The waters of Bloodsea were crimson red, but it was completely undecided whether that be because of some bloody legends of simply a natural phenomenon of algae. Either way, waves thrashed over the rail and left red water dripping everywhere on the Devil's ship.

In the dark night, a drop of ocean water fell from the wooden roof and onto the papery white covers in Silta's old corner room. Then another, and another, until the red water began to take over the blankets with dotted stains.

With each drop, a new thought came to Archer's head.

Drip. Lyra was not allowed aboard the Reprisal. Not much on its own, perhaps.

Drip. Liam Britter would know his name. Would recognize his face.

Drip. You would never have fallen into the traps he did—not the mutiny I saved him from, not the alcoholism I had to drag him out of—

Not the mutiny I saved him from.

On its own, not much. Together, though, with everything else, it was the final detail, the end of it all.

Because what kind of audacious, possibly-brilliant-but-also-quite-possibly-suicidal man would have the gall to pull mutiny on Vallin Bardarian?

One was Archer Kingsley, and the other was Adrian Everson.

*

The story starts before pirates eradicated the word officer, back before the Kingsland spires rose tall, back before any champions or kings graced the world. All that time ago, a schemer was born to the most mysterious island in Myria. A schemer was all he was, and all he still is.

In his first lifetime, Adrian Everson was too thin and frail to beat anyone to the punch, but he had twice the work ethic of the next man, and that was all a pirate captain needed to sign his contract. Without a friend in sight, he spent his nights playing chess by candlelight. He was awful at it, but he believed brilliance to be a learned skill like anything else, and he couldn't be bigger, so he had to be smarter. He had the heart of a mastermind, but his mind couldn't keep up. If only you had a few more years to bulk up, the pirates would say. If only you could train that mind for another decade, the strategists would mock. If only, if only, but a man's affinity for labour in that age hit the ground after thirty, if they lasted that long at all.

Everson hid the taunting down deep in his bones, using it to fuel his fire. It festered there in his quiet soul, moulding and rotting away at his humanity. He played his chess by candlelight, built his schemes up like pyramids in his mindscape. He felt his life ticking away like a rusty clock that wouldn't tick much longer. Twenty, twenty-one. Tick, tock.

But brilliance is somewhat of a learned skill, and Everson did get better. Better and better, until the day his old pirate captain put that little pip on his shoulder and declared him an officer. Declared him an advisor. The moment he was able, Everson filled his old captain's head with any kind of legend he could. He wanted a scheme, a ploy. He was insatiable for it. It haunted his dreams, danced liked ghosts in the candlelight of his midnight chess games.

In the end, perhaps the old captain sailed for Myria's chest just to shut Everson up—to prove to the world that nothing lay up in the harmless bloody water but exactly that. His navigators did not navigate their way there, but rather took directions from Everson himself. How did he know the course? How did he know where to find that cursed chest? Everything has an explanation; it simply depends how fantastical a story you'll believe. In this story, Everson's rotting, festering soul was a deep friend of the Devil, who spared him no expense. If that's far too outrageous for you, then perhaps he simply got lucky.

And tick tock goes his life. Twenty-two, twenty-three. He can hear the clock ticking away at night, in the silence of the candlelight and the chess games. Tick tock. Twenty-four, twenty-five. The end is near.

The pirate crew stumbles upon that legendary chest, that one that doesn't exist, that one that's no more than a story. Neither the crew nor the Captain truly believe it will work, this chest and the heart myth. They don't believe it, but they follow Everson's lead. When it's all said and done, they still don't believe it, aren't quite willing to take a bullet to the head to test it.

But Everson knows it will work. He hears it in the silence of his chess games, because there, in that stillness, he can hear the absence of his rusty clock. It's stopped ticking.

He leaves the pirate crew tormented by their new power. When the first of them is killed with an arrow, they get back up. Bullets are no match for their bodies. Deadly age and injury are not things they can experience anymore.

Still, even there in their immortal hearts, there is the memory of fear, the old, since-silenced tick of their clocks. At some point in their lives, they begin to miss it.

For some, it happens quicker. The Captain is the first to go, for his wife is wondering why she is the only one going gray. People often mistake her son for her husband's brother. In his fury, he steals back his heart. He dies with his wife.

