"Who the fuck are you!?"

"CHHHOOOOOAAA!"

"Jaspers you were supposed to warn us about this kind of stuff!"

"Meow!"

"Holy fuck the Ghost Ship is right there fuck you John fuck you forever—"

"The island's exploding!" said Aradia, pointing up at the plume of lava that was rising up from the center. Much of the forest had erupted into flames from mere convection and soon the molten rock would come raining down on their heads in pyroclastic fury.

The strange small man was already wading his way over to Jaspers. He was pale and stout, with hair that had probably been very blonde when he was young and had beady little eyes. He wore an expensive looking white coat and a huge, blue, cheap looking stovepipe hat. Jaspers meowed happily.

"Don't let that creep on board!" Roxy demanded, just as the stranger brandished a baggie of catnip at the figurehead. It was too late; Jaspers was entirely on his side.

John looked at the approaching wall of fire. "No time for that Roxy, let's go!"

"The Ghost Ship though…" she said, hesitantly. It was far too close to shore; such a massive ship should have run aground. The once magnificent galleon was longer than the island and several times taller, but it seemed on float on the surface like a leaf on a pond.

"It's transparent," said John. "Maybe we can just sail through?" He was already running out onto the boat, getting out his pocket knife to cut the line.

"If we stay here," said Aradia, watching the cherry red glow of the eruption, "we're going to die. If we leave, we might live."

Roxy sniffed at such a poor choice and damned herself for not wanting to sail at night. "From now on," she said, dashing into the cold water, "we don't stop anywhere, especially if it seems nice!"

Aradia took a running leap and unfurled her wings, gliding the short distance to Jaspers' hull and never once touching the water.

"This boat is far too crowded," Roxy said, glaring at the stranger.

"I can sit five more people," Jaspers reassured. Aradia took charge of the sail while Roxy busily inspected the visitor.

"Who the fuck are you!?" she snapped. "Why were you just sneaking into our camp like a creeper?"

"You may call me Old Man Ho Ho," said Old Man Ho Ho. Roxy knew in her bones that that was a pseudonym. "And I was waiting for the Ghost Ship to appear."

"Fuck you," she said.

"Why," said John, eyeing the thing warily. The light from the eruption was not illuminating it; it remained cold and blue as if it were not truly a part of this world, but somewhere else, and they were merely looking at it from a great distance. He carefully tried to steer Jaspers away from it, but try as he might, they only got closer and closer.

"The ship wants what is the ship's," Ho Ho said sagely.

"Once again," Roxy said sharply.

In response, Ho Ho produced the chart. Roxy and John felt coldness in the pits of their stomachs. Aradia however squealed with delight. "The story really was real!" she shouted.

"We're gonna crash," said Jaspers with the same cheerful indifference that he said almost everything.

"We'll pass right through," John said firmly, trying to convince everyone including himself.

"At last," said Ho Ho, "The Triumph—" he commenced a clearly faked coughing fit somewhere in the second syllable. It had been entirely unnecessary, because at that moment Jaspers's nose touched the ethereal planks of the Ghost Ship and everything went black.


Aradia had never seen a palace before, a proper palace and not the Empress's boudoir of course, but she thought that her current surroundings came quite close. The deck of the ship was covered in splendid carvings, wood painted gold depicting scenes that she could barely imagine the context to, sculptures of gods and demons that she had no name for. Behind her, the magnificent stem of the ship transformed into a figurehead shaped like the head of a dragon that was the spitting image of Pyralsprite, covered in scales of burnished, silvery metal. There was a hatch for someone to climb up into, and inside his head were a pair of ruby colored lanterns.

All around her circular tables were being set up for dinner by dozens of lowbloods in extravagant clothing, beautiful full sleeved coats and dresses in vibrant colors with metallic embroidery and printed images, with huge lacy cuffs and hooks instead of buttonholes, elaborate straps and buckles and feathers and things she didn't even know the name for, all stuff out of a fairy tale.

