The massive ship entered the silent waters
of the Moon Bay. The silent fishermen villages could be seen from it, waiting
to be attacked and pillaged. The pirates aboard the ship were getting ready to
do what they did best, drinking wine and recalling past victories. However,
their captain was on the observation deck, contemplating the bay were he had
been born all those years ago. It was his first time back and he was thinking
about telling his men to stand down and retire to the open ocean.
Captain Fox was renowned as one of the most
vicious pirates in all the seven seas. But that night, he felt as a kid,
unprotected and filled with emotion because of the place he was in. He had been
taken from his home from a very young age and he had never known what it was to
have a family. His crew was his family but he felt that wasn’t the same thing,
especially when he had seen true family love in his past raids.
When the men were ready, he was unable to say
anything. Captain Fox authorized them to set the first town on fire and take
all they wanted from it. There were only a few houses there, so not many
people. Fox stayed on his ship as he saw his men rowing in the silent night,
slowly taking the town by surprised. From his place, he was able to see the
houses catch on fire, he heard the screams and he even felt something strange,
a certain uneasy feeling that he had never felt before as a pirate.
As expected, the men returned almost empty
handed. Village of fishermen was not an
interesting target and Captain Fox was sure of it. He told his men that they
needed to go back to the open ocean and then plan the raid of a real big city
or at least of towns that had something more to offer than rotten fish. But his
men argued that they were hungry and that they needed the fish to survive. None
of them was smart enough to make a net and use it a way to get food.
Without permission, the pirates attacked the
second village. That one took longer to fully take over but they did. When they
came back from the shore, Fox noticed they had brought someone with them. It
was an elder, and old woman who was shaking and seemed to be on the edge of
dying of how scared she was. Fox told his men to hold her in the empty cabin
and not in the lower cells.
His men obliged as they ate and celebrated the
fact that they had a decent dinner for the first time in a month. The captain
when to his room and tried to sleep but the noise his men made was difficult to
ignore. Besides, he just couldn’t rest. There was something pressing his chest.
Maybe it was being in Moon Bay again or maybe it was realizing he was becoming
a very weak captain.
He decided to join his men for a beer and some
fish, seeing he wasn’t going to be sleeping for the next few hours. On his way
to the staircase, he passed the cabin where the old woman was and the door
there was wide open. He returned to see the woman sitting on the bed, in
complete silence and darkness. However, he could feel something was wrong. Fox
decided to enter the place and talk to her. Maybe she needed to know she wasn’t
going to die there. When he was about to touch her shoulder, the woman looked
at him with glowing red eyes.
In some strange tongue, she said various
words. She began saying them in a normal register but then she raised her voice
and look upward, to the bridge. The captain then heard some noises above but he
didn’t move because he wasn’t able to. He was very scared and wanted to do
something, whether it was running away or stabbing the old woman with his
sword. But he just couldn’t do any of those things. Something was preventing
him from doing so.
The woman had stopped speaking but her eyed
were still very much red. After a moment, she spoke again, her voice amplified
a thousand times. It was like receiving a massive wave on the face and being
pushed a long distance by it. She told him he was a sun of the bay and that he
shouldn’t have come back.
That made Fox less scared somehow. How did she
knew that he had been born there and why shouldn’t he be there? The woman then
stood up from the bed and stretched out a hand towards him, as if she was going
to grab something. And it felt like she did: the captain couldn’t properly
breath, his eyes going blurry and his legs feeling very weak. It hurt a lot
inside his chest and he still couldn’t move at all. It was torture, the worst
kind.
When she finally stopped, he was very dizzy.
The old woman had driven him very close to the edge of death. She moved her
hand again and then he was able to move but only to collapse on the floor like
a bunch rocks. His breathing was heavy and he couldn’t talk but he knew he had
been very close to the end. He looked at her and she looked at him. It was a
strange connection that they maintained for a while.
The witch told him Moon Bay was a haunted
place. The villages there were nothing but illusions. All those things his men
had done that night were scenes played out in their heads. There were no real
villagers or fish or wine. It was all her, as she was the last surviving
inhabitant of the area. No one else there lived and it was because someone else
had been there before the pirates, setting everything on fire.
She told Fox that it was that warrior, that
creature made in hell itself, which had entered the bay in a similar night and
had set on fire every single soul there except her. She was able to hold him
for a while but he was too powerful to be stopped by an older woman. Her magic
tricks were nothing against his darkness and villainy. However, he spared her
life and made her stay there forever, attached to the waters of the bay,
waiting for any adventurers trying to take what that devil had taken.
Captain Fox was able to speak, even if his
chest was aching too much. He wanted to know why that creature, if real, had
left her there. Why her and for what purpose? The woman laughed like mad. She
was surprised he didn’t realize she was a slave of the devil that had burned
those waters. By magic, she was attached to the place and obliged to kill
anyone who entered the bay. She had to offer their lives to his cause. That
would make him stronger for his return.
So he was going to come back and set the world
on fire once and for all. She said it was not going to happen for another
couple of hundreds of years but that his reign was unstoppable. There was no
way to prevent it from happening. The captain asked the woman if she could be
able to break free from the shackles she had been put in. Her expression went
somber and turned away from him. The answer was obvious.
The old woman changed the subject, telling the
pirate that she had only let his men take her to the boat because she wanted to
speak with him, as she had an idea to try and tilt everything in her favor, at
least once. He didn’t understand. She explained that she knew his parents very
well, the witch knew exactly who he was and remembered the day he had been
taken away by a group of pirates. She told him about the tears they cried and
how they did during the creature’s first raid.
They had been very brave and had asked her,
just as the monster neared, to cast a special spell making their boy immune to
the powers of hell. After all that time since he had been gone, they still
loved him and wanted to protect him against the outmost evil. She did so and
that’s why she was onboard, to tell him he had a chance, a long shot at making
the devil pay.
Before he could ask anything of her, she said
some more words and vanished, turning into thick black fog that disappeared in
seconds. The captain ran to the bridge of his vessel to see if he could call
her back but he was stopped as he saw the bodies of all his men. It had been
her but only because It had ordered it. It was then when Fox realized he had to
think his next step very well.
