Capítulo 11: Death and Depression

Everything had changed.

She didn't wake up to the worry of unpaid bills any longer.

She woke up to terror.

She breathed the first gasps of smoke free air and then put the pipe on her lips faster than she could boil water. Over the years, her skill in forming nuggets of tobacco, moist or dry, had honed itself to the level of perfection only a true addict could achieve.

She didn't want to hotbox the space under the deck, so she moved upwards, strolling near the bow where few seamen cared to be bothered by the gray puffs.

Wind messed up her already tangled hair. She knew she looked like shit.

She didn't care. Her heart was a desolated place now.

The wind blew further, billowing the white sails.

All seemed to be well in the domain of death. The waves had lost the foaminess of storms and shorelines, instead bobbing up and down as an uninterrupted series of blue protrusions.

Serenica thought about jumping in.

It was her third day on the sea. Someone would have called it a needed vacation. While she did technically perform check ups on the crew members, treating injuries and preventing illnesses, most of her time was as loose as that one rope in the rigging that worried her with its swinging.

People died all the time. Especially on the high seas. Big deal. Still, she couldn't help but wonder when she would see the first cracked skull due to someone falling from that rigging.

Helen didn't bother her much. She could have cried a lot more, but the truth was that her trust in the woman had broken in so many pieces that she had hardly even lost a friend.

Did friends prepare to take down the other in armed combat?

At least Inky didn't try to be her friend. She felt like he did all he did for amusement only, and maybe out of hatred for Kinley. It was easier to see him on the wheel with Gadfly and exchange a few words than it had ever been to open the door and check the mail.

"You're late," he told her as the men turned the helm in unison.

Now, a helm was a heavy burden. Most were unable to operate such things alone, even on a good day. The turning of a ship took the full crew. Still, someone had to lead the operation, and usually that someone doubled with a strong guy and took the wheel so that the chain of command remained clear.

Inky failed to look very piratey, even while leading a crew of men who were, by all accounts, pirates. He still stuck with the robes that proudly shouted WITCH in every possible visual language.

At least he didn't have any stupid ribbons on him that could get caught.

"I'm not, since no one needed me," Serenica said, already reading too deep into her own words.

It was not exactly true. She was always needed. She was a healer and a doctor, for the sakes of all known gods! People paid with their last coins if they had a terminal illness. Some wasted their retirement savings dealing with preventable illnesses. Some stole, cheated, and murdered to get to live another day with Serenica's help.

It was not easy to discern how she felt about that.

She felt a warmth coming from the wind. It was a welcome change. While the sun was hot beyond belief, the coldness of the vast blue nothingness down below radiated so strongly that any normal winds picked up on it, as if to say that they, too, felt the gravity of death.

"You want to get up at noon? I will drop you off in Aja," Inky said. It was not easy to discern if he was joking.

"Aja…" Serenica shook her head. "Never thought I would go there."

"Aja Vana is beautiful. The way a fruit looks the last moment before rotting."

Then he shooed her away to have some peace for working.

She smiled, but only to herself. It was a forced expression. She was depressed.

She just wanted to make her own mind believe that she could, one day, be happy.

Relaxing as the waves were, the sense of impeding doom followed all ships. Or maybe it didn't follow anyone as much as it existed everywhere within water.

Kinley had powers over the dead.

Technically, raising someone from the grave was an impossibility. No one could ever get a dead person back. That was fruitless speculation. It was allegedly possible to put some external spirits into a carcass and make the dead walk with one's own will dictating what they said and did. That alone was an insult to all creation. Besides, who would have wanted to have his secrets revealed in death after guarding them with his life?

Still, apparently Kinley could do that. The thing about burials in water was that the mass of liquid was simply too hard to cross or penetrate. Not even the best pearl divers could resurface with the full weight of a corpse intact enough to be useful.

This was another reason why witches like that were supremely dangerous. Normally, they had to kill people for their morbid experiments. No one in their right mind wanted a ground burial in a world of zombies.

So, this was a good argument for the trinity doctrine of the soul – a living person consisting of will, spirit, and flesh. Without will, the being was a mere beast. Without flesh, a ghost. And without spirit…well, sometimes the will was hanging out near the deceased person for long enough that the living started to notice weird things happening, but a mere will could not do much besides throwing pots and kettles.

Serenica had lit three pipefuls while thinking about this.

She noticed the nest of the pipe becoming hotter with each puff of her delicious smoke.

She frowned. It was not good to heat up the wood too much.

As she observed in horror the crack forming in the pipe, she also saw her true source of terror surfacing from the ocean just a few feet away from her blind spot.

PENSAMENTOS DOS CRIADORES
IkuSaari

This is not an author's note.

This is something I need to tell you, my readers, as few as you may be.

I'm taking a break. I feel a debt of gratitude lingering in the air, and I simply cannot leave you people hanging, even if there is but one person who will read this. Why?

Because your support showed me time and time again that it's worth it to come back.

Because I feel joy whenever I read a comment. Good, bad, short, long, whatever, I'll take it. I'd like to say something profound about it, but the truth is that I'm just pretty desperate for any attention I can get.

What better way, then, to get that sweet dopamine than to write a pretentious note about a simple topic that could fit into two lines? I'm taking a break. Might be as long as a month. If I publish before that, I will be in an embarrassing situation where I made a huge scene out of tAkInG a BrEaK and then crawled back in after three days like an ant in search of sugar. I enjoy that thought as well.

See? This started out as me praising my readers and then I revealed that I'm doing this to use a book as a personal soapbox. Which is all my books will ever be, anyway. The thing is, you cannot possibly be as disgusted by this as I am. Fun, right?

I'll be breathing (rather heavily and creepily) and you can find me in my discord. Not sure why you'd want that. https://discord.gg/XnNGGn4Rvy

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