Warp Token 2 Word Update

2k words

***

The ship’s tilt worsened, all the water cascading down the deck and off the starboard side. Roderick had to be aware of each step, lest he lose his footing. Cursing, he made his way back to the forecastle, searching it from top to bottom once more.

Again, he came up with nothing. Next, he tried below deck, struggling to balance himself on the angled steps leading down. Cargo had been tossed around in the battle, crates and pallets and barrels rolled into clumps as gravity turned everything slightly to the right. The galleries down here were packed with dozens of working men every hour of the day, but now it was eerily quiet, only bodies remained, the creaking hull providing a solitary ambience.

He called out, but not even his echo answered. He searched a few of the cabins, but only found more of the dead. Halfway up the galley, a piece of the ceiling came loose and struck him on the back. It left a bruise, but he was otherwise fine, though he had to move more cautiously now, and that just ended up making his search even slower.

“Roderick!” a voice called from one of the hatchways. He recognised Wilfred’s voice, but he didn’t answer, straining his hearing to the limit. She could be pinned beneath something, unable to escape.

His search brought him up to one of the ballasts, a peek inside the contraption confirming it was overflowing, the room drowning in ankle-deep water. There was plenty of strewn cargo, but no bodies. Searching down here was probably too far of a stretch, but Roderick’s growing desperation demanded he look everywhere.

The soft planks of the floor and the layer of water ruined any grip his boots may have had, and on his fifth step, he lost his balance. His legs flung forward, and he landed hard on his back, and his head cracked against the ground.

Roderick lifted a hand to his hair, and it came back red with blood. Getting up was an effort, his back flaring in pain. For a terrible second it seemed he would be the one in need of help, but then he suddenly felt a hand clasp around his own.

He was hauled to his feet, Roderick turning to see Wilfred stood beside him. “Roderick,” he breathed. “We are out of time. The ship is lost, we must leave at once.”

“I won’t leave Skyseeker behind,” Roderick insisted, fighting through a wave of dizziness. “She could be trapped down here somewhere.”

“We will be too if we don’t get out of here right this moment,” Wilfred shot back. “Let’s go,” he added, seizing his arm and pulling him back the way he’d come.

Roderick wanted nothing more than to continue his search, but the fall that had almost cracked his skull had almost been his end, and he didn’t’ want to test his luck a second time. He glanced over his shoulder, hoping that he’d spot something, a tail, a spot of dark fur, anything.

“She’s likely to have boarded a lifeboat already,” Wilfred said, picking up on what he was thinking.

“And she’s just as likely to still be stuck,” Roderick answered, but he allowed himself to be led back to the upper deck. I’m sorry, lass, he thought. I’m so, so sorry I wasn’t with you.

The rain was pouring down at an angle as steep as the wolfship’s current list, pelting at his face with the force of thrown stones. The ocean seemed a lot closer to the deck when Roderick glanced to the side, the waves lapping at the bulwark itself.

They returned to the aft section. Most of the men had departed, only a handful of crew staying behind to help crank the winches suspending the last lifeboat. Von Kessel was among them, shouting to be heard over the monsoon.

“You didn’t find anyone else, Roderick?” the Captain asked. He had probably assumed he’d left to search for survivors, and certainly not the Skaven kind.

“No,” Roderick muttered. “There’s no one left.”

“Damned Skaven,” Von Kessel grunted. “They will pay for every man lost today.”

They loaded onto the boat, Roderick helping Wilfred on first before following. The gap between the wolf ship and the boat was maybe two feet across, basically a lunge, but through it was a terrifying drop to the thrashing waves below, his heart racing as Roderick took the plunge.

He made it aboard the lifeboat, but the craft was far from steady. It swung against the two pulleys suspending its front and rear ends, jostling in perilous see-sawing motions, Roderick all too aware of the open air below them.

The last few men stepped over the gap, until Von Kessel was the last one to board. He flipped a mechanism on the pulleys, pausing for a moment to check behind him, as though giving anyone left one last chance to let themselves be known. Roderick had to hand it to him, if his ship was to sink, then Von Kessel was going to be the last one on board.

