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Chain of Cryxar

DaBigJay
7
chs / week
The average realized release rate over the past 30 days is 7 chs / week.
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Synopsis
"Chain of Cryxar: A War of Thrones and Shadows" Cryxar is bleeding. King Varyn Dreadhelm’s conquest carves deeper every season, his infamous Chain of Cryxar dragging the free realms into shackles. Some kneel. Some plot while others sharpen blades in the dark. But chains, no matter how strong, have weak links. Varyn sends off Krystof "The Second Sword of Croyton" to map up the uncharted lands so he can expand the Chain of Cryxar further is caught up in a fierce storm that threaten to extinguish his life and his loyal men that follows him and somewhere in the wilds, a witch with storm in her eyes whispers to the winds—let the Chain break. War is coming. Not the polished lies of heralds and treaties, but the raw, screaming kind—the kind fought in muddy trenches and throne-room betrayals. Blood will decide who rules. But first? Someone has to dare strike the blow. This isn’t a story about saving the world. It’s about who’ll be left standing when the darkness devours it.
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Chapter 1 - Through the Veil of Shadows

The storm didn't rage—it screamed. Not the petty fury of squalling winds, but the livid howl of something alive, as if the gods had peeled back the sky and spat their contempt onto the Dreamweaver's deck. Waves weren't just waves anymore; they were leviathan spines, blacker than a slit throat's blood, heaving themselves out of the deep to slam against the hull like warhammers. Each crest tore at the ship's belly, wood groaning like a hanged man's rope.

Captain Nel Lucero wasn't steering—he was wrestling a demon. The wheel kicked back like a spooked stallion, its salt-crusted spokes biting into his palms as if the ship itself wanted to throw him overboard. Tendons stood out like rigging under his skin, his fingers locked in a death-grip that had long since stopped feeling like hands—more like rusted hooks fused to the damned wheel.

The wind wasn't just tearing at his coat anymore; it was peeling it off in strips, the oilcloth shredding like rotted sailcloth in a gale. Something cold and wet—maybe spray, maybe blood from where the rope had flayed his palm earlier—trickled down his wrist.

He coughed a laugh (why? Habit? Hysteria?) and tasted what the sea had left in his mouth: gunpowder grit, bilge stink, and that coppery tang that meant either split lips or a lung full of saltwater. The storm wasn't making promises anymore—it was reading his last rites.

"Batten down, you spineless bilge-rats!" Nel's voice ripped through the gale - a ragged, animal sound torn from his chest. The rain came sideways, punishing, each drop a white-hot brand against exposed skin. "Move or you're shark shit by lightrise!"

Thunder wasn't laughter—it was a coffin lid slamming overhead, shaking the deck like a rat in a terrier's jaws. Lightning didn't illuminate—it flayed the darkness, for one heartbeat exposing the crew: pupils blown wide, lips peeled back from teeth in pure animal fear. Then blackness swallowed them whole.

Tymás—just sixteen and still smelling of land—tripped over his own feet as the wave hit. The rope coil flew from his hands as the sea drove him shoulder-first into the mast. Something popped, maybe the wood, maybe him.

Gyreth had him up before the pain could register, calloused fingers digging into his arm. "On your feet, pup." No rage in it—just cold truth. "Drown now or fight. Choose."

Wind gnawed at the sails with teeth of salt and spite. Canvas split with a wet, tearing gasp. The mast—god's bones, the mast—shuddered like a dying man, its timbers shrieking as they twisted against their own bones.

Ser Krystof Morevain burst from the cabin as lightning split the sky. Rain slashed sideways, pinging off his armor like hail on an anvil. The deck heaved - his body reacted before his brain, fingers closing on sword-hilt from years of muscle memory. When the next flash came, it lit his face like a death-mask, those cold surgeon's eyes scanning the wreckage of the deck.

'She'll hold?" His voice vanished in the storm's gullet.

The captain snarled as a wave like a drowning god rose before them, his arms corded with effort against the wheel. 'Pray she does. The alternative's quicker than you'd like.

The wave hit like God's own hammer. Wood screamed as the deck disappeared under a wall of black water. Men forgot they were men.

Fingers tore on salt-crusted hemp. Knee-caps cracked against bucking deckplanks. The prayers came anyway—hoarse, half-remembered words to gods whose names they'd spat in dockside taverns.

The storm smelled wrong. Not just pine-pitch and ozone, but the throat-clenching stink of a butcher's block after a week in the Aetheris. The kind of stench that lingers in your shirt folds after burying a friend.

From the crow's nest: "CAPTAIN! STARBOARD—!" The rest tore away in the wind.

Nel wiped salt from his eyes. Nothing. Just the storm's endless hunger. Then—

Lightning.

A shadow uncoiling beneath them.

Something that made the waves look small.

"What did you see?" Krystof demanded, noting the sudden pallor in the captain's weathered face.

