Authors: savvysparrow and ladyofthesilent
Rating: R for Violence, Language and Sexual Situations
Characters: The PotC-crew and several OCs
Chapters: Not sure, yet, but will be novel-length
Disclaimer: Though we wish we owned the characters of POTC, especially Jack, we are but humble pirates. All characters, motivations, dialogues and in some cases costumes belong to Disney.

Summary:

The Cape of the Sinner's Tongue is an impassable strait off the islands of the Caribbean, haunted by a mysterious phantom known only as: The Ghost Raider. The Raider's activities have caused the EITC to double its presence in the Caribbean waters and piracy is at stake once more. Old and new alliances must be formed, as a world that was once destroyed must be rebuilt to brave the dawn of a new era.

Can Jack, Elizabeth and Will put aside their differences and stand together?

The raven tresses of the sea swarmed in malcontent, slapping the sturdy beams of the Indentured Bride like the punishing whip of the boatsun. Silence dripped foreboding from the cool night air, a sound so heavy it condescended with the iridescent fog whetting the deck of the apprehensive ship.

Two sailors, their rough faces bathed in the devilish glow of the lamps searched the foggy horizon, their eyes wary of the sharp teeth-like volcanic rocks that had slowed their ship's progress. The Bride had rocked through perilous weather from England, past the bitter winters of the Atlantic into the balmy embrace of the Caribbean Sea. The heat of the tropics welcomed them like a lover with an open embrace, but her fair smile had been two faced; while the seas had smoothed to glass, there were other lurking dangers. The prettiest of smiles concealed the most debauch and devious of intentions. Fair Caribbean had armed herself with a strait of vicious rocks, notorious for claiming the lives of honest English ships, ripping through the ship's bowels like the razor sharp blade of a bayonet—The Cape of the Sinner's Tongue. These treacherous waters did not stir the stoutest hearted sailor to trepidation--there were the stories. Whispers circulated with the faintest puffs of wind, of a black-hearted sailor who pillaged any ship bearing the seal of the Crown.

"Drop canvas--steady as she lies--maintain the current course. Under no circumstances are you to deviate. Do I make myself clear?" The Captain's cold, hard voice reverberated in clipped, urgent, undertones. His voice, tone laced with scorn, contained none of the fear his crew indulged in. Engagement in superstitious notions and foolish flights of fantasy were a vice in which he never allowed. With haughty disdain, he stepped forward to view his rabble of men; he'd hand selected them from the lowliest taverns, gambling dens and prisons in London. They were a festering, rotting lot—filthy, wretched to the core. Their reviling stench forced him to press his scented handkerchief to his raw, sutured nose which he vainly took pains to shield from prying eyes. The only order to his hideously arranged features was his attire, which was precisely aligned; no button sat out of place, his powdered hair was tied with an appropriate black ribbon, pulled so tightly the loops appeared strangled by the tension.

"I will be in my cabin. If the circumstances alter from the present, you have my orders." An officer dared to interject the orders with a polite cough into his hand. The crimson red of his uniform shone brightly in the grim surroundings, the only visible marker for the Captain's searching eyes through the opaque mist.

"Sir, I hardly see the purpose of navigating the straits by night. Given the fog, would it not be better to engage the enemy in the brightness of ..."

The Captain rounded on his Lieutenant, the large lapels of his lavishly adorned coat caught in the winds of motion; his lace handkerchief was thrown to the ground in contempt. His disfigured face, twisted with scars and burned flesh, was made uglier by the tell-tale symptoms of apoplectic temper. He studied the younger man's keen gaze; innocence masked with contempt. They, the men he had gathered from the barracks of the royal Navy, thought him a fool for pursuing a phantom—a pirate myth. They knew nothing of this apparition, what he was capable of and the chaos that ensued in his terrible wake.

"Do not question my methods Lieutenant Hayes!" He snarled, leveling a blazing gaze that caused the questioning subordinate to take a step back in fear. The façade of serene levity had slipped away, revealing a soul as twisted by the searing fire of revenge as the Captain's dry, peeling flesh.

"We are not being hunted by an ordinary man." He released his grip on the lapels of stalwart Hayes as he struggled to keep his temper and wild desperation in check. His demonstrative display of bad humor drew the curious stares of the crew who had pretended to keep up with their work as the sails shifted to their resting place, tied safely to the mast while they were hanging with baited breath on every word. When they were mustered he had told them nothing, save for the barest of details of the promise of a purse of coins for each if they reached their destination.

