Blackheart's Promise
Note: Image associated is from Ironage.media, specifically their prompt, 'The Ketch'
"Phillip, who's the kid? Didn't think the Captain had ever kept a woman long enough to care if he fathered one?" Theodore spoke to his friend without breaking concentration on his work, waxing the gunwale to keep her from rotting in the sea's spray.
"None I've heard of." Phillip almost didn't say anything more before he recalled his younger friend's penchant for questions. Sighing into his work on the lines, he said, "That 'kid's' been on ships longer than I have, Ted. Keep your head down and wax, yeah?" He spoke softer than Ted had, almost mumbling the warning as he focused on tarring the hefty lengths of hempen rope in his callused hands.
"I am waxing. It was just a question." Ted answered, feeling a slight nick to his pride making itself known at his friend's dismissal of him. Even so, Phillip had spent 6 years on ketches like The Hicorax, learning every job on board, only just last spring earning the right to sail with whichever captains would take him or recommending fresh hands to a crew that needed a pair. Ted owed his friend this job, and he was grateful, but Phillip had been changed by the water. Less rowdy than he once was, even when they were ashore. He drank less, joked less, and talked less than Ted had ever known him to. Even looked at women less. Ted wondered what 6 years might do to him and what more than 6 had done to the kid inspecting the forecastle.
Snatching a glance over, the kid didn't even look like he'd seen his first underarm hairs, let alone his chin. To be on a ship for more than 6 years, he'd have been barely away from his mother's skirts when he started. 'Orphan' was the word passing through Ted's mind as he saw the boy at the edge of his vision. Certainly walked like a deckhand or any other sailor; even as the ship pitched and rolled, his bare feet never wavered from where they were going. Going barefoot didn't make much sense to Ted. Still, he supposed he'd yet to be sent to handle the rigging or sails, which the lad was checking thoroughly, even retying lines to their horns as he watched the jib and how it shifted in the wind.
Something twinkled in the distance ahead, an odd pale flash of green light hovering over the water. The boy reacted faster than Ted, belting out in a cracking voice, "Captain! A cable fore the bow, one point starboard, something flashing there!" All eyes and ears were up, nigh all watching where the boy described, save Ted staring at the lad's mastery of shipboard language. The flash came again as the Captain crossed the ship, a broad smile breaking across his weather-beaten face.
"Good lad. Double pay if we make it." The older man patted the boy's shoulder before returning to the wheel and adjusting course to head straight for the strange flashing light. The breeze of the day picked up as the ship's prow split the shifting waves.
Ted was about to ask Phillip what the Captain would have meant when the space around the flashing light split apart, and the sky became that exact shade of green around them. The roll and pitch of the ship died as the sails fell slack, yet the Hicorax pressed on, moving through this alien environment. "Haha! Proof! Proof at long last!" The Captain's proud voice rumbled through the foreign landscape, the area brightening around them as he continued laughing, giddily marking their last position on the chart carved into the wheel's housing on the raised bridge.
"Captain? Where are we?" Ted yelled, breaking the man's mischievous giggling at his success, if only for a moment.
"Mr. Theodore? Where none have gone before! Hahahahaha!" The Captain only stood by holding onto the wheel, otherwise bent over laughing in euphoria. As his seeming insanity passed, the Captain collected himself once more, all but one of his crew fixed in place at his aberrant joy in the face of this utterly verdant frontier. As his giggling receded, he stood tall behind the wheel, saying, "I'm sorry, I couldn't pass the opportunity." Sighing, "We, boys, have found that point where worlds meet. And what fame will we achieve in showing it to the world."
"That was not our deal," a new voice split the air. Layered, at once bassy as a war drum and flying high as a flute in the spring fair. The boy stepped out from the crew, less a boy now, more a mix of man and plant, able to look the Captain in the eye even from the deck. "You will deliver me to mother and stay here with her. As you promised." The ship rattled as the sky lost its lustre, blacks and reds shooting through close to the vessel, emanating from what was once the boy. "You will honour our deal. Father."
"Will I? Lads—" A single streak of amethyst struck the Captain's heart, and he froze in place. His eyes were the only thing able to move as the creature closed the distance between them.
"Did you forget? You promised her your heart, father. And you promised me you'd sooner die than lose her again. There's more than one way to keep both." Its three root-like fingers touched where the amethyst flash was stuck to the Captain's breast, passing through flesh like a fish through a river. "How is it that you'll be made an honest man? Living? Or, not so living?"
The Captain shuddered as he was allowed to move once more. Staring at the arm reaching into his body, he uttered a single word: "Living?"
The creature shrunk back into its previous appearance, a child's voice again speaking as the sky became solely green once more, "Good, Mom would've been so upset if you weren't. Oh, uh, one thing," the boy turned around to look at the crew, the twin voice speaking this time, "You will tell no one of this. Ever. Never ever. Even one word and all of you will suffer. Mother promises," his voice changed once more, saying "Ok, come on, Dad, Mom's missed you."
As he and the Captain vanished, the boy stole the alien world away, leaving the ship suddenly pitching and rolling on the ocean once more, sails filled with the gentle breeze, and not one man daring to think, let alone speak, of what they'd seen, terrified of whatever it was that the Captain had brought onto The Hicorax on his last voyage.