Sleep, if that oblivion could even be called such, didn't last long. Raksha's prediction came true sooner than he would have liked.
The world listed sharply. It was a sudden, nauseating lurch that sent his stomach into his throat. A crash came from above—as if some giant had slammed a fist onto the deck—followed by a heavy, vibrating rumble that shook the floorboards.
"It's begun," Raksha growled, bracing her feet against the bulkhead to keep from sliding to the other end of the cage.
Axis opened his eyes. The darkness in the hold had thickened; the moonlight was gone, replaced by flashes of lightning piercing the cracks like a strobe light. The ship groaned with all its wooden guts. The creaking of the bulkheads turned into a shriek.
Another wave slammed into them, throwing them sideways. Axis, lighter than the orc, couldn't hold his ground. His body whipped around, and he slammed his shoulder painfully against the iron bars. The collar dug into his throat, cutting off his air for a moment.
"Hold on!" Raksha barked. Her powerful arm shot out in the darkness, snatching his forearm and hauling him toward her, away from the bars. "If you crack your skull and die now, I'll eat you out of sheer spite!"
In the corner of the hold, something broke free from its lashings. A heavy water barrel, which had been standing peacefully against the wall, rolled across the tilted floor with the grace of a cannonball. It smashed into the neighboring cage with a thunderous crash, reducing it to splinters, and ricocheted straight toward them.
Time slowed for Axis, a familiar sensation. It was a reflex ingrained in his subcortex, one that even elven artifacts couldn't fully suppress. He saw the barrel's trajectory. He saw its vector—a red line tracing death through the air. It was hurtling straight for the bars, right where Raksha was sitting. An impact of that mass at that speed might dislodge the bars, but it would more likely just crush the orc, shattering her ribs.
A headache flared like a supernova behind his eyes. The collar grew searing hot.
Just a little. Just one degree...
Axis didn't raise his hands. He simply looked. He focused his entire will, punching through the static of the dampeners, on a single point in space ahead of the barrel. He didn't need to stop it. He only needed to shift the vector slightly.
His temples throbbed, and a hot trickle of blood ran down from his nose.
Half a meter before hitting the bars, the barrel suddenly veered unnaturally to the left, as if hitting an invisible bump. With a monstrous crash, it slammed into an iron support pillar, shattering into pieces and showering them with splinters and stagnant water, but harming no one.
Axis went limp, sagging against Raksha's arm. Black spots danced before his eyes.
"You..." the orc breathed. Her voice was barely audible over the roar of the storm. She wasn't looking at the shattered barrel, but at him. The mixture of fear and awe in her gaze had become unmistakable. "You didn't even lift a finger."
"The roll..." Axis rasped, licking salty blood from his lip. "Just a lucky lurch of the ship."
"Don't lie to me, half-blood," she gave him a shake, settling him more comfortably and pressing his back against her broad chest, making herself a living buffer against the violence of the storm. "The ship listed to the right. The barrel went left."
She fell silent as the vessel plunged into another trough between waves, but her grip tightened.
"The dampeners don't work on you fully?" she asked quietly, right into his ear.
"They work," Axis whispered, closing his eyes to try and quell the throbbing in his skull. "It's just... vectors have no masters. Sometimes, you can just ask them."
Raksha grunted, but this time there was something akin to approval in the sound.
"Sleep, shaman. If we don't drown tonight, the captain is going to have a lot of problems. And I want to watch you give them to him."