On the morning of the third day of the Emperor's ultimatum, Louai woke to a different sound. It was not the usual creaking of wood, nor the roar of waves beneath the hull, but something more like a faint hum, as if thousands of insects were buzzing just beneath the water's surface. He rose from his narrow bed in the small captain's quarters, donned his dark cloak quickly, and climbed to the deck where he found Dorik standing at the helm, his single eye fixed on the gray horizon with a focus Louai had never seen on him before...
"What is happening?" Louai asked, his voice calm but his eyes searching rapidly for signs of danger in every direction..
"The currents have changed," Dorik replied without shifting his gaze from the water ahead. "At midnight, the ship was moving according to the map Lithan gave us, smoothly and predictably. But about an hour ago, the currents began behaving as if they had a life of their own. Look there."
Dorik pointed with his whole hand—not his finger—toward a point several hundred meters away on their left side. Louai stared intently, and at first he saw nothing but the usual shimmering fog. But after moments, he began to discern a strange shape: a massive whirlpool, spinning very slowly, appearing and disappearing beneath the water's surface in an irregular pattern, as if breathing rather than rotating.
"What is that?" Louai whispered, feeling an unexplainable coldness run down his spine despite the relative warmth of the morning.
"A death current," Dorik said, his voice becoming lower than it had ever been. "I named it that myself, because I've seen what it does to ships that dare approach it. Those whirlpools are not ordinary, Prince. They are gateways, or something like gateways, opening and closing beneath the water in a pattern that cannot be fully predicted. A ship that enters one might emerge from the other side of the Archipelago in an instant, or might never emerge at all."
Louai stood silent, his eyes fixed on the distant whirlpool appearing and disappearing in a terrifying pattern. His accountant's mind was working at full speed, trying to find a mathematical equation that could explain this phenomenon, but he failed as he had failed before in explaining the laws of the fog. There were things in this world that did not submit to numbers, and this realization, in itself, was what disturbed him most.
"How many of these currents are in our current area?" he asked finally, trying to regain control of the situation in the most practical way possible.
Dorik looked at the map Gilbertt had copied, which was placed on a small wooden table beside the helm. The map still retained some of its strange luster, though the edges were beginning to fade slightly as Lithan had warned. "According to the map, there are three active death currents in our immediate vicinity. One to our left as you saw, one about a mile ahead, and a third..." Dorik paused for a moment, trying to read the small symbols on the map, "...and a third that moves. This is the most dangerous part. Most currents are fixed in their positions, but some, the rare and ancient ones, move slowly through the water, changing their course without warning."
"Moves?" Louai repeated, utterly disbelieving what he had heard. "How can a water current move?"
"Don't ask me how, Prince. I'm only telling you what I've seen with my own eye." Dorik raised his gaze from the map and fixed it back on the horizon. "On my first voyage, twenty years ago, I lost half my crew when we collided with a moving death current that appeared suddenly out of nowhere. We were sailing in calm waters, and suddenly, the ground opened beneath us—or what seemed like ground. The ship capsized, and three men were swallowed by the whirlpool before any of us could help them. We never saw any trace of them afterward. No bodies, no wreckage, nothing."
Louai fell silent for a moment, analyzing the information with his cold mind. He knew time was running out; the four-day ultimatum his father had given him was shrinking rapidly, and only about two and a half days remained to complete the mission and return to Oswald. But he also knew that haste in these waters could be more devastating than any mission failure.
"Can we go around them?" he asked, trying to find a practical solution.
"Yes, but that would add at least eight hours to our journey," Dorik replied, his single eye gleaming with hidden anxiety. "And there is another problem: the moving current may change its course while we try to go around, and we may find ourselves trapped between three currents instead of one."
Louai felt the weight of the decision pressing on his chest. He had to choose between risking crossing the current zone to save time, or going around it and sacrificing precious hours that might mean complete mission failure. But there was a third option, one that had not occurred to Dorik.
"The map," Louai said suddenly, reaching for it and examining it more carefully. "Look at this symbol here, next to the third moving current. It's different from the other symbols. What does it mean?"
