As the pale hue of night slipped away, giving rise to the light of dawn, Duncan stood on the aft deck of the Vanished, his gaze fixed skyward, following every fleeting detail of the changing heavens.
The scar—that mysterious gash stretching across the night sky—faded slowly, like the last threads of a dream unraveling with the morning. The bleached mist it shed melted into the blue above, and the scar itself became translucent, less a wound and more a ghostly memory. Yet, throughout this transformation, its position never shifted.
Duncan narrowed his eyes, thoughts spiraling. The immobility of the scar—was it a celestial structure impossibly distant, or something far closer, projected across the firmament like a mirage stamped on the atmosphere itself? Could the Vanished's world be perfectly synchronized with that scar, or was the scar moving too slowly for the human eye to perceive?
Possibilities came and went in Duncan's mind like the tides. Yet he knew too well—speculation without data was a sailor charting maps on fog. It might be science, it might be illusion. Either way, the mystery remained.
Then came the light.
Not the golden sun he remembered from Earth, but the immense, rune-bound orb of this strange world, rising from the horizon like a glowing prison. Its light burst into being along the line where sky met sea, casting a golden sheen across the mist, then slowly revealing the bound sun—trapped within rotating arcane rings that hummed with unseen power.
As always, there was that sound. A deep, slow pulse like the breath of a god, echoing through Duncan's mind—but gone the moment he tried to focus.
Hallucination or reality? Another question without an answer.
The Ship's Breakfast
Perched as always on Duncan's shoulder, the pigeon known as Ai twisted its head and stared at the ocean. Then, out of nowhere, it shrieked:
"Get fries! Get fries!"
Duncan chuckled in spite of himself. "No fries on board," he muttered, flicking the bird's beak. "But you got one thing right—we need food."
A short time later, breakfast was served. Duncan stood at the navigation table—repurposed now as a dining surface—laying out his meal: dried meat, a wedge of cheese that looked older than sin, and a glass of water.
To his left was the ever-cheerful Alice, the cursed doll with a porcelain smile. Across the table, the wooden goat head—the ship's first mate and self-proclaimed expert on every topic—watched him with lifeless black eyes. And on the right, Ai, who occasionally murmured eldritch nonsense that reminded Duncan uncomfortably of home.
It was, in its own strange way, the perfect ghost ship family breakfast.
He took a deep breath and attempted to cut the cheese. The blade screeched across its hardened surface. He jabbed the meat with a fork—it struck the plate with a sharp clang. He looked up and found Alice staring at the meal.
"Captain," she asked, "why is today's food the same as yesterday's?"
"Because tomorrow's will be the same, too," Duncan replied flatly. "Want a bite?"
Alice nodded and took a strip of meat. She chewed, grimaced, and immediately spat it out. "That's horrible!"
"You don't even have a stomach," Duncan said, rescuing the remains from her hand. "But thanks for confirming."
He stared again at the unchanging plate. No matter how he boiled, baked, or fried the dried rations, they retained their taste and texture—which was to say, awful. He suspected the cheese might have fossilized into sentience by now, and the meat may well have been dried back when empires still traded in bronze.
A Not-So-Private Feast
Ai flapped onto the table, peered at the plate, then announced, "Insufficient crystal resources!"
Duncan tossed it a crumb of cheese. The bird pecked twice—and froze. Three seconds passed. Then with a shriek, it flapped off to the shelf, muttering: "I'd rather starve in the streets than eat this garbage again!"
Duncan sighed, offended. Across the table, the goat head creaked to life, its wooden voice filled with curiosity.
"Captain," it said, "I've been meaning to ask—your companion, Ai… why does it speak in such strange riddles? What does 'charging Q-coins' mean?"
Duncan raised a brow. He'd underestimated the goat's patience—he'd actually waited a full day to ask. "Ai speaks in a… language only it understands. You'll get the hang of it eventually."
"Hm," the goat mused. "But there's a strange consistency to its nonsense. I suspect there's a deeper logic. Could it be some form of temporal projection? Perhaps a fragment of knowledge displaced from a different reality?"
Duncan's knife stilled for the briefest moment. Then he resumed cutting, voice calm. "Good luck decoding it, then."
The goat's musings might've been nothing more than rambling—but a seed of doubt had been planted. Ai did not belong to this world. Whether it had followed "Eliot Vance" from Earth… or emerged from the hidden depths of this realm, twisted into bird form, Duncan could not say.
But one thing was certain—somewhere in the folds of this cursed sea and these fractured skies, the truth waited.
And Duncan would find it.