Someone New

At sea, they say a man’s vow is as sturdy as the hull of his vessel, that his word must hold strong against the hostile tides. Silas had made just one promise in his six years aboard the Angel’s Wing: “I will not betray my Captain.”

***

Waves hammered against the ship as thunder tore through the clouds. It was on this violent November night that a jagged rock pierced the hull of the Angel’s Wing, and Silas Harris pointed a pistol at Captain Rodrick’s chest. 

“Ya best hope the sea’s cursed you with the madness, boy. Otherwise, tonight is the night she takes you,” the Captain said, face impassive. He never showed fear, not at the glint of a pirate’s blade, nor when Governor Trent arrested him for selling counterfeit goods. The Captain was guilty. Still, he talked his way out of the gallows with an easy smirk.

Silas chuckled. “What is sanity, Captain? How am I to know?” 

“Your gun’s wavering, son.” Lightning cracked. Silas clutched his pistol tighter. “Doug’s got his blade at your back. Thomas has a clear shot to your head. There’re four other men on the deck who could kill ya before ya get off a shot. Put the gun down.”

“I can’t.” Silas hoped his words were steadier than his aim. 

The Captain tilted his gaze up at the sky, letting the rain pelt down his face. Eyes closed and head raised, he asked: “Why’s that?”

“I can’t say.”

When the Captain’s eyes finally met his, Silas was faced with a storm more volatile than the one raging through the night. 

“That’s a real shame. Thomas,” he called over his shoulder, “get the rope.” 

The hilt of a sword jabbed at his hand, and Silas’s pistol went clattering against the deck. 

Gregory and Johan bound his arms and legs. The same men he shared countless meals with, snuck his first ale with, hoisted him to his feet and shuffled him to the plank.

Captain Rodrick meandered across the deck until the heat of his breath was close enough to brush Silas’s cheek. 

“Walk the plank, son. Keep the pistol.” He pressed the gun into Silas’s bound hand like it would do him any good now. 

Though the storm shrieked around them, the deck of the Angel’s Wing was silent in a way only a dead man can truly feel. 

Silas turned to look at each and every one of his brothers. Thomas, Wyatt, and Paul met his eyes. Stoic. Distraught. Angry. Doug and Ronald disappeared, unwilling or unable to watch. Gregory and Johan stood on either side of the plank, eyes downcast.

The last face Silas saw was Captain Rodrick’s. His was the first face Silas Harris had seen, too. His tanned skin was less wrinkled then, and the grays hadn’t yet started to spring up at his temples. 

“What are ya doing in a place like this?” The man asked. 

The boy said nothing as he sat in the charred remnants of his family home.

“I can’t say I love what you’ve done with the place. A bit too black and crispy for me. I prefer a home like I do my woman, welcoming and smellin’ like fresh apple pie. Maybe a hint’a gun powder if she’s feisty."

The boy said nothing. The man crouched down and sighed. 

“There’re pirates afoot, boy. You can’t be staying here.”

“I know that,” the boy murmured. 

“What was that, couldn’t hear ya over the wood cracklin’ at your back.”

“I said I know that!” The boy shouted. “They destroyed everything! Mother, father, Sarah. They’re all gone!’ He sobbed into his bloodied hands. “I’m the only one left!”

 “And who are ya?”

The boy scowled. “All that I am is gone.”

“Sounds like an excuse to be someone new.”

“Someone… new?”

The man nodded toward the sea. “I can give you that. I’ve got a ship, ya see. A rowdy crew.”

The boy’s gaze drifted past the man to the glittering shoreline. “Where do you sail?”

“Wherever the sea takes us.” He shrugged. “So, I’ll ask ya one more time: who are ya?”

“I’m…” He paused, thinking. “Silas. Silas Harris.” 

The man’s grin shone just like the sunkissed water as he stuck out his hand. “A pleasure to meet ya, Silas Harris. Are ya ready to live?”

