In the cellar, the kegs began to fizz.

The Edgewise could feel him through a thread of essence twisting and spinning in grasp too tight for a human. Through that flickering thread, it explored, tasting the chaotic darkness of the man, buried deep beneath a mask of flesh and bone. That darkness stole closer, following the thread to its source, seeking a weakness in the Edgewise to pry his way in. The tavern recognized the wielder and his stolen thread, another piece of stolen magic among the many he coveted. Through byways and hidden paths even the tavern was barely aware of, the man slipped inside, his oily presence slithering through the tavern's scars, reopening cracks that should have remained sealed.

The Edgewise knew it grew weakened.

A keg popped, sending a burst of sweet violet liquid across the dirt. It was unheard by all the patrons in the common room but one, who turned toward the bar. That would be enough. The Edgewise hunkered down and drew deep on its reserves. It had to be enough. 

How fitting it should finally grasp a concept as odd as time when it was so close to running out.

A miasma bubbled up through the dirt of the cellar, coalescing in the form of the hooded man. The thread of essence dissolved in his grip, its purpose spent. He glanced around, looking for that which must remain hidden, frustration and anger like a great snake coiled around him, waiting to lash out.

The hooded man froze, glancing over his shoulder. There was another there, swathed in shadow,  all he could see was the bird shaped mask, bone white like some avian infused reaper. A vial whipped through the air, landing in the slush of dirt and violet liquor at the hooded man's feet.

Caustic smoke plumed, clogging the air. The hooded man staggered, dodging a green tinged needle that whizzed through the smoke. Tricky of the tavern, to summon a defender he wasn't aware of. He'd prepared for the others, ready with tricks and traps to subdue the peskier patrons, but this one...

He side-stepped as the alchemist whizzed by. He lashed out, catching the underside of the mask to knock it free. The plague doctor's mask tumbled into the muck, sinking up to the eye holes. The alchemist straightened with his back to the hooded man, hands limp and empty at his sides.

"How rude," said the alchemist as he turned.

A mistake, he'd make a terrible mistake. The hooded man found himself snared by the twin hollow pits in the man's face. The pits dripped shadows and as the hooded man stared, a high bell-like tone rang in his ears, like the pealing trumpets of vengeful angels. They grew louder as the alchemist stepped forward, scooping his mask from the mud. He casually wiped it clean on his robes.

"You don't belong here," the hooded man rasped, his words swallowed by the rising sound in his head. He felt warmth gush from his ears, an internal rupture beneath the gaze of the void. The alchemist smiled and the hooded man tasted bitter metal on his tongue.

"But you are not welcome here." The alchemist placed the mask on his face once more. The awful ringing stopped as the hooded man sagged.

"There are methods to neutralizing even your kind," he rasped. The alchemist withdrew another tinted needle, liquid beading at the point.

"There are indeed. One could neutralize even a god with enough preparation," said the alchemist in a cheery tone. He flicked his fingers.

The needle passed through the hooded man, now intangible as he sank back into the mud. "It still takes an awful lot of time," the alchemist remarked before the intruder disappeared from sight.

The kegs stopped hissing. The door to the cellar opened, pouring in the whiskey and warmth of the common room.

"Yosepf? Are you down here?" Lady Agatha's steps were thunderous on the wooden stairs as she clambered down with the graceful stealth of a blinded ox.

Yosepf smiled beneath his mask. "Here, my lady. It appears the tavern lost a rather lovely vintage of Tumerian Wine."

The lady knight paused on the bottom step, frowning at the mud on his robes. "Tumerian wine? Isn't that liquid rather volatile?"

"Oh yes, my lady, it can be quite toxic with the right application of chemicals," said Yosepf, enthused that she remembered his lessons.

Lady Agatha rolled her eyes upward. "The things that man collects. Come along, will you? It's your turn for darts."

He cocked his head at her. "You bet your silver on me again."

Lady Agatha didn't bat an eyelash. "Everyone else bet on that simpering Ariel. Twenty to one odds. Make me proud."

"Of course, my lady," said Yosepf.

She stopped him as he started up the stairs, grey eyes studying the swirling mud as it rapidly evaporated. "Did you run into anything troublesome down here?"

"Nothing I couldn't handle."

Calponia gripped the rail of the ship until her fingers creaked in protest. A prickling sensation wormed its way down from the base of her skull. She felt an inner crackle like breaking ice in her veins. She tried to pinpoint the source, her mind far and away from her present location, as she blindly followed a vibrating string attached to her soul.

Cool fingers curled around her arm, giving her a gentle shake.

"Calponia?" The soft murmur of her name dropped through her consciousness, an anchor to her physical body she followed home. Calponia shuddered, absently reaching to keep Eugene's hand in place when it began to slip away.

"I'm okay," she said, looking up at him. She almost believed her own lie.

