Chapter 3 – The Belly of the Beast

"I did," Soren whispers, the words tearing out of his newly mortal throat. "But not like this."

The heavy parchment trembles in his hand. The blood-red wax of the seal seems to catch the dim, ambient light of the whale-bone chapel, glowing like a fresh wound. I stare at the jagged signature at the bottom of the sinking order. His signature. The man who just laid me bare on the floorboards, whose sweat is still drying on my skin, whose frantic, living heartbeat is still echoing in my ears, is the architect of his own watery grave. And the grave of everyone aboard.

Before I can speak, before I can demand the truth of why a captain would sell his own vessel to the Crown, the hour breaks.

It does not fade. It shatters.

Soren’s eyes widen in sheer, unadulterated panic. He drops the contract. His hands fly to his chest, fingers digging into the wet linen of his shirt. The deep, heavy rhythm of his heartbeat stutters, misfires, and stops.

The heat radiating from his skin vanishes as if blown out by a gale. I watch, paralyzed, as the living flush of blood drains from his neck, his jaw, his chest. The agonizing pallor of the deep returns in a violent rush. His edges blur. The solid, heavy musculature that had pinned me to the floor moments ago begins to smoke, turning translucent. I can see the cracked altar right through his ribs.

He falls to his knees, gasping for air that his lungs can no longer process. A horrible, wet rattling sound escapes his lips.

"Soren," I say, stepping toward him, my own voice rough from the song I gave him.

He throws a hand out, stopping me. His fingers are already phantom smoke. He cannot touch me. He cannot touch anything in this room anymore. The dead zone of the chapel is built to keep magic out, and without my song sustaining his flesh, he is entirely a creature of magic. The chapel is actively repelling him.

He stumbles backward, his boots making no sound on the wooden floor. He hits the heavy oak door and falls right through it, his spectral body phasing through the solid wood as if it were water.

I snatch my leather leathers from the floor, pulling them up and tying the laces with trembling, frantic fingers. My fin-cloak, thawed by the heat of our bodies, hangs heavy and damp from my shoulders. I grab the leather satchel containing his ghost-heart, scoop up the contract, and shove my weight against the heavy oak door.

The moment the door swings open, the Nattr sea reclaims its territory.

The cold hits me like a physical blow. The moisture in my fin-cloak crystallizes instantly, the delicate membrane stiffening into a heavy, frozen sheet. The air is so frigid it burns my lungs, forcing my gill-slits to flare wildly in a desperate attempt to filter the freezing oxygen.

Soren stands by the shattered mainmast. He is fully restored to his purgatorial state—a drowned phantom in a dripping black privateer coat, his chest a hollow void where the heart in my satchel belongs. But he is not looking at me.

He is looking up.

The galleon is alive.

With its captain returned to the spectral realm, the ship’s dormant magic erupts. The black ice that had locked the hull into the towering cliffs of the fjord groans. It is a deafening, earth-shattering sound, like a mountain splitting in two.

Soren raises his right hand, his translucent fingers curling into a fist.

The galleon violently surges backward.

The massive pillars of ice shatter. Shards the size of houses rain down into the churning black water. The ship tears itself free from the stone, leaving a massive, jagged crater in the side of the fjord. The impact throws me against the chapel doorframe. I dig my claws into the wood, my lamprey teeth baring on instinct as the deck pitches at a terrifying forty-five-degree angle.

We hit the open water. The splash sends a tidal wave of freezing brine washing over the aft deck.

Soren does not flinch. He stands perfectly balanced on the slanted deck, his coat unaffected by the wind. He lowers his hand, and the ship rights itself with unnatural, terrifying speed.

We are out of the fjord. We are in the hunting grounds.

Thick, impenetrable fog rolls over the gunwales, swallowing the ship in seconds. It is not normal sea mist. It is heavy, oily, and stinks of ancient rot and sulfur. The aurora borealis above is completely blotted out. The darkness is absolute.

And then, I hear it.

A sound that vibrates through the marrow of my bones. It is not a roar. It is a low, thrumming frequency, so deep it bypasses the ears and registers directly in the sternum. The water around the hull begins to froth and boil.

A leviathan.

"Captain!" I shout, pushing myself off the doorframe, my voice immediately swallowed by the unnatural fog.

Soren turns. His gray eyes are chips of ice, entirely devoid of the desperate, burning humanity I saw in them moments ago. He is the Drowned Captain again, a predator woven into the timber of a ghost ship.

"Man the lines!" Soren roars. His voice is a grinding, glacial resonance that echoes through the fog.

He is not speaking to me.