For some, it happens much later. Sometimes they grow tired, sometimes they grow bored. Some of them chase the feeling of near-death for their immortal years, willing and hoping to experience it once more, but they can no longer find it. That's the message at the core of the legend: The inevitable end makes the adventure all the less certain, and all the more fun. No matter how long it takes, one always, always concludes that life is better when it is not a sure thing.

Well, not always.

Everson spends his days planning ways to protect his heart. He draws maps, hides them in unforgivable places. He practices spells, makes it so that only the rarest of blood may open the chest. He dreams, plans, concocts, devises and above all schemes to prolong the uncertainty. He can't even recall the sound of that clock anymore; it silences with the mocking and the taunting. He has his time now, has used it to his advantage. No longer is he so frail, so tiny. No longer must he only be smarter, because hundreds of years of practice will make anyone a formidable combat opponent.

Until he meets his match.

It comes years after he signs under Vallin Bardarian of the Avourienne, of course with plans to take the devilish ship for himself. He cozies up to the King of the Sea—someone who simply got life right the first time around—and accepts the powerful position of being his first mate. His old crew members are long gone and dead, and his new ones have no knowledge of his true age. He has it all planned out so well, so beautifully.

Then there's Everson.

Everson?

But any good story must have a wrench, and the wrench in Everson's story is the cunning saviour to their Siren problems, dark and beautiful brilliance epitomized in the form of none other than Novari Silta.

Does the evil and incredibly talented Adrian Everson get the woman? Of course not, because then there'd be no story. He tries his best, wraps her up in his façade and holds her tight, but she twists free.

Adrian could pull her away, cut out her heart, toss it in the chest and force her to choose him, but instead he decides to wait her out in the long game that he's become the expert of. Bardarian always had a thing for his pretty deckhand, but it won't last, of course. She'll come back to Adrian.

She doesn't. Her guesses of who Everson truly is haunt her in the night, solidify the love she has for her own ticking clock. She likes the fight between the good and the grey, the people who fight for what they believe and feel with everything they have. She refuses to play an evil so far gone it has no beliefs nor feelings to motivate it.

Her prolonged absence startles Everson, so he threatens her, threatens Bardarian, but they only fortify their front against him. For the first time in hundreds of years, they present a new danger to him: They know that his clock has paused ticking, and with that knowledge, they are able to begin planning how to properly stop it.

It festers in him, rots and moulds and solidifies in his dark soul as it had before. He can hear those bullies, can hear the taunting and the mocking, can hear the rusty clock getting ready to tick again at the hands of his lover. There is only one option left. He waits for the right time and when it comes, he strikes.

Tried to sweep captain from right under Bardarian.

Everson commits mutiny. He tries to kill the Captain, thinking Silta will assist him, since there is nothing more she wants than power, and he's promised her that.

Until Silta shot him dead.

Silta shoots him dead on the deck. She chooses love; perhaps she's not quite as cold as she'd like to be.

He's dead as dead can be. Threw his cold body over the rail my damn self.

Liam Britter throws his body over the rail his own damn self.

Everson is dead once again, except that he's not. He can't move on with his life elsewhere like he's done before because of those two, tiny little problems—those two, festering, rotting, moulding problems by the name of Silta and Bardarian.

They know who he is. Sometimes, when a cloaked man walks across the street far ahead of them, they'll glance at each other. They never speak the truth aloud, but they know the other knows. It is one of those things that binds them, keeps them watching the other's back, waiting for Everson to pounce.

In the end, it's Silta that makes the first move. Without Bardarian's knowledge, she leaves the Avourienne on her own while they are docked at a port in the Cobalts. Archer Kingsley lounges in the strategy room with Liam Britter, calm and content, but Britter senses something is wrong. He doesn't know why—but Bardarian, nursing a similar feeling the floor above, thinks he might. Adrian Everson is in that port.

Silta gets off the ship, finds Everson, steals the key to Myria's chest he's hoarding and kills him for the second time. But he puts up a fight.

She reboards the Avourienne a bloody and hysterical mess. She confuses everyone but that ever-clever Bardarian, who plays dumb but knows exactly what happened because he's smarter than he pretends to be. While Silta has her breakdown, he feigns confusion, but it's all just an act so he can slip the key from her while she goes off the rails.

When she recovers, she demands he give the key back. He refuses, saying it's better with him. She fights to the bone for it—even cuts off most of Bardarian's pinky finger in an attempt to get the key back—but he won't tell her where he's hidden it. The fight dies down eventually, Bardarian wins, and no one has any clue what really happened.

