We had been sailing for months after departing from the port of Whitehill, and had left even the most remote hunting grounds of the whalers behind weeks ago. The charts put us northeast of the Forsaken Islands, but their bleak shores were not our destination. Our route led us farther north than most men had ever sailed, across the desolate black waters of the Northern Sea.
What a fool the captain of the ship we pursued must have been to believe the unhinged claims of the priestess. There was no warm summer sea hidden by ice, no uncharted passage, no prophesied land for our people to settle. We were alone out here, so far from any known shores that not even the gods could watch over us anymore. The rough formations of the icy mountains and their fluctuating shapes were mightier than the Sea Mother, and the blizzards and fog banks obscured the Sky Father’s eyes. Yet the captain was the son of a wealthy guildsman whose ancestry traced back to the age of the old kings, and when he didn’t return from his foolish voyage it fell to me and my crew to find him – or his body – in this forsaken place.
The fog banks grew thicker the further we sailed, the closer we came to the Veil of the World. Only few ships had ever crossed this ghostly barrier and even fewer had returned from the uncharted waters beyond, said to be more dangerous and mysterious than the cold eastern sea. The Veil marked the end of the known world, and past it lay lands and oceans mortal men shall not wander; the dark, hostile realm of something else. Legends spoke of creatures no man could fathom, of unnatural storms and swells, of impenetrable fog shrouding the waves like the cold breath of giants, of the sea itself being alive. Yet here we were, bound for the unknown and the unknowable, looking for a lone ship in the perpetual twilight of a strange, portentous world.
My men prayed when we entered the fog of the Veil, asked gods who could not hear them for safe passage through the ominous white shroud. I did not join them. We were out of the gods’ reach, blind and at the mercy of a world no man should enter. Around us, amorphous icebergs and floes groaned and moaned, ice creaking as if mountains were shattered in the distance. And yet there were no mountains, none we could see, invisible dangers hidden in the thick mist. More than once, we barely evaded collisions, adjusting our sails when it was almost too late. For an entire day that felt like an eon, no winds blew at all, and we were adrift in unknown, unseen currents.
The few sailors who had returned from voyages past the Veil estimated it took four or five days to emerge on the other side of the fog bank, but I can neither confirm nor deny this claim. All I know is that we made it through in one piece, that the Veil spit us out into an endless night. In all my years at sea I have never seen a comparable phenomenon. Behind us a seemingly infinite foggy wall of white stretched from horizon to horizon, diving us from the realms known to men. And before us lay the deepest, blackest waters I have ever beheld, the Great Unknown, a different world were beings like us were not welcome or wanted.
There were islands here, this was true, but none men would ever settle. In the wan twilight of a hidden moon, frozen mountains emerged from the water. Bizarre formations that seemed to remain at the same distance, no matter in which direction we sailed. Some islands were flat and small, barely matching the length and width of our ship; pallid grey rock with sharp, treacherous edges, carved by the winds of a merciless sea. Other times we passed by tall cliffs on the shores of enormous landmasses, jagged walls of a fortress built by giants that looked upon us, the invaders, the way men look upon insects. Insignificant, not worth true attention, a mere nuisance that would be gone with a swat.
If the captain we chased had made it this far there was no conceivable way we’d find him alive. It was a miracle we hadn’t run aground when we passed through the Veil, that unseen forces had guided us through the hazards hidden in its fog. But our restored sight only revealed desolation and this terrible vastness of darkness and ice. There was no vegetation here; the frozen shores were hostile and barren. A ship lost in this world would not find food or timber to make repairs or feed fires, and only a madman would dare eat the spoils of the sea.
We had cast our nets after breaking through the Veil, more out of curiosity than need or hunger. They had yielded nothing but strange, deformed creatures. Only few resembled fish, and even those had too many fins, lacked eyes or grew appendages from peculiar places. We threw them back without second thought, a choice not a single man has come to regret. The further we delved into this ominous world, the more often we spotted strange lights in the sky and the sea. A faint glow, emitting from blurred shapes of all sizes, moving in erratic patterns just beneath the waves. I don’t know what it was that lurked under the water and I don’t care to find out, but it stands to reason that we were better off eating the cured meat from our barrels than taking our chances with these things.
It was neither hunger nor darkness that frightened us most, nor was it the knowledge how far the winds had carried us from familiar shores. It was the ominous feeling that we were not alone in this cold desolation, the Northern Sea being not as still as expected. There was a baleful melody in the gale, droning, almost unheard, but ever present. A dirge of frozen mountains that moaned under the weight of the ice, the creaking of eons-old glaciers, the wails of lost souls echoing from the most remote corners of the Unknown.
Sometimes we saw movement on the distant horizon, cyclopean shadows against the black of the night. Some were of bizarre elegance, slender and tall, surpassing even the world’s greatest towers in height, but swaying to and fro in high winds. Other times the shapes were crawling and sprawling, a formless mass just where the sunless sea met the sunless sky that stretched out all across the horizon. While some danced in the darkness, others were accompanied by strange lights; shades of pale green and purple like the strokes on a painter’s canvas. Always hazy, never blurred enough to be dismissed as a trick of the eye.
