The Seawolf

Velius Renatus woke hungover in a low-ceilinged harbor tavern at Crestmere after the three-day hunt for the enormous ink-black creature that had sunk two fishing boats off the cape. The Seawolf was under repair at the far dock, scaffolding around the hull and two planks stripped where the creature’s barbed tail had raked them open; Velius’s coin purse was also lighter than expected. Aldric, an older harbor pilot, approached Velius with three northern-channel wrecks from the past three weeks: pilots had vanished, the forty-foot ketch Harrow’s Reach had left only hull fragments near Dunmore Point, and two survivors of the first wreck had seen blue-green lights beneath the water before it struck. With another run due in four days, Aldric asked Velius to commit to guarding the forty-two-foot grain-and-lamp-oil ketch Maren’s Call, commanded by Captain Sura, and to pursue the threat afterward aboard the Seawolf if it did not attack that voyage. Velius agreed to take two companions. After bargaining down Velius’s proposed 120 gold from the Maren’s Call, Aldric settled on ten gold immediately and seventy more on confirmation of a kill aboard the merchant ship, while accepting Velius’s rate of two hundred gold if the hunt required returning to sea on the Seawolf. Aldric gave Velius the chart, promised to notify Sura, and paid the ten gold advance.

At the Seawolf, Velius recruited Hydrania, Velius’s Triton love, whose blue-grey complexion and silver-white braided hair marked her among the shipwrights. Recognizing the reported light, Hydrania identified the creature as a Veilray: a huge, flat manta-like deep-water beast armored along its dorsal ridge, which blinds prey with blue-green bioluminescence from below before surfacing to capsize hulls with its wingspan. She said it was unusual for one to be so far north and insisted that Baylor accompany them only as rigging overwatch with his rifle, never on the deck rail; Velius accepted, and Baylor agreed without argument. During the four days before departure, Hydrania and Velius planned to target the Veilray’s unarmored gill slits and thinning wing edges, noting that silver would be useless against a creature that was not cursed. They prepared fire oil, two flash charges, a saved vial of caustic compound, and a weighted chain net to tangle a surfaced creature’s wing joint; Velius would close with the greatsword while Baylor fired into the gill line from above. Velius left the still-repairing Seawolf with Hammer, the scar-browed bosun, who promised she would be whole when Velius returned. On the fourth morning, Velius, Hydrania, and Baylor boarded the Maren’s Call. Captain Sura, a compact grey-haired woman, warned Velius that she wanted the threat dead before it touched her hull, not heroics. The ketch sailed from Crestmere by midmorning, leaving the Seawolf’s pale exposed planks behind; Baylor took position in the rigging, Hydrania stood beside Velius at the rail, and the northern channel lay flat and grey-green ahead over the waiting Veilray.