Chapter 41: Riptide
The water was full of burning wood.
Planks and beams and sections of hull floated in every direction, some of them still catching, their fires struggling against the waves that moved through the debris field in rolling surges. Bodies were in the water too, sailors who had gone overboard in the fighting or jumped from decks that could no longer be stood on. Their shouts carried across the surface in broken fragments, competing with the sound of groaning hulls and the continuous crack and boom of the battle.
Two of the hydra's heads had found a frigate.
They bit down on either end of it simultaneously, their teeth punching through the hull planking with the same ease and the same disregard. The wood split. The sounds it made were structural, coming from deep inside the vessel where the keel was trying to hold against forces that had not been part of its design considerations.
The heads pulled in opposite directions.
The frigate came apart.
Men fell from both halves as the ship separated, dropping into the water amid raining debris. Rope ends, broken spars, barrels sealed tight enough to float. All of it came down with them. The two halves of the ship rolled as they hit the water and kept rolling, their ballast now irrelevant.
"Coordinate fire!" The naga captain's voice cut across the noise from her position at the rail of her vessel, which was still whole and still moving, though the margin on both of those conditions was narrowing.
Her remaining ships of the armada tried to form a line. But the swell from the hydra's movement made it difficult.
Every time a ship found its heading, a new wave from something large shifting beneath the surface pushed it sideways and the process started again. Gunners were trying to load in conditions that had no right to be called anything other than a world-ending storm, except there were no clouds in the sky.
Three ships managed to coordinate.
Their guns fired together, which was a genuine accomplishment given everything, and the combined shot hit one of the hydra's necks at close to the same moment. The neck snapped back from the impacts and went down into the water in a thrashing arc, taking part of a ship's rigging with it as it fell.
The captain's hands tightened on the rail. Her teeth showed.
Then the water rose.
Not waves. The surface itself lifted in a broad swell that came from below the debris field and spread outward. Where the one head had been blasted off, two new heads of the dragon emerged from it, rising through the red ocean.
The ten heads found each other immediately, the necks curving until the heads were side by side, and then the mouths opened.
The glow inside them was not a single colour. It was several, layered in a way that had no natural equivalent, each element visible as a distinct band within the combined light.
They turned the glow over one ship.
Everything happened at the same time and in sequence, which was the nature of the combined attack. Ice came first, driving downward with a cold so concentrated it went past freezing, building a vertical tunnel from the ship's position straight toward the ocean floor. Fire came in the same instant from a second head, not contradicting the ice but contained within it, travelling down the tunnel's centre. Lightning travelled along the ice walls. The other elements arrived in the fractions of a second that followed, each one adding to a point of convergence that had nowhere to go except through the thing it was aimed at.
The ship in the centre of it all, as well as that part of the ocean itself, was gone before the sound arrived.
The crackling vertical ice tunnel stood for two seconds, a shaft punched through the ocean's surface to somewhere far below, its walls transparent enough to show the dark water on either side pressing against them.
Then the walls cracked.
The cracks spread in every direction at once.
With a surge, it gave way and shattered. The ocean refilled the space with everything it had been holding back.
The whirlpool caused by that refilling was immediate and strong. The nearest vessel had no time and no chance. It turned sideways and went down in a spiral, pulled toward the refilling depths, its crew going in after it with and without their own volition. The men who jumped fared the same as the men who didn't.
From her ship, the naga captain stood at the rail and looked at all of it.
She had been in bad situations before. She had been in situations where people called a thing hopeless and she had found the angle that made it manageable, and she had built a career on the gap between what other people called impossible and what she decided to make happen anyway. Her crew was steady in storms that would send seasoned admirals back to port. Her voice worked courageously under fire that would cause others to raise the white flag.
Her hands were shaking on the rail.
Her fleet. The work of a decade of accumulation, of trades made and debts called in and ships stolen fairly and bought honestly and won. It was coming apart.
She stared at the water.
The roar of something ten-headed was everywhere.
A pull at her arm.
She blinked.
"Captain!" The boy, Swain, was there, his face wet, his voice at a pitch that meant he had been saying this for longer than once. "The fleet! Your orders!"
She looked at him, her face blank.
"Captain!" he called again, shaking her arm. "We still have enough black powder to take it down below deck!" he said, clearly fully optimistic. The thought of them, of her, losing a fight wasn't even something that registered as a possibility in his mind.
The captain quietly looked at the churning water. At what was in it, what used to be in it, and what was never going to be in it again. A streak of what appeared to be black, dark magic shot across the sea from one end of the horizon to the other.
"Abandon ship," she said, her tone neutral. It came out at normal volume, which was too quiet for anyone to hear over the ongoing destruction. "ABANDON SHIP!" she shouted, louder now and clearly audible.
Her crew looked at her.
The hydra, terrifying as it was, had not made them freeze. But her saying that had. There was something in the specific wrongness of hearing their captain give that order that hit differently than the terror of even the monster itself did.
With a loud slap, she grabbed her own face with both hands, her fingers dragging from forehead to jaw with enough force to pull the skin white. She held that for one second.
"Get off of my boat, you bilge rats!" she snarled, and the growl in it was the voice they knew. Immediately, the crew set in motion. Lines dropped. Rafts hit the water. Men went over the sides.
She grabbed the boy, Swain, by the collar. Their eyes met as she lifted him and threw him in the direction of the nearest raft. He tumbled into it just before they dropped.