"If we are to reach the coast of Abyssinia, we must first defeat the cunning of the Raider. Our course does not alter. If we fail to fetch our cargo, it will be your commission as an officer…" The Captain regretted the use of the infernal name that escaped through the gates of his swollen, purple lips. Activity on the ship stilled to a halt, and though the night was vigilant, he swore he heard a gasp of horror from one of the fair-haired cabin boys. The Captain and the crew regarded one another with blinking stares of gravest misgivings. He drew a hesitant breath as he studied their perplexed expressions. How he hated the wide, vacant expression—they reminded him of the sheep that littered the landscape of his country estate—ripe for the slaughter with no notion of their impending, inevitable doom. Their stupidity made their presence aboard his ship intolerable but they were a necessary evil. As they continued to regard him with eyes hungry for the strength of leadership, gapes of hope that he might bring meaning to their wasted lives, the Captain struggled to formulate the correct response of lies and truth. His mind wove words on a loom, lacing the rows of pronounced syllables in a tidy row, to create a blanket in which he might effectively smother their suspicions.

"Yes, it's true; tonight we face the Ghost Raider, a phantom of cunning intellect and savagery. His men will show you no mercy; they'll not grant you quarter, even if you were to beg with your final breath." His lips twitched in irony as he became trapped in his spun web of deceit until even he believed the nonsensical fabrication.

"You must stand as men of the realm of England. Fight as though your very lives depended upon the success of our mission. We must show this Raider that we are men of equal savagery; the wishes of the Crown cannot be spurned by the fanaticism of a ghost story. Progress, gentleman, is a force of reckoning that is inexorable. Keep your wits about you or you may find yourself ensnared by Lucifer's honeyed tongue." He believed nothing of the lore of Heaven and Hell. Ever a man of logic, sound reasoning of the mind was the only religion of merit. These men, however, were incapable of thought beyond what they were told. Men of faith were easily led; it was to his benefit they believed the Raider a man with unholy powers.

Their ignorance would fuel hatred and serve his purpose—to capture the ghostly specter to ease the endless financial woes his interference had wrought against the Company. His words echoed against the cavernous walls of the straits, against the rocks which acted as observant sentinels. The blank stares of apprehension had melted from the wary faces. Superstitious, unwashed sailors had been transformed by the power of words into brave soldiers; they were united behind their leader to fight to the death against a shapeless specter.

He fixed his wintry, grey eyes on his second in command, a soundless reminder of the stakes of their perilous game and the cost of failure. The inflamed soft tissue of his startling puckered face melded into the darkness until all that was left of the Captain was the sound of retreating footsteps and the mechanical click of a pistol—his pawns were strategically poised to strike on the board.

"Why ain't we goin' no faster? Cap'n's asking for trouble. Bad omen this is, trapped in the Cape of the Sinner's Tongue what on Friday the thirteenth and mired in fog. You've heard the stories... About...him..." The sailor, a burly man with thick hands and a thicker neck kept his voice low, as though afraid he might be overheard. He sat on a gun powder barrel with his back against the mast; his calloused hands worked a frayed section of rope, revitalizing the shattered edges with his patience. His nerves resembled the rope he worked; frayed to the edges in their exhaustion. He had a strong stomach; rough seas, treacherous bandits, a hen pecking wife he would brave with courage but those terrors paled in comparison to the rumors of what stalked their ship. His companion, a gaunt man by the name of Willis, whose penchant for liquor had left him with a hand that trembled with palsy, found that the whole of his body shivered with uncontrollable paranoia.

"Not another word about it, Jonesy. They say the mere mention of the man brings him from the darkest regions of the depths…" He ran a trembling hand through the thin sheet of hair that graced the sun burnt portions of his scalp. The Captain had cruelly siphoned the nightly rations of rum, claiming that he wanted a crew of level headed sailors. Willis thought it pitiless to deny a group of dying men liquid fortification against the impeding storm. Had their leader's disfigurement not proven so fierce to behold; it was the cool, burning hatred of the eyes that gave him a monstrous appearance, Willis would have encouraged the crew to mutiny.

Jonsey ceased his tireless braiding and fixed his friend with an uneasy stare.

"B-b-best never to speak of him again—don't dare breathe the name. He'd slice your throat if you'd sully his ears with the sound of your voice whispering that dreaded moniker." A pulley creaked, aged with rust and use; a wet braided rope was tossed to the roughly hewn deck with a wet slap. Both men jumped raggedly to their feet, startled by the sharp contrast to the oppressive calm. One of their fellow crewmen coiled the wet rope with precision at his feet. Jonsey could scarcely make out the man's shape and a scuffed pair of boots was the only distinguishing feature that reassured him that the crew man was friend not foe.

A snort of contempt echoed in the hush; the man dared to balk at their stories! Every sailor who'd made the journey from England to the Indies knew the stories were irrefutable, truths told by the men who had managed to escape the raids with only their lives and their willing tongues.

