It was nonsensical, and The Errant groaned as the deck pitched portside-down.
With a cry surprisingly high and soft, half of the wyrm slid from the deck, its heft and weight doing the work once enough of it had disappeared off the edge. Its stunted arms clutched and scrabbled for purchase on the deck, tearing anew the wood into splinters, but it was not enough, and the greater part of its body slid away.
Its head and tail, though, had linked together on the starboard side of the ship, and as they trailed the body, the wyrm lashed about, turning head and tail to blunt destruction.
Sailors were lifted from their feet and thrown through the air, crashing into masts or stairs or the gunwale or each other. Stone-Gwen swung her steel-banded cudgel into the beast’s head just as it collided with her, and the impact she made after being thrown against the mainmast had the distinctive sound of bones breaking.
The wyrm disappeared over the edge of the ship, ripping most of the ship wall of the gunwale away with it.
The remnants of the crew stared after it for a moment, clinging to whatever they could to avoid sliding down after it.
“Wyrm away!” called a voice above, and Kindred looked up with a start. She had forgotten Ragged Sarah was up there, and she saw her now, hanging from the crow’s nest with one foot and one hand, leaning over to look down into the abyss below, her face flushed with a wide, courageous smile.
“Up, Kindred! Bring us up!” Captain Caraway cried, pushing up the hill of the deck with sword in hand, heading for the vines still clutching the ship there.
Rise, Kindred thought, her attention snapping back to the fire.
“I’m here,” Scindapse said, her voice quiet and terrified, but she had returned to the fire, leaning in a squat against the slope of the deck.
“Good,” Kindred said, surveying the mess she had made of the hearthfire, barely able to see through the thick smoke. “Help me break this down. Just follow my lead.”
She began to sing in a sharp, clear voice, loud and powerful as she could manage without choking on the smoke.
“Courage! So warped, so sunk, once pass’d?
Skies! Alight with feverish cast?
Rise, again, like questions once ask’d.”
The fire, its flames still contorting and bulging, quieted somewhat under Kindred’s ministrations, and she reached in, breaking down and spreading out her build with an outstretched hand. Scindapse followed, and bones fell as the magics in their hands and Kindred’s song worked on them, breaking bonds.
“A rough circle,” Kindred said, stopping her song to gesture at the build. “But with breaks at the four directions.” She pointed fore and aft, port and starboard.
It looked a mess, and the flames still coughed and warped, but The Errant righted itself and began to lift from the dark below to the dark above.
“Vines away!” Cora the Wraith called, her blade severing the last of them. “Free and clear!”
The rough cheer of the crew was buoyed by the ascent of the ship, and for the space of a long breath, it looked like they were going to make it.
“Belay! Belay! Wyrm rising!” Sarah’s call came a moment before the sounds of the wyrm’s own ascent, its soft, high-pitched cry nightmarish in the dark. Kindred opened her mouth to sing, to scream for speed, but it was too late.
The wyrm became a blurred comet rising portside, up and above the ship, and Kindred realized it must have leapt from below; the grasses here were too thin and weak to hold it up, and its claws clutched nothing as it rose and curved above them.
The crash when it landed on the deck, beaching the top half of its body on the slab of The Errant, was enough to destroy Kindred’s hearing for a moment and hurl her backward, replacing the song of the hearthfire in her head with a high whistling.
Scindapse was gone when she looked up, replaced by the wyrm, its great maw puckered. For a terrified moment, Kindred thought the wyrm had killed Scindapse, eaten or fallen on her. Kindred’s heart juddered to a stop at the thought, but then leapt again when she saw Scindapse thrown to the side, prone on the deck.
The wyrm cocked its head just slightly, neck coiling for a strike.
Three eyes trained on her.
The circle of defense had shattered, and she was revealed at its center.
Up so close, Kindred saw the skin of the beast, which was like a latticework of calcified spiderwebs, weaving through and around one another, exposing great, black holes burrowing in and through, roots and skin and wounds interchangeable.
Kindred launched herself away from the wyrm’s horrible, curious gaze. Her back collided with the mainmast, an explosion of pain seething across her body. Lances and axes and swords flashed in a corona around the wyrm, but Kindred could not see who wielded them. Someone was screaming.
The wyrm held her gaze as it moved closer, somehow soft in its movements, unaffected by the violence around it, the violence being done to it.
A voice, so quiet and distant it might have been a horizon away, screamed at Kindred.
“The fire, Kindred! The fire!”
Who was that? Who were they speaking to? Questions bloomed and died rapidly in the expanse of Kindred’s mind. Every muscle in her body strained, pushing her back into the mast, as if she could retreat into it, become the ship, but her mind had gone suddenly calm in the immediacy of the wyrm’s gaze.
As the wyrm wove closer, it pulled more and more of its body aboard, carving a runnel of splintered, fractured boards.
The wyrm mewled and stretched closer, the bottom of its scaled neck stretching over the hearthfire.
The hearthfire.
Resilience stirred in Kindred, deep down, past the fear and manic stillness that had taken her over. This was not the end. This was not her end.
The wyrm screamed, high and victorious.
Kindred screamed too, in a language none on deck understood, save for a few words here and there. She screamed in a language meant for flames, for burning.
And reached for the fire.
A melody, first light and sweet and then savage, a panoply of major chords sung in a ragged, rising voice, lit through Kindred, blaring through the echoing corridors of her mind and body, singing along her bones and giving rise to the hairs on her arms and neck. Words in a language like kin sang for Kindred, every line a question.
The hearthfire rose, its voice a triumph in Kindred’s mind, its colors blazing a sunset streak as it reached flicking fingers up, stroking the wyrm’s fattened gullet and leaving trails of blackened, bubbling flesh.
To speak was to exercise power, and Kindred spoke, calling the fire friend in its own language, giving it leave to devour air and feast wildly, to reach skyward and seaward.