As the blizzard approached, huge dark clouds slowly marched across the blue sky. Small flakes of snow started drifting downwards towards the frozen land, only to be unsettled and blown about by the strengthening breeze.

Down on the toxic river accessing Half Peak, the wind was increasing rapidly,, and the sky was ominously dark. Larger and larger snowflakes pelted down onto the deck of the Black Pearl, as it fought its way upriver to the sheltered cove.

But the cursed crew of the vessel were unfazed and unaffected by the deteriorating conditions. They climbed up and down thin rope ladders, trimming the tattered black sails in preparation for the high winds.

And standing on the deck, their fur rippling in the freshening breeze, were four sabre-tooth tigers…

"Ooh, I can't wait to get my claws into that mammoth!" cackled Zeke. "And then sink my teeth into his warm flesh!"

"Nobody touches the mammoth until I have that baby!" snarled Soto as he loped past.

Zeke nodded meekly as his leader passed by. As soon as Soto had passed, however, he started to shake with anticipation.

"First," he said to himself, "I'll slice its hindquarters into sections. I'll put all the red meat in one pile, and the white meat in the…"

"Knock it off!" growled chubby Lenny. "I'm starving!"

Zeke didn't listen.

"Next are the shoulders," he continued. "Occasionally tough…but extremely juicy!"
"I told you to knock it off!" shouted Lenny, raising a paw to swipe at the thin, scrawny sabre next to him…

…when Soto grabbed the sabre's raised leg.

"Save your energy!" he snapped. "Mammoth's don't go down easy, don't you know that?"

The leader of the pack dropped Lenny's leg, and slowly advanced towards the tubby scimitar cat. Zeke and Oscar grouped in behind him.

Lenny whimpered and backed away from his leader.

"Cursed or un-cursed, there's only one way to do it,' growled Soto. "First, you force it into a corner. Cut off its retreat. And when you three have it trapped, I'll go for the throat!"

Lenny gulped and instinctively covered his neck with a paw.

At the sight of the scimitar cat's fear, Soto grinned, a horrid, evil grin that could have easily frightened Fear itself.

Meanwhile, down below decks, Pintel and Ragetti mopped the wooden-plank floor of thebrig.

The Black Pearl's brig was fairly large. Under Hector Barbossa's command, the cursed crew had added several more cells to the original four, so that the pirates could take more people as prisoner during battles.

Currently, though, only two cells were occupied. One cell was filled with the former crew of the former HMS Interceptor. Cotton, Cotton's parrot, Mr Gibbs, Anamaria, Marty, and several other surviving crew members were squished up in the cell.

The sole occupant of the other cell was Will Turner.

"AWK! Shiver me timbers," squawked Cotton's parrot.

Mr Gibbs looked at the parrot, and then turned his head to Pintel, who was caulking the deck just beside their cell.

"Cotton says you missed a bit," he informed the pirate.

Pintel snarled, and shoved his soaking mop at Mr Gibbs, All the occupants of that cell quickly moved away from the wet dirty mop.

There was silence for a moment. Then Pintel continued washing the deck.

Nobody spoke for a few minutes.

Finally, Will looked Pintel in the eye.

"You knew William Turner," he said simply.

Pintel stared back at Will. "Ol' Bootstrap Bill. Aye, we knew 'im."

He leaned on his mop. The brig was now silent, as everybody listened to Pintel's story. Even Ragetti had stopped mopping and wandered over beside his comrade.

"Never sat well with Bootstrap, what we did to Jack Sparrow, the mutiny and all," the stout pirate continued. "He said it wasn't right with the Code. That's why he sent a piece of the treasure off to you, as it were."

Pintel snarled. "He said we deserve to be cursed…and remain cursed."

"Stupid blighter," Ragetti muttered.

"Good man!" Gibbs called from the other cell.

Pintel ignored him. "But as you can imagine, that didn't sit too well with the captain."

"No," Ragetti sniggered, "that didn't sit too well with the captain at all. Tell them what Barbossa did."

"I'M TELLING THE STORY!" Pintel roared into Ragetti's face, showering the tall, thin pirate with spittle.