"Nothing good," Nel muttered, then raised his voice to address the crew. "All hands! Double-check those knots!" Nel's voice cracked like wet canvas. He hesitated—just a heartbeat—before adding: "And keep your eyes sharp as gutting knives. We've got company."

Krystof's hand closed on the sword's grip—that old dance of muscle memory. The leather wrapping felt different tonight. Not the usual wear, but the sweat-slick tension of his first battlefield at sixteen, when he'd learned steel weighs more in the killing hour. "One of those scaled bastards from the southern charts?"

"Maybe. Or something worse." Nel's voice was grim as he fought another wave, this one coming at them sideways, threatening to roll the ship entirely. "The deep waters hold secrets, Krys. Things that should stay buried."

Old Ryck's gnarled hands moved first—the Aetheris-bleached tattoo of a fishhook on his thumb trembling as he sketched the sign of the Threefold God. "Ain't no serpent," he breathed, the words sour with cheap gin and missing teeth. "Storm's stirred the pot. Things're rising that oughta stay drowned."

"Stow that shit, Ryck!" But Nel's callused hands slipped on the wheel—just once—before regaining their grip.

"Shut your fool mouth!" Nel snarled, but there was fear in his own voice now. "Save your breath for working!"

Rain went from bad to worst—not falling now but hurled, the wind whipping drops sideways into faces like birdshot. What passed for deck became a churning gutter, shin-deep where the scuppers clogged. Men skidded on their asses, their swearing swallowed whole by the storm's animal shrieks.

The next wave didn't lift the Dreamweaver so much as pick her up by the scruff. The crash down punched the breath from every man aboard. The timbers shrieked—not the clean snap of fresh oak, but the wet crack of Krystof's childhood barn collapsing under winter snow. The sound of something that wouldn't heal right. Then from the bowels of the ship rose that particular scream sailors call the "drowning man's psalm"—a sound that starts in the balls and climbs up through shattered teeth.

"She's splitting!" Voice raw as a fresh flogging wound.

Nel's reply came automatic: "This bitch has swallowed whole fleets!" But the wheel fought him now—a sick, sluggish resistance that spoke of seawater sloshing between ribs.

Krystof materialized like a rain-slick ghost. "There must be—"

"One place." Nel's gaze locked on the horizon's hidden threat. His voice dropped to the tone men use naming executioners. "You'll wish I hadn't said it."

The storm's fury paled against what waited ahead—a darkness so thick it choked lightning from the sky. Not star time's absence, but something hungry. The kind of black that sticks in your throat like priest's ashes. It made the storm look feeble as a tavern brawl.

"Qadiran tits," Tymás whispered, swaying on his sea-legs. His boyish face had gone the color of week-old fish guts. "That ain't natural."

Krystof's sword hand twitched—the same involuntary spasm he'd gotten since the Plague Siege. "Umbral's Maw." The words tasted of copper and grave dirt. "That's no sailor's tale."

Nel's fingers locked on the wheel like rigor mortis setting in. "Choose, princeling. Drown like rats or dance with devils." Rain dripped off his nose like a leaking coffin.

Old Ryck's tattooed hands shook—the faded mermaid on his forearm seeming to shudder. "Twenty winters back... the Duskmore crew came back. Couldn't look at shadows after. Cut their own—" His voice broke like rotten mastwood.

"Fuck your ghost stories!" But Nel's usual roar came out hollow. The wheel groaned under his grip, louder than the dying timbers.

Nel's words died halfway to courage. That flicker in his eyes—same as when he'd lied about the Moonmaiden's wreck. The Umbral Realm wasn't just ghost stories. He'd seen the wrecks wash up in his youth, their decks scoured clean as if licked by something with too many tongues. Men babbling in languages that made dogs howl. Shadows that moved wrong.

Lightning struck. Close enough to taste—burnt ozone and the metallic tang of fear-sweat. For one heartbeat, the darkness stood naked before them. Not a wall. A maw. Throbbing like a sick man's pulse from horizon to horizon.

"CAPTAIN!" The lookout's scream tore his throat raw. "MAINMAST—!"

Nel looked up. A jagged split ran down the mast, weeping sap like the gash on his thigh from the Battle of Three Tides. Widening with every roll of the ship. One good gust and—

"Fuck the storm's whore mother!" Spittle flew from Nel's lips, lost in the gale. "Lash that bitch down or we're all feeding the keel!"

Krystof moved before the order finished. Sword abandoned—his hands remembered the rope's bite from the siege at Velfmark, when they'd hung siege ladders under arrowfire. Hemp burned his palms, saltwater opening old calluses. "Climb, you sons of soggy whores!"

The crew moved. Not orderly. Not clean. But fast—the way rats scramble from rising bilge. Hands slipped on rain-slick lines. Boots skidded on decking slimed with seaweed and vomit. For now, the darkness could wait. The mast's groan was the louder monster.

Gyreth's roar cut through the storm's howl—"Starboard cleat, you motherless dock-rats! Lash it or lose it!" His pointing finger trembled, not from fear but from that old rope-burn scar that always ached before a squall.