Dorik approached and looked at the symbol Louai had indicated, his features furrowing in deep thought. "I've never seen this symbol before," he admitted finally, frustrated. "Perhaps it's something new, or perhaps it's a mistake in the map itself. These maps are not without errors, Prince. Those who draw them are not human, and what they do is not always exact science."
"Or perhaps it's a key," Louai said, his eyes beginning to gleam with that cold intelligence known to his scribes in the palace. "Look: the two fixed currents have the same symbol, the same shape, roughly the same size. But the moving current has a different symbol, slightly smaller, with a dotted line extending from it and disappearing to the northwest. What if this dotted line is not just decoration on the map, but a safe passage? What if the moving current is not just a danger, but a gateway to a fast passage that can be used if we know how?"
Dorik looked at Louai with a look that carried a mixture of astonishment and awe. "You're suggesting we deliberately enter the moving current?"
"I'm not suggesting we enter it," Louai corrected calmly, "I'm suggesting we use it. If this dotted line represents a path emerging from the current, that means someone has used this current before and survived, leaving this clue on the map for those who know how to read it."
"Or it could be a trap," Dorik objected with extreme caution, "someone might have wanted to mislead others, to drive them to certain death."
"Everything in this journey is a potential trap," Louai replied with that black pragmatism that distinguished him. "The question is not whether this is a real trap, but whether the potential reward is worth the risk. We have only two and a half days, Dorik. If we waste eight hours going around, we will arrive at our destination too late, and the deal will have slipped away. But if we take the risk, we may arrive on time, and we may have the upper hand in the negotiations."
Dorik stood silent for a full minute, his single eye moving between Louai's pale face and the mysterious map before him. He knew the prince was right in terms of calculations, but the old sailor's instinct was screaming inside him, warning of an adventure that might be his last.
"If we decide to do this," Dorik said finally, in a voice carrying cautious surrender, "we will need to change everything about our sailing method. Moving currents don't behave like ordinary currents; they have their own rhythm, their own pulse. We will need to maneuver according to that rhythm, not according to our own will."
"I trust you," Louai said, placing his hand on the old captain's shoulder. "You know these waters better than any living human. If anyone says it can be done, you are that person."
Dorik looked at Louai for a long moment, then turned his face toward the horizon where the moving current was slowly shifting in the distance, and ordered the crew to adjust the sails and prepare for a maneuver they had never performed before.
The following hour passed in indescribable tension, the ship moving very slowly toward the moving current's location according to Dorik's precise instructions. The old captain stood at the helm, his single eye fixed on the water ahead, reading the wave movements and color changes in the water as if reading an open book that no one else could see.
Gilbertt stood beside Louai, his face paler than usual, his hands trembling in a way he could not hide. "My Lord," he whispered in a barely audible voice, "are we about to die?"
Louai looked at his old scribe, and for the first time felt the weight of responsibility he bore not only for himself, but for these men who had entrusted him with their lives. "No, Gilbertt," he said in a voice warmer than he usually used, "we are about to do something no one has done before—or at least, no one has done successfully. And there is a big difference between taking a risk and dying."
"Are you not afraid?" Gilbertt asked, his eyes searching Louai's face for any sign of natural human fear.
Louai thought about the question for a moment before answering. He could have said he wasn't afraid, but that would have been an obvious lie. He could have said he was afraid but pretending to be brave, but that too wasn't entirely accurate. Instead, he chose the truth as he saw it.
"Fear exists, Gilbertt," he said slowly, "but I learned long ago that fear is not an enemy to be suppressed, but a tool to be used. Fear sharpens the senses, focuses the mind, and makes decisions more precise. If I weren't afraid, I would be reckless, and if I were reckless, I would already be dead. Fear is what keeps me alive, and what keeps you alive too, as long as I don't let it paralyze me."
Gilbertt looked at his prince with a new gaze, as if seeing him for the first time, then nodded slowly and returned to his trembling silence, less afraid than he had been moments before.
