Chapter 678: Elowynn Embershade [III / Bonus - ]
She waited for the anger.
A captain robbed by her own crew ought to be furious, ought to be tearing the dockside apart plank by plank, and she searched herself for that fire and found only a cold hollow quiet.
’The gems, the cuffs, the ring... fine,’ She thought. ’Take it all. I would have given you every coin if you had only asked.’
A hollow agonizing ache blossomed deep in her chest, and it had nothing to do with money.
These weren’t random sell-swords she had picked up in a dive bar.
...She had sailed with this specific crew for over fifty years, most of those girls were the daughters and granddaughters of her original crew from the southern archipelagos.
She had watched them take their first steps on a rolling deck... she had bandaged their sword wounds, taught them how to weave mana into their cutlasses, and shared every single copper of plunder equally down to the last scrap of bread.
They had called her their Captain and some of them had even called her their mother as well.
’Why...?’ she thought, her vision blurring as she looked at the empty gray water. ’Why didn’t you just trust me enough to tell me you wanted to go...?’
Anger would have been easier as anger burned hot and burned out but this feeling...
This sat in her chest like a stone and when she finally put a name to it, the name was disappointment.
’I’m so stupid...’
She was not furious with them, Elowynn was disappointed, in the tired way a mother is disappointed in a child she raised better than that but for her... It hurt far more.
She reached for her neck, searching for the mana transponder that could ping her ship’s helm but it was gone.
Her neck was bare.
She had been left stranded.
Alone, without a single copper to her name, without a weapon, and without a vessel to call her own, standing in the cold rain of a lawless pirate haven...
A quiet bitter laugh slipped past her lips.
It grew, bubbling up from her parched throat into a dry broken chuckle that made the dockmaster take a cautious step back.
"Well," Elowynn whispered, turning her back on the sea, quoting the old corsair proverb she had heard a thousand times on the docks. "Trust the sea to drown you, trust the wind to turn on you, and trust a pirate to show you who they truly are..."
What else was there to do? Cry in the mud?
She pulled her hood up, buried her bare hands into her pockets, and walked back into the squalor of Kuvikui Island.
The next few days passed in a gray sunless blur.
Kuvikui Island was an infamous sanctuary for the worst filth the shattered seas had to offer, a lawless volcanic rock where outlaws with six-figure bounties congregated to trade stolen cargo and drink themselves into an early grave.
Elowynn’s own bounty was substantial, but compared to the legendary names that frequented the deep coves, she was barely a footnote so she needed a way off the rock.
She definitely wasn’t going to crawl into a ditch and die... She was an Ember Corsair.
If she didn’t have a ship, she would do what pirates had done since the dawn of the realms... She would steal one.
Her eyes were already set on a sleek twin-masted schooner anchored in the private bay of the merchant guilds.
The security along the docks was tight as high-tier mercenaries armed with heavy mana rifles had been hired.
It would be a suicide run in broad daylight, but at night, beneath the cover of the torrential rainstorms that battered the island... it was nothing she couldn’t carve her way through.
Until night fell, there was only one thing to do... Drown the silence.
Elowynn sat in the corner of a dingy smoke-filled tavern near the lower docks, watching the rain hammer against the greasy windows.
Outside, the sky was pitch-black with lightning tearing across the low clouds in jagged violent forks.
She lifted a bottle of cheap, burning grain alcohol to her lips, gulping down half the contents in a single, desperate swallow.
The liquid burned her esophagus, but it did nothing to numb the hollow gnawing ache in her chest.
"Hey, miss," the tavern-keeper called from behind the counter, scowling as he dried a mug. "You haven’t paid for that third bottle yet."
Without looking, Elowynn reached into her pocket, pulled out a small leather pouch of silver coins she had "liberated" from a drunken privateer in the alley two hours prior, and tossed it across the floor.
The pouch landed on the counter with a heavy clink.
