The festival preparations flowed around them in a restless tide —streamers being hoisted, lanterns lit and re-lit when the mist dampened their flames, the constant thump-thump-thump of drums from somewhere up the cliff. But in the small clearing where Vesta had planted herself, there was only the sound of tuning.
Bianca watched with the expression of someone witnessing a natural disaster in slow motion. Vesta sat on an upturned crate, Mikasi cradled in her lap, her rainbow hair catching the lantern light and throwing fragments of color across the stone. Her fingers moved across the guitar's strings with the gentle familiarity of a lover's touch, coaxing tiny sounds—a note here, a chord there—each one tested and considered and either accepted or rejected with a slight tilt of her head.
"So like, really?" Bianca said.
Vesta looked up, face beaming with the full wattage of a sun that hadn't been seen in this mist for six hundred years. "Well yeah! Look at this crowd! They're just buzzing with excitement for music!"
Bianca looked over her shoulder.
A woman was hanging streamers from a second-story window, her mouth full of nails. Two old men argued about the proper way to tie a lantern knot, gesturing emphatically with gnarled hands. A child ran past chasing a chicken that had clearly had enough of festival preparations. A dog slept in a patch of weak light, twitching in its dreams.
No one was looking at Vesta.
Bianca flipped a wrist at the scene. "So like, I don't see it."
But it was too late.
Vesta struck her first chord.
The note rang out across the market—clear and bright and alive, cutting through the mist like a blade through silk. Mikasi hummed in response, the living instrument adding its own harmonic layer, and for just a moment, the combined sound hung in the air, refusing to fade.
Everyone froze.
The woman with the nails in her mouth stopped mid-reach. The arguing old men turned as one, mouths open mid-sentence. The child chasing the chicken tripped and fell, but didn't look down—looked at Vesta. Even the dog woke up, ears pricked forward.
Vesta grinned and launched into the next chord, and the next, and the next.
Her voice joined the instrument, and the combination was something else entirely—not just music, but feeling, poured directly from her soul into the air around her. She sang about the sky islands, about clouds that tasted like cream, about dials that could capture sound and light and memory. She sang about a girl who dreamed of the blue sea, about musicians who became legends, about the way music could find you anywhere, even in the darkest mist, even at the edge of the world.
Bianca's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Vesta—" she tried, but the word was swallowed by a particularly soaring note. "Vesta, like, there's no audience—"
Vesta didn't hear her. Vesta was somewhere else entirely—in that place where musicians go when the music takes over, when the song becomes more important than anything else in the world. Her eyes were closed, her body swaying, her fingers dancing across strings that glowed faintly with each touch.
Galit jogged up, his long neck weaving through the crowd of frozen festival-goers like a snake through grass. He stopped beside Bianca, green eyes fixed on the performing musician.
"What is she doing?"
Bianca shrugged, the gesture encompassing everything from helplessness to resignation to a kind of grudging admiration. "I like, tried to tell her. But—" She gestured at Vesta, at the music, at the way even the mist appeared to be listening.
Galit watched for a long moment. Then, slowly, his neck coiled into a shape that might have been appreciation.
"It's... not bad," he admitted.
"Right? But like, the crowd—"
"What crowd?"
Bianca gestured at the frozen people. "That crowd!"
"They're frozen."
"I know!"
Vesta hit a particularly high note, and somewhere in the distance, a dog howled in harmony.
---
High above the market, stone steps wound their way up the cliff face toward the Shioji-hime Shrine. The path was old—older than the festival, older than the market, older than most things on this island of ancient things. Each step was worn smooth by centuries of bare feet and sandaled feet and feet that had long since turned to dust.
A figure climbed them.
He was ordinary in every way—the kind of face you'd pass in a crowd and forget before you'd finished passing. Brown hair, brown eyes, the simple robes of a minor monk on some errand for his superiors. Nothing remarkable. Nothing memorable.
Perfect.
He reached the top of the steps and rounded the corner into the shrine's outer chamber. The San-Zekai Seals rested before him—three disks of polished stone, each inscribed with a symbol: triangle, square, circle. They sat on individual pedestals, arranged in a triangle that mirrored the positions of the Rokaku out in the misty sea.
The monk stopped.
His eyes traveled across each seal in turn—the triangle that blazed with inner fire, the square that sat heavy and still, the circle that pulsed with something like breath. For a long moment, he simply looked at them, letting his gaze linger on each one with the appreciation of a collector viewing rare treasures.
Then he smiled.
