The End Times | Marienburg's Stand

Late Winter, 2525 Midnight

The stars glittered coldly in the clear black sky. The face of Mannslieb shone like a coin, its silver glow sparkling across the cresting waves of the otherwise inky Manannspoort Sea. The three-mast galleon, Meesterhand, tacked east to west, plotting a zig-zagging course against the north wind and deeper into the Sea of Claws. The wind sighed through the rigging and the loose raiment of the duty watch, bringing an unobtrusive ripple from the ensign of Marienburg that fluttered from the sterncastle.

It carried a faint, rotten, smell.

The navigator wrinkled his nose, compared the stars to his charts with a silent prayer to Manann for clear skies and in a lowered voice called their course and bearing to the helm. The merchantman came slowly about, bow riding high as it nosed into the wind towards a port tack. Dark and quiet as a Nordlander spy in Marienburg’s South Dock, the vessel shushed ever northward. Even before the razing of Erengrad and the destruction of the Bretonnian navy at L’Anguille, these had been treacherous waters, haunted by Norscan raiders and dark elf pirates. Even with Marienburg plagued by the spectre of war, only the most reckless or desperately indebted fools would risk leaving harbour at all.

Next time, Captain Needa van Gaal would think twice before wagering the Meesterhand on such a cold run of the dice.

‘Get me lanterns prow and starboard,’ said Captain van Gaal, an urgent whisper that aped the chill night wind. He leaned over the gangrail from the high sterncastle and peered into the susurant, silver-black sea. The captain pointed north, to a raft of deeper black floating amongst the moonlit glitter, and then emitted a triumphant bark. ‘Wreckage! Helm, hard to starboard, bring us about.’

Van Gaal hurried down the pitching steps to the main deck as the twelve-gun merchantman heaved to.

The high elves’ mighty Marienburg fleet had left harbour in the early hours of the previous evening and, while the proud princes of the sea were as disdainful of their enemies as they were of their fleet’s human hosts, van Gaal was not nearly so choosy about the spoils he was willing to pick through. Just one Norse longship laden with furs and silver would pay off his debt to that serpent van der Zee.

‘Helmsman, station keeping,’ van Gaal shouted back to the shadowy mass of the sterncastle as the ship pulled through the loose island of flotsam with a series of soft, distant bangs. ‘Ready lines. And give me that light, damn it.’

There was a stab of illumination as a boatswain nervously unshuttered his storm lantern. The waves shadowed under the gunwales turned from black to a deep nightshade. Light glinted from hooks as they were lowered. Van Gaal gripped the gangrail anxiously as the debris was drawn up. His brow knotted in confusion. Norscan craft were generally of pitched black oak or pine, but the torn piece of planking hanging from his ship’s hook and twirling slowly before his eyes was as white and smooth as a pearl.

But that… couldn’t be right.

‘Shut off the light,’ he murmured, the ship sinking back into blackness just as the wind dipped. A dying ripple ran across the sails.

The horizon was dark, too dark. Van Gaal could not avert the prickling certainty that thousands of unseen sails had just passed between his rig and the wind.

When the wind returned it bore a putrid reek of rancid flesh and decay, as if the ocean itself had become diseased.

‘Hard astern, full sails,’ van Gaal choked, voice muffled by the sleeve held to his mouth and broken by dry heaves.

The elves had been defeated.

The very idea stunned him into mute inaction as the first bloated, creaking shadow appeared beneath the ocean of stars, and he felt in that moment that he understood how it was to have one’s ship teeter above a whirlpool.

All he could do was gape.

They were heading south. To Marienburg.

And there were so many.