The harpoons came from all directions at once, without warning — the sound of them a rapid series of impacts, metal driving into wood, the hull shuddering with each one. By the time we had turned to look, they were already embedded in 'The Lady's' sides at multiple points, ropes trailing back to the three ships surrounding us.
Then the figures came over them.
They swarmed up the harpoon ropes with the practiced efficiency of people who have done this many times on many ships — men, mostly, unkempt in the specific way of those who have been at sea for longer than is good for them. Sunburnt skin, darkened teeth, clothing that had lost its original colour somewhere on the water. They came over the railing without difficulty or hesitation and spread across the deck with the quiet territorial confidence of people who consider any ship they are standing on to be already theirs.
Benedict's face had gone through several stages and settled on something between sourness and controlled fury. He had just repaired 'The Lady's hull from the island welcoming. Now it had more punctures in it than he could count from where he was standing, and every one of them was a personal affront.
He said nothing. None of them said anything. They watched with contempt and waited, which was clearly the established protocol.
A wooden plank was thrown from the nearest ship to our deck — thrown with a gall that sent it crashing down hard enough to vibrate through the entire vessel — and two figures walked it across.
The first was an enormous man. Twice the breadth of any of his crew, and bearing the same weathered, neglected appearance, but carrying himself with an authority that required no announcement. He walked with the absolute assurance of someone who has never, in recent memory, arrived anywhere to find that he was not the most powerful thing present. The captain. It did not need to be said.
Behind him came a girl. Young — not yet out of her teens, from the look of her, a fact that sat oddly against the context surrounding her. She was notably feminine against the backdrop of the men around her, with black hair and blue eyes that matched the captain's, and a face that was, if you disregarded everything else about the situation, quite pretty. She moved with a composure that suggested she had grown up in these circumstances and found them ordinary.
The captain reached the end of the plank, stepped down to our deck with the impact of a much larger event than a single step, and turned to help his daughter across. They both wore expressions that were variations on the same theme: the smug, self-satisfied ease of people who are entirely comfortable with having interrupted your day without your consent.
It made something in my skin want to be somewhere else.
"Long time no see," the captain said. His voice was built for carrying distance, and it reached every part of the deck without effort.
"Three months ago," Rei replied, with the economy of someone who is not hiding his feelings about this reunion. "That's not a long time."
"Perhaps not for a man of your particular gifts." The captain's smile was the kind that uses too many teeth. "My daughter, though — she'll be disappointed to hear you feel that way."
He stepped aside and the girl came down to the deck.
She was not looking at anything on this ship except Rei. Had not been, since she first appeared at the other end of the plank. Her eyes tracked him with the particular fixed quality of someone who has decided, at some point, that this one specific thing in the world is what they want, and has not since revised the decision. She was young enough that this was more concerning than flattering.
She said something to her father — just one word, quietly, his name for him — and hooked her arm through his.
The captain cleared his throat.
"I have a proposal," he said, directing it at Rei with the magnanimous tone of a man presenting an offer he considers generous. "I would like you to become my son-in-law."
"I decline," Rei said, before the sentence was properly finished. "Your daughter is a child. And there is someone I intend to love for the rest of my life, which means my answer to this particular proposal will not change regardless of when you ask it."
The girl's eyes filled immediately. She looked at her father with an expression of pure appeal.
The captain sighed, with the air of a man who has been placed in a situation by his daughter's feelings and is going to be impractical about it.
"Then I have no choice but to take you by force." He said it with the resigned practicality of someone announcing an inconvenient necessity. He turned to his daughter. "Do it."
The girl turned to face us.
The tension shifted. Something changed in the quality of the air — not a sound, not a movement, but a presence, an attention directed inward toward the very foundations of what we were. I felt it the moment it began: something reaching toward the outline of my magic with the specific intention of separation, of interruption, pressing against it from the outside with a force that was not violent exactly but was deeply, fundamentally 'invasive'. Like a hand reaching into something that belongs to you and being about to close.
It was one of the most unpleasant sensations I had encountered.
I was not alone in this.
Phoenix and Sheriya grabbed onto each other — both of them going pale, the colour draining from their faces as the sensation reached them more completely than it reached me. Ivanna wrapped her arms around herself and grimaced, her whole posture contracting around the intrusion. Rei's brow furrowed deeply, his jaw set, the expression of someone refusing to show how much something costs them.
The girl's eyes found me.
They had begun to glow — faintly at first, then more definitely, a gold light building in her irises as the ability extended. She looked at me for a long moment.
"What are you?" She asked. "Why is there so much of it around you?" A pause, her head tilting slightly. "And who are you? You weren't here before."
"Why does that matter to you?" I said. "I don't see that it's your concern what I am."
She smiled, and it was the smile of someone about to do something unpleasant.
"You're right, it doesn't matter. With that much magical signature you're probably one of the half-breeds — like those two over there." She nodded toward Phoenix and Sheriya with the casual contempt of someone who is very comfortable dismissing things. "I'm looking forward to seeing what hideous form you take."
The effect came simultaneously for both of them — Phoenix let out a sharp sound as his magic ceased entirely, his human form dissolving without his direction, his clothes falling empty as a small red fox hit the deck where he had been standing. He was not large. He was, in fact, quite small, with bright red fur and alert eyes that were still entirely recognisably his. Sheriya made a different sound — lower, less vocal — and then she was a black-scaled snake, moving quickly and low to the deck, sliding behind a nearby crate with the reflexive instinct of something that knows it is vulnerable and finds the nearest cover. She disappeared between the crates and was still.
Ivanna went to her knees. She was not shifting — she was being held away from something essential to herself, the magic that constituted half of what she was being pressed back against her will. She made no sound but the way she held herself said everything about what it cost.
Rei's transformation was quieter. The silver hair that had grown back to his waist over the course of the voyage shortened — a visible retraction, the magic that had sustained its length withdrawing as the Nullification reached him. The accessories he wore that carried engraving enchantments stopped shining, one by one, the light going out of each stone and setting as the stored magic was suppressed.
He turned to look at me briefly.
"The prototype held," he said.
I looked at my bracelet. 'The Bliss' still shimmered, its stone still carrying its light, the enchantment intact while everything else around it was being stripped.
Then I felt my own magic begin to go.
Not gently. In large pieces, torn away rather than drawn, the girl's eyes now blazing with gold as she pushed her ability against the scale of what I was carrying. She had not encountered this quantity before — that was visible in the effort, in the strain that was crossing her features, in the way the gold in her eyes was becoming something more urgent and less controlled.
Then the first drop of blood appeared at the corner of one eye. Then the other.
Her father noticed immediately.
"Dura! Stop, you are bleeding!" He moved toward her, alarm overriding the casual authority of a moment ago.
She did not stop. The blood continued, falling from both eyes in thin lines, reaching the deck in a pattern that spread as more drops followed. She was bleeding for the sake of suppressing me, and she had not made a decision to stop doing so.
More of my magic disappeared. In enormous pieces now, the suppressions accelerating, the bracelet still holding but everything else going rapidly toward nothing.
I made a decision.
I moved to the railing and went over it into the sea.