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The cloudless night sky shone back up at itself in the liquid velvet that was the impossible placent Sea of Whispers. As the northen winds flowed unfettered above the waters, leaving not the tiniest ripple in their place, the nature of the place was revealed, as that ghostly breeze carried with it the chill of death, the whispers of the departed, the promise of end. The mist that rolled over the water would rise up around a ship as if the fingers of the damned, lapping at the ankles of men as almost tangible hands, driving the weak of spirit to the brink of madness and drawing them to the only escape they could find- the onyx depths of the abbyss.

The dead called to him. Artemis Wells was mainly unfettered by the whispers of the wind. He ignored the constant call of the cursed, the anguished rasp of the unfulfilled. The dead had called him north, and he had heeded. The night sky was divided in two as the galleon Sea Saint flowed through its glass copy. The crew had all left, jumped to their freedom from the merciless madness and to their cold, frozen ends. Wells stood alone on the prow, his aged eyes wandering the vast plane of black hell. The whisps of the ghost mists lapped at the Captains feet alone.

The Captain's quary, the great Sea Dragon of the Whispers, rose ahead. The silver mirror of the black wood and night sky broke as the mighty beast neared, and great beams of light as if from as four earthly moons streamed across the heavens as its great head turned to face the hunters. Scales glistened as polished obsidian, showing the moon and starts in a thousand different veiws. Mist rolled out of the splits between its scales, and its cry was silent as the stars above, yet the living all felt it and were frozen as they stood.

The harpoon cannons, for years put to use against the mightiest waterside citidels in the land, went unarmed as it raised a single massive tail. The water streamed off of the huge, twisting appendage and fell onto the man below. As they poured over man and wood and steel, all were sent far beyond the point of ice and death, yet the captain yet lived to see the mighty tail- bone and muscle and sleek, onyx scale- come down upon him and his prized galleon. The mast went first. Rope snapped, steel rent and wood cracked. Splinters scattered from a hundred different points as the pole was crushed. The main sail fell, its white canvas covering half the drenched and frozen deck. Then the tail hit the deck, straight on top of the captain. He had no power to form a screem, and no air to send through his gapin mouth. He went silently, but the cursed place held no door to the abyss for Artemis Wells.

The dead called to him. He was sailing through the wreckage of another ship, the planks torn apart by some force unknown to nature. Not a pair of boards remained together. Not a single board remained whole. The wood had been ripped apart, the iron of the nails pulled form the planks and dropped to the depths. The bodies of the ship's crew bobbed amidst the splintered wood, their bodies torn much the same. One man shared two arms an a half a leg between himself and the one next to him. None others had that much to spate, except one.

Ahead was a single fully intact corpse, its head facedown in the water. It had been stripped of all items before being cast before the ship. Its skin was as white as its blood was red as it still poured out of wounds on its back, despite the lack of a heartbeat. Artemis Wells took a long pole and prodded the corpse's shoulder. It sunk down then came back up, his own body staring at him through empty sockets. The dead of the water called to the dead above, and Captain Artemis Wells answered.