PREVIOUSLY.
[Suddenly, a flash of bluish-white light tore through the heavens from top to bottom, illuminating for a fleeting second the silhouette of the five ships against the total darkness of the storm. Three seconds later, a peal of thunder so profound that Columbus felt it in his very marrow made the timber vibrate beneath his feet.
"It is here," Columbus whispered, watching as the first bolts of lightning began to dance upon the crests of the waves which, all at once, had begun to swell with terrifying violence.
The sky broke. The first roar of the storm struck the hull, and Columbus knew that, despite all the science of the Suaza, many European and Suaza names would be written this day only in the foam of the Sunset Ocean—or perhaps, a miracle would save them.]
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Month 6 of Year 12, SuaChie Calendar.
The Sunset Ocean (Pacific), aboard the Tequendama I (Spanish Delegation).
The world, as Christopher Columbus knew it, dissolved in the first shudder. It was no ordinary jolt; it was a dry impact, a hammer blow that made every last fiber of the Tequendama I's structure groan.
The Admiral, whose long years at sea allowed him to walk heaving decks with the ease of a man strolling through a village square, found himself forced to cling to the teak rail with both hands in desperate strength. His knuckles, white and numbed by the sudden cold, were the only things keeping him tethered to the ship.
The waves appeared with a ferocity that defied all nautical logic. Columbus had crossed the Sunrise Ocean (Atlantic) and survived the furies of the Sea of Floating Islands (Caribbean), as the Suaza called it, but this was something else entirely.
The size of the crests was so gargantuan that, before breaking, they completely blocked the light of the lightning, plunging the ship into the absolute darkness of liquid walls. If the waves forming on the periphery of the squall already seemed to dwarf the mainmast, the heart of the storm had to be liquid hell itself.
"I dare not imagine what it is like within the eye," Columbus murmured, his voice cracked by a fear he had not felt since his first years as a cabin boy.
Wrestling against the wind that threatened to rip the cloak from his back, he hurried toward the helm. The air was saturated with a blinding shroud of rain and sea-spray that tasted of salt and death. Despite the deafening clamor of the thunder, which resounded like constant cannon fire, the commands of Luis and Quihicha managed to pierce the chaos.
Luis, transformed by adrenaline, shouted orders to reef the storm sails and correct their heading. His voice, bolstered by urgency, commanded the deployment and adjustment of the lines with a precision Columbus had never seen in him.
What was most surprising was the response: the Spanish sailors, who weeks ago would have been lost in prayer or succumbed to panic, answered every command with clear confirmation, repeating the status of every maneuver exactly as the Suaza had taught them. The discipline of the Suaza Kingdom had become their language of survival.
The water fell with such violence that Columbus felt every drop like a frozen projectile. Within minutes, his clothes weighed twice as much, soaked by that Sunset Ocean that seemed to be asserting its right to devour them.
Quihicha, who had been inspecting the lower levels, emerged from the hatch like a blue specter under the lightning's glare. He approached Columbus, moving with an unnatural stability while the ship pitched at suicidal angles.
"Admiral!" Quihicha shouted, pressing his face close to Columbus's to be heard. "We must record our dead reckoning at all times! Every variation in course, every knot lost!"
Columbus, overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility and the terror of seeing the waves toy with the Tequendama I as if it were a walnut shell, snapped. His patience, already frayed by the tension, broke before what he considered a technical trifle in the midst of the apocalypse.
"Dead reckoning?!" Columbus roared, gesturing toward the darkness. "We are trying not to sink, lad! It is more important to hold the course and keep the mast from snapping than to fret over the trifles of a scribe! Survival knows naught of ledgers!"
Quihicha did not flinch. His eyes remained fixed on Columbus's, projecting a frigid calm that contrasted with the fury of the ocean. His words were steady, yet weighted with implacable logic.
"If we manage to survive, Admiral… it will avail us nothing if we know not where we are! If we know not whence, we came and whither we go, we are dead men even if the ship floats! In this ocean, to lose one's reckoning is to lose one's life!"
Quihicha's words struck Columbus with more force than the gale. Fear—that primal instinct of self-preservation—had made him forget the very essence of his craft: navigation. They were in the midst of a vast and unknown abyss; without the record, the journey's success was impossible.