The Captain sends out a message for Everson, recovering from his last death: He has the key, and he'll keep it hidden from Silta on the conditional that Everson never interferes in his life or the lives of his crew ever again.

Everson sees it as a pretty good deal. He fades back into the shadows, feels even more comfortable when he finds out they're both dead, and the key now long lost.

But what does every story have to have? A wrench. Maybe even a few, if it's a good story.

This wrench comes in the form of the will the actually-dead-Bardarian left his actually-not-dead-fiancé. Along with the deed to his ship, every coin he possessed and the trust of his crew, he leaves her the location of the key to Myria's chest. To use only on an antagonist basis, the will warns. Does she listen? If she did, there wouldn't be much of a story.

When Everson finds out Silta is now working on her own free will, without her level-headed lover to buffer her, he panics. It's worst-case scenario: Bardarian's protection is shattered, and his cunning leftovers are drawing Everson into the most precarious game of chess he's ever played.

But of course he'll play, because there's nothing he does better than scheme. He moves; he enchants the cave where the map is hidden so she can't access it. She moves by sending the Myriad to get it. So he pulls up to the Myriad under the disturbing pseudonym of Corpher Avoure and bargains with the Captain. When that doesn't work, he attacks.

But she's there, waiting to move. She kills him for the third time with a well-placed arrow trick shot. The Myriad gets the map. So he boards the ship at night and defiles the map.

She kills him for a fourth time as he sneaks off the Myriad. She takes Alli Laurier, the new map, aboard her ship.

He moves. He approaches Charles Courtley and flips his loyalty. He sneaks aboard the ship to kill Alli Laurier.

She moves. She kills him for the fifth time, throwing his body over the rail.

He moves.

What's his move?

*

It was nighttime when the sheets turned completely red.

The water of the sea dripped and dripped onto the white sheets. Archer could've put a bowl under the water; he could've tried to put something over the hole. Instead, he let the sheets turn completely red.

It could've been midnight, or it could've been sometime in between midnight and morning when the door to the corner room was pushed gently open.

Archer had his back against the wall, his feet crossed over the covers, head resting on the wood. He didn't need to look over at the door to know who it was.

She closed the door behind her, resting her own head on the wood behind her. It was silent for a moment.

"I gave you a clue," she whispered through the dark, red air.

Archer lowered his chin to look at her. In the absence of any real light, he could see the curves of the bags under her eyes, the hollows of her cheeks. She looked like a ghost, the exhaustion of her face unparalleled. She didn't quite look stunning in that moment.

"It's Everson," he said.

She closed her eyes, as if those words said aloud made everything simple again. There was one more person in the world now that knew about this. The feelings of the extreme pressure, the loneliness, the exhaustion—he saw it all lift right from her shoulders.

He watched her for a moment, then very simply gave up fighting. He held out his arm for her, and she let out a strained breath while she moved, ignoring the soaked sheets as she curled up next to him.

He only moved to wrap his arm back around her shoulders, keeping his eyes on the door. He rested his chin on her head, that familiar smell of the ocean salt in her hair.

A few of her fingers wrapped around his wrist, nails biting his skin, holding on to the one thing that was safe and stable in her crumbling world of chess.

He moved one finger to trace her neck. The Orphano chain, then one more. He lifted it up, his fingers finding the shape of a key. With the gentle sigh, he let it fall back down.

"Fill in the gaps for me," he whispered. "Because I never seem to be able to do it on my own."

Archer felt the warmth of her words through his shirt, "What are you missing?"

"His move," he replied. "I can't figure out his next move."

She was still for a moment, breaths slow but shallow. "I'm tired," she whispered.

He held her tighter. Every part of her was ice-cold to the touch. So he didn't get to know now. That was fine. In the morning, when she had slept the night, she could tell him. Archer truly believed she would. They'd go up to the strategy room, figure out his plan and put an end to it. Right now, she could just sleep.

The sea kept leaking onto the covers, red stains spiralling out onto the white and spreading. The sea splashed onto the deck and the clouds roiled with storms. For perhaps the first real time in months, Silta fell asleep. Her heart slowed to that impossibly leisurely beat—the one that had once kept Archer awake at night, wondering if one minute, it would stop altogether.

He listened to her breathe, his heart slowing into sleep.

And somewhere out there, in the dark, silent, bloody night, Adrian Everson made his move.