Then he turned back to Will. "So, what the captain did, he strapped a cannon to Bootstrap's bootstraps."

"Bootstrap's bootstraps," sniggered Ragetti, cackling loudly until a furious stare from his crewmate shut him up.

"An' the last we all saw of Bill Turner," Pintel grinned horribly, "was him sinkin' down to the crushin' black oblivion of Davy Jones' Locker."

Will's eyes widened in horror. His father had died a horrid, death that he hadn't deserved at all.

Pintel sighed. "Course, it was after that that we learned that we had needed his blood to undo the curse."

"Now that's what you call ironic," Ragetti put in.

The podgy pirate looked at his skinny, lanky friend...and they both burst into laughter at the exact same time.

Will gave both of them an angry glare. 'They all deserve to remain cursed until the end of the world. All of them.'

It was now past sunset. The blizzard was howling across the landscape at full strength.

The snow was falling so thick and fast that Manfred the mammoth could hardly see the track in front of his face. And the intense cold was biting through his thick insulating fur and into his skin.

'Heck, if I can feel the cold…what about the kid?'

"Guys!" he bellowed over the howling gale. "We've gotta get this kid out of the wind!"

Everybody shouted their agreement. They were all freezing cold, especially Elizabeth, who was wearing only her thin nightgown which offered no protection against the harsh wind.

Manfred's eyes suddenly spotted a small cave nestled in the rock of a nearby cliff. The cave was quite small, but it was deep enough to offer shelter from the gale.

"Over here!" the mammoth shouted, leading the others into the cave. Quickly, Jack Sparrow, Elizabeth, Sid, and Diego trudged through the thick snow into the small alcove.

It was cosy inside the cave. The wind and the snow could not reach inside the alcove, and there were small clumps of moss here and there on the cave floor; just enough to make a soft bed for Elizabeth.

Everybody collapsed down on the floor of the cave, too tired to stand up any longer.

Nobody spoke for several minutes.

"How much further?" Elizabeth heard Manfred ask to Diego.

"Ten miles. Another day's walk."

The mammoth sighed, looking up at the silhouette of Half Peak, appearing and then vanishing in the waves of falling snow. His legs were weary from the many miles they had already travelled. "I'm beat. We'll get there in the morning."

Elizabeth nodded in agreement. Her feet were tired and cold from endless walking in the snow. Sure, she had found some tattered shoes on board the Interceptor, but they were extremely uncomfortable to walk in.

"That's a good idea. We'll have a rest tonight. What do you think, Jack?"

No response.

"JACK?!"

"M' right here, luv."

Elizabeth suddenly heard the sound of footsteps in the snow…and the sound of glass on glass.

Clink! Clink!

Jack Sparrow emerged at the mouth of the cave, his arms laden with several large objects. It was only when he came closer that Elizabeth realised they were bottles full of a dark tan-coloured liquid: rum.

"The rum-runners had a secret cache just around there," Jack commented happily, depositing his load of rum bottles on the floor of the cave. "They seem to have been out of business for quite a while, though. This is all that's left. You can thank your bloody friend Norrington for that."

"So you're just going to sit down and drink rum?" Elizabeth asked incredulously. "Is that all you do?"

"Welcome to the Ice Age, luv."

The lady glared at the pirate. "What do you think, it helps?" she snapped.

Jack Sparrow gave her a look. "When I was marooned on that tiny frozen spit of land, I was there a grand total of three days. I had nothing to drink for the first two days. Then I found a cache of rum."

"Let me guess," Elizabeth said in an icy voice. "You spent the next day lying on a beach drinking rum, until a ship came along and you were able to bargain passage off."

"Exactly," Jack said happily.

Then he sauntered past her, uncorking his bottle of rum and tilting his head back.

Elizabeth sighed. Was this the real truth behind the glamorous tales of pirates? All she knew was they weren't what she had thought they were.

Manfred smirked, watching the pirate gulp down the rum. "Here we go," he muttered to Diego. "It's going to be a long night

The sabre nodded. "If that guy has one fault, it's drinking.'