With a look heavy with silent apology, Columbus nodded. "You are right!" he shouted. "Take an assistant to my day cabin! Let him establish himself there and record without fail every variation, every blow the ship suffers! Let not a single datum be missing!"
Quihicha walked away with a composure that Columbus found almost insulting in its perfection. The young Suaza did not seem to feel the shifting temper of the storm; he moved with a balance that spoke of generations of navigators who had learned to dance with the sea, not merely combat it.
While Luis maintained order in the sail maneuvers, a Suaza communications assistant, wrapped in a treated leather slicker, approached the Admiral. His task was vital: to maintain visual contact with the signals of the flagship amidst the tempest.
Columbus pulled out his spyglass, trying to focus on the rest of the fleet. The image he captured between the flashes of lightning was a nightmare vision. The ships did not look like the proud vessels that had set sail from Sunset Edge City; they looked like small wooden skiffs riding liquid mountain ranges.
The swaying was so extreme that Columbus felt as though gravity vanished at intervals. At the peak of a wave, the ship seemed to hover for seconds in the air before plunging into the vacuum of the water's trough—a sensation that made his entrails rise to his throat. Had he not been lashed to the rails near the helm, he would have been hurled into the abyss.
"Sir!" the communications assistant shouted. "Orders from the flagship! Raise deck security to the maximum degree!"
Columbus knew the protocol. It meant the worst was yet to come. "Maximum security!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs. "Bring the harnesses!"
Immediately, several sailors, both Spanish and Suaza, dashed to the deck stores.
A young Suaza mariner reached the quarterdeck with a set of harnesses. They were pieces of engineering Columbus had never seen in Europe: reinforced leather straps joined to ropes of an unusually dense and resilient weave.
The communications assistant, the helmsman, and Columbus himself lashed themselves firmly to solid iron rings that the Suaza Kingdom had strategically installed throughout the deck months prior. Columbus tugged the rope, testing its firmness. The material was no ordinary hemp; it possessed an elasticity and strength that gave him a glimmer of hope.
I hope this material is as resilient as its creator's wit, he thought, looking at the rope that was now his umbilical cord to life.
With the harness secured, Columbus looked through the spyglass once more. The Tequendama I crewed by Suazas held an impeccable formation, their storm sails perfectly trimmed. The English Tequendama II worked with a belated urgency, struggling to correct the details Norrington had overlooked in his initial arrogance. But the situation of the Portuguese ship was catastrophic.
"Cortizos, you fool!" Columbus cried out as he beheld the disaster.
The Portuguese crew, who had not taken the hygiene protocols or the weather alerts seriously, were now in a state of total chaos. Men struggled against sails that had broken loose and were lashing through the air like canvas guillotines; the deck gear was unsecured and rolled from side to side, striking and shattering the legs of the sailors. Columbus could guess that the ship's interior was a cauldron of wounded men and ruined supplies.
Despite his current loyalty to Spain, Columbus felt a deep affection for the Kingdom of Portugal. He had spent years there, trying to convince King John II; he knew those men, those navigators who were once the finest in the world. To see them die due to incompetent leadership tore at his soul.
Then, a bolt of lightning illuminated the Portuguese ship's mainmast. Columbus, with the lens of his spyglass fogged by raindrops, saw something that made his heart stop. A man—a small, desperate figure—was falling from the mast's crow's nest. It was a slow descent, a death-dance against the black sky, before being swallowed by the white foam of the sea.
Columbus lowered the glass, stunned. His breath hitched, caught in a knot of pure horror. The wind lashed his face with renewed fury, and for a moment, the sound of his own heart seemed to compete with the thunder tearing through the atmosphere. Fear—true fear of the unknown and of a lonely death at sea—invaded him once more with the force of a tide.
He raised the glass again, his hands trembling, and focused back on the ships. But the storm was doing its final work. Visibility was dropping by the second, and the vessels, prey to the current and emergency maneuvers, began to drift rapidly away from one another, vanishing into the wall of water and shadows.
