Episode I — The Sea Spray Broke
The voyage of The Sea Spray began as an unremarkable duty of the Heterland Navy: a grain shipment departing Southport under the authority of King Gregor XIV, bound for the port of Silversea along the Osweg coast. No special escort. No notable cargo. No expectation of history.
By the second day at sea, something was already wrong.
The ship had passed Silversea without slowing. No explanation was offered. The Sea Spray pressed on into open water, sails full, officers silent. Sailors muttered, but discipline held.
That evening, a small group of crew and passengers gathered around a candlelit table below decks: Thorin Windfurrow, Basarios Heros, Gravos Etnad, ChoRoke, Zovis, and Vincent Slag. It was there that the ship revealed its first secret.
A wooden crate on a high shelf began to shake.
Gravos moved to investigate just as the lid burst open and a dwarf tumbled out onto the deck, blinking and confused. He looked up at the room and asked, quite sincerely:
“Are we there yet?”
The dwarf was a stowaway. His name was Grimgrun Blunderforge. Thorin recognized him at once. Grimgrun, for his part, seemed unsurprised to be discovered, explaining cheerfully that he had been told “there are no stowaways on the Sea Spray, only volunteers.”
Thorin turned to fetch an officer.
Before he could, the alarm bell began to ring.
The storm came down from the north without warning.
Winds screamed through the rigging. Waves hammered the hull. Orders were shouted, swallowed, shouted again. Basarios and Vincent each seized one of Grimgrun’s arms and hauled the uninvited dwarf toward General Quarters.
The Sea Spray fought the storm bravely.
Then she lost.
There was a sound — not thunder, not splintering wood, but something deeper and wrong. A single concussive blast tore through the ship from within. The world went white.
The survivors awoke on a beach.
Hills rose in the distance. Scrub and low brush clung to sandy soil. Half of The Sea Spray lay shattered along the shore, her keel torn apart as if by an inward force. Weapons, armor, crossbows, chainmail, and crates lay scattered in impossible abundance for a simple grain shipment.
There were bodies.
Many bodies.
Only seven still breathed.
The dead were gathered and buried as best they could be, beneath stone markers and hurried words. Then the survivors turned back to the wreckage, trying to understand what had destroyed their ship.
It had not run aground. It had not capsized. It had not simply broken.
The Sea Spray had exploded.
And her cargo had not been grain alone.
The answer did not wait long.
From the surf emerged figures half-man, half-fish, with slick skin and mouths full of sharklike teeth. They carried crude weapons and malice in equal measure. Sahuagin, or something close enough to match the old sailors’ tales.
The survivors fought.
Zovis hurled freezing sorcery that crystallized the air. Basarios charged, flail swinging. Vincent called down the tolling of an unseen bell. ChoRoke loosed star-lit magic drawn from older rhythms. Gravos’ knives flew true. Grimgrun’s eldritch power manifested as phantom tankards and dissolving liquid light. Thorin closed barehanded, striking with disciplined, brutal precision.
Blood darkened the sand.
Some of the creatures fled back into the sea. Others did not rise again.
When it was over, Zovis vomited. Gravos hid behind Grimgrun. Grimgrun stared at his own hands and admitted, quietly, that it was the first time he had ever cast magic to kill.
ChoRoke identified the attackers as undersea devils, known to prey upon ships that strayed too far or carried something of interest.
That knowledge settled heavily.
The survivors knew the sea would not leave them alone.
They turned inland.
Recorded Consequences
- The destruction of The Sea Spray
- Discovery of unmanifested weapons and armor among the cargo
- First contact with undersea devils
- The binding of seven survivors by shared catastrophe
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