"Bring me two more," she muttered, staring blankly at the dark rain.
Before the barkeep could reach for the shelf, the tavern’s front door was kicked off its iron latch.
BANG!
A soaking-wet scout, his leather cloak dripping with rainwater, stumbled into the common room with his chest heaving and his face looking as pale as a corpse.
"The Dread Queen!" the man screamed, his voice cracking with hysterical terror. "It’s Morwenna! The Dread Queen of the Seas and the entire crew of the Leviathan’s Wake... they’re gone!"
The tavern went dead silent... The drunken brawlers, the card-cheats, the hardened captains, every single soul in the room froze mid-breath...
"What are you screaming about, boy?" a scarred veteran growled from the corner. "Morwenna doesn’t sink so who took her?"
"Not a fleet!" the scout choked out with his knees trembling. "The Corporate Deities of the Righteous Pantheon! Lord Aurelius himself! They came down on the Nebula of Orinon with three hundred golden dreadnoughts! They didn’t capture her... they annihilated the entire sector! Burned the sea until it boiled! Morwenna... she’s dead! They killed her!"
Shatter!
The bottle in Elowynn’s hand slipped.
It struck the stone floor with the dark glass exploding into a hundred jagged fragments as cheap alcohol pooled in a bitter puddle around the toes of her boots.
Elowynn sat frozen with her breath caught in her throat and the world around her turning into a silent ringing void.
"N-no..."
Her lips parted, trembling violently as a single broken whisper escaped her.
"Mor... Morwenna... is dead...?"
...
’Five hundred years...’
Elowynn opened her eyes, drawing a sharp shuddering breath as the damp freezing mist of the high seas bit into her skin.
She sneezed, it was a pathetic wet sound that echoed across the silent water and aggressively wiped her red nose with the frayed cuff of her sleeve.
Beneath her, the small solitary rowboat rose and fell on the dark ink-black swells.
The air here was dead lacking any sort of wind or bird-calls while carrying that lingering metallic tang of slaughter... In short a lot of blood had been spilled in this very location.
To Elowynn, this was the coordinate.
The exact forgotten graveyard where the Corporate deities had unleashed their judgment five centuries ago, boiling the sea to bedrock and extinguishing the brightest fiercest flame the oceans had ever known.
"I tried my best, Morwenna..." Elowynn whispered into the dark, her voice cracking with five hundred years of accumulated exhaustion.
She had tried... Gods above, how she had tried...
After that night on Kuvikui, she had spent two centuries hunting the ghosts of that battle.
She had sailed alone, built a new foundation from blood and salvage, and eventually tracked down one of the lower-ranked arbiters who had participated in the purge.
She had launched herself at the divine construct with suicidal fury, burning her own life-force to unleash every drop of her Ember Corsair foundation.
...And she had failed.
The entity had crushed her fleet with a flick of its mechanical wrist, fracturing her core, stripping her levels, and leaving her to rot in the outer drifts under a festering soul-rending curse that had slowly poisoned her pathways ever since.
"I couldn’t do it," she choked out with hot tears finally spilling over her cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the salt-grime on her face. "After all this time... I couldn’t even avenge you. Five hundred years, and I couldn’t lay a single scratch on the people who took you."
Her hands clenched into fists, hammering against the wooden gunwale of the rowboat until her knuckles bled.
"Useless," she sobbed, burying her face in her arms. "I’m useless... completely useless! A captain without a crew! A warrior who can’t hold her steel and to make it even more pathetic... five hundred years later, and I’m still a virgin, for heaven’s sake! What kind of legendary pirate dies an untouched miserable drunk in the middle of nowhere?!"
She grabbed the neck of an empty bottle rolling in the bilge, her fingers trembling with rage, and shattered it against the mast.
CRASH!
"Hic...!"
A violent pathetic hiccup tore through her chest.
She leaned back against the thwarts, staring up at the empty, starless sky while wiping her tears with the back of her dirty hand.