If that was how the servants looked, the highbloods dancing in the center with their elaborate masques and finest silks were objects of indescribable beauty. They looked at her with something like detached interest and for the first time in her life Aradia felt just slightly inadequate. After all, here she was, a lowblood, and not even dressed for the party. She self-consciously touched her forehead—

And her hand darted back in shock at the touch of her hair. For the first time ever it felt silky and smooth, and from the weight distribution someone had pulled it up onto her head into a sort of knot, from which only a few artfully selected locks hung. Looking down at herself, she saw that her adventuring clothes had been replaced by an elegant ball gown of brilliant crimson, like human blood streaked with burgundy and patterned with maroon. The skirt was incredibly frilly she noted.

Above, strings of lanterns made of gold beaten to such fineness that it was light-transparent shone, casting a warm, cheerful light on the scene. The odd thing was that each and every person here had a lantern clipped to their belt, lit with a cold blue flame that gave no light.

A sea-dweller approached her and offered a deep bow. He had a harpoon gun slung on his back that crackled with purple magicks and a pair of wicked scars across his handsome face that made him look incredibly dashing. "Est du mid mésaltest?" he asked in Old High Trollish.

It occurred to Aradia that everyone here was long dead. She offered a wild grin and a deep curtsy. "Sure!" The ghost took her hand, and she felt proud of herself for bringing some ease to this curious afterlife.


John was unaware of how he had wound up in the ship's hold, or in the ship at all, if it was in fact a ship. The rocking underneath and the sound of waves and the wooden textures underhand reassured him that it was, but something, some inner sense, told him that he was careening across the water entirely without support, and that there was nothing around him at all, except for that silly, pale little man with his ridiculous hat, the only thing in his line of sight that was entirely present and therefore visible despite the darkness. The old man let out another sound like choking and laughing at once and John realized why Roxy had disliked him so intently. "What the fuck," said John.

"We're aboard the ghost ship," said Ho Ho, rubbing his hands together conspiratorially.

"I only play the straight man for people like Roxy," John said warningly. "I can be plenty whacky when I want to be." He unslung his hammer and his shield, smiling inwardly at his pun.

"Look here boy," said Ho Ho, gesturing grandly; there were boxes and chests and jars all around, and, as John's eyes adjusted to the dark, he noticed that each was fill to the brim with rupees and precious metal. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head.

"No one would come with me on this adventure willingly, I'm afraid," Ho Ho explained, "but there are unspeakable rewards for a very little risk, really, when you think about it. You and your companions may take as much as you wish but," he raised a finger, "you must help me find a thing. A particular thing amid all this rubbish."

"What thing?" John asked, raising an eyebrow.

"A shard of gold," he said. "A triangle, broken and jagged on one side but shaped on the other two. The artifact is about as thick as two fingers."

John looked around. There was more gold here than anyone could ever want, not to mention more valuable things like rupees. "It is a valuable historical artifact," Ho Ho explained. "A minor thing, useless to the uneducated except for its weight in gold of course, which is comparatively little, but it is one of very few such things and I must have them all," he said, eyes bright with hunger.

John took a step back. "Where are the girls?"

"Help me first," said Ho Ho. "Everything else in its time."


The ship was half rotted and had no right to still be sailing anywhere, thought Roxy, as her foot squished through a plank that had ceased to be wood ages ago. She was stalking her way through the labyrinthine below-decks of the Ghost Ship, every bit of which was swarming with monstrous crew. The thing was staffed by a crew of Stalfos, skeletons animated by dark magic. Their bones were black and their skulls crowned with horns that had long ago dulled from their fiery color, and they went about their daily tasks as they had when they were alive. No, better; they didn't have any pesky emotions or freewill or probably even a mind to slow them down and keep them from their tasks.

It was easy to avoid them; the damn things didn't have eyes after all; it was easier than sneaking past living people and that was easy enough; she's dyed her hair partly because she wanted a bit more of a challenge.

There were regularly spaced hatches leaking strange, dim blue light into the ship. At the end of the corridor, a short stairway connected to the surface, illuminated in the same curious light. It was a long stretch from where she was with few hiding places, and she didn't even know what she would find up on the deck, but it seemed there was nothing else she could do. Roxy drew a knife, took a brief slug of gin from a hidden flask (she had an array of concealed flasks as impressive as her stash of knives) and bolted down the corridor, willing the shadows to conceal her as she ran.