After a brief delay, the Captain stepped onto the lifeboat. Roderick was about to ask how they were going to lower themselves without anyone to man the winches, when one of the sailors got to his feet, and reached for one of the ropes suspended above them. There was some sort of automatic release system, because the lifeboat began to descend after he flipped a switch on the pulley.

With a loud clunk, the lifeboat was lowered to the sea, the iron hull of the wolfship panning upwards. It didn’t take long to reach the ocean, the lifeboat slapping against the waves, the impact making him and the fifteen others aboard lurch.

Four of the men took up paddles, heaving in rhythm as they turned the craft away. Roderick watched the wolfship shrink with distance. After a minute, the waterline visibly rose above the sunken nose, and then the list became too much, and a thousand tonnes of wood and steel collapsed into the sea. There was no great splash to mark its end, the Imperial vessel simply kneeled into the ocean until all that was left was its upturned belly.

Roderick sat there, facing the rain and wind. Only hours ago, he’d been cutting fish with his Skaven companion, and now she was gone. He’d done all he could to find her, yet even that didn’t feel like he’d done enough, and now he was powerless to do anything.

All he could do now was wait, and pray to Sigmar that Wilfred’s optimism was in the right.

-xXx-

The borders of the maelstrom curdled across the sky, black clouds shifting into the pink hues of the coming dawn, rays of light filtering through the vestiges of overcast.

The sea stretched on forever to the left and right, and Roderick stood upon its edge, one leg lifted up onto a rocky outcropping. The shore lay before him, a carpet of gravel and rock, the black waters obscuring it behind layers of foam was the waves curdled back and forth.

It was on this beach they had made landfall, after a half hours’ worth of rowing. A couple of the lifeboats were pulled up to his left, the survivors of the shipwreck transporting cates, barrels, and bodies.

Some of the braver men had journeyed back out into those troubled waters to search for supplies, and had come back with corpses instead. At first there had only been one row of bodies, but after the third hour, the dead men stretched on and on in almost ten morbid columns. The beach had become a graveyard.

He heard from someone that even then, not everyone was accounted for.  Two hundred and fifty men had been on the wolfship. Seventy were currently gathered on the beach. That was barely over a quarter. It was hard to say how many had been killed during the battle, and how many had died during the sinking of the wolfship, and it would never be possible to tell, the bodies would be trapped at the bottom of the ocean with the ship forever.

Some stragglers had gotten very lucky, swimming to the shore by hand, but only four men had managed this, and while that was cause for joy, none of those four had been Skyseeker.

Roderick must have questions every survivor twice over, and they all said the same thing. There’d been no sign of her. One of the men claimed to have seen her by the forecastle, going towards its front, but she had very few witnesses besides that. It made no sense. How could she simply disappear without anyone noticing?

He looked down at the battered men below. Could one of them be hiding something? No, why would they lie, what reason would they have? Skyseeker had treated them well, maybe not to a normal standard, but she’d been agreeable in her own way, and she’d never raised a blade against any of them. Perhaps he shouldn’t vent his frustrations on them so easily.

Over the curdles he watched one of the lifeboats course into the shallows, the rowers lit from the back by the rising sun. Roderick began his descent down the rocks, cradling his head as he felt waves of dizziness. He’d been nauseous ever since taking to dry land, probably because he’d been stuck on that rocking boat for two entire weeks, his body wasn’t used to level ground.

His boots splashed in the water as he waited for the rowers to dismount, Roderick moving out to pull the boat out of the ocean’s clutches. He glanced inside the vessel, then shot the closest man a frown.

“Nothing?” he asked.

The sailor shook his head. “A couple kegs, arms and armour was all.”

“Then unload and go back out there,” Roderick grumbled. “What are you waiting for?”

“I’m sorry, sir, that was our last trip. Captain’s orders. Our ship has sunk for three hours now, nobody could have stayed afloat that long.”