"All pirates do," the mammoth commented. "But, deep down, he's showed us that he's still human. You don't often find a pirate willing to risk their life for the life of somebody else."

Diego nodded again.

Suddenly, Manfred heard a scratching noise from behind. The sound of something scratching against rock.

He turned to see Sid, holding a small piece of chalk, drawing something on the back of the cave.

"What are you doing?" the mammoth asked.

"I'm putting sloths on the map," Sid repied, drawing a few more lines before standing back to admire his work, paws on hips.

Manfred studied Sid's drawing as well. In his opinion, it wasn't exactly a masterpiece.

The sloth on the wall had a wonky rectangle for its body and head, with two long lines for arms and two small squares for feet. Two more squares represented paws. Lines extending out from the feet and paws were claws. The sloth also had a nose, a mouth (with the uneven buck teeth) and the bug-eyes that were a signature mark of the sloth species. It was the kind of picture that a four year old school-kid would draw, thousands of years in the future.

Manfred snorted softly, amused by Sid's ridiculously unrealistic interpretation of how he looked.

'Has he ever checked his reflection?'

Sid smiled proudly, looking once again at his drawing. He was very proud of it.

Suddenly, there was a snort from behind him. The sloth turned to see Jack Sparrow, holding his bottle of rum, looking at the picture.

"You could've drawn him more realistically," he said, "by making him lying down."

While Sid was shocked by this comment, Manfred used his trunk to snatch the chalk out of the sloth's claws.

"Make him rounder," instructed Diego, with a sneer on his face.

The mammoth was only too happy to comply. He sketched a round pot belly on the sloth's body.

"There! Perfect," the sabre commented.

Sid glared at Manfred and Diego. 'How dare they mutilate my drawing!' Now it looked more like a pear with arms and legs than a sloth.

"Ha, ha, ha," the sloth snapped sarcastically, snatching back his fragment of chalk. "I forgot how to laugh."

Then he started scratching out the chubby light-bulb shaped sloth, rapidly scraping the bit of chalk up and down on the hard rock wall.

Suddenly, there was a flash of light. A shower of sparks fell from the wall as Sid brought his chalk down at incredible speeds.

One solitary spark landed on a small pile of dry twigs.

And, slowly, a small orange flame started to flicker on the cave floor.

Manfred's eyes widened. So did Elizabeth's and Diego's.

Sid let out a wild whoop. 'Yes! I did it! I made fire!"

"I'm a genius!" he cried, kissing his chunk of chalk.

Within an hour, the small flickering flame had turned into a merrily crackling fire, fed by small branches and sticks gathered from around the cave.

The snowstorm was now dying down, but the temperatures outside remained freezing cold.

Thanks to Sid's blazing bonfire inside, however, the cave and its six occupants were toasty warm.

Sid fed another small branch into the fire, smiling proudly at his creation.

Then he turned to Manfred, and Diego, lying in the light of the fire, watching him with bemused eyes.

"From now on," Sid announced in a haughty voice, striking a majestic pose, "you shall have to refer to me as 'Sid, Lord of the Flame!'"

Manfred smirked. He had noticed something the sloth hadn't: that Sid's tail was too close to the fire.

"Hey, 'Lord of the Flame!'" he called. "Your tail's on fire!"

Sid's eyes widened. His head whipped around to see a small smoke trail, coming from the end of his tail…glowing orange in the heat of a flame!

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Sid screamed, racing around and around the campfire, his paws flapping around in panic as his tail burned. "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

Diego watched as the sloth sprinted around and around, screaming in pain as the flame slowly crept up his tail. Part of the sabre found Sid's antics very amusing, and could easily watch the sloth racing around the fire for hours. But another part of him – a kinder part, which had been awoken when Manfred had saved him from the lava – didn't like seeing Sid in pain, and told the sabre to do something to help the sloth.

Diego decided to help.

As Sid passed him again, the sabre grabbed the sloth's tail and pulled him backwards into a pile of snow. Immediately, the flame was extinguished by the cold.

"Ahhhhh…" Sid sighed in relief. "Thank you!"