"They are separating..." Columbus whispered, feeling the Tequendama I sink into a water valley so deep it seemed they would never rise again. "We are alone."
The roar of the ocean was the only reply. The expedition of the three kingdoms and the Suaza empire had just been shattered, and only fate knew who would live to see the dawn.
20 Minutes Later.
Time had fragmented into a succession of violent impacts and absolute darkness. Twenty minutes had passed since the Tequendama I had lost sight of the position lights of Umzye's flagship.
To Christopher Columbus, those twenty minutes felt like hours of agonizing struggle against a liquid titan. The rain was no longer a weather phenomenon; it was a frozen mass, solid and dense, falling with such ferocity that every drop seemed like a lead pellet trying to pierce the flesh of the few men who held out on deck.
The cold of this Sunset Ocean (Pacific), which the Admiral was beginning to respect more than his own God, seeped into his bones, turning his doublet into a suit of soaked, heavy leather armor.
The wind was a howling gale that did not slacken, but rather seemed to roar with malevolent intent. Above the storm, the sound of the iron pulleys and the metal reinforcements of the masts—that Suaza engineering Columbus had once viewed with suspicion—emitted sharp clinks, a metallic music that accompanied the constant thundering of the heavens.
Quihicha had crawled across the quarterdeck until he stood shoulder to shoulder with Columbus. Luis joined them, clinging to one of the safety rings. The three were bound to the ship by their harnesses, watching as the waves swept the deck with the force of an avalanche. The water reached their knees before draining through the scuppers.
"Admiral!" Quihicha shouted, his voice barely a whisper against the din. "There is no way to search for the others in this hell! Our only option is to hold our course west! We must deploy the storm jib and clear the pressure zone before the mast gives way!"
Columbus could barely see Quihicha's face, but he felt the steadiness in his arm. Through the curtain of water, the Admiral felt a pang of anguish for the other ships.
Would James Norrington be maintaining his composure? Would Juan Cortizos have survived his own arrogance?
But doubts were a luxury he could not afford. If the Tequendama I sank, the Spanish crown would lose its seat at the table of the future.
"Luis! Order the men to trim the staysails!" Columbus roared, straining his vocal cords to their limit. "If the sails tear, so be it! I prefer a tattered sail to a ship at the bottom of the abyss! Turn the helm, hold the pulse against the current!"
The shouts of command began to ring across the deck with renewed spirit. The Spanish crew, who minutes before had been on the verge of psychological collapse, found an anchor in the firm voice of their Admiral.
"To the sheets! Pull with your souls, sons of Castile!" Luis shouted, directing the sailors who, lashed to their stations, fought against the rigging. "Help that man, the bow line has come loose! Strength, damn it, strength!"
They watched as the Suaza support crew moved with an agility that defied gravity, repairing ropes and securing hatches while the ship pitched at suicidal angles. Columbus knew that the foresight of the Young Leader, Chuta, in preparing reserve materials and disaster-trained personnel, was the only thing keeping them afloat.
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Nearly two months had passed since that night of nightmare.
Columbus sat at his small desk inside his personal cabin. The space smelled of dry wood, slowly burning candle wax, and the persistent aroma of ancient maps.
Exactly 49 days had passed since the great storm, an event that still visited his dreams in the form of black water walls and muffled screams. In total, they had been sailing for 96 days since departing Sunset Edge City. Three months of isolation in the deepest blue on the planet.
The Admiral re-read his notes, leafing through the pages where he had recorded the survival of the fleet.
He remembered the almost mystical relief of seeing, two days after the storm, the silhouette of Umzye's flagship emerging from the mist. Then appeared the English Tequendama II, its hull scuffed but its sails intact. The last to arrive was the second Suaza Tequendama I. But it was the Portuguese ship that brought shadow to the expedition.
"Folly... pure folly," Columbus whispered as he read his own entry concerning Juan Cortizos.
The Portuguese, having failed to follow safety protocols and lacking firm leadership, had been sucked into the core of the storm. They had lost valuable supplies that now rested on the seabed, but the price in lives was what truly enraged the Suaza. Five Portuguese sailors and two Suaza support men had perished. To the Suaza, who valued the life of every subject as an extension of the Kingdom's body, this was unforgivable.
