Written for the Quidditch League Season 9, on the team Caerphilly Catapults.
Round 13: It's A Life On The Sea For Me
Arr, thanks be to me' seafaring betas: HP Slash Luv, S L Blake
Using prompts:
Chaser 2: [au] Mermaid/Sea-creature
[object] Lantern
[song] Bones in the Ocean — The Longest Johns
[creature] Sea Serpent
Word count: 1296
The final voyage of the King's Crest ended violently, with only a single survivor. They were travelling back to England from the New World, their stores filled with new spices, fabrics and other luxuries. The ship's manifest was fortunately recovered alongside the survivor, but it was mostly too sodden to be readable, the ink having run free as the ledger floated on the ocean, but a few details were able to be extracted.
They set out from the port that now belongs to the city called Boston with a crew of just over three score, with only a few other academics and travellers on board. The survivor was a boy who had convinced the captain to hire him in exchange for a trip back to England - his offer being what was described as a seemingly magical ability to fix things. The captain noted his ability multiple times in readable segments of his journal, that the boy was able to fix broken masts, fill holes in the hull and repair cannons in mere moments that would require days and plenty of resources for any other crew member.
About three weeks into the crew's journey, the captain had made a note about expecting a storm and judging by the shaking of his handwriting in later notes, he was all too correct. It's hard to imagine what they went through over the next few days: waves crashing against the hull, every night a restless battle for sleep against an unrelentingly shaking ship, sea spittle drenching them every moment.
The final log the captain ever wrote described how his crew members had begun to disappear. He suspected they must have slipped overboard while on deck during the worst of the storm, for they would occasionally hear a scream but wouldn't find the crewmate when they searched just moments later.
Beyond that, though, the only account is that of the sole survivor of the King's Crest. Not much is known about him other than a description of dark hair and a lightning shaped scar on his forehead. Some say he had eyes that spoke to a troubled, violent past.
He was found floating on a broken set of planks after the nearly week-long storm passed, a single lantern held up above his head so that passing ships could spot him in the night. Around him were bodies, few of them in one piece, most having great bites taken out of them.
When a vessel caught sight of that glinting lantern against the darkness of a nighttime ocean, they hauled the boy aboard. The story goes that he was probably around sixteen, though they never got an age out of the teenager. All he had on him was clothes that were all but torn to shreds and a single stick of wood that he refused to part with. No documents, and he never mentioned his name either.
He was in shock, not speaking for days. Eventually, though, he told them of the horrors that happened to the King's Crest and its unfortunate crew.
He woke after a long day working around the ship, running repairs from the battering the ship was receiving from one of the worst storms in history. Any sleep at all was a blessing after so many rough nights at sea, most of it unrestful from the water that was impossible to fully remove from their clothes, hammocks and possessions.
By that point, the crew count had been whittled down from sixty to a little over forty. They were about to get an explanation for their disappearances.
The lightning-scarred boy stumbled up to the deck, torrents of white sea spray plunging up from the sea. The sky was overcast, barely letting any light through from the rising sun, the lanterns hanging across the deck providing most of the illumination through which to see the chaos.
Crewmates tied ropes to shift the mast, fighting against the sea to keep the ship from capsizing, the captain yelling down orders from the wheel. The boy immediately set to work on repairs, doing his best to ignore the fear of disaster on the high seas.
He didn't get far. Only moments later, a cry of fear erupted from the front of the ship and the whole crew turned to the blood-curdling shriek.
They only caught a flash of movement, of glistening green scales and a maw of sharp white fangs clenched around the torso of a fellow crewmate.
"Shark!" one of the crewmates yelled, but the boy knew that couldn't have been true. A big enough jaw for a shark, true, but whatever had just pulled his crewmate overboard had managed to reach out of the water, over the side and bitten into the sailor. The way it moved was almost prehensile.
"Man overboard!" another crewmate yelled. Looking over the edge of the ship, however, revealed no crewmate, only the stain of red against the froth of the sea. Blood in the water.
Then they saw scales moving again. Rushing up for another victim.
Wood splintered across the deck, the wailing of sailors piercing the early morning air, even louder than the roar of the waves. The boy, along with the rest of the crew, fought back against the beast, the light of the lanterns finally revealing its form.
It was long, towering up into the sky, as broad across as any man, but closer in shape to that of a serpent if not in size. It flew across the deck, its body slithering after it before its head plunged back into the water. Its head reappeared on the other side again, sliding across the ship, using its body as a rope to wrap around the centre of the ship. It must have been hundreds of metres long, and, the crew quickly realised, it was using that length to coil around the ship, using its body to crush it.
The crew were quick to grab weapons, slashing at the creature to try and get it loose. Its head rose out of the water again and it lashed out, biting at every sailor that attacked it. The boy, for all his skill at repairing, was unable to stop the beast as the deck first splintered and then collapsed inwards, water rushing into the middle of the ship.
As the two halves of the ship quickly took on water, cannons were turned towards the beast, a great volley blasting at the sea serpent. While it shrieked in pain to the heavens, it was not so easily downed, and continued its murderous rampage. In the carnage, the captain lost their life, swallowed whole by the creature.
The boy must have managed to get to one final cannon and reload it, for the tale goes that he managed to blast the creature, landing a brutal blow that knocked the sea serpent free of the ship. So badly hurt was it, that it slithered back, snapping at sailors as it went, quickly plunging into the safety of the depths.
The King's Crest sank, battered and broken, its crew doomed to a watery grave. Maybe a few of them held on for a few minutes more, struggling to keep their heads above water in the ferocious storm that still continued, but now, they are surely nothing but bones in the ocean.
Through some miracle, some act of magic or fate, the boy survived. The teenager who the captain sang their praises for, who was meant to be able to fix anything. They clung onto a small fragment of the destroyed ship and made it through the storm through sheer force of will. And when the sky cleared and the fog faded, they lit a lantern, a speck of hope in that vast Atlantic, and managed to survive another day.