And there was something else, something lingering, something unseen, something incomprehensible and disquiet. Not a singular thing or being, but an all-encompassing presence that surrounded us, as if the sea and the sky and everything in between was alive. Even under deck, in the confined shelter of my cabin, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched by a thousand eyes, of a thousand ears listening to my thoughts, to my heartbeat.
But we soldiered on, braved the storms and the bone-chilling cold, and we reached what sailors called the Archway of Night in hushed whispers. Gargantuan monoliths emerged from the water in regular intervals, forming a natural passage along the steep cliffs of an endless glacier. The invariable distance between the sharp, pointy rocks was a rare constant in this world of shifting coastlines, but it didn’t mean ease for my navigator. The currents were treacherous here and the slightest inattention could alter our course, push us dangerously close to the glacier wall and its insidious ice calvings. Compass needles haphazardly spun out of control, only to rest calmly again one moment later.
Nobody had returned from what lay on the Archway’s other side, and only the bravest of sailors had ventured far enough to catch a glimpse past the last towering rock formation. A maelstrom, frozen in motion eons ago, a vast basin that had become the last resting place of countless lost ships, they said. And beyond it, both the rumors and the world simply ended. No icebergs, no glaciers, no small, floating islands. No stars or clouds in the sky, no howling winds, not even fog on the water. Only an endless black surface under an endless black sky, each so tenebrious that they were indistinguishable from another.
Our journey would end there, regardless of what we would find in this graveyard at the end of the world. If the ship we pursued was not among the remains we’d consider it lost, even more so than we were in this dark part of the world. We’d turn around, sail back to familiar shores where the gods could hear our prayers, where they’d guide us home.
Icy winds howled and ghostly voices whispered within them, growing louder the closer we came to our destination. The moon played hide and seek behind clouds and shadows when we spotted the last monolith in the distance, but my gut feeling told me it was the nadir of the night. The perpetual twilight made it a futile endeavor to measure the time, and our instinct, sharpened by years at sea, was all we could go by. Before us the sea was shrouded in fog, and against all evidence to the contrary it seemed as if our vessel was floating through clouds instead of passing through water.
The outlook’s hoarse voice startled me, as did the sudden commotion of my crew. “A ship, there’s a ship ahead of us in the Archway!” the man cried again and again as if he was trying to convince himself of the truth of his words. The murmurs of the crew, rushing to the rails on the main deck below my position, carried similar sentiments; doubt and disbelief merged with fright and unease.
I hurried to find my binoculars under my coat, though I did not believe for a moment that what the outlook reported was real. It had to be a trick of the eye, a mirage in the mist. The ship we were looking for couldn’t possibly be seaworthy after being lost for so long. Even our formal assignment to recover the captain’s body and return him to his father for a proper burial was a far-fetched idea. At most we hoped to discover the wreckage, evidence for the ship’s final demise, and the crew – myself included – had long made peace with the thought of finding nothing at all.
And yet there it was. I saw a ship when I peered through the lense of my binoculars, a large vessel of indeterminate design. The creeping fog obscured the shape of its hull, and I could not tell the number of masts with certainty either. The dark, tattered sails thrashed against a dark, stormy sky and my eyes could not find a flag amidst the flapping chaos. But the most unsettling sight was the forecastle. The ship was not abandoned, not adrift. There were hazy, phantasmal shapes moving about, and though my vision was blurred and hampered by fog, I was certain these were not merely two or three desperate survivors.
“This can’t be!” I gasped. “It is impossible that anybody endured out here for so long!” A part of me wished we had eaten the deformed fish now. At least the consumption of tainted flesh would have provided an explanation for this hallucination. Yet I knew none of my men had even touched the strange creatures. We had cast the garbled beasts back into the black waters they came from without taking a single one out of the nets. Our trusty barge had made voyages to the remote ports of the Bright Sea. We knew how to stock our cargo bays for long journeys. There was no shortage of food, no reason why anyone would have resorted to the bizarre catch instead of eating the salted meat, beans and bacon from our barrels.
“Perhaps they scavenged cargo from wrecks in the frozen maelstrom,” my first mate suggested after some hesitation. “There might have been barrels of pickled food they retrieved, and wood from shattered hulls to keep their fires burning.”
“Aye, it is possible,” I gave back, though I didn’t truly believe that it was. However, it was equally unlikely that there was anyone else in this place. The closest inhabited shores were far away in the south, located on the bleak rocks of the Forsaken Islands. Their strange denizens feared the sea, they built no ships. The seafaring peoples of mainland sailed close to their coasts, maintained trade routes, but had no interest in exploration of the northern ocean. It simply defied any logic that there was a seaworthy vessel besides our own out here, and it left us no choice but to investigate it. As far-fetched as it seemed, maybe the zealous captain had beaten the odds. Had survived, could be rescued and brought back to Whitehill alive.