He reached out to touch Diego's shoulder. "From now on I'm gonna call you Diego…"

"Lord of Touch Me and You're Dead."

"Aaah!" Sid yelped, leaping up and racing away from the sabre. Diego jumped up and galloped after the fleeing sloth, letting out a playful roar as he did.

Even at a half-gallop, Diego caught up with Sid and pinned him to the ground.

Sid let out a frightened wail.

Then the sabre let out a laugh. "I'm just kidding, you little knucklehead!" He grabbed the sloth in a headlock, and gave him a very rough noogie on his skull.

"Ow!" Sid cried. "No! Not the noogie!"

Elizabeth laughed at the sloth's attempts to get free from Diego's headlock. The sloth was the most comic character of their strange group. But she liked him. She liked Manfred as well. She also liked Diego.

And then there was Jack Sparrow.

Right now he was dancing around the fire, rum bottle in hand, singing an old pirate shanty.

"We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs!

Drink up, me 'earties yo ho!

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirates life for me!"

Jack grinned. "I love this song!" he declared loudly. "Really bad eggs!"

Suddenly, he stumbled, and dropped to the ground next to Elizabeth. Settling down next to her,

"When I get the Pearl back," he said to her, his face and tone quite serious despite the bottle in his hand, "I'll teach that song to the whole crew, and we'll sing it all the time!"

Elizabeth laughed. Her disappointment at learning Jack's true story had faded with the day. 'Nothing is as it seems to be,' she had told herself.

"And then you will be positively the most fearsome pirates in the Northern Regions!" she teased the pirate.

Jack shook his head. His brown eyes were softer now, not confident and scheming like earlier in the day. "Not just the Northern Regions…the entire ocean! The entire world!"

He sat up more upright. "Wherever we want to go, we'll go. That's what a ship is. Not just a keel and planks and sails and masts…that's what a ship needs…but what a ship really is…what the Black Pearl really is… is freedom."

His eyes had a faraway look in them as he said this. Elizabeth could tell that Jack really longed for his old command. She could see the pain in his eyes. And now...she felt sorry for him.

Slowly, she turned her eyes away from the pirate, who was taking another swig of rum, to look at Diego and Sid. The sabre seemed to have got bored of treating the sloth to the noogie, but Sid was still trapped in Diego's headlock.

"Hey," the sloth said. "Are you going to let me go, or do I have to bite your paw? My teeth are quite sharp, you know."

"If you bite me, I'll do this," the sabre said playfully, pulling Sid's head closer. He raised his paw, ready to give Sid another noogie, when…

"Hey, lovebirds," Manfred said proudly. "Check this out."

Everybody looked up. Sid slipped out of the sabre's headlock.

Diego's eyes widened in surprise.

For standing in the middle of the cave, unsupported…was Roshan.

Slowly, he lifted his left leg…and took a step forward.

Then another.

Then another.

"I don't believe it!" Sid exclaimed.

"Oh, wow," Elizabeth said softly,

Diego was genuinely touched by the baby's first steps. A small smile spread across his face.

Roshan continued to slowly toddle forwards, making his way steadily towards Sid.

The sloth spread his arms wide. "Come here, you little biped!" he cooed. "Come here, you little wormy-worm! Come to Uncle Sid!"

Roshan took a few more steps towards the sloth…but then he changed direction.

Towards Diego.

"No, no, no, no, this way, this way!" Sid called, but the baby did not turn back. He kept slowly toddling towards the sabre.

Diego looked surprised by the baby's change of direction. "No, no, no. Go to him. Go to him." He gestured back at Sid with his paw.

But the baby kept on walking towards the sabre, arms spread out for a hug.

Jack Sparrow smiled widely at the sight of the baby's first steps. He watched Roshan toddle towards Diego with impressed eyes.

Roshan had only a few more steps to go before he reached the big orange tiger in front of him. He liked the tiger. It was just like his dad's sabre-skin cloak, only even better, because it was alive. He could sense it was trying to get him back to his tribe.

Suddenly, he tripped over his feet. As he toppled over, he grabbed for the nearest thing to him – which happened to be the sabre's leg.

