Captain Malice Grimwave's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Captain Malice Grimwave wanted the kraken that took his arm match three weeks ago, but his ship was rotting beneath him. He stood at the rail and watched a dark shape glide under the waves. Eight arms. Maybe nine. A kraken big enough to be worth wrestling. His hull was patched with tar and prayer. The demons living inside him screamed into the oars below, driving the ship forward because he had demoted them to rowing after they tried to steal his body. He wore the clown paint he had peeled off his old captain. Pinning that man felt good. But a kraken this size would crush his ship before his hands ever touched its flesh. He needed a vessel that could take the beating. A voice came from the water. "Your boat sinks before the bell." Grimwave looked down. A man floated beside the hull, half skeleton, half fish. His bottom half shimmered in green and purple scales. His top half was bone and brown muscle, a skull where a face should be. Grimwave had heard of him. Davy Bones, who climbed up from the ocean floor looking for a reason the laughing was worth it. He wrestled now. He belonged to neither place. "I know my boat," Grimwave said. "Then you know it's dead." Davy Bones gripped the rail with a skeletal hand. "I came up for a fight. You can't give me one. Not in this." Grimwave leaned over him. "You want to wrestle me." "No." Davy Bones pulled himself higher. "I want the kraken too. Saw it from below. But I need a ring that floats." He let the silence sit. "So do you." Grimwave understood then. Neither of them could take the kraken alone. Davy Bones had no deck. Grimwave had a deck that was falling apart. "There's a ship," Davy Bones said. "Pirate ring. Black and purple. Shaped like a warship with a clown's grin on the bow. It's beached past the shallows. Nobody holds it." "Why not take it yourself?" "Can't crew it. My legs are a tail." He tapped his scaled half against the hull. "You need a crew. You have one." Grimwave thought of the demons below, screaming at the oars. A warship ring could hold them. A warship ring could hold a kraken. They took it that night. Davy Bones dragged the beached vessel off the sand with his tail while Grimwave drove his screaming demons to haul the lines. The Gallows Corsair Ring slid into the water. Its black hull held. Its spiked rail did not splinter. Grimwave stood on a deck that would not sink under a kraken's weight. His old boat drifted off, empty. He did not watch it go. "Now I can wrestle the big one," Grimwave said. Davy Bones hauled himself onto the new deck. "We," he said. "I don't crew for free." Grimwave had a ship that could survive the kraken. He also had a partner he never asked for, and a debt he had not agreed to pay.