"Prepare yourselves," Dorik suddenly shouted, his voice carrying a sharp warning tone. "We are approaching the edge of the current. I will need all your focus in the coming minutes."
Louai looked ahead and saw what Dorik was warning about. The water before them began to change color gradually from dark gray to a strange greenish-blue, as if transforming into a substance entirely different from ordinary sea water. There were subtle ripples on the surface, resembling a giant serpent moving very slowly beneath the water, creating a pattern of overlapping waves that followed no natural logic Louai had ever known.
"Now," Dorik commanded, turning the helm at a sharp angle, "loosen the main sail halfway, and tighten the rear sail completely. We will need a different speed than our usual speed."
The three sailors moved with great speed and professionalism, executing orders with precision despite the high tension. Louai felt the ship change beneath his feet, as if responding to a new rhythm, a rhythm Dorik was imposing with his expert hands.
At that moment, Louai felt something strange happening beneath the ship. There were subtle vibrations, irregular, as if something was scraping the ship's hull from below, examining it, deciding whether it was worthy of passage or not. He looked down, but the water was too dark for him to see anything directly beneath the surface.
"Dorik," he said quietly, trying not to alarm the crew, "there is something beneath us."
"I know," Dorik replied without shifting his gaze from the water ahead, his voice remarkably focused. "It's the current itself. It's examining us. Don't move, and don't make any loud sounds. Let it feel us, then let it decide."
Long, heavy seconds passed, the ship vibrating beneath their feet in a strange pattern, as if playing on invisible strings. Then, suddenly, the vibrations stopped, and the water began to change around them again. The whirlpool ahead of them seemed to widen gradually, opening a narrow passage in its center, a passage where the water was completely calm, as if a magical tunnel leading to another place.
"We're in," Dorik whispered, his voice mixing awe and astonishment. "The current has accepted us. Now, we don't deviate from this path by even a single degree, or we'll lose everything."
The ship moved slowly inside the narrow passage, the calm water around them strangely contrasting with the massive whirlpools spinning just a few meters away on each side. Louai felt as if he was walking through a narrow corridor between two walls of moving water, as if any small mistake might crush the ship like an eggshell.
"How long will this take?" he asked in a quiet voice, trying not to show his growing anxiety.
"Perhaps an hour, perhaps less," Dorik replied, continuing to steer the ship with extreme precision. "It depends on the speed of the current itself, which is not constant. But don't worry, Prince. We are in safe hands now."
Louai found little comfort in these words, but he kept his face calm, his eyes following the narrow passage ahead, and the dark water around them that seemed to contain mysterious shapes moving in the far corners of his vision.
And as the ship progressed slowly through the passage, Louai noticed something strange on the edge of the right current: a dark shape, almost rectangular, floating motionless on the water's surface. As they approached closer, he realized what it was: the remains of a ship, or what remained of it. A shattered hull, broken in two, its sails completely torn, with no sign of life on board.
"Look," Gilbertt whispered, his voice trembling. "Another ship."
"Not an ordinary ship," Louai said, his eyes narrowing in intense focus. "Look at the hull shape. This is not a merchant ship, nor a warship from Oswald or Liridan. This design is different. This ship... this is a ship from the Amroz Sultanate."
Dorik looked toward the wreckage and nodded with sad confirmation. "You're right, Prince. This is an Amrozian ship, or what remains of it. I've heard tales of Amrozian convoys trying to shortcut through the Archipelago, but they always end up like this. The moving currents don't distinguish between friend and foe. They accept those who respect them and devour those who ignore them."
The ship moved slowly past the wreckage, and Louai stared at the broken hull, trying to imagine what had happened to that ship's crew. Did they all die? Or did some survive and find their way to shore? Or did they disappear just as his great-grandfather had disappeared thirty years ago? There were no answers, only that heavy silence surrounding them from every side.
After about ten minutes of sailing inside the passage, Louai noticed a new change. The water walls on both sides began to narrow gradually, as if the passage was closing behind them while opening ahead. He felt the ship accelerate slightly, as if the current was pushing it gently toward exiting its territory.