“Who are ya?” Captain Rodrick asked. Suddenly, the sea in Silas’s vision wasn’t that calm, glittering blue. It raged and thrashed at his feet as he teetered at the plank’s edge.

Silas swallowed “All that I am is gone, sir.”

“If only life handed out third chances, son.” 

Silas squeezed his eyes shut as the boat jerked. He toppled from the plank into the dark, angry depths. 

***

Silas jolted, dropping the ladle into the pot of simmering stew. 

“You alright?” Wyatt asked.

“I–I need a moment.”

Silas bolted out of the galley and into the storage closet across the narrow hall.

Not again. Not again! How many times was this? Twelve? Twenty? He’d lost count after the sixth cycle. Silas dug his nails into the soft flesh of his forearm where the mark sat. With every renewal, the symbol got darker, clearer. The first time he saw it, the lines were a pale white, like a long-healed scar. Now, they were charcoal. 

He’d heard the tale around tavern tables and up in the crow’s nest during the evening watch. Every sea-fairer knew of the Reaper’s Mark: a twisted scythe held in a perfect circle. 

It was at the Boar’s Back, a brutish little pub on the Emerald Coast, that Johan first regaled him with the story. He stood on the bar, sloshing ale around with every sweeping wave of his arm.

“The mark is a demand from the Reaper himself. When it appears, the cursed man is required to carry out the quest.”

“What quest?” Silas asked. 

Johan’s smile was crazed as he ducked down to meet Silas’s eyes. “Someone you love must die by your hand.”

There were countless fables where a marked man killed his wife, his child, his parents, only to realize he chose wrong. Never, though, had Silas heard that he must relive the same day until he got it right. 

He refused to kill anyone the first time around. Somehow, that was worse. Wyatt cut himself cooking dinner. He bled out before anyone could find him. When the storm grew more hostile, Doug tried to tie down the deck. Instead, he slipped, hit his head, and fell overboard. Johan was struck by lightning. 

Silas went to bed that night, one of four surviving men. He woke up to a full crew and a sunny sky, ladle in hand and the earthy scent of potato stew kissing his nose.

The day passed. Five men died. Silas came-to for the third time with the same stew bubbling on the stove.

He killed Wyatt first. It wasn’t on purpose. Rather, he didn’t have anything against Wyatt. They’d bunked together during Silas's first year aboard. He snored like a hog, but he was a good man. As good as anyone on the Angel’s Wing could be, anyway. 

He was just the first person Silas saw every time he woke. Surely, that must mean Wyatt was the one. Silas took one of the discarded cooking knives and sliced him clean through the neck.

As he watched the blood seep into the cracks between the floorboards, Silas wondered. Would the mark disappear if he got it right, or would he only know if he made it to the next day? 

Neither happened. He reawakened in the kitchen, the mark on his wrist a pale gray. Every life he took, every cycle he lived through, he prayed the answer would finally come.

It had to be the Captain. He was the only one who’d lived every time. It wasn’t just his vow that kept Silas from killing him. He loved the man like he had the family he lost. Silas loved him, but he couldn’t keep living through this day. He couldn’t. That thought carried him all the way up to the helm. It steadied his hand. It allowed him to pull the trigger. 

Captain Rodrick’s body hit the deck, a fresh hole in his head. 

Silas stared. The man’s expression was calm like the one he wore on early mornings as he watched the sun break on the horizon. 

He sat gently next to the Captain's body, leeching away at the last traces of heat the man would ever give him.

Surely this was enough. The Reaper had to be satisfied now. 

Boots thundered up from the deck as the others shouted at him. He couldn’t hear the words, but it didn’t matter. Whatever they were saying was already screaming in his own chest. 

He took the Captain’s hand in his. A click drew his eyes upward. They met the barrel of a gun, then Thomas’s lethal expression. He pulled the trigger, and the world faded away. 

Silas blinked awake to simmering stew. Wyatt was somewhere at his side, whistling and chopping vegetables. Silas turned his back on him and rolled up his sleeve.  The mark was a solid, undeniable black. The color had broken free of the circle, crawling up Silas’s arm as though his veins were made of ink.