From the frost-choked floorboards, shadows begin to peel upward. They detach themselves from the deck, rising into humanoid shapes. The spectral crew. They have no faces, no distinct features, only the rough silhouettes of sailors clad in tattered, phantom rags. They move with terrifying, mechanical precision. They seize the frozen halyards. They climb the icy ratlines, their hands passing through the solid frost to grip the spectral essence of the ropes beneath.

The shredded canvas sails above us do not catch the wind. They do not need to. The ship is propelled by the sheer, collective will of the dead.

The low frequency hum hits the hull again. This time, the massive galleon shudders, pushed sideways by a displacement of water so massive it defies comprehension. The beast is circling us.

Soren glides across the deck, stopping at the railing mere feet from me. The ambient cold rolling off him makes the frost on my collarbone crackle.

"I cannot see it," he says, his voice flat. "The fog is a byproduct of the beast. It blinds the dead."

"And you want me to be your eyes," I say, my breath pluming white between us. My hand rests on the leather satchel at my hip. The contract is folded inside, burning a hole in my conscience. "You want me to help the man who took coin to drown these very phantoms pulling his ropes."

Soren’s translucent jaw tightens. A flicker of something raw and agonizing passes through his gray eyes, a phantom echo of the human guilt he felt in the chapel. But he buries it under the ice.

"If the leviathan breaches the hull, the ship shatters. I will be scattered to the currents, and you will drown in the Nattr sea," he states, the logic cold and irrefutable. "We can settle the ledger of my sins when we are not actively being hunted. Find the beast, Elka."

He is right. The ocean does not care about betrayal. It only cares about blood.

I step past him, moving to the edge of the gunwale. I peer down into the churning, black water. I close my human eyes and unhinge my jaw.

My throat is raw. The bioluminescent sacs lining my neck are depleted, bruised and aching from paying the cost of his hour of life. But I force the mechanism to work. The dim, weak blue light flares to life beneath my skin. I draw a massive breath of freezing air through my gills and release a sharp, staccato pulse of sonar.

Thrum-thrum-thrum.

The soundwaves tear through the water. In my mind’s eye, the ocean is mapped in lines of silver vibration. I see the jagged underside of the iceberg we left behind. I see the schools of dead, floating fish killed by the beast’s wake.

And then, the soundwaves hit a wall.

It is a continent of flesh, moving with terrifying speed just beneath the surface. It is easily three times the length of the galleon. Its skin is thick, scarred, and studded with barnacles the size of carriages.

But my sonar catches something else. Deep within the center of the massive beast, there is a dense, metallic resonance. A perfect, hollow bell shape.

"The church bell," I say, snapping my jaw shut and opening my eyes. "It’s deep. Starboard side. Forty fathoms down and rising fast."

Soren does not question me. He turns his head toward the phantom helmsman at the wheel. "Hard to starboard! Prepare the flensing harpoons!"

The spectral crew moves in a synchronized blur. On the forecastle, massive iron harpoons—weapons designed to tether whales, now encrusted with black ice—are hoisted onto the rails. The heavy, tar-soaked hawsers attached to them coil like impatient serpents.

"It’s coming up," I warn him, my hands gripping the railing. The water to our right begins to bulge upward, a smooth, terrifying hill of black ocean rising into the fog.

"Hold," Soren commands the crew, his hand raised.

I trigger another sonar pulse, a quick, sharp burst to track its ascent.

Thrum.

The soundwave penetrates the beast’s blubber, hitting the church bell in its gut. But the echo that bounces back to me is wrong.

It is not just the dull, metallic ringing of the gold bell. It is a chaotic, frantic vibration. It is the sound of a hundred small, frantic signatures moving around the bell. The vibration hits my jaw, translating into a sensory experience that makes my blood run cold.

It sounds like screaming.

It sounds like human hands beating against the inside of a fleshy prison.

I stagger back from the rail, gasping, the blue light in my throat flickering erratically.

"What is it?" Soren demands, his ghostly form shifting closer to me.

"The bell," I choke out, pressing a hand to my throat. "It’s not just the bell in there. It’s your men."

Soren freezes. The unnatural wind whipping around the deck seems to die instantly.

"Explain," he grates, the word barely a whisper.

"Your original crew," I say, looking into his hollow, gray eyes. "The ones who went down with this ship. The beast didn’t just swallow the bell from the wreckage. It swallowed the souls anchored to it. They are trapped in its belly, Soren. They are being digested in a purgatorial loop."

The silence on the deck is absolute. The faceless, spectral shadows manning the ropes seem to pause, their empty heads turning toward their captain.

Soren stares at the rising bulge of water. The impenetrable facade of the privateer king shatters entirely. The contract in my satchel proves he ordered their deaths, but seeing him now, I realize the truth is infinitely more complicated than a simple assassination for coin.

