Quis hic locus, quae region, quae mundi plaga?

Pike Trickfoot once died in a dark room, too far down to see the sky. Some part of her, she thinks, has never forgotten.

It's quiet on the deck of Broken Howl, which really just means she's getting used to the sound so it doesn't seem quite so loud: the creaking of wood, the flapping of sails, and above it all the whistle of the keen wind that sprays salt and cold in her face, that knots her newly white hair into a hopeless tangle, that steals her breath and steals her words and carries them back and back and back.

She squints up at the stars, but they're half-concealed by a faint dusting of cloud; the crew assures her it'll mean days of stormy weather ahead, and she's trying, really she is, to maybe not look quite so excited at that prospect. She knows that the sky and the sea both stretch to a comfortable vastness in a storm, impossibly far removed from cramped chambers where the heavy stench of blood once hung in the air.

Rolling her shoulders against a barrage of unfamiliar aches and pains, she starts her nightly stroll fore and aft, fore and aft, a little self-conscious about her imperfect imitation of a sailor's rolling gait, a little self-conscious about how long it takes her, how silly she feels to be walking without purpose. The crew keep any snide remarks to themselves, or look at her fondly as she passes, which is even more embarrassing. Pike continues her walk, fore and aft, fore and aft, until she's starting to breathe a little heavy, until she counts each breath, each heartbeat. Wonders how many breaths she lost that night, how many heartbeats. Wonders how many she gained.

It's tight quarters on Broken Howl, and she knows at least some of the crew's noticed her scar: wicked and puckered and by no possibility survivable, livid against her midsection and stretching, greedily, all the way around to her spine. She knows because an older elven deckhand, with hair the color of night and skin weathered like old ashes, once tugged down their own tunic to reveal a deep sunburst scar across their throat and chest, then drew her near and kissed her on the forehead and said nothing for a very long time while Pike murmured how sorry she was that this happened to them, that it looked like it hurt so bad, that it must have been so scary. The elf said, finally, "We are all alive here," and Pike smiled uncertainly and said goodnight and lay awake staring at the overhead, picturing the sky above.

And as she lay awake that night and stared, the thought became a mantra, if not yet a certainty. We are all alive here.

And now Pike breathes, and counts her heartbeats, and paces.

"You're very good at this," the boatswain tells her as she rebandages the wound on his shin. The infection's already subsiding, but she's not willing to consider him completely out of the woods. Even a small scratch has a distressing tendency to get worse before it gets better, out here. He's pale and sweating and clearly has a thing about the sight of blood, but he grins at her from behind his bushy dwarven beard. "Extremely good."

Pike shrugs. "Oh, well, you know. You pick some stuff up, here and there." The glow along her hands fades, and she rubs at the lingering tingle in her fingertips.

"Here and there," he says, and she sees the shape of the question on his lips before the wind pulls it away. He shakes his head, instead, and says, "Thanks."

She slaps him on the shoulder, a little harder than she maybe should've, but she can't help it if her muscles keep remembering a much more solid mass. "Hey, it's nothing. You owe me an ale next time we make port."

"Gonna be out here a while," he says. "But I'll hold you to it if you're serious."

"Oh, I'm always serious about ale." She leans back in her chair until her spine gives a satisfying crack; it seems to stiffen up these days whenever she stays in one place too long. "You really didn't have anyone doing this kind of thing before?"

The boatswain rolls his pant leg down with a wince, then stands, putting weight experimentally on the bad leg. "Yeah, I mean, we've had medics. Even a doctor, once. But I guess it's a bit of a weird thing when the only people you patch up are your crew, you know? If you're a medical type on a ship, you're the one who has to watch the closest thing you got to family bleeding or puking or crying 'cause it hurts too much. So they usually head out on their own before too long. Easier to handle that kind of thing with strangers."

Pike swallows, hard, and says, "I guess I could see that."

He smiles too-big into the silence that follows, and runs a hand through his beard, picking out knots tied by the wind. "You'll stick around a while, though, yeah? I can tell you've got the adventuring bug. And we're miserable fucks who spend half our time ignoring you, so you probably don't have to worry about getting too attached."