Then a winged shadow suddenly blocked the light ahead of her, standing between her and freedom. It emitted a sound, something like an alarm but unlike any she had ever heard. Not bothering to slow down or ask questions Roxy hurled a knife at the apparition and produced two more. It raised its left hand—or was it a wing?—it was holding a rod tipped with a red jewel and her knife shattered in midair with a flash of red sparks and a carbon smell. Roxy growled and took a flying leap at the thing, aiming both her legs at the center of its chest—

And it was gone. Roxy smashed uselessly into the stairs and took a brief tumble, almost cutting herself on her own knives. The sound started up again. Roxy sprang to her feet and turned, and saw the creature as it materialized under a lit hatch. It wore a black robe with a red hood—or did it? The way the cloth moved was unnatural, as if it were not merely being filled by a shape but fully animated. The full sleeves rippled and fluttered like bat wings, and hands did not emerge from the ends: rather the cloth stretched up from the elbows into short , shapeless fingers, one holding a three foot rod, glowing red yet somehow not illuminating anything. She wondered if it was just an animated robe, until she saw the face. A face of real flesh, covered in black feathers, with huge eyes colored like a metallic rainbow on either side of its head—it turned to the left in order to look at her, like a bird, and that gave her a good look at the monster's beak. The thing was nearly four feet long and looked powerful enough to crush stone. An electric blue tongue flickered in and out. The mandible was black and covered in twisting red-orange and blue patterns that looked almost like flames.

It opened its beak and shouted laughed, a sound something like the cooing of a dove, and then it shouted, an echoing 'PAH' that seemed to come from a long distance, while slashing its rod downwards like a sword. The stone glinted, and issued a ball of fire that quickly split into three. Roxy ducked under the attack, the heart from the flames almost singing her back, and withdrew the pictobox. She didn't particularly care for taking the monster's information down, but once she'd gotten in close, she set off the flash and it screamed, a sound almost like a mad turkey's gobbling. It dropped its rod and covered its eyes with its hand-sleeves, spinning around and beeping. Roxy stabbed it in the back—it felt somehow both fleshy and hollow—and it gobbled again before disappearing.

The Stalfos sailors continued their drudgery. They were probably not very bright, Roxy concluded, before snatching up the rod. The beeping started up again so suddenly that she almost dropped it and the creature—the pictograph that had fallen to the ground read 'wizzrobe'—appeared further down the hall. It emitted the cooing sound again and all the Stalfos snapped to attention. Once more, and their eyes flared red. Each skull pivoted on its vertebrae and locked eyes with Roxy. She blinked. "Pchoo!" she said, pointing the rod as hard as she could. A streak of pink light shot from the gem and struck one of them in the head, shattering its skull. Roxy barely had time to enjoy her newfound magical thingy before they all pounced.


John was quickly growing frustrated. After filling his laughably small wallet with rupees he had sifted through two dozen crates of ancient cargo, most of it clothing so stiff with dust and fossilized rat droppings that it was razor sharp and found nothing at all of value, but worse, the more time he wasted here, the more time he was away from his friends. He would just leave, but firstly he had no idea where to go and secondly Old Man Ho Ho seemed to know what was up, or at least have some vague idea. He could hear the old man mumbling from the other side of the hold and saw the tip of his blue cap bobbing up and down amid the increasingly larger pile of rubbish.

John sighed and kicked the chest he was searching out of the way, spilling its contents all over the floor. There was a hole worn into the wall to his right (starboard bulkhead, he thought, happily reveling in his nautical discourse) and a little ray of blue light shone into the hold. He'd looked through other such chinks, they were all around, and seen something disturbing. He'd assumed that the odd color and quality of light was due to it being nighttime, never mind that it had been so dark when they entered the ghost ship, but upon looking outside he saw that the sun was high in the sky, late morning or early afternoon if he could see it from inside. However, the sun was a dim, deep indigo, staring dully down at the almost flat ocean below. The Ghost Ship was not of his world, and he feared they had gone beyond it.

This sliver of light however, shown on something interesting; a pure white lily like a miniature trumpet, growing from a chink in the floorboards, a spot of life and color in this dull, dead place. Ho Ho shouted absently to himself, "The Triumph Forks!" What the hell was he babbling about? That urban legend about magical wish-granting cutlery? What kind of idiot was he? John decided that he'd been wrong, Ho Ho was senile and he wanted nothing else to do with the man, and just then he noticed something glinting in the chink the flower was growing from. It pained him slightly, but he pulled it out; the lilly came away easily for such a little thing, and tangled in its roots was a little chip of gold, the exact shape and dimensions that Ho Ho had described. It seemed to twinkle with a light that was all its own. John glanced over at the man and pocketed it. "Hey I'm leaving," he said.

