Unpacking was well underway. There was a rhythm to it now—ropes hauled, crates passed hand to hand, curses exchanged like coin. Salt crusted every boot, and sand clinged to everything else, even the pages in my satchel. I stood off to the side, boots firm on a plank that’s only mostly dry, watching the organized mess play itself out like a shoddy opera.

  The wind had been rising since morning.

  I imagined the New World as a dry place. Sunbleached stones, long thirsts, heat. Certainly not this—not a desert with hail, not a coastline where the air bites sideways and the sky splits like rotten cloth. Even in a world where the rules spit in your face, this felt... wrong.

  "A storm," I muttered, adjusting my collar. "It’s meant to be dry here."

  The Dockmaster—lean, jaw like rusted hinge—stood nearby, arms folded beneath a waxed coat slick with brine. "Aye. And rain's not supposed to come up from the ground neither, but it has. Last week. South beach."

  I raised a brow.

  He shrugged. "We stopped asking why. Been bad this season. Worse every week. Letters from three counties inland, growing sharper with each line. ‘Where are the supplies? Where are the orders? Where is the reply?’" He spat into the sea. "As if we hoard the Empire’s ink in our pockets."

  Thunder rolled—distant, but heavy. A sound that came through the air, not over it.

  I checked the clasp on my satchel. "I need to set the record straight. I won’t linger. Storm or no. I’ve letters to deliver, and authority to clarify. The capitals must hear from me directly."

  He gave me a worn look— Like he somehow saw pity in me for being so naive.

  "Capitals’ve gone quiet. We sendt couriers. They don’t come back."

  I said nothing. Turned to face the shoreline. Another gust tore at my coat. Sand lifted in sheets. The wind howled like something living.

  I tried to speak. Just one word: "Authority."

  It felt hollow even before I could utter it. Like a lie told too often.

  Then—thunder.

  Closer now. Sharp, as if the sky itself had teeth.

  This was already the worst storm I’d seen. And yet it worsened. As if bad was just the prelude.

  Behind me, one of the Blemmyes halts mid-lift. Frozen beside a quarantine crate. The slack-jawed one with the face in its chest and arms like twisted roots. Always still. Always blank.

  Now?

  Its eyes glimmered. Like it had thought. Like it had intent.

  It turned its body—slow. Deliberate. The flesh around its mouth shivered.

  It looked at me.

  No—into me.

  I could not move.

  A bell rang.

  Not the clamor of some portside alarm, but the tollhouse bell—struck full by a bolt of purple lightning. It howled like cannonade. Iron screamed.

  The Blemmye moved. The storm had scoured the drool from its lips. What was left, was focus. Not the mimicry of man I had observed. Pure purpose.

  And it came for me.

  The bell tolled again. The chapel joined in—its chimes stuttering into life like a broken prayer. The wind rose, and the dock became a symphony of chaos.

  Then the chapel door bursted open.

  The other one—the one they said prayed backwards, I supposed—stumbled out into the storm. Its torso twisted. Its lips moved in silence. And still it turned. It saw me too.

  They both did.

  Lightning. Bells.

  A scream. The Dockmaster is gone.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  One moment he was barking orders, eyes on the storm. The next—a shriek of metal, a groan from the gantry, and the world rewrote itself in one blink. The cranes pole came loose like it had been waiting. It struck him square, and he collapsed without ceremony. No time for a cry. No time for a thought.

  His skull ruptured like overripe fruit. One instant of silence. Then the noise rushed back in.

  I'd never seen a man die before. Not truly. Not suddenly. I’d seen corpses, yes—wrapped up and carted off, clean and explained. But this? This was a man crushed into paste at my feet. His jaw slack, eyes rolled, blood already diluted by the rain.

  And I stood there, soaked, stunned, staring like a fool.

  No last words. No dignity. Just the end. Swift. Stupid. Real.

  Lightning. Bells. Lightning. Bells.

  I bolted through the dockhouse door.

  Inside was no refuge. The rain had turned sideways. Walls rattled. Shadows stretched. The wind forced its way through every crack like a curse.

  I gripped the doorframe, soaked, gasping for air.

  Then I saw it—the color.

