Azra'il - POV
I was not nervous.
Absolutely not.
The fact that I had woken up before dawn, technically before the sun itself had the decency to appear over the horizon, meant nothing. The fact that I had spent the last hour pacing my cabin, using a pattern of eight steps to the left, turn, eight steps to the right, turn, repeat, counted with obsessive precision, also meant nothing. It was just… morning exercise. Blood circulation. Very healthy. Recommended by physicians in at least three of the worlds I'd previously inhabited.
The fact that I was mentally checking, for the seventeenth time, the exact composition of the tea I had brewed last night, recalculating dosages, reviewing potential pharmacological interactions, and constructing increasingly catastrophic scenarios of failure? Also completely normal. Just professional diligence. Nothing to do with nerves.
I insisted mentally, making my eighteenth lap of the cabin.
[Analysis of behavioural patterns: You are definitely nervous. Heart rate is elevated by 15% above baseline. Compulsive repetitive movement patterns. Obsessive mental rumination on variables outside of your control. Conclusion: You are experiencing the pharmacological equivalent of an artist's post-performance anxiety while waiting for the reviews.]
[That's just nervousness with more syllables.]
The inconvenient truth, which I was making a Herculean effort not to admit even to myself, was that I had wagered a great deal on that tea. Not just the trip to Bilgewater—though that was important, obviously, for purely academic and scientific reasons and absolutely not because I was as curious as a child before the winter solstice. No, what was truly eating away at me like alchemical acid was the possibility of 'failure'.
I had promised a miracle. I had looked a broken man in the eyes and said, with all the arrogant confidence I could muster, "I can fix this. For one night. Trust me."
And what if I couldn't? What if he woke up just as haunted as before? What if, by some unpredictable chemical interaction that not even Eos could anticipate, the tea had made things worse? What if—
My cabin door opened without a warning, and Morgana entered with the irritating tranquillity of someone who hadn't just spent the last hour building mental castles of catastrophe.
"You're wearing holes in the floorboards with all your pacing," she observed, closing the door behind her with a soft click. Her eyes analysed me with that unbearable motherly perception that always saw straight through all my carefully constructed defences.
"I'm just… exercising," I retorted, stopping mid-lap. "Blood circulation. Very important on long sea voyages."
"Of course," she said, her tone laden with gentle scepticism. "And the fact that you're exercising in an obsessively precise pattern while muttering pharmacological calculations is purely a coincidence."
[That is what happens when you allow someone to remain in your proximity for long enough to recognise your neurotic patterns. Lesson learned.]
Morgana came closer and placed a hand on my shoulder, the touch light but effective in forcing me to stop pacing. "Azra'il. Breathe. If something had gone terribly wrong, we would have heard by now."
"What do you mean?" I asked, though I knew exactly what she meant.
"No sailor has come banging desperately on our door shouting that the captain died during the night," she said with relentless logic. "No alarms have been sounded. The ship hasn't changed course for an emergency run to the nearest port. There are no sounds of panic or chaos from the deck. By the most basic logic of an absence of disaster, we can conclude that Mahr'Lokk survived the night."
[Also true. He could be in a catatonic state. Or trapped in a loop of intensified traumatic memories. Or—]
[—experiencing severe temporary dissociation. Or developing a substance-induced psychosis. Or, my personal favourite, convinced that he is a chicken and currently trying to lay eggs on the ship's helm.]
[My apologies. I was merely offering statistical possibilities for your collection of anxieties. On second thought, I should mention that I have not observed, through the ship's ambient sensors I can access, any Vastayan captains acting like poultry on the deck. So that specific possibility seems unlikely.]
[I'm here to serve. Occasionally even usefully.]
"See?" Morgana said, interpreting my moment of distraction as her comforting words being processed. "No disaster. No deaths. No…" she hesitated, her expression curious, "…chickens?"
I looked at her with suspicion. "How did you—"
"You muttered something about chickens during your obsessive rumination about fifteen minutes ago," she explained with a small, irritatingly amused smile. "I didn't catch the full context, but it seemed important to your anxiety spiral."
[Unlikely. You have a documented tendency to partially verbalise during extreme stress. It is one of your more human tics and, I must say, occasionally charming.]
Before I could reply—to Morgana, or to Eos's condescending commentary—I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor outside. Footsteps that stopped directly in front of our door.
My heart, which was already operating above the recommended speed, decided it would be fun to accelerate even further.
[Statistically, both are still possible. Breathe. Or don't. Mild cerebral hypoxia might help with the anxiety.]
Three firm knocks on the door. Controlled. Polite. Absolutely no panic or urgency in them, which should have been reassuring but somehow only heightened my tension.
"Come in," Morgana called, because apparently I had temporarily forgotten how to use my voice.
