The captain had found a crate.
It was a good crate. Solid and flat-topped. He had dragged it to the edge of the dock, where he could sit and look out at the water without having to look at the island.
He preferred it that way.
It was still night, but dawn would soon break.
The water was still. Dark and quiet, it asked nothing of him, which was exactly what he wanted from it.
Just some rest after a long journey.
A few of his crew were nearby, waiting. Sitting at the edge of the dock, legs hanging over, throwing small pieces of rope into the water for no good reason.
Others leaned against posts, technically keeping watch, though in a way that suggested they were mostly just standing around.
It had already been a few hours.
The captain knew this because he had checked the position of the moon more than he could justify and because the particular feeling of waiting had shifted from alertness to something duller.
He had accepted his situation, and then there was just a low dread.
He had been turning the situation over in his head ever since she, the mage, had left.
She must have swum to the shore, or flown into the air, and turned invisible.
However magicians managed to disappear and get out of sight when they wished to.
With her sword, her staff, and whatever other strange things she must have been carrying that the captain had no good names for.
But she hadn't come back yet.
That was the whole of it.
He didn't know what she was doing. Hopefully something useful. Hopefully something that meant they would be leaving soon, with everyone they had come with, and without whatever lived on this island deciding to follow them.
Hopefully.
He was not a man who prayed much, but he had found himself doing something adjacent to it twice in the last hour, which he found mildly embarrassing.
Unbeknown to the captain, two people were coming down the dock, walking towards him.
Their pace was unhurried but purposeful. It was clear that they had somewhere to be and intended to reach their destination quickly, but without drawing too much attention to the fact.
They approached the captain, and he looked up.
They were well-dressed, or dressed in a way that was trying to be well-dressed, which he noted without knowing why it felt significant.
A man and a woman. The man was tall and broad and carried himself with the kind of settled authority that didn't need to announce itself.
The woman beside him was composed in a way that seemed structural rather than practiced, as though composure was simply the material she was made of.
To the captain, they looked like the others. The monsters.