"No you must continue searching," said Ho Ho, hungry looking face emerging from a rubbish heap, face sweaty and red.

John cringed. "Yeah no, I'm going to go find my friends—"

A creature appeared in the center of the room, like a big cloak with a huge bird where the head goes and, curiously, a knife in its back. John wondered if it was supposed to be that way, like some sort of impaled bird apparition ghost thing and concluded that that was stupid. It tilted its head to the side to get a good look with its big, metallic eyes, and then it started beeping loudly and incessantly in alarm. Glowing-eyed Stalfos marched into the room, weapons glinting, and leapt at John soundlessly.

John smashed through the first one's ribcage with a two handed blow and its bones clattered to the floor uselessly. The second skidded to a stop just behind him on its toes and tried to headbut John with its horns, but John jumped out of the way and struck it in the face with the rim of his shield, smashing its skull with a quick lunge. A third emerged and took a swing with its weapon, a rusty metal racket, rectangular in shape, which was glowing blue. John did not find this unusual and blocked the strike with his shield. The weapon discharged a load of blue sparks like lightning and John jumped back in surprise. More of them were closing in, and many held the glowing rackets. Paying no mind, Ho Ho went about with his ratlike scurrying. No one else seemed to notice him.

Another Stalfos leapt and who the hell decided these things should jump like that? But John sidestepped the attack and crushed its spine with a backhanded blow. A pair of them came at him, rackets sparking, and John decided to try out something new. He reached for that feeling of unstoppable power—it was easy, with hammer in hand—and felt himself being propelled across the room, spinning at high speeds. With a pair of healthy crunches the Stalfos pirates fell to the ground, ruined, and their bones crackled and popped from the heat. He wondered if bone was naturally that flammable and concluded that it was probably the magic—

And felt a hideous pain coursing through his body as one of the spark-rackets struck him in the leg. Sparks filled the air and he tasted blood; John fell limply to the floor and saw the Stalfos he'd broken in half, walking on its hands with its racket in its teeth. Then they were upon him.


"Héo béon sé Çásernes þínen," explained the captain. Aradia assumed he was the captain, at least. He was holding her close as they spun round the dance floor, explaining something about his past. It was difficult to translate in her head—of course a good archaeologist has passable (at least!) Old High Trollish, but she could tell it was important, and had probably led directly to his death. A woman he knew, who had worked closely with the Empress at the time. Judging from his dialect, he must have been living under the rule of one of the most tyrannical Empresses ever to rule. "Damara æfreda wæs," he growled, face livid. She took a moment to admire his teeth; even more sharklike than Eridan's, who had the sharpest example's she'd ever seen. Troglopology was the best branch of archaeology, she thought. "Tó sum Ealdwita béonne," he spat; the air shook around him, as if rippling in the heat. His words felt…heavy.

It occurred to Aradia that he was in all likelihood a Poe, a kind of ghost she'd never met before. They were usually unaware they'd died, and were animated entirely by their negative emotions. That was it, she realized. They were all out here trying to drown out their negativity. He'd fallen in love with a lowblood, or so Aradia had deduced, who looked like her, hence the uncharacteristically good reception. The Empress, just out of spite, had sent the lowblood away to be a…something. Regardless, she was entirely beyond his power, and so he'd taken his entire court out here and…died somehow. That she could not figure out. Regardless, this was a fascinating way to learn about ancient peoples!

However, as fun as it was to figure out puzzles, she was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that he had latched onto her as some sort of replacement for his lowblood girl. "Cwide þú setl?" he asked softly. Ah, there it was. "Ælfscíene forÞwíf?" Aww, to think two words could carry that much adoration; he must really have loved his lowblood girl—or been very creepily obsessed with her.

