The pain, aye, it was like nothing I’d felt before. My wooden legs, useless as they were, weighed me down as I lay helpless on the shore. The gulls circled overhead like the vultures of the sea, and the flies… the flies swarmed me as if they could smell death approaching.
Smoke choked the sky above One-Eyed Isle, rising in thick, dark plumes. Through me half-blind eyes, I watched Skalebreaker vanish into the distance, a shadow against the dying light. I called out for the crew, desperate to hear Coral’s voice or even Mad Dog’s familiar grumbling, but all that answered was silence—cold and final as the grave.
By the time I clawed my way back to the hideout, I was met with ruin. Nothing had been left untouched, destruction ripping through our sanctuary like a storm. Gold, silver, and de’Blooms—everything Captain had spent his life gathering, every prize we’d ever fought for—gone. Vanished into the wind.
With the last breath in me, I called for the crew again, but the fires roaring through the isle swallowed my voice. The place once teeming with life was now a graveyard of ash and smoke.
When the morning light crept through the cave, the fires had smoldered to embers. I pulled myself upright, bones creaking like an old ship, and hobbled out into what was left.
One-Eyed Isle, the only place I’d ever called home, now lay in ruins. And the crew—the only family I’d ever known—gone without a trace. Dead? Or had they escaped, abandoning me to this hell?
