… of having a less than optimal experience.” The GM finished in an over the top fake breezy tone. “If anyone should see her, please let her know the GMs are all on the lookout for her, and upper management is eager to find her.”

  “Wait, she’s-“ Ayerelia moved her hand up to swiftly cover Soup’s lips. He gave her a dirty look.

  The elf smiled at the GM and said, “of course, if we see her, we will be sure to put in a ticket.”

  “Excellent, I’ll be in touch if there is anything more to be communicated.” Again the GM’s tone was light, but they said this directly to Rose.

  Then they were gone.

  “What the hell is going on?” Soup burst out. “She is clearly sitting right there.” He pointed at me in exasperation.

  “No, she is not.” Ayerelia said, in defiance of the fact that I was indeed sitting right there.

  Soup’s brows drew together. Barry laid a hand on his shoulder. “Not here, Soup.” He looked puzzled, but he dropped it.

  “Let’s go see if this boat has some loot in its cargo hold.” Copperbeard stood up, stretched and headed down the stairs. Everyone avoided talking about what had just happened. I was worried. Great danger? What kind of danger? The GM’s behaviour made it very clear we shouldn’t speak about it. Concerned but silent, I tromped down the stairs into the hold.

  The ship was laden with cargo. There were crates of spices, fruits, and herbs. Bolts of fine cloth, jewelry and finely carved items out of a lustrous opaque stone. There was even an area off the galley that was stocked with meats, cheeses, wine, and beer.

  “This is a party boat if I ever did see one.” Copperbeard said with great amusement. “We are rich.”

  “Assuming we can sail this ship and dock it somewhere. If it sinks or gets dashed to pieces on some rocky shore, we won’t be,” Ayerelia said. She was carrying around one of the bolts of fabric. A delicately woven purple silk. So gossamer thin, it was like smoke, but with an iridescent sheen. If this ship started to sink, I bet she would try to swim with it.

  “We can just put it in our inventory and fast travel back, sell it and repeat,” Soup suggested, walking by covered in golden chains and jewel encrusted crown.

  “How are we going to get back here?” Ayerelia asked acerbically. "This isn’t a town or village that we for sure can fast travel to. If you leave, you might not be able to get back.”

  “True,” Barry was trying to help Mage with some ropes to change the tension in the sails. “I’m pretty sure Vyper would have came back if he could have.”

  “He messaged me,” Mage said, heaving on a rope that ran through massive pulleys. “Said he was ok. And he can’t fast travel to us.”

  “That answers that,” Barry turned back to the rope.

  We had changed direction and now with the sails pulled in it was filling the canvas sails. I hoped we were going back towards shore. Right now we were running with the sun at our backs, so we should be. But how accurate were we? What shore would we end up on?

  Dekka was standing at the prow, her nose raised to take in the scents of the sea as we charged across the waves. Joining her as lookout, I gazed down into the waters. The way the surface bent and light reflected was almost hypnotic. Were there programmed sea creatures down there? Mermaids? Perhaps there was a whole other world we were skimming over. I gave Dekka a pat, and her tail wagged. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about how I had handled that. But all’s well that ends well?

  Rose and Soup had gone down to figure out a meal, so it wasn’t a surprise when Rose joined me with a couple of bowls. Dekka gave off doing her figurehead impression for the chance to stick her face in a bowl full of food.

  It was good. Fish and rice. Not up to Aubie’s cooking but quite decent. When I said so, Rose replied, “Soup knows his way around a kitchen. Or in this case, a galley. I mostly just stirred things.”

  “This is so much better than more roast beast haunch,” I said, shoveling it in.

  “I imagine that does get bland. Oh, and we found sleeping quarters. So we should be able to log off here and return if we need to.”

  “But you can’t fast travel?” Because I couldn’t do either, I wasn’t clear on the rules.

  “No, we can log off and back on to a sleeping place. Fast travel is only between certain locations you have been to.”

  “Don’t you log back on to where ever you logged off last anyway? Why need a bed?” I put my bowl down on the deck for Dekka to lick.

  “Ayerelia pointed out that we are on a moving vessel. So the game might log us back in to the same location we logged out, in the middle of the ocean with no ship or land in sight.”

  “That would be a problem,” I agreed.

  “So we are going to take turns logging out for a while. We should hit land in good time, but we don’t want to get kicked out and leave you to manage the ship alone.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate that.”