Aradia shook her head and politely explained that she could no, or at least tried to as her grammar was atrocious. "Haben þú sum…Déorcynnum ansíen?" she asked, hesitating slightly on the word for 'human'. The captain raised his eyebrow. There was no polite way to say it in his dialect, and trolls had considered all non-trolls 'Déorcynnae'. Aradia absently clicked her tongue as she thought of what to say. "Hie beon meine freondas," she added hopefully. A dark pall came across the ghost's face and he hissed, exposing once again his fascinating teeth.

Just as he was about to speak, something happened that filled Aradia's face with a look of absolute joy. She broke away from his grasp, not caring about her rudeness whatsoever, eyes bright and smile wide. Her friends were being escorted from belowdecks by some wonderful gentlemen—of course she knew they were Stalfos, animated skeletons weren't nearly the same thing as ghosts, what idiot would assume that all undead creatures were the same—in much rougher piratey costumes than the ghosts up top. Clearly the low-blooded sailors, as opposed to personal servants above-decks, had no emotional connection to the incident and had simply moved on after death, forcing their masters to reanimate—aha! There, the wizzrobe responsible! His race hadn't been seen in the living world for ages, this would be a perfect opportunity to make a sketch!


John's eyes filled with horror at the grim tableau before him as he was forced to his knees on the rough planks of the dark, dilapidated wreck. Aradia, dressed in rags and grinning like a madwoman, had clearly been driven insane by the ghosts. There were dozens of them, horrible black blobs shrouded in darkness, dressed in scraps of colorful cloth and masquerade masks, as if to hide their true, horrible face from the rest of the world. The wreckage of the ship's stem-figurehead loomed like the rotting corpse of a huge animal; what was it supposed to be, a whale? One of the Poes, armed with a glowing harpoon, the only one without a mask screeched at him and Roxy and placed a twisted claw on Aradia's shoulder defensively. "Hey guys!" she said with a wave. "This is the captain, I think!"

The ghost started babbling at the wizzrobe in some strange language, and the wizzrobe might have responded in the same language for all John knew; its voice was so thickly accented he couldn't tell if he was talking at all or just chortling in its birdly way.

"They're saying that they caught you sneaking around downstairs," Aradia translated, "trying to steal the sea-dweller's treasures." She gasped. "Is that true?"

"Hell yeah," said Roxy, just as John loudly declared "no!" "I see your pockets bulging with rupees Johnny," said Roxy with a roll of her eyes. "And they don't seem to speak our language anyway." A Stalfos cuffed her in the back of the head and she winced, glaring up at the creature. "Rae-Rae can lie for you right?"

"They actually speak a very old version of our own language," said Aradia absently, before beginning to converse with the captain very rapidly and John thought to himself that he probably had the least amount of useful skills in the group, as he spoke only one language and could barely magic at all. Was magic even a verb? Dammit.

"Oh," she said, looking surprised. "he said that he's never going to let me go but the two of you are free to—wait, where's the Old Man?" she said, taking care to pronounce the capitals.

Roxy snorted. "Who cares? He got us into this so he can just get himself out! Ow!" The Stalfos had hit her again.

"But what about you?" asked John. "You can't stay here forever! You'll…" he looked around, "get tetanus, at the very least!"

The Poe hissed and a pair of thunderbolts crackled at its head. It was becoming more cohesive in shape, more humanoid. Two lines of fire like cracks of light appeared where its face should be. It took a step forward with its newly formed feet—

And Aradia stepped in front of it, arms outstretched, speaking in frantic…whatever it was. "Þú earon blac fore diese kreatur?" Aradia choked, and set her teeth, glaring up at the monstrous shape. Then it stepped through her, temporarily becoming like purple mist, and she shouted, jumping away from the painful chill.

It raised a crooked hand and leveled its finger at John. "Ich will agon-gamen git, O wilde!" It drew its harpoon, crackling with purple light.

Aradia seemed ready to rush the Poe, but another, this one in a pale porcelain mask that imitated a fat human face, stuck its hand through her shoulder; she groaned and stood still, leaking purple mist and unable to move. "He says," she began, wincing in pain; the Poe chuckled, something between a child's laugh and the rattling of bone, "that he challenges you to a duel."

John leapt to his feet. "I accept!" The other Poes joined in the wretched laughter, their masks clattering against nothing in an imitation of life.

"A 'game of pain' specifically," Aradia elaborated.