His expression was politely dubious. "You look....startled." The word was loaded with worry, red rimmed eyes studying her with an intensity that might have made her blush under other circumstances.

Calponia released his hand, rubbing her face as she internally berated herself. Her thoughts kept straying to the vampire beside her, as if some internal switch flipped without her knowledge and permission to intensify her awareness of him. Bugger, but the timing could be better. She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose, trying to stem the ache under her sinuses. Would there ever be a better time? She could feel him watching her, a steady, cool presence beside her at odds with the ship rocking beneath her.

A ship bound for a place that didn't exist. That was a headache by itself. Despite her efforts to follow the interplay between Mack and Eleni the night before, she lost the thread of conversation more than once through coordinates and nautical talk. She remembered Eleni saying she couldn't find Ravelock without a proper 'physical tether' though Mack merely brushed her concern aside as something he would handle if the Captain could not. She burned with curiosity to ask the boss-man about their destination but the plotting ran long into the deep dark hours before dawn. Calponia woke to filtered sunlight, tucked into an overstuffed chair in a corner of the room. Someone had thoughtfully wrapped a blanket around her and left her a still steaming cup of tea but she woke up alone.

Honestly, she had been too scared to move and explore until someone came to get her. It would be just her luck to wander off a dock while the others were bustling about prepping for their voyage. Mack eventually poked his head in and beckoned her along but the tavern master was unusually pensive and she couldn't bring herself to pepper him with questions.

Instead, Calponia stood at the ship rail, careful not to put her full weight on it, and enjoyed the view. Oceanus was a breath-taking world, even with the threat of krakens lurking in the blue green waters. She watched pods of feathered dolphins and enormous neon colored eels flit between ocean and air over her head. The eels followed Eleni's ship as it drifted, their colors rippling hypnotically up beside the ship's sails. She got lost in the play of color and light, drifting until that strange feeling wrapped itself around her senses.

Her spine still tingled and Calponia felt, oddly, violated. She tried to shake the feeling off, goosebumps rising on her skin as the clouds shifted, blocking out the buttery light of the sun. The world around her seemed to lose color with it, except for the startling rings of red around Eugene's irises.

Calponia swallowed. "Do you know where we're going?"

He raised a brow. "Didn't Mack brief you this morning?"

She hunched her shoulders, tucking her hands up into the sleeves of her over-sized sweater. "He was kinda distracted."

Eugene's gaze shifted upward to the water. The gray light highlighted a prominent scar visible through his faint stubble, running along the underside of his jaw. It made him seem more human.

"Oceanus is a world of conflicting gravitational forces. It is the source of its unique geography, but as a consequence it suffers from intense electrical and magnetic interference that makes navigation and communication near impossible over great distances. So impossible, two cultures exist, counterbalanced to each other yet unaware of the other's existence." He held up his hands illustrating the parallel existence of two city states with clasped palms facing opposite directions. "Their development continued in mutual ignorance for some time, though at some point, Infra experienced a technological revolution. They have chosen to remain a myth until their sister nation catches up."

Calponia blinked up at him. "How do you know all this?"

To her surprise, his countenance turned awkward. He dropped his hands to run one nervously through his hair, leaving it stuck in a disarray of messy clumps. "Well, uh, for a time the Blood Empire had considered the possibility, that is-"

"You were going to invade the place, huh?" She grinned.

Eugene huffed, a hint of a smile on his lips. There was another scar, a faint one just above the left corner of his upper lip. How had she never noticed them before?

"When were you turned?" She wanted to slap a hand over her mouth at the immediate unease in his expression. "I'm sorry, you don't have to answer that." She closed her eyes, wishing she could take it back. "I'm an idiot."

"I was twenty eight," he said, moving to lean on the rail next to her. He wasn't looking at her anymore. "Younger than most but my father insisted."

It was the first time he'd ever mentioned his family to her. She wanted to ask more, to know more about him, but she held it in, hoping silently that he would continue. The expectation swelled between them, a shadow that stayed even as the sun emerged, a bleak pale version to what it was before. She could have let it sit there, smothering the moment, but she slipped her hand over his, wishing she could ease the pain clearly still festering inside him.

Eugene exhaled. "He wasn't a good man, but I think he meant to protect his children, forcing us to undergo the procedure early." His features shifted, smooth and blank, but the red bled further into his irises like blooming ink. She could feel his anger as heat against her fingers resting on the back of his hand. "It was an extra precaution. We were born infected."

She glanced up at him. He'd never been human. Not fully. 

"When I was a kid, I fell out of my tree house," she said. One of the furred whales breached the ocean overhead in a graceful arc. She kept her eyes on the graceful arc it swam as she spoke. "Broke right through the floorboards, even though my father bought new wood. The underside was black and rotted where I'd been playing. I cracked my skull when I hit the ground. I can't remember much from before that, nothing really."