It pulsed with searing heat, the pain offering a clarity Silas had been a stranger to for weeks now. It wasn’t the Captain. It wasn’t Wyatt or Thomas or any of the others. The mark wasn’t getting blacker just because another cycle passed. It hadn’t darkened after those first two rounds, had it? No. The bloodier his hands, the darker the scythe. 

Laughter bubbled up from his gut. It erupted from his lips like Mt. Ghon the last time the Angel’s Wing had sailed east. 

Silas had never heard of a marked man reliving the same day. He’d never heard of it, because the ones who experienced it were all dead. 

The Reaper’s quest demanded his life all along. 

***

Vincent Rodham wasn’t always a captain. Long before he was a sea-fairing man, he’d lived in the Capitol with his wife and two boys. Labor took Rachel from him as she tried to birth their third. At sixteen, Tony joined the military and died fighting a war that meant nothing and helped no one. Benjie, his sweet little boy, he’d been playing too close to the road one day. He darted out to get a runaway toy and was crushed by a trader’s cart.

Captain Rodrick was born the day he laid Benjie to rest. He sold everything to procure the Angel’s Wing, then carved their names into the deck: Rachel, Tony, Benjie. 

When he found Silas, surrounded by smoldering devastation, all he saw was himself standing at the foot of their graves. 

He offered the boy a fresh start and gained another son.

“Captain! Captain, come quick!”

Rodrick wasn’t a running man. He sauntered, stalked, but at the panic in Wyatt’s voice, he moved as fast as he had the day he saw Benjie by the road. He was too late this time, too.

“Oh, son.” 
He collapsed to his knees beside Silas. A kitchen knife jutted out of his chest.

Wyatt crouched down beside Rodrick. “He told me to get more potatoes. The door was locked when I came back. He was already gone when I managed to get it open.”

Rodrick said nothing, staring blankly at what remained of his last boy. Something dark caught his eye, and he turned Silas’s arm over. A gasp rolled through the crew who had filed into the kitchen behind him.

The tide, sometimes, was kind. It hugged the Angel’s Wing, blessing her as she journeyed onward. Other times, the tide was bitterly cruel. The memories came in like the latter, a raging tempest wave. 

Silas sitting beside Wyatt’s corpse in this very same kitchen. Thomas shoved overboard. Gregory’s body slumped against cannons. Johan, Paul, Doug, Ronald, each of them dying over and over again. Silas with a pistol in his hand, shooting the Captain through the skull.

Rodrick glanced around his crew. Anger was the most prevalent expression, sorrow a close second. 

The same feelings were battling brutally in his own chest. He’d ordered Silas’s death in more than one of those cycles. He didn’t regret it. A vow broken made for an untrustworthy man and, at sea, trust was as necessary for survival as food, water, and the wind’s blessing.

Captain Rodrick vowed not to hurt his crew, no matter the hardship. Silas knew that.

He tucked a bloodied strand of hair behind the boy’s ear. He would always be a boy, just like Tony, like Benjie. Silas would never see eighteen.  

There would be no grave for Silas Harris, a boy who only existed to those aboard the Angel’s Wing. Captain Rodrick carried his body to the bow as the crew watched on. He unhooked the blade at Silas’s hip and tucked it into his own holster. 

Rodrick spoke softly, so only the wind and the dead might hear. “Death. Death sounds like an excuse to be someone new, doesn’t it, son?” 

Silas’s body splashed all too lightly as it met the sea. Rodrick ambled across the deck to where his family laid carved into the wood. With the tip of Silas’s blade, he scratched new letters below their names. 

When he was satisfied, he clutched the knife tighter, stared at it as it glittered in the sun like the more welcoming tide. Then, he drove the blade into his chest. 

The crew shouted, the waves crashed, but it all faded around him. The pale scythe mark on his wrist hummed as he collapsed on the deck. His blood seeped into the carved names there: Rachel, Tony, Benjie, Silas, and Vincent Rodham