"Toten Mannes Vvolley," he said, rising up into the air. He hung over the ship near the ruinous crow's nest, glaring down with violent purple eyes like some damned angel of death. Despite her less than stellar position, Aradia could not help but crack half a grin and 'ooh'. "Dead Man's Volley," she breathed, "a very popular form of duel in the last days of the Empire. He's going to attack you with magic and you have to reflect it back at him, and it keeps going back and forth until someone dies!"

"What!?" John snapped. "I can't reflect magic—"

"Use Din's Fire Johnny," Roxy said. Her Stalfos, proving itself to be somewhat of a bitch despite a complete lack of a personality, cuffed her again. She growled. "You can reflect magic with magic, just use Din's Fire on your hammer again and you'll be fine!"

"Earon þú fuslic, O wwilde?" the Poe demanded, losing patience. He seemed to be developing a slight stutter.

John rose to his feet. "I need my hammer!" Aradia translated for him and it was provided. No sooner was the weapon in his hand than the Poe launched a burst of purple lightning from the end of the harpoon that screamed across the air and struck John right in the chest.

The Poes laughed at him as he rose to his feet, clothes smoking. "You can do it! Wooo woo!" Roxy shouted, this time catching the Stalfos's hand and breaking it off at the wrist before it could hit her. She waved the hand like a little semaphore flag.

John eased his trembling muscles. It had hurt and it was doing awful things to his movement—he found he did not enjoy electricity whatsoever—but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. The Poe was toying with him. He could tell from the way the others laughed, the way it spat its words when it referred to him, even though he couldn't understand them, and the way Aradia was not translating directly, like his Nana had when the traders came up from the extreme south once in his youth, but just giving him the gist. They thought John was beneath them. They underestimated him.

The hammer head ignited in a burst of red. When the ball of lightning came for him he was ready and struck it back expertly. The Poe returned it with a jab, and the game was on. It fed off their energies, growing bigger and faster and more livid in color, so bright it hurt to look at, crackling with enough electricity that everyone stepped back except for the two players. The Poe was too good at this though, and John figured he'd never hit him just punting the ball back at him. With an underhanded feint, he sent the thing flying wide and as the Poe flew off to intercept it, John spared a glance at Aradia and she smiled and winked.

She burst into flame and her captor squealed in agony, and Aradia ran toward John's opponent. "Ich lufian þú!"she shouted, and the Poe turned to look at her in shock, fiery orbs widening as a gurgling gasp escaped its ethereal lips. In its distraction, it forgot all about the burning magical sphere and was struck in the shoulder, screaming in pain, if ghosts feel pain, and floating to the ground in a smoking spiral.

"Facen!" A Poe cried. "Cwielman þá Déorcynnas!" And then several things happened at once. The wizzrobe laughed in its cooing, echoing voice and raised its rod, summoning a ring of fire around John and Roxy—but Roxy was no longer there. It looked around frantically for her as the Stalfos, without his mind for direction, ignored John as he proceeded to smash them to pieces. A Poe rose into the air and dove for him with its lantern and Aradia felt a little twitch inside her brain. Something went *pop* and suddenly she was holding up her hand as if to call a halt, bleeding profusely from one nostril, and the Poe hung in the air, suspended.

The wizzrobe shouted, "PAH," readying an aurora of magic with its rod, preparing to kill her with a blow—and then Roxy was right next to it, jabbing it in the eye with her stolen, skeletal hand. Acid-green blood sprayed out as it screamed its gobbling scream, too much in pain even to warp out of the way, and Roxy snatched up the magical rod. "Pchoo motherfucker," she said, and the wizzrobe burst into flame. Within seconds, there was nothing left of the strange creature, and all of his Stalfos clattered to the ground, as dead as they had always been. Roxy was all too eager to turn her new weapon against the Poes, using the rod as if she had been using one all her life as she fought off the ghosts.


Aradia saw the captain, lying in a spreading pool of his own blood at the foot of the mast as his fabulous, eternal party collapsed around him. The flame in his lantern was burning bright as ever, having found a new hatred to feed off, and he reached for his harpoon. Aradia frowned. All the other Poes were caught up in his hatred; he was the basis of everything that went on here and the Ghost Ship would continue to haunt the sea until he could move on. Feeling wretched in the frontmost part of her brain, she sat down next to him and placed a hand on his forehead. "It's okay," she said soothingly. "Þá Çásernes toten," she added, tapping into her psychic reserves. "You can rest now, restan, join your þínen in Heofone." For a moment his eyes became calm, clear, almost childlike, not daring to hope. Then he shoved her out of his way as he leapt to his feet, lantern flaring to life as a livid blaze. The harpoon flew into his hand of its own accord.