It was a small smile. A private smile. The smile of someone who had just confirmed something very important.
He turned for the exit.
Footsteps echoed up the steps.
The monk moved with fluid efficiency, finding a corner where shadows pooled thick and old. He pressed himself into the darkness, becoming nothing, becoming no one, becoming just another piece of the ancient stone.
Jannali burst into the shrine, Charlie half a step behind.
She slid to a halt, her heeled sandals scraping against the worn flagstones. Charlie, unable to stop in time, nearly collided with her back, his satchel swinging forward and catching her in the kidneys.
"Oof—Charlie!"
"Sorry! Sorry! Ahem—my profound apologies, I—"
But Jannali wasn't listening.
She stood blinking, her eyes fixed on the San-Zekai Seals. The itching under her headscarf had stopped—not faded, not eased, but stopped, like a shout cut off mid-word. In its place was something else. A pressure. A weight. A voice that wasn't a voice, speaking words that weren't words.
Triangle. Square. Circle. Fire. Earth. Spirit. The world held together by three points of light.
Charlie, oblivious, righted his pith helmet and pushed his glasses up his nose. The sight of the seals hit him like a physical force.
"Oh," he breathed. "Oh."
He stepped forward, notebook already open, pencil already moving. "Ahem! These appear to be the Interlocks! The primary stabilizers for the island's localized atmospheric veil. Note the Triadic Vertex: it signifies the kinetic impulse—the intrusive, generative spark of the initial forge!
Observe then the Quaternary Foundation: the terminal stasis, the receptive substrate, the very lithic weight of permanence! And, of course, the Singularity of the Infinite: the phase-shifting medium, the ethereal conduit, the aqueous flux of—" He turned, expecting validation, expecting the shared excitement of a scholar recognizing greatness.
Jannali stood in stiff silence.
Her eyes were wide. Too wide. The kind of wide that meant she was seeing something that wasn't in the room.
Charlie's pencil stopped moving.
"Jannali?"
No response.
"Jannali, what is it? What do you—"
She didn't move. Didn't blink. Didn't breathe, as far as he could tell.
Charlie's voice dropped. "Perhaps we should—perhaps we should leave. I don't think we're supposed to be—"
He reached out, touched her shoulder.
She gasped—a sharp, violent inhale that was almost a scream—and snapped her head toward him. For just a moment, her eyes weren't her own. They were older. Deeper. Filled with something that had been watching since before humans walked this world.
Then she blinked, and it was just Jannali again.
"Charlie." Her voice was rough. "Charlie, I—"
"Should we go?" His words tumbled out in a rush. "I think we should go. Right now. Going seems excellent. I'm an advocate for going."
She looked back at the seals. Her hand rose toward her forehead, stopped, fell back to her side.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, we should—"
A footstep.
They both spun.
Clarissa Belote stood in the shrine's entrance, one hand on her hip, the other pointing at them with the kind of judgmental precision that made Charlie feel like he'd been caught stealing from a temple offering box. Her sharp eyes narrowed in that particular squint that said I've already decided you're guilty, now I'm just waiting to hear what excuse you'll make.
"Oh," Jannali managed. "G'day. We were just—"
Charlie cleared his throat with enough force to dislodge a small rock. "Ahem! Good day! We were merely—that is to say—admiring your shrine. The architecture is remarkable. Truly world-class stonework. The fit of the blocks alone suggests a level of craftsmanship that—"
Clarissa's eyebrow climbed toward her knitted hat.
She walked past them without a word, her awayo swaying with each step, and stopped before a small statue in the corner. The Kankiten—the elephant-headed god of obstacles and their remover, carved from dark stone and worn smooth by centuries of reverent touches. She placed a small offering on its base—a handful of dried corn, a pinch of salt, a single flower whose name Charlie didn't know.
Charlie opened his mouth.
Clarissa turned her head just enough to fix him with the look.
Charlie's mouth closed with an audible click.
She returned her attention to the statue, held her hands in placation—palms together, fingers pointed upward—and offered a silent prayer. The shrine lapsed into a vacuum of stillness. At the threshold, even the mist grew stagnant, as if the air itself had reached a point of equilibrium.
When she finished, she turned to face them fully.
"Now." Her voice was raspy, high-pitched, and carried the weight of someone who had seen too much nonsense to tolerate any more of it. "Why aren't you two helping with festival preparations?"
Jannali found her voice first. "What is this place?"
