bearded face.

"Don't drop those sails," the admiral reiterated.

"Hold the sails!"

A thick silence settled over the deck until the captain broke it—his voice wire-thin. "Laurent...there's a man."

"Where?"

"There. Just off the starboard bow."

Laurent gritted his teeth as he spied the silhouette of a man bobbing in the waves, kicking and clutching a few floating bits of wood and rope. "Captain, get one of the boats out to him. Urgently, please."

"Yes, admiral!"

It took only a few minutes for one of the L'épine de Rose's four rowboats to be lowered. By the time it was making its way toward the man, Flavien's ketch had lowered a bit of their forward sail, getting them moving just enough to drift within range to investigate as well.

"Hang on, Sir! We're almost to you!" the forward-most officer aboard the rowboat yelled when he noticed the man had stopped splashing. "Hurry, boys!" The three sailors seated behind him fought valiantly with their oars against the short, choppy waves to make quick headway. But as they got within a yard or so, the officer and the sailor peering just over his shoulder froze. The man looked terribly pale. Grey, even.

"Did he just...die?"

"Sir?" the officer called again, but the man didn't move. "Get us closer."

Within another moment, the ketch was on their right, her wake causing their small boat and the wreckage to bob further, a row of curious sailors and soldiers lining her side. "He alive?" one called down.

"I-I don't know," the officer yelled back, covering his nose with a handkerchief as a putrid stench overtook him. He leaned to reach for the man once they were close enough, but as he grasped the man's arm, the stranger lurched toward him, snapping his half-gone jaw down on the officer's hand and eliciting a horrifying scream.

"Sir!"

"Help him!"

"Get 'em off of him!"

The undead pulled the officer into the water and clamored for the rowboat, tipping it dangerously as one of the sailors tried to beat him loose with his oar while another abandoned the rowboat entirely in his panic to swim for the ketch.

Laurent and his captain watched in stunned silence from the bow of their galleon while a soldier from Flavien's ketch risked firing a flintlock at the creature. The sharp bark of the gun and the smoke only seemed to add to the men's terror as they splashed about.

Turning on his heel, Laurent stormed toward the stairs leading below deck, ashen-faced sailors parting like waves before him.

"Undead?!" he roared as he plunged down the steps into the brig and came to lock two fists around the bars between himself and Prince Viotto. "Why didn't you tell us that undead had attacked La'Trest?!"

Artus was nearly nose-to-nose with the man in an instant. "You didn't even believe there'd been an attack at all! What would you have thought if I'd said it were undead and giant toads?"

"Much less the dragon," Sebastien added dryly from his cell.

Laurent's heart froze in his chest. "A dragon?!"

"What happened? Are we in the bay yet? How does the city look?" Artus rattled. "Can we dock?"

The admiral ground his teeth together as he released his hold on the bars, turning away to remove his hat and slick back his hair while he gave himself a moment to think.

"Admiral?" Artus pressed.

After another moment, Laurent motioned to the guard who'd followed him halfway from the stairs. "Open his cell."

"Yes, Admiral."

"And theirs," Laurent added, pointing to the cages housing the rest of the prince's men.

The fresh air and earliest sunlight above deck were a blessing that Artus and the others weren't given a chance to appreciate before the captain had caught the admiral.

"Laurent!" he shouted, shoving his telescope at Laurent and pointing. "There, above the horizon—there's s-something in the sky."

***

The streets of La'Trest were nearly unrecognizable. What was once a bustling, lively city was now a ghost town. The streets and markets were vacant. Anyone who ventured outside did so at their own peril, but most of those who were able had evacuated days ago. The necromancer's minions now moved freely within and outside the city walls; they'd overtaken the soldiers and civilians trying to hold and repair the docks as well. The only area they seemed to avoid was the castle itself, but that seemed to be more out of some twisted courtesy than anything else.

In the southern end of the market quarter, the second-floor shutters of a house opened carefully. Then, a single messenger pigeon was tossed out before they were slammed shut. The bird fumbled for a moment as it found itself unable to return back through the window, instead taking to the air to flee high into the smokestacks of the city as fast as its wings would carry it. On its leg, it held a precious message, perhaps a plea for help or assurance that the sender was still alive, no doubt addressed to some distant relative. A message that would never reach its destination.

The bird was swiftly swallowed by the massive black and purple maw of Auganull, only a few feathers escaping on the wind as he passed. Bird after bird was plucked from the skies, like a crane sniping fish from a pond, until he came to land on a hill outside of the castle walls, where a figure in black was taking a morning stroll.

"Perhaps I was unclear when I recommended that you discontinue eating those..." Obtoxicullous grumbled. "Tales of my victory won't spread if all recounts end their journey in your stomach."

