I had tied knots less confusing than what I saw. Her ironclad limbs were woven into the Pang. She grunted. It squealed. A beetle-helmed face surfaced from the confusion. "Think!" she yelled, the T-shape of her face red with exertion.

  Great. Teeth snapped, and I realized the level 4 was testing its way past the staff, aiming for openings to get at me.

  My heart raced. The sailors were yelling to one another, and the screaming civilians behind them. How was I supposed to think with approximately a hundred sharp teeth all up in my face and a bunch of people screaming? And on a sinking ship, no less.

  So that's what I did. I made a mental list. I named everything I could see, all the challenges and dangers. I gave mental names to each person in the room: Fat Sailor and Barstool; and to the civilians: Mohawk Dad, Dark Elf Nightgown, and Kid.

  It wasn't that time slowed when my gears started turning, not exactly. But I felt more capable, more in control of the moment. In the outer-outer-world, the real world, moments like this always move so chaotically. Like that time I saw a kid almost drown at at Dane's little brother's birthday party. It moved quickly because I wasted thoughts, which wasted time--panicking and trying to figure out what to do. In the end, several moms hurried over and extracted the boy and he was fine, although he cried for several minutes after.

  But making a list here felt like setting everything into some kind of order. Processing it. It turned everyone into--not data exactly, but comprehensible pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn't have that many pieces in it, after all, even though there were. My brain multitasked, worked on everything at once, multi-threaded.

  The feeling was incomparable. It was my intuition versus a couple of nasty frog monsters. And really, all we needed to do was kick their asses.

  I felt, I perceived, I listened. The lantern blazed. I ignored the blooming pads of names and numbers, the golden threads of connection--or, not ignored, but delegated to a lower mental lobe. I urged my staff to redouble its efforts, and it danced. It hacked at the thing's legs, stamping at its wet claws and making it duck and retreat toward the jagged cliff of the fissure.

  There was something in my mind--no, something just outside it, something that wanted to be let in. Visible reality bulged with it. Something potent, intoxicating, if only I could let it in, an elusive thought striving and maybe pleading for acknowledgment. The gulls and vultures called for food and heckled us for being on a sinking ship.

  Constitution was shouting something. My big Pang turned its sideways-football of a head, and rushed toward her. "No!" I yelled. The list was gone, and I panicked, sending the staff whirling end over end after the creature.

  Both Pangs responded to her shout instantly,

  My clarity was shattered. They were on here in an instant, swinging and slashing, sparks and water droplets a sizzling mist. Constitution stood her ground. She planted her feet and welcomed them, arms wide. Her chest jutted with a primal challenge. I thought I saw her eyes gleam red, at least the scarred one, teeth a bloody, clenched grid. Her dark iron shimmered.

  The lesser Pang's claws lashed against her. I'd seen what they could do, I was not certain a solid iron plate would hold against them. They drew glowing parallel streaks of sparking hot metal, and Connie winced.

  The shimmering metal revealed a mirage, bending light in the way that a long highway in the hot sun will. For an instance, I thought I saw barbs of cruel iron. The Pang's foreleg shredded, and it sank to its knees in an oddly sapient acknowledgment of its pain. Rubbery frog-flesh parted, brittle bones gave. Reflexively, it swiped with its good arm. This time, the returned damage did not stop at the limb, and the body of the creature lost integrity from the waist up. Its huge frog legs kicked involuntarily even as its unspooled torso splashed down, gray-green gushing.

  The greater Pang ought to have been smarter, but its fury was renewed by the scent of blood, even that of its own kind. It jumped onto her, grabbing and biting, its muscular tongue attempting the toxin attack I had been the near victim of earlier. The metal thorns flashed into being, and I watched a bulge sent backward along the coiled tongue like a hose in old Bugs Bunny cartoons. The Pang's head made a gagging sound, then vaporized. Toxins sizzled in the wet floor. Constitution pulled the headless frog corpse off of her, smoke and steam rising from her pauldrons and helmet.

  "What was that?" I asked, breathless.

  She didn't answer. It stood to reason that, as my Barbarian's inner apotheosis of Constitution, she would not merely take damaage, but send it back. When the pen and paper crew got together and talked in overly gamey terminology, they'd called this a tank. Maybe the ultimate one, at least here.

  Fat Sailor and Barstool approached us cautiously, both with a thin crew-cut mohawk pattern on their heads. Mohawk Dad was hugging the child to him; obviously, he had a mohawk, although short and somehow more formal and intentionally groomed. His clothing might have been formal, but it was frayed and torn and clung to his skin. He had done some swimming today. The child I took to be his daughter had her mother's pointed ears, and unnaturally glowing eyes. I didn't see any Arthrem-like features on her, but then again, she didn't not look like him. The mother was the Underdark skintone and white hair of a drow, slender in a slim ball gown and pearl earrings. Was there a scar over one eye...?

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  I wanted to hit the pause like never before. The feeling of questions bubbling up inside me was irresistible. "Okay," I said, pointing at Constitution. "This, I get. You're Constitution. I'm Wisdom. Who the hell are they?"

