It's when you don't need an anchor. It's when the land crowds around you, uninvited, sinking its sandy fingers into your hull. And it crunches you to a halt.
Before – everything is chaos. There are voices screaming and shouting, roping flying, massive wheels creaking and turning and all you can hear is gigantic tearing of the sea in your ears. Bodies push past, shoving into your shoulders, not caring if you fall of the edge and go below the water- just concerned you might take them with you.
But all the turning and all the shouting and all the swearing in all the world doesn't stop the maelstrom happening inside your stomach when you hear that deathly crunch along the hull. The point where even the most battle scarred of men will turn grey, their deaths flashing before their eyes. Not swift and bloody via the cutlass, but waxen, starved and mad. A death which lives in the horrific lands, where atrocities against nature seem to scream sanity.
It is a death sentence like no other. Not the sudden cacophony of cannon blasts or the powder dry crisp of gunshots. Even the strange meat resistant sound of flesh as it hugs the blade that surrouds it is preferable.
No one who lives life on the sea fears anything more than that sound. That shuffling, scraping, herald of rotting pain and depression. Because you can't un-hear it. There isn't a moment where you can subscribe to new beliefs and pray hopeless to new gods.
You can't go back and wish you had drunk more wine, stolen more hearts, cheated more men, or had more hot and breathless nights with mouths pressed furiously against your own.
You are faced with one future and one fate. With your crew and the sea and the silence.
Stuck.
And already you can see shadows of gaunt faces- staring.
Hungry.
Waiting for the mad games to start.
Inspired by: Sunday Scribblings: Grounded
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