"We are approaching the end," Dorik said, obvious relief in his voice. "A few more minutes and we'll be in safer waters... or at least, safer than we were."
And suddenly, without any warning, something unexpected happened. The water ahead had seemed as calm as it had been throughout the journey, but suddenly, a massive shape appeared out of nowhere directly in front of the ship—a huge dark mass that completely blocked the passage, as if emerging suddenly from beneath the water without any prior warning.
"What is that?!" shouted one of the sailors, his hand trembling on the rope.
"Silence!" Dorik snarled, trying with all his strength to change the ship's direction, but the passage was too narrow for any major maneuver. "This is not a current... this is something else!"
Louai stood beside Dorik, his eyes fixed on the massive shape blocking the passage ahead. The shape was moving very slowly, as if breathing, and its surface gleamed with a faint light beneath the water, as if covered with a layer of crystal or something similar. It seemed like a living creature, but unlike anything Louai had ever seen. It was no fish, no whale, none of the sea creatures he knew. It was something else, something older, something that had existed in these waters long before any human had sailed them.
"Dorik," Louai said in a voice calmer than he actually felt, "what is that thing?"
"I don't know," Dorik admitted, his voice carrying fear he didn't try to hide. "I've never seen anything like this in all my years of sailing these waters. But I know one thing: we must stop immediately. Any attempt to pass through it might be our end."
"We can't stop!" Louai said sharply, pointing toward the rear where the passage was closing rapidly behind them. "Look! The current is closing behind us. If we stop, we'll be trapped between this thing and the closing current. We have to move."
Dorik had no immediate answer. His face was as pale as snow, and his single eye moved between the massive shape ahead and the narrow passage behind, as if trying to calculate survival probabilities as fast as possible.
Then, in that moment of extreme tension, Louai noticed something he hadn't noticed before: the massive shape ahead was not moving randomly. It was moving in a regular pattern, resembling the breathing pattern of a deeply sleeping creature, or perhaps waiting for something. And above all, he noticed something else: on the shape's surface, there were markings, mysterious engravings resembling those he had seen on the map—the same symbols that were beside the moving current.
"Dorik," Louai said slowly, pointing toward the markings on the shape's surface, "look at these engravings. Do you see them? They are the same symbols on the map."
Dorik stared with intense focus, then his single eye widened in astonishment. "You're right... these are the same symbols. But what does this mean?"
"Perhaps it means this thing is not an obstacle," Louai said, his voice becoming more resolute, "but part of the path. Perhaps these engravings are the key to passage, like the laws you taught me on the first night. Perhaps we should not try to avoid this thing, but interact with it in a specific way."
"And how will we do that?" Dorik asked, his voice carrying growing desperation. "We don't know what it wants, and we don't know how to communicate with it!"
"No, but we know one thing: it follows a pattern," Louai said, his eyes gleaming with that cold light known to his advisors in the palace. "Everything in this Archipelago follows patterns, Dorik. The fog, the currents, even the creatures that live here. They all follow rhythms and laws we don't fully understand, but they exist and are readable if we know how to look."
Louai looked at the massive shape ahead, at the mysterious engravings on its surface, at the regular pattern of its movement, then said in a firm voice: "I'm going to do something that might be foolish, but it might be the only way to pass."
Louai descended quickly to his cabin, where the second chest of Depths Salt was still carefully stored. He opened it, took a small handful of pure white crystals, then climbed back to the deck and approached the ship's edge.
"What are you doing?" Dorik shouted, real terror in his voice. "Don't throw anything into the water! That's one of the laws I taught you!"
"I know," Louai said, raising his hand that held the white crystals. "But this is not just 'anything,' Dorik. This is Depths Salt. The only substance the creatures of this Archipelago recognize as having real value. If this thing ahead is part of the Archipelago's system, it might recognize this substance and respond to it."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then we will have lost a small handful of salt, and perhaps our lives as well," Louai said with terrifying accountant-like coldness, "but the other option is to stay here until the passage closes behind us completely and we become trapped forever."