"Right," she says, and laughs. "Guess I'm probably okay, then."

"I think," she whispers to her holy symbol, sitting alone on her bunk with her knees drawn up to her chest, "that I would like to go to war for you."

She waits, politely, for a godly reply, and when none is forthcoming, she says, "I've given it a lot of thought, and I understand the value of redemption and second chances. Maybe a bit more now than I ever did before. And for me, I think, that means being angry for a while."

And then she's quiet again, listening to the creak of the bulkheads. No reply. "All this is to say that I think that I would like to go to war for you. I think I would like that very much. So just, I don't know, I guess stop me if you think that's not the way I should go."

Alone in the dark, she watches her holy symbol for some sign, any sign, of acknowledgement, then tucks it up under her pillow and goes to sleep.

Pirates are a fact of life on the Ozmit Sea, even for a prize as lackluster as Broken Howl, and Pike's begun to learn when to worry and when to trust in the skill of the deckhands and the crew and her own weapons and spells and cunning to carry the day.

Today the pirates have attacked in the middle of a raging storm, fighting with a horrifying wildness that speaks to their desperation and futility, and Pike is very, very worried.

"Pike!"

She turns, nearly losing her footing on a deck slick with water and blood, and scrabbles toward the sound of the voice, drawing on her dwindling stores of divine energy to light up a half-orc's cutlass in the instant before he swings it down on one of the younger deckhands, giving him enough warning to roll out of the way with a yelped thanks. She's breathing hard now, feeling the pinch of her armor against a glancing scrape left by a crossbow bolt along the join between her shoulder pauldron and her chestplate, but she's breathing, and some part of her is counting off each breath.

The deck bucks beneath her feet, and she feels her stomach lurch, a betrayal of months of training against seasickness, but manages to keep both her footing and her lunch as the sea rises ominously around her. A halfling is drawing his sword free from the guts of the coxswain, who crumples soundlessly to the ground, and Pike lunges, swinging her mace, roaring her terror and frustration and anger like a battle cry. It connects with a force that jars her arms right up to her shoulders, and her fingers flash pain before a tingling numbness takes over. She nearly drops the mace when the halfling's body crumples, has to yank it free and stumble back, gasping for breath.

She's just about to move forward and check on the coxswain when the mast swings into the side of her head and slams her into the deck.

We are all alive here.

She stays face-down for a long while, breathing bubbles into the bloody water around her head, and wonders if this is what it felt like, if this is the moment that's been missing from memory: choking, slowly and helplessly, on the blood and the cold, waiting impossibly long for the void to finally consume her.

But it doesn't consume her, and so eventually she reaches back to the blood matted in her hair and focuses on flesh and bone knitting back together, and she rolls onto her hands and knees, and she looks up to see the coxswain, dead on her back, her staring eyes fixed just over Pike's left shoulder.

Pike fumbles into the pouch at her side, sprinkles diamond dust across the young woman's chest, mouths the words once before speaking them out loud, just to be sure. The surge of power aches, heavy and warm like a smothering blanket, and when the coxswain coughs and grabs at the still-bleeding wound in her gut, when she looks at her in that first wounded moment of bewildered betrayal, Pike says, softly, "I know. I'm sorry. You're all right."

Then the shock kicks in, and the coxswain laughs, high-pitched and nervous, and Pike eases her up to a sitting position and sets to work stopping the bleeding, moving quickly, mechanically. "That was amazing," she says. "You're quite a healer."

She doesn't realize, Pike knows, that she'd stopped living for a few seconds in there. Pike could tell her, but she wouldn't believe it except for when the nightmares of some vast and fathomless depths finally started to haunt her. Instead, Pike finishes a rudimentary healing spell—her stores are nearly spent—to slow the blood flow down to a trickle, then claps her on the shoulder and staggers to her feet to rejoin the battle and the storm.

She drinks often with the crew, out on the deck at night with an impossibility of stars wheeling overhead. The ale's atrocious, the conversation's far from scintillating, but there's something about the slow, rocking weave of the ship between waves and sky that makes everything seem bigger, more significant. Meaningful.