"Captain!" he called down from the water, as the escaping crew pulled him back into the raft and quickly began paddling as fast as they could.
The naga was already moving the other way.
Slithering, her lower serpentine half propelled the rest of her up over a cannon and onto the rail in one continuous movement, her lower body finding the rope and holding it without any effort she had to think about as her tail wrapped around it. The ship rose and fell under her, falling in free-fall for a second as the momentum of a powerful wave threw it into the air. It splashed back down with a crash, water flying everywhere. Using her tail, she turned the cannon around and aimed it down toward the ship's core itself. Her cutlass raked along the metal, creating a wash of sparks that caught the fuse at its edge.
It started to burn down.
The hydra's heads were spread across the water in every direction, each one busy, each one aimed at something that had been a ship.
Snarling, the captain drew her cutlass and opened a gash along her forearm, a long clean cut that she pressed to the outside of the rail, letting the blood run free into the ocean below her.
"Hey!" she shouted, her voice hoarse and raw.
The destruction continued.
"HEY!" she bellowed, hitting her own chest with her fist. "You like royal girls, don't you?!"
The blood hit the water.
Every head stopped moving. Ten pairs of eyes, each one a different colour, turned to face her ship at the same moment.
"Come on!" The naga woman beat her chest again, the mast collapsing behind her with a crash she didn't flinch from. "I'm already salted!"
The seawater from the latest swell hit her from the side, soaking her through. She kept her eyes on the heads. Out of her periphery, she tracked the surviving ships moving. Turning. Gaining distance. Rafts and lifeboats pulling in every direction.
The hydra stopped its assault on her men and instead moved toward her.
The ocean itself seemed to part and she couldn't tell from the scale of it if the creature was standing all the way down on the ocean floor or simply floating in it. The waves crashed forward, either way because of their locomotion, each one threatening to become a tsunami by the time they hit the shore.
It came as a mass, the many heads converging on her position from their spread across the debris field, the water pushing outward from whatever was below. Her ship rose on the swell of its approach.
The captain adjusted her grip on the rope. Tightened her fingers around the cutlass.
The heads towered over her vessel, close enough that each individual eye was larger than her whole body, each one a different colour, each one fixed on the blood still running from her arm. One of the hydra's heads lowered itself, hovering above the surface of the water, its black pupil expanding to nearly fill the entire width of the crimson red iris.
"Come on," the captain said again, quieter this time.
The cannon's fuse burnt down low.
The fairy, formerly a bandit, came up coughing.
Having been thrown out of the brig of a vessel by sheer good fortune, he hit the surface of the water and grabbed the nearest solid thing, which was a broken plank. He draped himself over it with both arms and stayed there for a moment, processing the situation.
"Oh God," he said, to the plank. "Oh fuck me." He coughed more water out. "Fuck. Fuck!"
He pulled himself further onto the plank and looked around at the debris field, the burning wreckage, and the ongoing catastrophe happening at a distance that was not comfortable but was at least a distance.
An elf's head broke the water nearby.
"Boys!" the elf shouted, spinning in place, water streaming from his hair. "Jergel! Mako!"
"Over here!" the fairy called, raising one hand. He watched his friend surface. "Thank the maker." He crawled to the edge of the plank and reached down as the elf swam over. "Are you okay?"
"Mako! Where's Jergel?" the elf asked, grabbing the plank's edge and hanging there, catching his breath.
The fairy looked at the water around them. The elf looked too. They both called the name, their voices competing with the ongoing sounds of destruction across the water as they looked for their orcish friend.
Then they stopped.
Both of them, floating there in the water, looked toward the distance where a leviathan was towering over the last ship out at sea.
"What the hell is that...?" asked the fairy, Mako.
All ten heads came down onto the ship from above in a converging pattern that left no part of the vessel unaccounted for. The strike was simultaneous and total. The vessel ceased to exist as a ship and became a point of impact as it plunged into the water.
"Oh, I really, really hate dragons," said the elf.
The ocean drew down where the hydra struck, like a meteor hitting the sea. A second later, a massive fireball erupted outward past the ocean as something exploded. The deafening crack of the blast sent the two of them back as the shockwave travelled over the water. Chunks of red meat flew through the air, together with burning shrapnel, all of it splashing down into the sea.
Then the ocean came back.
The inward rush that followed the downward strike reversed into a tidal wave that built fast and moved outward from the impact point in a widening ring. It picked up debris as it moved and carried it, and it did not slow as it crossed the open water in all directions.
Mako looked at the wave.
The elf looked at the wave.
The fairy held out his hand and his friend took it.
"...Don't let go," said Mako. The fairy's voice was steady, which surprised him.
"I won't," replied the elf. It came out the same way.
In that second, something green surfaced directly beside them, large hands finding the edge of a barrel that bobbed up alongside the plank. Their orc friend blinked water out of his eyes, looked at the fairy, looked at the elf, and looked at their joined hands.
As if fully indifferent to their predicament, the orc's expression went from confusion to a mocking, smug grin. "Heh? You two gonna kiss or something?" he asked.
They didn’t respond.
Confused, he followed their eyes toward the blue mountain about to fall over them in a second’s time. The wave was blocking out the sun and behind it, the black, rippling silhouette of a beast with endless heads could be seen in the shimmer of the water for just a brief second.
Quickly, the orc reached out, grabbing the elf’s other hand. None of them had any words left.
The ocean came.