Jonsey and his emaciated companion glared into the darkness that obscured the eavesdropper. With a sniff, he ignored the man's wordless commentary and continued. Let him laugh! He'd had a cousin who'd survived one of the infamous raids, though he had admittedly never been the same since the encounter.

"I heard his eyes could burn a hole straight through your head—missing his arm too, chewed straight through it after being shackled by the devil himself. And that's not the half of it—I heard he lost his leg on account of a cannon ball ran right through it. They say he laughed and turned to stab some poor blighter in the gut. One of his own men he stabbed too—cruel if you asks me." Jonsey rambled; his trembling fingers reached compulsively for his rope again. To his great ire, the man's chuckling continued.

"Go ahead an' laugh. I hope he steals your tongue." He remarked with some venom as he gave the braided rope a final twist. The taunting laugher continued to rise into the night's fog in a long crescendo before it dropped into silence.

"Listen to you pretty pair of birdies twittering on. I'll tell ye the real story—it'll curdle the blood and make ye go half mad." The man's voice rose with a reedy timbre, shifting mysteriously from their left, to their right, and all at once engulfed them like a wave.

Jonsey's fingers stilled; the rope slipped from his fingers and fell listlessly to the ship's deck.

"J-j-jonsey…" Willis voice quivered with dread as he struggled to follow the shapes of the encompassing fog. Swirling mist took on ghostly contours. Willis saw the visage a misshapen man, with a hump on his shoulder the size of a small bolder next to a small child who streaked with ghostly glee across the deck, a razor sharp cutlass in each hand. Jonsey let out a small shriek of fear and stumbled to his feet, tripping over the rope he had dropped. He scooted on his haunches toward the gun powder barrel. Like a frightened infant, he clung to it, his lips whispering the Rosary he hadn't uttered since childhood. Mary protect him! The words soon escaped him, and all he could manage was an announcement of their fate; a shout to warn the others before it was too late.

"The Raider! The Ghost Raider is here!" He groaned with dread, hardly able to urge his crippled throat to scream. Willis stood frozen, his jaw dangling open at the hinges, unable to move as a high pitched wail so like a banshee's scream tore in unison from the throats of the Raider's crewmen. The Indentured Bride was hopelessly surrounded! Crewmen of the Bride took up the alarm, the warning bell was sounded but it was too late. They were ambushed, defeated before they even managed a single volley; the once tranquil night was filled with the sepulchral screams of fallen men.

A withered hand, a sliver of silver slipped through the darkness, formed and circled like a snake until it turned its sights on Willis. Petrified, Jonsey's words of warning ripped his chest but lodged in his throat. Before his eyes, his friend of two years was jerked by the ghostly hand of fog into the darkness; he heard the shrill scream of his comrade and then silence--the oppressive silence of an enemy who had paused to draw breath before a final, killer blow. He was left to imagine the carnage of his fallen friend but his mind was wholly fixed on Willis' sad fate--the Raider approached.

"Do you know what he does with the men he captures? The treacherous villains who deserve death for their part in despicable deeds? Do you…"

Jonsey shook his head so hard his cheeks flapped against the force. Try as he could, he was unable to summon an answer to the Raider's question. He pressed the barrel more tightly to his chest and with his eyes twisted shut he thought of the life he had left behind in England. He'd preferred the life he had led with his sharp-tongued shrewish wife and mother-in-law to this abysmal end.

"He takes the men what works for the Company for pittance and drags 'em down to the depths. The Company steals lives, mate…" Each word was accented with a step forward from the Raider. His ship's deck shook in waking terror of each enormous step—Jonsey was convinced the man was gigantic. His heart leapt into his throat; he wrenched his eyes more tightly shut so that the Raider would not cleave them from his skull. These were his last moments, stalked by the growling tiger of death, accompanied by the drumming of his heart and the compelling click of the cocked hammer of a pistol.

The Raider's footsteps hesitated to a stop a breath away from Jonsey. He felt a rush of air from the swirl of the Raider's coat tails as their unearthly, damp texture brushed his cheek. He squeezed one watering eye open loathing his desire to view the scene but eager to capture the scope of his doom in the same breathless moment. The Raider, enshrouded with a fiendish mantle of gleaming white fog towered over him, his pistol aimed at truly toward the crest of Jonsey's skull.

"P-p-please—show mercy. I beg you…" In the lamp light, there was a glint of white; the Raider barred his teeth in a sickening grin.

The pistol exploded into the silence with the brilliant flash of exploding vermillion and gold powder. There was a sickening thud; Jonsey gasped as though the air had been pilfered from his lungs by the ghostly fingers of fog. Mist invaded his vision, and his world went black…