  The sailors seemed to take this as their cue. They lowered their makeshift weapons, letting them splash and roll downhill unevenly, and approached us. They stood at attention, not quite in a military way, but remembering their naval discipline in the midst of chaos.

  "Torm Dason," said the fat one. "I'm an officer in the crew. This is Drave." He looked uncomfortable. "He's... housekeeping."

  "Housekeeping?"

  "Aye, lords," said Torm. "As you know, the Barbaric is the greatest vessel to ever sail the seas." His tone had slipped into pride, only for a moment, before remembering where that had gotten us. He glanced back toward the family. The sort of drowish woman stood, watching us stoically from the edge. "There is a considerable contingent of passengers."

  Across the rift, the parallel array of torn-open decks was tilting crazily. The other passengers there chattered nervously, helping one another brace against the shifting gravity as sideways became downward. The same swells hit both halves of the boat, but the fore was taking the worst of it. There were screams from below.

  "We were helping these ones escape, but... well, you should look for yourself."

  We followed the two sailors to the edge of the fissure. Debris sloughed off only a few feet away, twirling into the dark water twenty feet below. I could see the shorn termination of several decks above, dripping and ejecting debris into the fissure. The water boiled, it seemed, frothing furiously at the base of the fore half. A half dozen yellow dinghies--not life rafts as I would have expected, but something a little more appropriate for a quasi-enlightenment, pseudo-medieval pen and paper world. Or at least, the world within that world, I had to remind myself. They were vibrantly painted wood, or so it appeared from here. I guess Arthrem's inner universe had not developed rubber harvesting or the manufacturing techniques to shape and mass produce it.

  Whenever we thought we were calling Teo out about this inconsistency in our tabletop game nights, Teo always gave himself a get out of jail free card by sayiing something about technology being distributed unevenly and mentioning someone named William Gibson. This was lost on me but it sounded smart and authoritative, although it satisfied none of us.

  In the water below, dozens of civilians and sailors swam between too few dinghies. They crowded the little boats. One of them overturned as I watched, spilling its burden of passengers into the water in a chorus of screams. All the souls aboard seemed to be converging here, little impromptu parties of escapees trying to find their way off away from certain death to slightly delayed but equally certain death. From every deck they came, panic in their eyes, looking to one another for help. Strength was nowhere to be seen. Far across the "man"-made canyon, I could see Pangs cutting easily through the water, chasing the flailing swimmers in decks that sank as we watched. They were too far to help.

  But that is not what caught my eye. It was the massive, jagged mineral burr that jutted out of the water like the talons of an angry Poseidon. Crooked stone tapered into wicked spikes, a caltrop the size of a small neighborhood. Hectic waves thrashed around it, pendulously drawing away and revealing its stained base, reaching ever down. It shifted slowly, unmoored from the base of the sea.

  Well, that explained why they hadn't just steered around it. The boat was massive and couldn't turn on a dime. This "sliceberg," as Yorc had called it, had come up from below, intercepting the *Barbaric* from underneath, clawing like a predator at its unprotected underbelly. Whether the sliceberg had been sent by the Pangs, or both sent by the same person or force, was a tantalizing question. That feeling struck again, the sense of an answer that wanted to be revealed, that everything was within my reach if only I would allow it to make itself clear.

  What was this great sloshing weight I carried in my head? No, not my head. My heart. The heart as the ancients had seen it. The soul, the spirit, the mind--that ephemeral and unphysical connection to everything around me. Whatever it was, it was churning one micrometer behind the veil of obscure reality. I sensed--yes, sensed--that it tugged back on that curtain ever so slightly to reveal the light of thelantern and the staff.

  "So where's the captain?" I asked.

  Torm and Drave shared a look. Drave wiped his nose on the back of his wrist.

  "Lost to the wave-madness." Torm just put it out there, as though we would know what that is. I didn't, obviously, I took a breath, exhaled slowly. I allowed the screams below to just happen, as they were, and faced the fact that we could not be everywhere, saving everyone. A tiny ember in the depths of my mind began to turn, circling the subject of the captain, and whatever wave-madness was, flitting around it like a moth arounda flame, unable to touch it but rapidly seeing it from different angles.

  Constitution was staring at me. The T-slit in the helm prevented me from seeing the corners of her mouth. "What?" I asked.

  She bared her teeth, the lines between them still red. "You're doing it," she said. "Aren't you?"

  "Doing what?"

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. The ember drew figure-eights in the air somewhere deep within me. A picture of the captain formed in my mind. Probably not a correct one, but a true one. A stern man with whiskers like coral and, obviously, a short-buzzed mohawk beneath a big tricorn hat. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he was surrounded by disciplined crew members, including First Mate Yorc. He had a peg leg, but only for a second until I realized that was probably too kitschy. He retreated into his private quarters. He shuddered. The ship shook violently. He ran, slipping down the passageways and dropping through tight stairwells as the ship bellowed its death rattle. Farther, to the bottom holds.