The whale's breach sent a spray of spinning sea water orbs, which orbited the air around the ship, refracting bits of sunlight in shimmering rainbows that danced along the mesh fabric sails. Calponia pursed her lips in wonder, soaking in the beauty of the moment as she shared one of her oldest pains.

"I think that was the first time the bête noire really affected the world around me. After that, my parents were...nervous. They stopped letting me go out, alone or with friends, though by the time I was ten, I pushed people away on my own. They were protecting me, but they never told me they knew what was wrong with me."

Eugene said nothing but his hand turned so that his fingers curled around hers. She lost count of the seconds their hands remained entwined, surrounded by floating droplets of sea water and sunshine. She felt someone watching her, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Calponia glanced over her shoulder to find Mack nearby, close enough to eavesdrop on their conversation. It should have annoyed her but he stared at her as if he'd seen a ghost, one hand clutching his chest. Calponia retracted her hand, as if she'd been caught doing something wrong, but when the expression didn't change, her annoyance shifted to worry. Calponia took a step toward Mack when Eleni's rich rough voice broke over them like ocean tumbled rocks.

"Time for one of your miracles, Waykeeper," she said, clapping Mack on the shoulder. The contact snapped him out of it, shaking off whatever specter haunted him as he stood, towering over Eleni's short and wiry frame.

"It's not a miracle, my dear, merely sleight of hand," he said, the spooked expression wiped away so fast Calponia doubted its existence. Mack followed the Captain to the old school ship's wheel and popped open a hidden panel on the steering column.

Calponia's eyes widened as the panel slid back to reveal an elaborate circuit board, far more sophisticated and advanced than any desktop computer she'd popped open. A section of the board lifted, unfolding like a lady's fan until it resembled a pilot's dashboard of winking lights. They were on a flying tri masted galleon but Claponia had assumed the engines were more along the lines of steamships or internal combustion over something so complex.

She leaned toward Eugene. "You said Infra was the more advanced of the two?"

"Indeed," he said.

Her wonder continued as Mack stood before the panel. He held his hands out, hovering a foot above the panel, eyes closed as his face pinched with concentration. The air around his hands began to shimmer, like a heat mirage before he abruptly gasped and lurched forward, gripping the panel for balance. His eyes snapped open, briefly meeting hers. A jolt of fear shot through her, caught off guard by the exhaustion and panic she saw there. She took another step toward him before he looked away, inhaling deep. She stopped, her body humming with anticipation and anxiety as he lifted his hands once again. Calponia held her breath as the shimmer started up again, intensifying to golden snaps of light like summer sparklers. She watched, mesmerized at the electric dance of sparks over his skin when he fingers twitched. His hand shot upward, clasping a glittering golden thread that twitched in his grasp like a living thing.

Calponia's stomach rolled. Sweat beaded her forehead. She'd seen something like this before.

Mack's hold on the thread solidified, until it resembled a golden gossamer fishing line which he carefully wound around two metal tines that extended from the ship's unfolded dashboard.

The floorboards buzzed with hidden energy beneath her feet as the ship changed direction. Abrupt enough for Calponia's footing to wobble, held in place by Eugene's hand on her elbow.

Mack's chest heaved from the effort, adding to her building unease. It didn't feel right that something like this should leave him so drained. He appeared satisfied by his efforts, dusting his hands off one another as he stepped back, leveling a smirk at Eleni.

"Coordinates entered Captain."

Calponia caught the woman's gaze a beat before her easy going grin returned, aware the wizened Captain shared her concern.

"Well then, onward to nowhere," she said.

Mack nodded, backing further away from the console. Eugene tensed beside her. That was how she knew, rushing forward, but the vampire was already moving. He caught Mack as the tavern master sagged to his knees, barely conscious. Calponia was several steps behind him, but Eleni was there first, supporting his other side.

"Easy there, love," she said, cupping the side of Mack's face in her palm . "What have you gone and done to yourself now, you old fool?"

Mack was awake but out of it, as if he'd just guzzled a jar of sea plums.

"Do you have an open cot? Somewhere to lay him down?" Even Eugene looked worried.

"We aren't primitives fanger, we have a medical bay below. This way," said Eleni, ushering them along. Eugene slung Mack over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, leaving Calponia standing there, caught between shaken and useless. A dozen little nagging voices trickled through her thoughts. She wondered if her very presence made the tavern master weak as it did the Edgewise. She swallowed hard. Thinking that way would get her nowhere. She needed to follow them, bury her worries until she knew Mack was okay. He would be okay. He had to be.

Something crinkled under her foot. She frowned, bending down to retrieve a slip of paper from the ground. Not paper at all, but the familiar thick edges of an old photograph, the back stained by a smudged fingerprint of dried blood. She flipped it over.

The world grew small and tight around her as she stared down at a face so very similar to her own.