  We sailed until nightfall. None of us knew how to read the stars, and there was a concern we would get turned around.

  “We have an anchor.” I pointed out. “We could just stay put until morning.”

  “The water is too deep out here. I doubt the anchor would reach,” Ayerelia said.

  “We could try?” Barry said.

  Copperbeard was looking up. He had been steering the ship, but had joined the discussion. “We have magic sails, do we know if we have a magic anchor?”

  Mage looked thoughtful. “Ships like this often have multiple anchors We have the main one.” He pointed at a short column sticking out of the deck and went to go look over the side port side, then the starboard.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Without saying anything to us, Mage was a man of few words, he strode off to the doors in the forecastle. Bemused, we followed.

  He led us to a room at the front of the ship, near the waterline. There were orderly piles of chain that led out through a hole in the ship's side. Mage stuck his head out of a hatch and looked out.

  “This should work.” He looked at us, then at the chains. “You will all want to step back.” We did. “Further.” We moved back till we were well clear of the chains. Mage took hold of a rope and moved away from the chains too.

  He pulled the rope, releasing the anchor on the outside of the ship. The chain started rushing out the hole with a terrible racket as it clattered through the iron hole. The chain seemed impossibly long, but eventually the last of it spooled out and the ship groaned as the line went tight.

  “What sort of anchor was that?” Ayerelia asked.

  “Sea anchor.” Mage said as he started up the stairs.

  “Aren’t they all sea anchors?” Ayerelia asked, unimpressed.

  Mage didn’t answer, so we followed him up.

  “We should have furled the sails first.” He said as we came up on deck. Mage figured out how to pull up the sails, and with everyone’s help the ship was no longer being pulled by the wind.

  The sea anchor, it turns out, was a special kind of anchor. It looked like a large parachute in the water. As night fell, the anchor glowed, like a large jellyfish. “Magic after all,” Copperbeard said with a yawn.

  “It’s beautiful.” The night sky was vast, and the moon reflected a glittering path all the way to the horizon. I had never understood in stories where men were ‘called to the sea’, but I could kind of get it now.

  “I am going to log off for a bit,” Ayerelia said and started for the crew quarters. “I need to go check on things at home,” Barry said, following her.

  “If you are tired, go sleep,” Mage said to me. “I’ll keep watch for a while.”

  I was tired. Calling Dekka to me, I headed down. I could feel Dekka was hungry, so we swung past the galley. I took a couple of links of sausage. One for me and one for my dog.

  The crew quarters weren’t fancy. Looking around at the hammocks strung across the open space, I debated about looking for the captain’s quarters. Or the Lords. Unlike my friends, I would actually have to sleep here. But I was tired. I was pleasantly surprised that I fit on the hammock; they were long to span post to post. Dekka fell asleep and rolled off my chest to get caught between my side and the fabric, feet up. She started snoring.

  Again, I questioned my choices of the last day. Troubled, I felt I wasn’t always reacting the way I expected. The slight rock of the ship lulled me to sleep.

  I woke to the sound of waves crashing. Not the gentle slap of water against the hull I’d fallen asleep to. The hammock swayed as the ship rolled, and Dekka tumbled off my chest with an indignant yelp. Gray dawn light filtered through the portholes, painting everything in desaturated shades of shadow.

  Bracing myself against the roll of the ship, I scrambled up the stairs with Dekka at my heels. I emerged onto the deck to find Barry at the wheel and Copperbeard standing beside him.

  “Everyone else logged off?” I asked, joining them.

  “Aye,” Copperbeard said. “Been just us for the last few hours. Mage went about an hour ago. Ayerelia should be back soon.”

  “Why are we moving? Did you pull in the anchor?” I looked behind but saw nothing in the water behind us.

  “Sometime in the night the chain broke,” Copperbeard told me. “Mage was still here then. He said something about should have dropped more than one. Then he left and said he’d be back later and that we should do the best we can.”

  “And look there,” Barry pointed ahead, We’ve found land.”

  Found it. As if it had been missing. We had misplaced the continent accidentally in the night. I chuckled at the imagery. But then sobered, taking a good look. This wasn’t the docks of Mare’s Meet. I could see no city. The land looked flat; the mountains showed in the distance. We had moved east.