The door opened, revealing one of the crew's sailors, a middle-aged man with sun-weathered skin and a perfectly neutral, professional expression. He did not look scared. He did not look disturbed. He just looked… normal. Doing his job.
"Ladies," he said with a respectful nod of his head. "Captain Sangremar requests your presence in his cabin. Said he needs to speak with you. Urgent matter."
Urgent.
The word hung in the air like a suspended guillotine.
<'Urgent' could mean many things. 'Urgent, the tea worked and I want to thank you' or 'urgent, I'm having vivid hallucinations and need immediate medical assistance' or 'urgent, my Vastayan physiology has rejected all the compounds and I am dying slowly'.>
[You have a truly impressive imagination for catastrophic scenarios. Have you considered a career as a writer of tragedies?]
"Of course," Morgana replied calmly, because she had the self-control of an ancient statue. "We'll be right there. Thank you."
The sailor nodded again and withdrew, his heavy footfalls echoing down the corridor as he returned to his duties.
The door closed.
Morgana looked at me.
I looked at Morgana.
"Urgent," I repeated aloud, testing the word as if it were a potentially explosive chemical.
"Urgent," she agreed. "Which could mean anything. Including good news delivered with the typical military formality of a ship's captain."
"Or bad news delivered with the stoic professional restraint of someone trying not to panic," I countered.
"You're being pessimistic."
"I'm being realistic."
"You're being neurotic."
"I'm a scientist. Occupational neuroses are to be expected."
Morgana sighed, that long, suffering sigh that meant 'I love you but you are exhausting'. "Let's go and find out. We are speculating uselessly when the truth is thirty paces away."
[I concur with that assessment. Morgana has a correctness frequency of approximately 86%. Statistically impressive.]
I took a deep breath, a control exercise I learned in one of my lives where anxiety was considered a fatal weakness. Then I sighed.
"Alright," I said at last. "Let's go. To the verdict."
"To the verdict," Morgana echoed, but her tone was gentle, encouraging.
We left the cabin together, the ship's dark wooden corridor stretching out before us like a path to judgement. My steps were controlled, measured, absolutely not betraying the fact that my stomach was doing acrobatics worthy of a Piltovan circus performer.
[Unlikely. The sailor was far too calm for that.]
[Also unlikely. You calculated the dosages conservatively.]
[This obsession with chickens is becoming pathological. Consider therapy.]
We reached the door of the captain's cabin. The same door I had walked through last night carrying a cup of liquid hope and pharmacological arrogance.
Morgana knocked. Three times. Firm. Calm.
"Enter," Mahr'Lokk's deep voice rumbled from within.
The voice sounded… normal. Not agonised. Not delirious. Not like it was coming from someone convinced he was a bird.
[Possibly. Preliminary vocal analysis suggests a stable tone with no indicators of extreme stress or dissociation.]
Morgana opened the door.
And we walked in.
The cabin was lit by the golden morning light streaming through the large stern window, making the nautical charts on the walls glow softly. The desk was tidy, cleared of nocturnal clutter. And behind it, standing, was Mahr'Lokk.
He turned as we entered.
And for the first time since I'd met him, I saw something on his shark's face that I had not seen before.
Peace.
Not performative happiness. Not temporary relief. But real peace, the kind that comes from within, the kind that settles in the bones and softens the sharp edges of a soul that has been at war with itself for too long.
The deep, dark circles that had marked his black eyes like permanent scars… they were diminished. Not gone—a decade of trauma doesn't erase in one night—but lessened. His posture, which had always carried that tension of perpetual vigilance, was relaxed. Not careless, but… comfortable. As if his shoulders had finally been given permission not to carry the weight of burning ships and lost sons, at least for a few precious hours.
He looked at us. And then, slowly, deliberately, as if the movement were new and not entirely familiar, he smiled.
It wasn't a large smile. It wasn't explosive joy or theatrical gratitude. It was small. Genuine. The smile of someone who had forgotten what it felt like to truly rest and had just been reminded.
"Ladies," he said, his voice still that deep gravel, but without the rough edge of exhaustion that always accompanied it. "Please, be seated. We have much to discuss."
And it was in that moment, looking at that Vastayan shark smiling with something that looked dangerously close to hope, that I finally, finally, allowed the crushing tension of the past twelve hours to drain from my shoulders.
[It worked.]
[No. You did not, in fact, do any of those things. Congratulations. Your ego may now reinflate to its normal operational size.]
Morgana shot me a look from the side that clearly communicated 'I told you so', but had the grace not to say it aloud.
We sat in the chairs before the captain's desk.
And Mahr'Lokk Sangremar, former Reaver King of Bilgewater, a man who had lived an entire decade being haunted by flaming ghosts every night, began to speak.
"I slept," he said simply, and there was a reverence in those two words. "For the first time in ten years… I truly slept."