The wreckage of the floating city had turned the surrounding plains into a graveyard of silver and bone. But for Kael and Silas, staying there was death. The Royal Army's remnants and the opportunistic "Hero-Guilds" were swarming the crater like flies on an open wound.
"We need a ship," Kael said, his voice now carrying a strange, metallic resonance.
They had traveled south for six days, reaching the Jagged Coast—a place where the ocean didn't blue, but a bruised, stormy purple. This was the territory of the Salt-Slavers and the Sunless Merchants, men who didn't care about kings, only the weight of the coin.
"The Sunless Isles are a month's sail from here," Silas said, squinting at the horizon. "No honest captain will take us. The tides there are 'Living Water'—they eat the wood of any ship that doesn't have a Void-Core."
Kael looked at his left arm. The black, shifting runes pulsed. "Varg doesn't need a core. He is the core now."
They entered the port town of Black-Anchor. It was a vertical slum built into the side of a sea-cliff. In the center of the docks sat a ship that looked more like a skeletal beast than a vessel. Its hull was made of bleached leviathan bone, and its sails were woven from the hair of drowned hags.
"The Mourning Star," Silas whispered. "Its captain is a Wraith-Bound named Vane. They say he traded his heart for a compass that points to things that shouldn't exist."
As they stepped onto the pier, four mercenaries blocked their path. These weren't the polished knights of the Capital. They were "Chimeras"—men who had grafted monster parts onto their own bodies to survive the harsh mana of the coast. One had a crab's pincer for an arm; another had the multiple eyes of a spider.
"Small bird, big shadows," the spider-eyed man hissed, looking at Kael. "The boy looks like he's worth a few thousand gold in the slave pits. And that black arm? The Alchemists would pay a fortune to peel it off."
Kael didn't stop walking.
"Varg," he murmured. "Mimicry: The Harpoon."
A black, oily tentacle shot out from Kael's shoulder. It didn't have a blade at the end; it had a Barbed Hook made of Void-Glass.
Before the spider-man could draw his rusty cutlass, the hook pierced his shoulder. Kael didn't pull him—he drained him. The mercenary's mana was sucked through the tentacle like water through a straw. The man shriveled in seconds, his spider-eyes turning dull and grey.
The other three mercenaries backed away, their bravado evaporating into pure terror.
"I'm looking for Captain Vane," Kael said, the Void-runes on his arm glowing with a cold, hungry light. "Tell him a King of the Mud has come to buy a passage to the Sunless Isles."