Clarissa's eyes narrowed further—an impressive feat. "This is the Shioji-hime Shrine. Those are the San-Zekai Seals." She pointed at each in turn, a quick flick of her finger. "Triangle. Square. Circle. The things holding this island together while the rest of you run around eating pastries and playing music." Her gaze drilled into them. "Now how about you answer my question?"
Charlie's throat worked. "Ahem. We were—that is to say—exploring. And we became lost. Quite lost. Thoroughly lost. The definition of lost, really. If there were a dictionary entry for 'lost,' it would feature our photograph—"
Clarissa nodded slowly, her expression making it clear she believed approximately none of this.
"Well," she said, "how about I help you get found?"
She ushered them toward the exit with the kind of firm, maternal efficiency. Her hand on Charlie's shoulder guided him like a ship into port. Her presence at Jannali's back was as immovable as the seals themselves.
Jannali looked over her shoulder as they went, her eyes fixed on the three disks, on the symbols that pulsed with their own light, on the weight of centuries pressed into stone.
"Come on now," Clarissa said, her voice softer than before. "There isn't anything to do here. Nothing for visitors. Nothing for anyone, really. Just old stones and older secrets, and trust me, darlin', you don't want either of them."
The door closed behind them.
The shrine fell silent.
In the corner, the shadows stirred.
The monk stepped out from behind his hiding place, his ordinary face split by a grin that was anything but ordinary. He crossed to the door in three quick steps, paused, listened. The sound of Clarissa's voice faded down the steps, accompanied by Charlie's nervous throat-clearing and the soft scuff of Jannali's reluctant feet.
Then he was gone, down the steps, through the paths, away from the shrine and the temple and the weight of ancient watching things.
When he was clear—when the San-Zekai complex was just a shape in the mist behind him, when the festival noise was a distant murmur, when he stood in a concealed hollow between two outcroppings of salt-crusted rock—he stopped.
His body rippled.
The brown hair lengthened, darkened, became something else. The ordinary features shifted, rearranged, settled into sharp lines and a vulpine grin. The monk's robes remained, but the person inside them was someone else entirely.
Catarina Devon stretched her neck, rolled her shoulders, and pulled a transponder snail from inside her robe.
The snail's eyes swiveled, focused, and its face warped into the unmistakable shape of Marshall D. Teach—Blackbeard himself, all gap-toothed grin and greedy eyes.
"Zehahaha," the snail said. "Report."
Devon's grin widened. "I've found them, Captain. The seals. The San-Zekai thingummies. Three pretty little disks sitting in a pretty little shrine with barely any guards worth mentioning."
Blackbeard's eyes gleamed. "And the Condor? The fruit?"
"Not yet. But he's here. Whole island's buzzing about some ritual. The Condor's the star of the show, apparently." She leaned closer to the snail. "They're not heavily guarded, Captain. A few monks, some old women, a whole lot of festival chaos. We could walk in and take them."
The snail's face stretched into Blackbeard's laugh. "Zehahaha. Patience, Devon. We move when I say we move. But soon." His eyes narrowed. "Very soon."
Devon tucked the snail back into her robe, her grin still firmly in place.
"I'll be waiting," she murmured to the mist, to the island, to the seals that didn't know they'd already been claimed.
Then she melted back into the shadows, becoming nothing, becoming no one, becoming just another piece of the ancient stone.
And somewhere above, in the San-Zekai Temple, three monks were still trying to force Bō-Zak into pants with bells on them.
"FOR THE LAST TIME, I WILL NOT—"
"THE ANCESTORS DEMAND BELLS!"
"THE ANCESTORS CAN TAKE THEIR BELLS AND—"
Rayan spun in a happy circle. "I think you look pretty! Woob-woob-woob!"
Bō-Zak's response was lost in the chaos, but it was definitely not complimentary.
The festival continued below, oblivious. The lanterns glowed. The drums pulsed. Vesta sang her heart out to an audience of frozen strangers and one harmonizing dog.
And in the hollow between rocks, a predator waited.
If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider giving Dracule Marya Zaleska a Power Stone! It helps the novel climb the rankings and get more eyes on our story!
Thank you for sailing with us! 🏴☠️ Your support means so much!
Want to see the Dreadnought Thalassa blueprints? Or unlock the true power of Goddess Achlys?
Join the Dracule Marya Zaleska crew on Patreon to get exclusive concept art, deep-dive lore notes, and access to our private Discord community! You make the New World adventure possible.
Become a Crewmate and Unlock the Lore:
https://patreon.com/An1m3N3rd?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
Thanks so much for your support and loving this story as much as I do!