His translucent hands tremble. A memory, visceral and sharp, bleeds across his spectral features. I can almost see the reflection of it in his eyes—the memory of standing on a quarterdeck, of knowing every man by name, of the sacred, unbreakable oath a captain makes to protect the souls who sail under his flag. He had sold them. And now, he is listening to them scream in the dark.

"Captain!" I yell, snapping him out of it. "It’s breaching!"

The surface of the Nattr sea explodes.

The leviathan breaks the water. It is a nightmare of biology, a horrific amalgamation of a whale and a deep-sea trench predator. Its skin is slick, black rubber, draped in glowing, putrid algae. The displacement wave hits the galleon, throwing the ship violently to port.

I lose my footing, sliding across the icy deck. I slam into the base of the mainmast, the breath knocked from my lungs.

"Fire!" Soren roars.

The spectral crew releases the triggers. Four massive iron harpoons shoot through the fog, trailing thick black ropes. They strike the leviathan, sinking deep into the thick, rubbery blubber of its flank.

The beast lets out a deafening, agonizing shriek. It thrashes, rolling in the water. The hawsers pull taut with a violent snap. The galleon is violently jerked forward, towed by the enraged monster. Timber screams in protest. The ship is physically tethered to the beast, dragged through the churning, boiling waves at a terrifying speed.

Soren phases through the mast, appearing instantly at the bow of the ship. I scramble to my feet and run to join him, slipping on the frost.

We look down the length of the taut ropes. The leviathan has stopped thrashing. It turns, bringing its massive, horrifying head to bear on the galleon.

The maw opens.

It is the size of a cathedral. Rows of jagged, translucent teeth, each the size of a man, line the cavernous jaws. The stench of ancient rot, of digested bone and rotting ambergris, washes over the deck in a suffocating wave.

But it is what is inside the throat that makes my stomach heave.

Deep within the cavern of flesh, lodged in a massive ring of muscle, is the church bell. It is cast in solid, dull gold, glowing faintly in the darkness of the beast. Surrounding the bell, tethered to it by glowing, ethereal chains, is a swirling vortex of blue, spectral light. The trapped souls of the drowned crew. They are writhing, caught in a perpetual state of agony, their silent screams visible as frantic ripples of light.

Soren stands on the bowsprit, looking directly into the mouth of hell. His men. His victims.

The beast lunges forward, aiming to swallow the front half of the galleon, harpoons and all.

"The winch!" Soren bellows to the spectral shadows manning the heavy iron crank on the forecastle. "Haul it in!"

The dead men turn the crank. The chains scream. The galleon is pulled faster, straight into the open jaws of the leviathan. Soren is not trying to evade. He is driving us right down its throat.

"Are you insane?" I scream, grabbing his translucent arm, my fingers passing through the cold smoke of his sleeve. "It will crush the hull!"

"I need the bell," he says, his voice devoid of all emotion, locked into a terrifying, singular focus. "The gold is the key to the iceberg. The Crown’s treasure."

"Your men are in there!" I shout back, pointing to the swirling blue agony in the beast’s throat. "If you tear the bell out with the ship’s winch, the shockwave will shatter their souls. You will destroy them permanently!"

Soren looks at me. The galleon is feet away from the jaws. The rows of massive teeth are rising on either side of us, eclipsing the fog, eclipsing the sky. The smell of rot is absolute.

"We came for the treasure, huntress," he says, the glacial cold returning to his eyes. "We take the gold."

"No!"

I step past him onto the tip of the bowsprit. I balance on the icy wood, suspended directly over the cavernous maw of the beast. I unhinge my jaw. I ignore the raw, bleeding ache in my throat. I push past the limit of my bioluminescence, forcing the sacs in my neck to flare with a blinding, agonizing brilliance.

I do not sing for flesh. I sing for destruction.

I release a continuous, high-pitched scream of pure sonar energy, aimed directly down the leviathan’s throat. The vibration is so intense it cracks the frost on the galleon’s hull.

The soundwave hits the ring of muscle holding the bell. The flesh ruptures. The beast shrieks, a sound that bursts my eardrums. The jaws violently spasm, halting their descent.

"Elka!" Soren roars behind me, a sound of genuine terror.

The choice hangs suspended in the freezing air, illuminated by the blinding blue light of my throat and the trapped, swirling souls inside the beast.

We can fire a secondary harpoon and drag the gold bell onto the deck, securing the key to the treasure, but the violent extraction will permanently obliterate the souls tethered to it.

Or I can use the agonizing vibration of my song to shatter the ethereal chains binding the souls, setting the crew free into the Nattr sea. But doing so will cause the massive gold bell to drop into the bottomless trench of the beast’s stomach, lost forever.

The jaws begin to snap shut.

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