  The coastline was rocky and unwelcoming, waves exploding in white spray against jagged outcroppings that jutted from the water like broken teeth. But beyond the rocks, past a narrow strip of beach, the plains stretched out beneath a sky just beginning to lighten. And across those plains, like a constellation fallen to earth, hundreds of fires burned.

  “That’s an army,” I breathed.

  “Aye,” Copperbeard said again, “Maybe it is this prince the others are looking for.”

  The fires went on and on, organized in neat rows that spoke of military discipline. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, maybe. Even from this distance, I could see movement. Tiny figures silhouetted against the flames.

  “We need to find a safe place to dock this ship,” Barry said, fighting with the wheel as a wave tried to push us toward the rocks.

  “Could we sail along the coast?” I asked. “Find a better, safer place to land.” I eyed the dangerous-looking rocks.

  “There must be a current,” Barry said. “Maybe if Mage comes back in time, but I have been trying to steer us parallel to the coast, but then we drift sideways and the ship is broadside to the waves.”

  That must have been the motion that woke me.

  “There,” I pointed to a break in the rocks where the water looked calmer, a natural harbor carved into the coastline. “Should we try for that?”

  Barry and Copperbeard exchanged a look. “I don’t know if we are going to get a better option,” Barry said.

  The next forty-five minutes were tense. We didn’t really know what we were doing, and the sea was tossing us. Barry called out directions while Copperbeard tried out best to make the magic sails pull us just enough that we could fight the current but not so much that we sped into the rocks.

  The ship groaned and creaked as we maneuvered between stones, barely heard over the waves as they crashed implacably against the rocks. I held my breath as the ship scraped along the port side. She held together.

  As we drew closer to the harbor, details emerged that made my stomach drop. There was indeed an army.

  Men lined the cliffs above the beach. Dozens of them? No, hundreds. Standing in neat formations, they bristled with spears and swords that caught the weak morning light. And on the beach itself, archers. Three rows deep, with long bows already nocked, arrows pointed at our ship.

  “I don’t think they are happy to see us,” Copperbeard said quietly.

  “Maybe they think we are pirates; this ship doesn’t give off ‘harmless cargo ship’ vibes,” Barry pointed out.

  “Those fires didn’t just spring up overnight. This army has been here a while,” I said, holding Dekka to me. “They aren’t here for us; we probably just surprised them.”

  “That doesn’t matter if they kill us before we get to introduce ourselves,” Copperbeard said.

  The ship slid into the harbor, and the relative calm of the protected water felt like a trap closing rather than safety. The sudden lack of motion was it self disorientating. The rocky cliffs boxed us in. Ahead, the beach and its deadly reception committee. Behind, the open sea and ocean currents.

  The archers didn’t move. Didn’t lower their bows. Just watched us approach with disciplined stillness.

  “What do we do?” I asked, my hand moving to where my hammer should be. Shit. I had never gone looking for my hammer! Should I go look now? Would a massive barbarian seem friendly without her massive war hammer?

  “We dock,” Barry said, his voice steady despite the sweat on his brow. “We dock, and we see if we can talk our way out of us. See what they want.”

  “And if what they want is to fill us full of arrows?”

  Barry smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Then I suppose we’ll find out if we respawn on a ship that’s surrounded by the enemy or back in Mare’s Meet.”

  Copperbeard barked out a laugh that sounded more nervous than amused. “The Elf would be so mad if the soldiers got her silk.”

  “Should I go find my hammer?”

  “There are so many of them. You so much as raise it and you would look like a pincushion,” Barry said.

  The ship drifted closer. I could see individual faces now among the soldiers, hard, weathered, expressionless. The archers’ bowstrings were taut, fingers ready to loose. Above them, a banner snapped in the morning breeze, white with a red circle with a blue slash through it.

  Dekka growled low in her throat, sensing the army’s hostility even if she didn’t understand it.

  “Easy girl,” I murmured, though my own heart was hammering. I didn’t want her to get big and scare the archers, or their commander into letting loose.

  We were close enough now that I could hear orders being shouted. The soldiers shifted, forming up tighter. More archers moved into position.

  The ship ran aground in the sand with a terrible grinding noise and then listed to one side as it came to a stop.

  For a long moment, no one moved. Not us, not them.

  Then, from somewhere in the ranks above the beach, a horn sounded—long, low, and full of menace.

  The archers raised their bows another inch.

  We waited to see if we’d sailed all this way just to meet our end.