Umzye's justice was swift.
Juan Cortizos was demoted to co-captain, stripped of his autonomy. Umzye himself moved to the Portuguese ship to oversee every maneuver, leaving his first officer in command of the flagship.
Quihicha had remarked to Columbus that this incident would have severe diplomatic repercussions on the continent: the noble Juan would surely be imprisoned upon his return, and the Kingdom of Portugal would face sanctions that could cost it its participation in future trade routes. The Suaza looked after their own, and he who squandered a life under their protection paid dearly.
During the remainder of the voyage, the expedition had hopped from island to island. Columbus remembered the taste of strange fruits, the mapping of white-sand coasts and impenetrable jungles where they gathered fresh water and documented species that would make European naturalists pale. Every camp was a logistical delay, but a blessing for the body.
Yet, for Columbus, the discovery of these islands was something more. It was proof that his original theory—the one that led him to find the Suaza in 1492—was not entirely wrong, only lacking in scale. He was about to achieve his personal goal: to touch the Indies, but under the direction of a joint expedition the likes of which the world had never seen. This added even more weight to his achievements, which he knew would be etched into history.
He closed his journal with a sigh, observing the wear on his own hands. He went out onto the deck, where the midday sun fell with a golden intensity upon the spotless timber. The air was thick, vibrant with a humidity that carried scents that were not of the sea: the smell of fertile earth, of heavy flowers, and of smoke.
Suddenly, a cry tore through the silence of the voyage.
"LAND HO! LAND HO!"
The lookout, hanging from the mainmast's fighting top, waved his arms with infectious madness. Columbus felt a jolt of adrenaline course down his spine. He ran toward the quarterdeck, ignoring the ache in his joints, and snapped open his spyglass with feverish haste.
There, in the direction where the sun would begin its descent in a few hours, rose an island of imposing proportions. Its mountainous peaks were shrouded in low clouds, and its coastline was so vast that the spyglass could not see its end.
"Is it another island, Admiral?" Luis asked, arriving at his side, his breath hitching.
"It is no ordinary island, Luis," Columbus replied, his eye never leaving the lens. "Look at the size... the color of the verdure. It could be Cipangu. Or it could be the very continent of the Indies."
The possibility of encountering a complex civilization, capable of supplying food and materials for the return, filled Columbus with a euphoria he had not felt in months. If it were the continent, his name would be engraved in eternity as the man who united three worlds.
"Prepare the approach sails!" Columbus ordered, his voice regaining a youthful energy that left his officers stunned. "Quihicha, signal the flagship! We want a landing formation by dawn! Clear the decks, sharpen the steel, and prepare the diplomatic gifts! Today we are not merely navigators; we are ambassadors of Heaven and of Castile!"
Luis and Quihicha looked at each other and, for the first time in weeks, both truly smiled. The exhaustion of the long voyage, the weight of the storms, and the diet of dry rations seemed to evaporate before the vision of that green and promising land. The Sunset Ocean had finally surrendered.
.
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[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Hello everyone.
First, I'd like to wish you all a Happy New Year in advance. I hope all your wishes and goals come true. May you have a year full of happiness, health, and good company. And, a little selfishly of me, I hope you'll keep reading this novel from time to time.
Second, this chapter picks up directly from the previous one, and I was honestly annoyed with myself because I left out something important, focusing too much on the storm.
I wanted to finish the first encounter with Southeast Asian cultures in this chapter, but I might have to take up the next one.
I even wanted to add scenes of the argument between Juan, the Portuguese nobleman, and Umzye, or the first island they sighted and visited. But I couldn't help it; I got caught up in the storm. Haha.
By the way, after the next chapter, we'll be back with Chuta and also with some European news.
By the way, I had no idea there were so many islands in the Pacific, both North and South. It's incredible.
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Read my other novels.
#The Walking Dead: Vision of the Future (Chapter 91)
#The Walking Dead: Emily's Metamorphosis (Chapter 34) (INTERMITTENT)
#The Walking Dead: Patient 0 - Lyra File (Chapter 14) (INTERMITTENT)
You can find them on my profile.]