What I saw when the mysterious vessel drew closer was even less possible than the explanations I had already dismissed. The ship itself was of great antiquity, the ravages of many centuries had to have taken a toll to account for its battered condition. How it was seaworthy at all was firmly beyond me. I spotted holes in the hull, the sails were even more tattered than it had seemed from the distance; the rigging was torn and tangled up, and one mast was missing altogether. And these were not men scurrying about on deck, not men in the sense we know them at least. Man-sized, ghastly creatures that defied verisimilitude and nature itself. That’s what they were.
In the sprawling chaos of the ship’s main deck nothing made sense, yet it was there, undeniable, tangible and unfathomable at the same time. Ghostly shapes in all shades of the night; pale faces stripped of flesh and human features, wafting shadows in constant motion, morphing into beings from beyond the scope of my mind. The deck itself seemed to be alive in the darkness, like a mass of black rats mindlessly crawling about in every direction. The most frightening realization was yet to come, and I felt the full force when it finally did. These creatures did not stand still, did not wait for us to pull closer to them, instead they moved with purpose. Stirred their ancient barge in our direction, adjusted the course, made preparations to board us.
My men must have drawn the same conclusion as they stood on the rails as paralyzed as I was. Where every course correction was a struggle for us, these terrible creatures navigated the storm with apparent ease. Their ship, though larger and bulkier than ours, defied the laws of nature, braved the currents and shoals near the monolith as if they were not there. To the starboard side there were the cyclopean walls of the glacier, to our port side was the dark, open sea. Our only hope to escape the grotesque danger lay out there, in the baleful, black waters no man had ever sailed.
“Turn the ship!” I yelled, my voice cracking. “Take us out of the Archway, away from the glacier!” It was the one chance we had to not become trapped between the icy walls and the apparition that had taken the form of a ship. Who knew what dangers lay out there, past the everchanging seascape and the last landmarks that aided our navigation, in the black void of eternal night? Whatever we’d find, in these moments the uncertainty doubtless presented itself as preferable to capture and death at the hands of phantasmal sailors.
The crew scrambled to their stations, tried to carry out my desperate order, but it was to no avail. The unforgiving storm and the fog creeping up from the heavy sea worked against us, yet didn’t hinder our ghostly assailants at all. Their bizarre, antique vessel drew ever closer; close enough to make out their nets and harpoons, spears and axes, inhuman faces and otherworldly appendages with the naked eye. Though we had made it past the monolith, the distance to our pursuers was shrinking with each breath we drew. The apparitions matched our course without the same struggles, followed us out to the void at a steady pace. The freezing wind carried groans, hissing and ominous chanting to us, the frightening sounds growing ever louder – until they ceased altogether for no reason we could see.
Though the howling of the wind was still there and had not changed in volume, it now sounded closer, more primal in ways I cannot explain. Today, I believe we crossed a barrier, one even older and stranger than the Veil, sailed through an invisible gate in our frantic attempt to escape. But back then, all we saw was the effect it had on our pursuers. The sudden hesitation in their movements, that their ship began to fall back. Relief overcame us, followed by bone-chilling terror. If these bizarre creatures shied away from these waters, what unfathomable doom awaited us here?
Frozen in fear, we watched the ghostly ship and its sailors, and we slowly began to understand they had turned their attention to something else. They were clearly still preparing an attack, but we were no longer their target. Yet there was nothing but us out here in the void.
The sea rose in anger without any warning. Pillars of fog and waves taller than fortress walls emerged from the black surface, accompanied by a droning noise that could be felt more than heard. We lost all control over our vessel. There was nothing we could do but cling to the rails. Around us, the mist seemed to be glowing, an absurdly mellow, crystal blue light that permeated through the vehement gale and the furious waves. The forces of nature – or beyond it – came down upon the ghost ship and its terrible creatures; a hazy shape too enormous to fathom attacking in blue-glowing rage.
And then it was gone. All of it. The turmoil had lasted only for a few endless heartbeats and it left nothing behind. Nothing but us. The ancient, battered vessel and its grotesque crew had vanished. The glow of the waves, the air, and the mist had faded into ominous darkness. All that echoed in the wind now was a distant, primal growl, the kind a beast utters after a sumptuous meal. This is how we survived, at the whim of an unseen, mysterious entity that minded its own business in its own world. In its benevolent ignorance, a hungry beast saved us, perhaps even utterly unaware of our very existence.
We gave up the search for the ship and its delusional captain. After all we had seen or not seen beyond the Veil, we didn’t want to challenge our luck. We returned home, against all odds in one piece, and became the world-weary sailors who share their incredible yarn in taverns and inns. Warn people to not venture to the edge of the Known, to not wake sleeping giants that linger beyond the Veil of the World.