"Hmm...maybe not...but how long are we going to stay here? I don't think their prince is coming back..." the massive black dragon's words rumbled from its throat as it folded its wings and began walking behind the necromancer, unapologetically tossing a few undead aside in the process.

"Of course, he will... Well, perhaps..." Obi drummed his fingers nervously on the partially exposed skull of one of his undead servants that shambled along at his side. "I'll admit, I may have put too much faith in the idea that the humans would have had the courtesy to have the relic at the ceremony...or at least within the castle. They are either impressively negligent or..." Obtoxicullous paused as he looked back to see the dragon staring out at sea. "Am I boring you, old friend?" the warlock seethed.

"Boats...on the horizon." Auganull's words rolled into a reverberating growl, and in a few tremendous flaps of his wings, he was in the air and on his way toward his quarry.

The dragon's eyes narrowed into pinpricks, a hundred times better than any spyglass could boast. As Auganull soared over the ruined docks and out over the open water, it became apparent that the ships had spotted him. Large expanses of canvas unfurled like the wings of newly hatched insects, desperate to catch the wind as their bows began to swing northward. One looked to be unmanned, leashed to one of the smaller vessels, while another seemed to lack guns at all.

The gunmen on the galleon's main deck, however, along with those on the ketches, scrambled to tilt the noses of their guns in anticipation of the beast's attack while Laurent ordered the prince and his party to retreat into the lower decks.

"The moment your men have a shot, order it taken, lieutenants!" the captain yelled as Artus and his party squeezed past. Once the creature was too close, the angle would be too steep for them to aim the cannons on their middle deck at it, which would already put them at a horrible disadvantage when compared to an exchange with a typical naval enemy.

Auganull was coming in fast. Compared to him, the boats barely seemed to be moving at all. His massive form skimmed the top of the water, his belly only inches from the surface, as he raced across the waves toward his prey.

One booming crack after another sounded in quick succession as the port side cannons were fired—coughing black smoke into the sky and rolling backward from the force as far as their ropes would allow them.

The flashes of the cannons were Auganull's signal to pull up, and he arched into the air, soaring left and out of range with a swiftness that the ships simply didn't possess.

More cannons barked at him, this time from the top deck of not only the large ship but its two ducklings as well, though far too slowly for any solid shots to find their target.

The colossal shadow of the dragon now passed right over L'épine de Rose, blasting fire across the sails and top deck of the galleon. Though the wood and canvas were too wet to catch fire on this pass, crew members who weren't able to get out of the way were scalded by the heat. Some even jumped into the sea to escape the pain and douse their flaming clothes.

The rear ketch, which was still towing the prince's pirated vessel, was the first to pull hard to the east, lining up just well enough to fire another volley. It wasn't their cannons, however, that seized the dragon's attention. The ketch had also fired a hook that had managed to find its way around his ankle. The sound Auganull released when he realized he'd been snared was low enough to rattle ribcages but equally as piercing.

He dove toward the offending boat to which he was now tethered, tackling its tallest mast and easily snapping it with his weight and momentum. The ship tipped so far to the side that his wings grazed the water before he righted himself, gouging a clawed hand into the side of the ketch's hull while sending a stream of fire at the remaining mast, boiling the moisture out of it until it was consumed by flame.

The men on the deck that had managed to hold on and stay on their feet were now stubbornly jabbing at him with whatever they had on hand—sabers, rammers, a few were even armed with flintlocks, popping them off at him. Auganull made one such foolish soldier his next immediate target.

Over the sounds of the humans' frantic shouts, more cannon blasts boomed through the air. But the clouds of thick, powdery cannon smoke that rolled toward him and the ketch had not come from either of the boats he'd attacked. It wafted in from the south.

Half of the man he'd snapped up was hanging from his mouth, torso coming loose from his lower body, when Auganull twisted to look behind him. Another large Lorellian ship with three ducklings of her own was firing on him with their forward cannons, putting holes into the ketch that was being towed by the one he was brutalizing and hitting far closer to him than he liked.

A swipe from his claws freed him from the line still connected to the hook around his leg, and he treated the weapon that it'd come from to a hard swipe with his tale. Then, with a heavy beat of his wings, he again took to the sky, narrowly dodging another hook as the rest of the dead soldier plummeted from his jaws to the deck of the ship below with a smack.

Auganull left two more ships burning, and one nearly capsized before he broke off to head back to shore, dragging along the ketch that had initially affronted him by its broken mast. He wanted to show off his prize before there was nothing left of it, and he greatly doubted the remainder of the smoldering, limping fleets would get very far in the meantime, anyway.