She's had a little more to drink than usual, and she's talking semi-coherently to anyone who'll listen about Emon, about pain and death and fighting, about the feeling of solid metal in her hands and the satisfaction of breaking and remaking. "It's good," she says. "It's complicated, but it's good."

One of the younger deckhands is sitting crosslegged next to her, and when Pike's story of the battle with the Dread Emperor stumbles to a close, she says, softly, "Did you ever see Her?"

Pike blinks her blearily into focus: a smiling, earnest human with short black hair. "Who, Sarenrae?"

"Maybe? I don't know. I was horribly ill as a kid, and I remember seeing a dark shape standing at the foot of the bed during the worst of it." The girl shrugs, drawing her knees up to her chest. "My grandpa saw the same thing, before he went. He said She was terrifying and terrible. I thought She looked sad."

Pike exhales heavily and rubs at the incipient hangover lurking between her eyes. "I don't know. Maybe. It all gets a little weird." Her wandering gaze fixes on the coxswain, sitting quiet and pensive near the helm, hair like a dark halo in the moonlight, and she says, "Hey, I'm gonna be right back."

It takes her three tries to get to her feet, but she manages to stumble over to her with some semblance of purpose, and the woman looks up to watch her approach. "Hi," Pike says. "You're being real quiet."

She shrugs. "Just thinking."

"Okay," says Pike, and, seeing no other options, sits on the deck. "Just thought I'd come over and say hi."

A faint smile flashes across the coxswain's face. "Well, you've done that very well."

"Thank you. I try." Pike picks at some loose splinters of wood beneath her, a souvenir of a sword slash during the battle. "It's not easy, is it?"

The coxswain frowns. "What?"

"That's right," Pike says, and attempts a wink that nearly makes her topple over. "I mean, that's what's what. You know what I mean."

"I really don't know that I do."

"Dying," Pike says, and the word makes her lips more numb than the bottle of whatever it is the deckhands have dredged out of storage this week. "Or I guess living. That one's the hard one because you have to decide to do it. The other one just kind of happens."

"Uh-huh," says the coxswain, dejectedly, then says, "Um," as Pike starts wrestling with the process of pulling her tunic out from where it's tucked into the waist of her trousers.

"No no no, I'm not trying to-" Pike says, and finally forces her fumbling fingers into some semblance of dexterity. She pulls her tunic up enough to show off the horrific scar along her midsection, watches the coxswain stare. "I get it. Okay? So I guess I just wanted to say it's okay to be angry about it. Do what you have to if it means you actually wake up for a while."

The coxswain's smile twists, goes all sad, but she takes a deep breath and nods. "You're leaving soon, aren't you?"

Pike sighs, lying back on the deck to stare up at the dizzying trails of the stars. "Next time we dock at Emon." When the coxswain doesn't say anything in response to that, Pike rolls onto her elbows and looks up at her. "It's just, you know, my friends are all back together, and I miss them, and—"

"You don't need to make excuses." She smiles. "I'm happy for you. You seem a little more sure-footed than you did when you first came on board. Uh. Figuratively speaking."

"Figuratively," Pike repeats happily, enjoying the way the word rolls off her tongue. "Hey, you know what? We're all alive here. Every one of us. And second chances are worth fighting for."

The coxswain smiles, fondly, and this time it doesn't feel all that embarrassing. "You've been a great help, Pike. Thank you."

"You too. All of you. Thanks." Pike yawns. "I'm gonna bunk up here tonight."

"On the deck?"

"My best friend growing up wasn't a big fan of sleeping indoors. I'm used to it." She grins, flopping back, spread-eagled, on the wooden slats of the deck. "I like being under the stars."

She yawns again, looks up at the sky, and listens to her breathing and the thrum of her heartbeat. They seem quieter, now, which really just means she's getting used to the sound.

Her holy symbol is a cool, metallic weight over her heart, a reminder of all things that pull down and down toward the center of the planet, toward darkened chambers that reek of blood. A second chance, she thinks, comes with the responsibility to face that darkness again, this time with the full knowledge of what lurks within it. There's something terrible and wonderful about that.

"I'm ready," she says, softly, not really caring who hears her, and lets the ocean and the stars and the ship rock her softly to sleep.