Chapter 31: Only Once
The Black Pearl bobbed on calm waters, the air heavy with the scent of salt and something older—something that hadn't stirred in centuries.
Jake, Elias, and Raina made their way back aboard, their boots thudding softly against the worn wood of the deck. The crew gave them a wide berth, whispering about the ghostly green lights they'd seen, and the strange tremor beneath the waves.
As they reached the helm, Elias turned and looked back toward the island.
It no longer glowed with strange energy or shimmered like it had just been peeled from another world. No golden spiral. No portal. Just… an ordinary hunk of land, as if none of it had happened.
Elias narrowed his eyes.
Then slowly, calmly, he raised his hand.
From the mists beyond, they emerged—again.
The ghost fleet.
One by one, the spectral ships rose from beneath the waves. No crests broke the surface. No splash. Just existence. Lanterns burned with green flame, sails flapping despite a still wind, their skeletal crews manning stations with silent precision.
Jake's mouth opened just a little. "Well, that's not creepy at all."
Raina stared, a chill running down her spine. "Elias…"
Without looking away, Elias snapped his fingers.
In an instant, they vanished. The fleet blinked from reality like a dream fading with the sunrise.
Jake blinked a few times. "...Right. So! That just happened."
Raina slowly turned to Elias, her face somewhere between amazed and deeply concerned. "You can control them?"
Elias finally looked back at them, voice steady. "Apparently. Don't ask me how. I didn't read the manual."
Jake gave him a long look. "So, let me get this straight. You stab yourself with an ancient sword, open a door to ghost world, absorb half a cosmic truth—and now you're captain of the dead?"
Elias shrugged. "Captain. God. Prince of Madness. I'm flexible."
"But why summon them now?" Raina asked.
Elias' smirk faded a little. "Because... if the sea itself can't stop what's coming, we're going to need backup. And that backup just happens to be a fleet of ghost ships bound to me by something I don't understand."
Jake leaned on the railing, squinting toward the now-silent island. "And what exactly is coming?"
Elias didn't answer.
But the voice did.
It came one last time—low, ancient, echoing in all three of their heads like a final whisper from the abyss:
"You can only use them once. Remember that."
Silence fell.
Jake slowly straightened. "Well that's not ominous at all."
Raina frowned. "Use them once?"
Elias nodded slowly. "One chance. One fight. Then they're gone. Probably forever."
Jake rubbed his temples. "Lovely. So we've got a ghost fleet on layaway and a cosmic horror inbound, but no instruction manual, no prophecy, and not even a map."
Raina crossed her arms. "Then we find one."
Elias smiled. "That's the spirit."
The three of them made their way below deck, into the Captain's quarters. Charts were unrolled, strange runes sketched from memory, books of old myths opened and tossed aside. Jake poured rum into three cups and passed them around without comment.
They dug.
Jake stared at the compass—the black one that always pointed where you wanted to go most—and frowned. "It's broken again."
Raina leaned over. "How?"
Jake tapped it. "It's not pointing to gold, rum, or the Fountain of Youth. It's pointing inward. That's never a good sign."
Elias sat at the desk, staring at the sword—the same black blade he had stabbed himself with. Its runes had dimmed, but it still pulsed faintly when his hand hovered over it.
He looked up. "Do you remember what she said? The She-Prophet?"
Jake sighed. "'The sea is dying. The gods have fled. The world is not round—it spirals into madness.' Yeah, I remember. Bit hard to forget apocalyptic poetry."
Elias nodded. "We've been looking for meaning. Maybe we should be looking for patterns."
Raina furrowed her brow. "Patterns?"
Elias stood and began moving pieces on the map. He arranged ports, shipwrecks, cursed places—all of it. And slowly… it began to spiral.
Jake's smile vanished.
"Bloody hell…"
"It's a map," Elias said. "A spiral of events. Something is unraveling the sea. The old gods are gone. Magic is unstable. And we're standing in the eye of the storm."
Raina's voice dropped. "So what's at the center?"
Elias looked down at the spiral. "I don't know yet."
"But we're going to find it," Jake said, stepping forward with that old gleam in his eye. "A cursed fleet, a mad sword, a prophet in a dagger, and three absolute lunatics chasing the end of the sea. Sounds like a great story, doesn't it?"
Elias clinked his cup to Jake's. "The best ones always start with a bad idea."
Raina didn't smile—but she drank with them.
And above the Black Pearl, thunder rolled across a sky too calm for storm.
Something was watching.
Something old.
And it was waiting for the day they used that fleet.
The day they'd only get once.
---
You can contact me through my official page on the following Accounts:
telegram:
miraclenarrator
tiktok:
miracle_narrator
instagram:
miracle_narrator