Not a Turtle
Session: 2026-08-19
Zephyr's blade went across a throat and the fog swallowed the sound of it. "There's one less over here, brother."
Vath was already moving toward Pedro when something hissed past his ear — close enough to feel the air change — and he let it go and kept moving. He got the heal to Pedro clean. Pantera closed the last of the distance and settled in beside him, low and ready.
Behind them, Victor put his hand on Cain's shoulder and something in Cain's frame filled out, denser, steadier. Brawn, moving where it was needed.
A rat threw its bow down near Pedro and came in with its tail instead. Pedro knocked it wide with a fist, swung back, and missed. The thing broke off north-east and ran.
The one behind Vath came out of the grey without warning — twice, fast, and gone again before he'd turned all the way around. He felt both of them land. That's going to slow me down.
Another came the same way it had, sword and dagger, and missed twice. This one didn't run back into the cloud. It stood its ground, and that told Vath something the others hadn't.
Pedro gave Pantera a nod on his way past — professional courtesy, one hunter to another — and went after the rat that had fled north-east. He caught it at ten feet, the wolf on his fist reaching further than his arm had any right to, and it came away from rat with a piece of its skull in its jaws.
"They're over here, and there's still some rats," Cain called, already moving on the one beside Vath. Toll of the Dead landed heavy and finished it. He looked back toward Victor. "He's dead."
A rat put an obsidian dagger into the wall of a building near Pedro. It shattered like glass. The thing disengaged before anyone could answer it.
Vath turned into the fog, cutlass up, Pantera at his side, eyes moving over grey nothing.
Victor sized up the building he'd climbed — too high to jump, he decided correctly — and took it the slow way instead, then crossed to the next roof for a better line into the fog. Nothing to shoot at yet. He called down: he could see Vath, upright, fine. Pedro he'd lost.
Pedro had already moved on another rat headed for the boats and landed two solid hits doing it. Then something dropped off the roof behind him with a dagger in each hand and put one home — the worst hit of the fight so far, and he felt it in his teeth.
Cain heard where Pedro had gone and started that way, calling for him and getting no answer. What he found instead was a cloaked shape he didn't recognize. "There's more over here. I don't see Pedro."
Another rat came at Pedro with something that looked like it had been carved from bone, hit him again — hard — and stepped back out of range before he could return it.
Zephyr had circled wide in the grey and found his angle: Misty Step, and he was behind one of them.
Vath and Pantera closed up on Cain.
Above the rooftops, Victor found a gap in the fog he liked and threw a Lightning Bolt straight down it, between two buildings, out toward the trees. What it hit, if anything, he couldn't say. He came down and went to join the fight on the ground.
Pedro caught the flash of it through the murk. "Give'em hell, Victorious!" He ducked one attack, ducked the follow-up, and burned his second wind to close the worst of what he was carrying.
Another rat came for him and missed clean.
Cain climbed for a better line and found one — an injured shape he could reach — and tolled the dead over it again. "Stop hiding, brother," he said, to Pedro, to the fog, to whoever was listening.
One more swing at Pedro went wide.
Zephyr, flanking, missed his first strike and put everything into the second. It landed clean enough to matter.
Vath walked up on the last rat near him and opened its back with the scimitar. Pantera came in low behind it and took the meat out of its thigh in one motion. It went down and didn't get up.
Victor arrived to add weight to the melee that no longer needed much more of it.
Pedro — who has never once in his life liked a rogue — grabbed the last one by the throat instead of hitting it, hauled it in, and put a fist into its skull hard enough to lose it a tooth. "I gotcha now."
It got one more swing in on him for its trouble. Zephyr's shield ate most of it and snapped the tip clean off the blade doing so.
Zephyr followed with a cut that opened it up entirely.
"Mother would be proud," Cain said to him, and meant it.
Victor came over to look Pedro up and down, counting the damage with something like professional interest. "You look better than I thought you would."
The dead thing at their feet had drawn its last breath around a small piece of black glass. Victor picked through the daggers scattered nearby and found the same material lashed to each rat's tail — not a claw, not a sting. A weapon, tied on. He filed that away next to what he already suspected: whatever had happened to the ship burning down at the water wasn't fish-folk work. This was something else.
"Oh," Cain said, the fight barely out of his blood. "Fabri. The horses."
Vath went with him. They found Fabri exactly where he should have been — dagger in hand, chest out, standing over the animals like he intended to be taken through them first. He deflated when he saw Cain's face.
He said he would never let harm come to them. Vath believed him without needing to check.
Zephyr wanted to see the rest of the village. Vath understood the impulse and didn't share it yet — there was a debt he wanted to pay first.
He laid Water Breathing over the group, unhurried, the way he did most things. Been waiting on a reason to do this properly. The water had taken Beau once, and kept him. It had nearly taken Zephyr too, another time, with the whole party watching and unable to do a thing about it. He wasn't going to watch that again if he could help it.
Down the coastline two ships waited, and neither of them looked like an answer to anything. One was burning — a Seawatch cutter, they realized, once they were close enough to place the flag still standing above the waterline, a third of her up and alight, the rest already under.
"Burning ship or turtle ship?" Cain asked.
Victor offered to put the fire out. Cain wanted the turtle ship. The rest of the party, without much discussion, drifted the same direction he did — the way a flock turns without anyone deciding first.
The jetty beneath it was wrecked, the hull sitting half up on the dock like something that had run itself aground on purpose. Pedro and Victor studied it and arrived, separately, at the same unkind thought about whoever had been steering it last.
Nothing answered from inside. "I think we got them all," Pedro said.
Carapace covered the top of her in wide, layered plates — nothing Victor had ever seen grow in Etheryn, nothing close to it. Not a turtle. He didn't say what he thought it might be instead, because he didn't know.
Vath walked off the edge of the dock and went under the hull on foot, unhurried, breathing water like it was air, and marveled at it the whole way.
They crawled over the top and in. Pedro found the hatch. "Shall we venture forth, gentlemen," Victor said, and they did.
One open room, stem to stern — no cabins, no walls, just oars stacked in rows down both sides and the smell of something that had been wet and closed up for a long time.
Cain crouched by the oars. Claw marks, every one of them. "Looks like rats." Fifteen, twenty of them, they guessed, counting grip by grip. Coastal cutters ran eight or ten crew — a fact that would matter in a few minutes, though none of them knew it yet.
Someone said it plainly, finally: where had the Seawatch sailors gone?
They went into the cutter the way Vath had gone under the turtle ship — through the wreck of her bow, underwater, no need to surface. Zephyr and Victor stayed on the beach.
The whole front of the ship had been torn open by fire, not by teeth or claws. Inside: ten chests by the hammocks, and eight men who had been dead for hours, floating loose in the flooded hold. Whatever had done this had done it to all of them at once.
Cain pointed at the chests and they started the work of moving what could be moved — bodies and belongings both — up toward the shore. Clothes. Personal effects. Thirteen gold, twenty-six silver, seven copper, counted out on the sand.
"Doesn't appear to be the same work as the flesh-fish people," Victor said, turning one of the obsidian daggers over again in his mind rather than his hand.
Zephyr looked for tracks along the beach and found none worth following.
Vath found Cain once the worst of it was laid out on the sand.
"Can you talk to them?" he asked. "The sailors."
Cain looked at the row of dead men and considered it honestly, the way he considered most things. Tomorrow, he said. After he'd rested. Not tonight.
Vath nodded. That was fair. The dead, in his experience, kept.
He looked back down the beach at the two wrecked ships — one that wasn't a turtle, one that had burned from a fire nobody present had lit — and started working out, in the plain, unhurried way he worked out most things, which questions to ask first.