"Ac…Ich beon gan æt Hell," he whispered. Then the captain bellowed. "Wwilde!" he shouted, "cuman wwiþ Ich!" He shouldered his harpoon and unleashed a burst of magic right at John. He turned just in time to watch a hundred livid red orbs of energy arc their way across the deck, curving as sinuously as a river of hate in the air, just in time to—

Perform a perfect Sheikah Spinning Slash, striking each individual beam almost at once. They retraced their path through the air perfectly, following the purple after-images in Aradia's eyes like a roadmap back to their originator. He was struck all at once and screamed as he was engulfed in flames. He might have shouted his lover's name or something poetic like that, thought Aradia, but it might just have been a scream. All the same, he was consumed by his own hate, and the fires soon spread across the ship, the water, and the curious sky with its indigo sun, until everything went black.


Jaspers meowed. "Wake up sleepies," he said. The sun is up!" It was a dull, grey morning with fog all around, but the sun was indeed up, quite high in the sky in fact. Off in the horizon, the little round island was smoking, and the kids wondered if it had all been just a dream.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE YOU FOOLISH CHILDREN!?" cried a cranky, cantankerous old-man voice. Splashing around some several yards away was a silly looking pale man in a ridiculous blue hat. "YOU'VE LOST ME MY SHOT AT THE TRIUMPH FORKS THAT'S WHAT!" He started swimming at them full speed, which was surprisingly fast for one so old. Roxy casually unfurled the sail. Aradia, ever thoughtful (though usually the thoughts she's full of are not entirely grounded to the situation) rummaged around under the bench until she found a cork life-preserver and tossed it at Old Man Ho Ho as they sped away.

Roughly an hour later, John felt something heavy in his shirt pocket. He took it out, wondering what it might be, having forgotten nearly everything about their Ghost Ship adventure in all the excitement. It was a chunk of gold, triangular in shape, broken and jagged on one side but shaped on the other two, as thick as two fingers. John screamed.


Note: This is the first chapter to break the theme naming scheme and fuck it most of you already know the theme is the central character of the chapter's Legend of Zelda Aspect. Legend of Zelda obviously doesn't have aspects but I'm adopting the term from Homestuck for ease of reference; the only chapter title that wasn't wind-based was earth based and it was the one that introduced Aradia. Roxy will have one too in due time, and so will others.

Fuck this chapter. I mean it's good but goddammit fuck my need to randomly have the ghosts speak Old English, and I mean right proper Old English not Shakespearean which is Early Modern and laughably easy to write. A rational mind might realize that Anglo-Saxon record keeping is spotty at best and that the language is largely incomplete but I am an artiste and therefore a fuckass who enjoys running around the internet looking up grammar that doesn't exist and translators that only work one day at a time. Again, a rational mind might recommend using Welsh but I was already two sentences of stupidly hard work into this 'masterpiece' by the time that idea came up, and to make it worse, my grammar is atrocious. If any of you can be arsed to translate this back into Modern English (I tried to make it as clear as possible through context what was actually being said), know that this is actually a pidgin language constructed from Old English, German, and Greek, because fuck you. tumut

Another thing that was difficult was trying to find sounds to link from Wind Waker (for the Ao3 version with links, of course). There are half a million Let's Plays on YouTube, but no, like, ten second videos of Ho Ho Ho Hoing it up or Wizzrobes doing their freaky scream. Alas!

I know that the Ghost Ship is a full dungeon in Phantom Hourglass, a game I have not played :P All the same it should totally have been one in WW. A bit of sequence breaking this chapter, we are still in sight of the rails people!

Oh yeah fans of this story watch this space, a neat surprise is coming up soon and if you like this story I don't want you to miss it. Just click refresh all the time between now and Christmas.

(talk of music and sounds must confuse you yes? remember that the Ao3 version of this fic has a soundtrack starting with chapter 10!)