Prologue
Tia Dalma needed Captain Hector Barbossa alive. Unfortunately as things stood at the moment, he was very much dead. Not undead; no longer cursed to appear alive to the eyes, but suffer a kind of death that only the damned can suffer. Hector Barbossa was plain old moldering dead. Or, he would have been moldering had not Tia Dalma made every effort to stop the decay while she considered her options. To say she was annoyed would have been the most egregious understatement possible.
"Jack Sparrow!" she spat, her skirts rustling softly as she paced. "Jack Sparrow! I could kill dat man!" She spat again, crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes.
"If I didn't need him alive, too," she added as an afterthought.
She returned to pacing. She needed nine pirate lords, all of them in some condition resembling life. It followed, she thought, to divine a way to resurrect Barbossa. But bringing a man back from the dead, well… it was not something one did every day. She knew only that it had been done before, a handful of times in history, and that it could be done now if only she – She was surprised to find that she did not know how. The finding out would be the hardest part. It was best, she decided, to begin soon. Walking to the door she smiled to herself and whispered a few words into the dark, moonless night.
There was a soft, damp breeze siphoning through the twisted trees. Tia Dalma sniffed the musky air. It was a perfect night for new beginnings, she thought as she caught deftly in her hand the small night-creature with large, round eyes that had come at her words. Turning swiftly she pulled a dagger from some unknown pocket and slit the creature's belly, letting the contents fall onto a stunted table. The little animal had not even had the time to utter a cry and Tia Dalma paid it no more attention. She focused all of her attention on reading the entrails. Her laughter began quietly, and quickly grew to a crescendo. She stood and surveyed everything around her in apparent bemusement.
"Someone who love him!" she laughed. "Somebody who love him will be able to bring him back, back from death!" Her laughter died away as she considered the problem at hand, a problem possibly insurmountable. She walked to the doorway and sniffed the night air once more, as if hoping it could give her an answer. Nothing.
"Nobody love him," she muttered darkly. "Nobody I ever known could love dat man…." Another oracle, then, she decided. Another oracle would hold the solution, if she asked the right question. She drew from a deep pocket somewhere a handful of bones. They could have been knuckles; they could have been toe bones. Squatting, she shook them. She blew on them. She shook them some more, and threw them. They rattled across the floor before coming to a rest. Her breath was little more than a hiss as she surveyed the results.
"How could dat be? Somebody far away, somebody dat never met him. Somebody far away… in… time. It looks like time."