  The fog. The sea. The sky.

  Purple.

  Sickly. Pulsing. The air tasted like metal and fear. My heart pounded, not only with terror but... something else. Some echo of knowing.

  As if the world had judged me a trespasser. A foreign body to be purged.

  Then the door exploded.

  The Blemmye stepped through, framed in shards and stormlight.

  It did not lunge, no scream, no beastial conduct. But every step it took carried the weight of finality. Boards moaned beneath it. Wind coiled around its shoulders like a priest’s stole. Its chest-mouth flexed as if testing the act of breath.

  I stumbled back. Nearly fell. My boots slipped on rain-slick stone.

  It advanced.

  Each movement deliberate. Each pause... measured. A beast that has just remembered it was a being with intent. Or the echo of it.

  I reached for the latch behind me, found only air. My satchel clinged to me like dead weight.

  Then—the sound of another footfall.

  The second one. The backwards-prayer. It stepped into the ruined doorframe behind the first, limbs slack but steady. Both of them trained on me now.

  I had become their purpose.

  I raised a hand, a pitiful gesture.

  The nearer one closes the distance. Slowly. Unstoppable.

  Then—suddenly—it lifts me.

  Effortless. My feet leave the floor. It holds me as though I weighed nothing at all. For a moment, there is only wind. Thunder. My own heartbeat in my throat.

  Then it speaks, in the most hushed and gentle tone:

  "It is not safe, my friend. The passage is closing."

  The voice is low. Human in timbre. Not human in origin.

  There is a purple sheen behind its eyes.

  Something is closing in Divina Terra.

  And something else has just began to awaken.

  It doesn’t set me down immediately. Instead, it turned—still carrying me, with the calm of a priest removing a relic from the altar. Outside, the storm had become a shrieking cathedral. Lightning arcs in sheets, ringing off the sea with such fury it felt like sound itself might snap.

  The other Blemmye—the backwards-praying one—moved with equal intent, but in a different rhythm. I watched it drag a dockworker from the debris, lift him with care, almost gentleness. Another man, soaked to the bone and half-hysterical, tried to bolt toward the surf. It catched him, turned him, and guided him toward the carts.

  The carts.

  When had they been readied? How many of them had stood still until now, horses snorting, barely tethered?

  Together, the two creatures began gathering the rest of the dockhands—dazed, bloodied, weeping—ushering them with the slow, unstoppable force of shepherds reclaiming lost things. A limp body is pulled from the chapel threshold. Another from beneath the collapsed awning of the customs office. One by one, they are brought toward the road, toward safety.

  And I? I was carried like cargo. There was no sign of pity in its caress. It was here to protect.

  It moved with me past the shattered door, into the wind, and I realize the purple has deepened. It had turned into a veil. The whole world wore it now.

  Lightning cracked again. The chapel bell swung madly, but no hand touched it.

  And the Blemmye whispers, almost too softly to hear, as it places me onto a cart already heavy with soaked men and cargo:

  "There is little time."

  But before it turns, I caught something in its face. Meaning. As if some curtain behind those void-black eyes had been drawn back, and the thing that stepped forward to carry me now wore a soul it had only just remembered.

  Recognition.

  The kind you might see in a child who's just learned what fire is, or in an old man who hears a song from youth and mouths the words without knowing why.

  And then it turned, deliberate and strange, toward the heart of the storm. Toward purpose.

  The other followed it, silent and firm, guiding the last of the dockworkers up onto the carts with a gentleness that doesn’t belong to something born from error. The storm flayed their skin, blisters blooming across exposed flesh from hail and sand—but they did not waver. They guided the horses. They hoisted the broken. They did not speak. They did not plead. They knew.

  And then one of them turned to me. Just for a moment. Caught my eye.

  And smiled.

  The biggest, most childlike grin I have ever seen—wide and helpless and full of joy. As if some lost part of itself had been found again in this chaos. As if it had been waiting for the storm its whole life just to begin.

  The world was ending.

  But theirs had only just begun.

  Whatever engine drives us to fear, to scatter, to pray—it is not the same one that stirs them.

  The wind howled louder, as if warning the world to make way. For what had once been bound, now moved with memory.