“No man, perhaps,” Roderick said. “But Skyseeker would have a chance. She’s lighter, she wears neither plate nor leather. She could have found a piece of wood to hold onto, or… or something.”

“As you say,” the man replied, though he didn’t sound very convinced.

He began to unpack what few supplies he’d recovered, Roderick leaning a hand on the boat. He had half a mind to simply take it and search himself, but what good would that do? If the men couldn’t find her, his chances weren’t all that better.

Was she still out there? Had she found a way ashore? He prayed that was so, and she wasn’t still out there, at the ocean’s mercy. A lot of blood had been spilled during the battle, and if anything was bound to be drawn to the wreckage, it was sharks… or worse.

Wilfred approached from one of the rocky banks, his green robes swishing against the stones. He used his staff like a walking stick, wading into the shallows to stand astride him.

“Did they find her?” he asked him. Roderick shook his head. “Roderick, I’m so-”

“No,” Roderick said, cutting him off. “Don’t apologise. Even you cannot know what’s happened to her, there’s still a chance she’s alive.”

“A chance, yes,” Wilfred replied. He put a hand on his arm. “You’re stone cold. Come out of the water. I’ll have someone set up a fire before we all get hypothermia.”

Before they left ear shot, the rower shouted after them. “Wizard! We found something of yours!”

“Oh?” Wilfred asked. The man lifted a bundle of cloth from the lifeboat, along with a keg. He walked up the beach towards where the rest of the supplies were being stockpiled, and tossed the cloth on his way by. It landed with a rocky crunch at their feet.

Roderick kicked aside one corner of the cloth, and the wind revealed its contents. Sitting there on the shore, without so much as a scratch, was the relic of power.

“Oh, praise be,” Wilfred sighed. “I thought we had lost it for sure, thank the Gods for that.”

Staring at the relic, Roderick was suddenly overcome with a wave of fury. This thing had been locked away in the hull of the ship, sealed within the most proteted cabin in the hold, and yet here it was, intact when all else had been destroyed.

“Fuck the Gods,” Roderick mumbled.

“Beg your pardon?” Wilfred asked.

“Fuck. The. Gods,” Roderick repeated, louder. “Of all the things they could have saved, this foul staff makes it to land, while Skyseeker is still out there?! Fuck the gods!”

He kicked with all his might. The staff rose and fell barely three meters away, and the splash it made was pathetically small. Roderick fell to his knees, shouting an angry, wordless cry that was lost to the wind.

Roderick had not wept since he was a child of ten or eleven, and the emotions broiling inside him threatened to break that streak. And yet he did not shed a tear, and somehow that felt wrong.

Some of the nearby men turned to stare, but Roderick ignored them, his gaze squaring on that bundle of cloth. A flap had parted, revealing part of the sandstone grip to the sun. He could feel its mirth, as though the Chaos Gods themselves were revelling in his torment. Whatever entities lived inside it, it was responsible for Skyseeker’s disappearance. He had no proof, but he just knew it had something to do with the recent events.

“You did all you could for her, lad,” Wilfred said, letting him have his few moments. “Do not blame yourself.”

“I don’t,” Roderick answered, glancing over his shoulder. “because nothing did happen. She’s not dead. I will not believe it. I will not,” he reiterated, not sure whether he was convincing his friend, or himself.

As Roderick stood, darkness ate at the corners of his vision. He nearly toppled over, but Wilfred caught him in his arms, flashing him a grave look.

“What’s happened, lad?” Gingerly, Wilfred threw an arm over his shoudlers, then seemed to hesitate. Roderick felt a hand press against the back of his head. “My Gods, what’s this? You there, yes, you, help me get him to the camp.”

Roderick heard footsteps, and then his other side was supported by someone. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but then he remembered. He’d hit his head, hadn’t he? Back on the ship, he’d slipped and fallen. It must have been worse than he’d thought. Strange, it hadn’t felt painful at all since then.