Her thoughts drifted, as they sometimes did, back to the girls of the Cinder Maiden.
She had actually found them once, some eighty years after Kuvikui, in a quiet harbor town on the southern archipelago...
Sabine with gray in her hair, Vanya hauling nets, a clutch of children running underfoot.
She had stood on the pier for an hour with her hood pulled low, and not one of them had looked up... then she had turned around and sailed away without a word, too disappointed to forgive them and too fond of them to spoil their peace.
’I hope they had good lives,’ she thought, in passing, and found that she meant it.
"What would you say if you saw me right now, you arrogant ape...?" she whispered to the empty dark. "You’d probably laugh until your lungs gave out, wouldn’t you...?"
Then...
[Ding!]
A sound chimed through the stillness.
It wasn’t the creak of wood or the whisper of the waves.
It was a crisp crystalline chime that resonated directly inside her soul, vibrating with the harmonic frequency of dimensional authority.
A glowing blue holographic tab flared to life in the air before her tear-stained eyes.
[You have been summoned to be a Hero for a Lord.]
[Y / N]
Elowynn blinked with her amethyst eyes wide, staring at the glowing letters in pure alcohol-dazed bewilderment.
’Summoned as a Hero...?’
She let out a raspy self-deprecating snort.
’Do I look like a hero to anyone? I’m a broken, washed-up corsair drifting in a dinghy with a liver full of cheap rum.’
Yet, she didn’t hesitate. Her finger reached out, hovering over the golden rune.
What did she have left here? A ruined sea? An empty grave?
Her alcohol supply had run out two days ago, and she was so goddamn sick of the pirate life she could vomit just looking at a sail.
"Yes," she muttered aloud, tapping Y. "I just hope to the gods they have something decent to drink wherever we’re going..."
The interface flared, and a second box materialized over the first.
[Your level will be forcefully reset from Level 430 —> Level 1. You will lose some of your Priority Skills; however, you will retain the remaining foundation of your Original Skill Tree.]
Elowynn stared at the numbers.
A manic, breathless chuckle bubbled up from her throat.
’Level 430... down to Level 1...’
All these centuries, she had clung to Level 430, a fraction of what she had once been before the divine arbiter’s curse broke her pathways.
She had thought she was holding onto her pride, but in truth, she had just been clinging to a corpse.
’How could I have let myself become this weak...?’ she thought, a fierce bitter determination suddenly stirring in the ashes of her heart. ’If Morwenna were still alive... she’d be standing at the absolute peak by now... She wouldn’t be crying over lost levels.’
"Yes," Elowynn whispered, her voice firming for the first time in centuries. "Take it... Strip it clean..."
VUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!
A blinding celestial pillar of pure golden energy erupted from the base of her sou as the rowboat, the dark water, the weeping sky, everything vanished into a sea of incandescent warm light.
Elowynn felt the weight of five hundred years of cold stagnant grief lift from her shoulders as her consciousness was pulled upward through the dimensional rift, soaring past shattered planes and starlit nebulae.
FLASH!
The spatial updraft cleared with a chiming sound and the first thing that hit Elowynn was the scent.
...It wasn’t salt-water, it wasn’t rot, or smoke, or dead fish either.
It was the clean scent of wild mountain pine, fresh loamy soil, and blooming roses that was mingled rather intensely, with the heavy sour reek of cheap grain alcohol currently radiating from her own rumpled clothes.
Elowynn was sitting flat on her backside upon a platform of immaculate polished white quartz.
She blinked rapidly, rubbing her pounding temples with her amethyst-purple eyes struggling to focus through the lingering spatial glare.
Standing three paces in front of her was a small, extraordinarily cute girl with long flowing blue hair and wide, brilliant blue eyes that were practically sparkling with childish wonder.
The girl was wearing a soot-stained tunic and small leather boots, looking at her with an expression of pure awe.