Diego glowed red from under his fur as the baby cuddled his leg.

"Uuuuhhh…okay…"

Roshan smiled up at the sabre, and cooed happily.

Still blushing, highly embarrassed, Diego helped the baby back up to his feet. "Good job," he said uncomfortably. "Keep…keep trying."

He gave Roshan a little push in the right direction, back towards Manfred.

"You're a real big softie, aren't you?" Elizabeth teased, as Roshan toddled back to the mammoth.

Diego grinned sheepishly in reply.

Roshan took a few more steps towards Manfred. Then, suddenly, he plonked back down onto his butt, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

The mammoth smiled down at the tired little baby. "Bedtime, lumpy," he said, picking up the baby with his trunk. "You've had a long day." 'And,' he thought, 'you've got another long day to come.'

Cradled in Manfred's warm, furry trunk, Roshan smiled contentedly. Slowly, his eyes closed as the baby fell fast asleep.

Jack Sparrow smiled, slowly resting his hand on Elizabeth's shoulder.

She quickly shook his hand off, but Jack didn't notice a bit. Instead, he slowly raised his bottle in a toast. "To freedom. To the Black Pearl."

Then he tipped his head back, and drained the entire bottle in one go.

As the pirate drank, he slowly settled back down to the ground. Finally, Jack Sparrow slumped onto the ground, fast asleep. As he started to snore, his bottle rolled out of his hand and clattered across the floor.

Elizabeth sighed, shaking her head in amusement. 'Crazy pirate. He'll pay for his drinking when he wakes up in the morning. With a hangover.'

Slowly, she settled down onto her bed of moss and bracken by the fire. As she laid there, watching the flickering flames, an idea crept into her head.

Turning over, Elizabeth gazed at the pile of full rum bottles near the entrance of the cave. There were still over a dozen bottles in the pile, and she knew what Jack was planning to do with them.

'Not anymore,' Elizabeth thought with a small smirk as she laid back down and closed her eyes. Within a few minutes she was fast asleep.

"Look at that big pushover," Sid smiled to Diego as they watched Manfred, now fast asleep, cradle the slumbering Roshan in his trunk. "You know, Diego, I've never had a friend who would risk their life for me."

Diego nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah. Manny's…he's a good guy."

"Yeah." Sid yawned. "Well…goodnight."

The sloth settled down onto the cave floor, and within moments he was snoring loudly.

That left Diego as the last one awake in the alcove.

He had a lot to think about.

The mammoth had saved his life. Jack Sparrow, a supposedly selfish pirate, had saved Elizabeth. And now here he was, leading them all, plus a cute, innocent infant who saw Diego as an uncle, to their deaths.

'This isn't right.'

And this time, the side of him that wanted revenge for the loss of his pack-mates and friends didn't answer back.

But it wasn't only that which was troubling him. The young blacksmith, Will Turner, had been a very kind, quiet, but determined character, risking his life to save the woman he loved.

He also had the blood needed to undo the Aztec curse.

Suddenly, the clouds parted above the cloudy silhouette of Half Peak, and a glowing, blue, almost-full moon shone down on the landscape.

Diego poked his leg into a patch of moonlight, and watched as it transformed from a living, furry foot to bones wrapped in ragged flesh.

'Being cursed is torture. If it is lifted, I have to eat…but I can't eat the mammoth. He's my friend.'

Suddenly, a whole series of nasty scenarios played out in Diego's head. The baby screaming as Soto sliced open his skin…Manfred glaring at him, saying, "I thought you were my friend!" as each of the sabres attacked him in turn…and Will staring in horror as Elizabeth and Sid collapsed on the ground and were quickly devoured by Oscar, Lenny, and Zeke, while a knife slowly moved towards his neck…

Growling softly, Diego shook these images out of his head. He pulled his bone-leg out of the moonlight, and it morphed back into the tawny-furred leg he was familiar with.

The sabre laid his head down on his paws, and sighed. He would work out what to do tomorrow.

Slowly, his eyelids fluttered down…and everybody in the cave was asleep.