Before Dorik could object, Louai threw the white crystals into the water directly in front of the ship, in the path of the massive shape blocking the passage.
The moment of silence that followed was longer than any moment in Louai's entire journey. Everyone stared in astonishment at the white crystals disappearing beneath the dark water's surface, then at the massive shape that hadn't moved for a moment, as if time itself had frozen.
Then something unexpected happened: the massive shape began to move—but not as it had been moving before. It began to move to the side, very slowly, as if deliberately making way for them. Its movement was heavy and deliberate, as if responding to something it had sensed in the water, something that made it decide this small ship was worthy of passage.
"It worked," Gilbertt whispered in an astonished voice, staring at the passage that had suddenly opened before them.
"Move, Dorik!" Louai commanded in a sharp voice, his eyes fixed on the narrow passage that had opened ahead. "Before it changes its mind!"
Dorik didn't need to be told twice. He turned the helm quickly, and the ship surged forward through the passage that had opened for it, leaving behind the massive shape that had blocked the way moments before, slowly moving back to its original position, as if it had never moved at all.
The ship crossed the passage quickly, and after a few minutes, everyone felt a change in the water around them. It became more stable, less vibrating, more natural. They had exited the moving current zone and entered calmer waters, where the fog began to lift gradually, revealing a new horizon ahead.
Dorik stood at the helm, breathing heavily, his single eye fixed on the calm waters ahead. He finally turned toward Louai, his single eye carrying a mixture of astonishment, admiration, and fear.
"How did you know the salt would work?" he asked in a voice still trembling slightly.
Louai didn't answer immediately. He stood at the ship's edge, looking at the dark water where he had thrown the handful of salt minutes before, thinking about everything that had happened, everything he had learned about this mysterious Archipelago.
"I didn't know," he admitted finally, his voice calm but heavy with new awareness. "But I knew one thing: in this world, everything has a price, and everything responds to its own value. The salt is not just merchandise here; it's a key. A key to understanding how this place works. And I am still at the beginning of understanding it."
He looked toward the new horizon opening before them, where the shapes of new islands began to appear in the distance—different from those they had seen before, larger and more organized, as if carrying promises of new secrets waiting to be uncovered.
"How far are those islands?" Louai asked, his tone returning to its usual coldness.
Dorik looked in the direction Louai indicated and estimated the distance with experienced eyes. "Perhaps three hours' sail, if the wind holds as it is. But..."
"But what?"
"But these islands are not on the map Lithan gave us," Dorik said, pointing to the map still open on the table beside him. "Look, the map shows only open water in this direction, and no islands are recorded here at all."
Louai paused for a moment, looking at the map, then at the horizon where the new islands loomed in the distance, then back to the map again. There was a clear contradiction between what his eyes saw and what the map indicated, and this contradiction, in itself, was a new lesson.
"So," Louai said slowly, "either the map is incomplete, or these islands are new, or they appear and disappear like the currents we just crossed. In any case, we need to know more before we approach them."
"How will we do that?" Gilbertt asked, some of his natural curiosity returning despite everything that had happened.
Louai thought for a moment, then said: "We'll send a small reconnaissance. A small boat with two sailors, approaching close enough to see what's there, but not close enough to be in danger. Dorik, can you arrange that?"
Dorik looked at Louai with a new gaze, the gaze of a man realizing he was facing a mind that never stopped working even in the most tense moments. "I'll arrange it immediately, Prince. But I warn you: these islands may be more dangerous than they appear. In my experience, anything that doesn't appear on maps in this Archipelago usually does so for a good reason."
"I know," Louai said, his eyes not leaving the distant islands, "but the good reasons in this world are often the most valuable lessons that can be learned. And we will need every lesson we can get if we want to survive the coming days."
While the crew prepared the small reconnaissance boat, Louai stood alone at the ship's edge, looking at the distant islands whose details were gradually becoming clearer as they approached. He knew that every step in this Archipelago carried new surprises, and that what he had learned so far was just the beginning of a deeper and more complex understanding of this mysterious world.