Willem lurched into motion before the words fully landed, his bad knee popping loud enough to hear over the wind. That damn Port Veldez tavern brawl would haunt him till he drowned; the knee never healed right after the mastodon of a man had crushed it with a stool.

The shadow-wall loomed closer.

Air thickened. Breath curled white despite the storm's fury. Rain became needles—the kind Krystof remembered from the Frost March, when three of his men had blinked ice from their lashes and never blinked again.

Nel didn't turn when Krystof appeared. Just gripped the wheel tighter, his wedding band biting into swollen flesh. "Chances?" the knight asked. Too calm. The same tone he'd used telling recruits to "brace, it's just an arrow."

"Better than this." Nel jerked his chin toward the mast—their mast now, the crack spreading like betrayal in a marriage bed. Toward Tymás cradling his arm like it was the babe he'd left ashore. Toward the deck where seawater lapped at Gyreth's boots, the old bosun's toes curling against the wet like he could push the ocean back through sheer stubbornness.

The wave hit sideways.

Wood screamed. Men became ragdolls—"Hold fast! Hold—!"—as the deck tilted toward damnation. When the ship righted, she sat heavier. The way Krystof's father had in those last wasting months before the grave took him.

Gyreth spat saltwater and blood. "She's gulping it down now."

Krystof exhaled—the slow, measured breath of a man who'd stared down charging cavalry at Bluewater Fort. "Forward, then." Three syllables that carried more weight than the anchor chain.

Krystof watched Nel grin. That damned grin again. The one that showed the scar running through his left eyebrow like a crack in old porcelain. Twelve years old and stupid with hunger, he'd snatched peaches from Merchant Hale's cart near the docks. The cane had caught him clean - thwack - right above the eye.

Funny what the body remembers. The way the peach fuzz had felt against his palm. The snick of the cane through air before impact. How the blood had dripped into his eye, making the world glow red as he ran, peaches tumbling from his arms.

Now, when storms rolled in, the scar ached something fierce. Nel absently rubbed at it, fingers finding the familiar ridge of raised flesh. Still worth it. His mother had eaten well that night, even if she'd wept while stitching him up. "Aye. Straight into the devil's parlour. But we'll keep our boots dry 'til the last."

"Better'n puking seawater with the fish-fuckers," Gyreth muttered, spitting a glob of blood-streaked phlegm over the rail. His left pinky—half-severed in a rigging accident—twitched like it always did before ill weather.

The wheel fought Nel like a drunken whoremonger refusing to pay. The Dreamweaver turned slow, her bow rising with the labored grace of the beached whale he'd seen as a boy—that stinking, bloated thing that took three days to die. Behind them, the storm raged, waves coming now from all sides like the time the Hellmade's crew had stoned him for cheating at dice.

"BRACE!" Nel's shout tore his throat raw.

Then—

Silence.

Krystof gripped the rail—knuckles white as a drowned man's belly. The storm didn't fade. It was stolen. One moment howling winds, the next... silence thick as a burial shroud.

"Gods below," someone whispered.

The crew's panic spread without words. A dropped rope. A choked prayer. The quartermaster's hand twitching toward his gutting knife. Overhead, the clouds pulsed. Not gathering. Congregating.

Krystof's spit vanished into the water like it had never existed—no sound, no disturbance. Just gone.

Nel's hands had become part of the wheel—knuckles like barnacle-encrusted stone, tendons standing rigid as staylines in a gale. His whole body vibrated with that terrible stillness sailors know too well—when the sea holds its breath before the killing wave.

The silence wasn't empty. It was hungry. Pressing against eardrums like the ocean's weight at three fathoms deep.

"This ain't weather," he ground out between teeth that ached from clenching. The words hit the air like a gutted fish hitting deck planks—too loud, too final. The wrong kind of noise in waters this dark.

Then—

Lightning tore the sky apart. For one blinding instant, the world was stripped bare.

Krystof followed Nel's shaking finger. Not pointing. Stabbing at the darkness.

"LAND!" Nel roared, voice raw with something between hope and horror. "By the drowned gods, I see it!"

The blackness swallowed his words whole. But the echo lingered—too sharp, too clear. Like the island had heard him.

Krystof squinted into the dark abyss where light barely reached. "Naught but darkness lies there, Captain."

"Keep your eyes peeled," Nel barked, fierce determination igniting his tone. "The lightning shall reveal more."

Lightning tore the sky open—just for a heartbeat—but it was enough.

Krystof's gut lurched as the shoreline lunged into view—not emerging, but unfolding itself from the dark. Razor-edged cliffs. Black sand like ground bone.

"There!" His shout came out half-growl, the battle-rush hot in his throat. Dawnbreaker slid free with a hiss. Not steel clearing leather. A snake baring fangs.

Somewhere behind him, a sailor retched. The island didn't just wait. It welcomed.

"Land!" Nel roared, steering their battered vessel toward hope amidst despair.