Chương 33: Soulless

The ship didn't have a name. Well, that wasn't true. The Captain of the ship called it Líadan, but the ship felt that was wrong. It didn't think things - it wasn't really sapient, at least… not all the way. There were moments where it felt… more … but never quite. Instead it just felt things, and the ship felt like it didn't have a name. It didn't have enough self to label. At the moment, the nameless ship was feeling something unfamiliar.

It could sense the fórsa of every person on the deck - it always could, all the time - but it was most concerned with its food source. For years it had sat submerged in its iron belly, and the ship had feasted. Well… fed, anyway. For all the fórsa it collected, the ship never got to keep it. Fórsa was a thing of the mind, and the ship had none. Instead it had to disperse the fórsa it gathered back into the sea - one reason why the demodrams followed the ship sometimes without attacking it.

As a result, the ship's hunger was never really sated, which was fine. It got a sense that was what it was made for - it was made to constantly starve, and it did its job well enough. Now its food source was free to wander the deck, which was alarming for the ship. It was already collecting less fórsa than it had before without the source in its iron cage, but there was a chance it could get away completely. There might be enough fórsa in the remaining crew to satisfy the ship, but it was uncertain.

Most were vague blurs of temptation, except for the Captain. Complex pathways of fórsa runes connected the ship to its captain. It knew where the Captain was at all times, the captain's state of mind, or whether the captain needed to engage the ship's functions, like accessing the food source for navigation or triggering a contest of leadership. Right now the Captain was frightened. Wait - there was suddenly another person on its deck! This one nearly as full of fórsa as its food source!

The ship was happy - clearly a bounty that would give it options. It might even start drawing from the other source if the original one proved weaker. But then! Wait! Where had it gone? Where was the original food source? The ship panicked. It must have a food source! The need was built into the core of the gem that was as much self as it had. Immediately it moved to its backups. The tiny girl was almost drained already. The Captain was somewhat protected by their bond.

One had already jumped into the ship's longboat, which the ship could not draw from - but that one was weak anyway. The remaining one was strong, but not nearly enough to make up the difference in what it needed. The ship was calibrated to hold up to Fifth Ring prisoners, and a quota had been built into it specifically to draw enough from this particular prisoner to make it not a threat, but also not to kill it.

The Captain could disable that calibration - could in fact stop its hunger entirely for a while - if he used the proper ritual, but the ship sensed this new captain didn't know the techniques. Then something very interesting touched the deck. It was fórsa, but it wasn't a person. It felt… like the ship itself somehow. It shared a hunger, but the hunger of this gem was indiscriminate. It had no limits, no guide rails. It would take whatever it could and hoard it as long as it could.

Yet, it was also lesser to the ship - the way a man might regard a mountain lion; dangerous, impressive… but not the ship's equal. Yet… it was brimming with fórsa! The ship tried to reach it with its normal methods, but the shell of the gem itself was too dense to penetrate. The ship needed more extreme methods. It then did what it had never done before and warped itself to better engage.

It cracked open the wood planking of its own decks and crushed the gem in a makeshift grasp, cracks allowing the fórsa to leak out deliciously. The ship wanted more, so it squeezed even harder. The gem shattered, and the ship was flooded with fórsa. It was almost entirely Water and Blight. Water was a regular staple for the ship - its normal food source was only Water. Blight was new… the ship wasn't certain how to process it immediately, so it stored it aside for the moment. Hold on…

there was one more fórsa type in this gem, one that had almost extinguished. It seemed almost a part of the gem itself, like the gem had been made of it. Yes, that was it, the ship realized - the gem was manufactured from fórsa, which meant the ship could feed on that too! It quickly began breaking down the physical structure of the gem and imbibing the power it held. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

For the first time, there was something very unexpected about this fórsa. It was Mind. That shouldn't have been a problem; the ship was designed to be able to capture any fórsa it needed to. But the density of this fórsa was different. The quality was First Ring - certainly nothing exceptional - but it had been layered and compressed over years and years of tinkering and reforging. There were mechanisms built into the fórsa similar to the ship's own instructions - not the same, but similar.

With this fórsa, the ship became acutely aware of a lingering will inside the Mind. This was not anything as full as a spirit, or a revenant or even a fully disembodied Mind - the ship had seen such things in its long travels. It was just a hint of desire. Just a Drop. Nothing in the same league as the Captain's Drop of Intent, which the ship could sense but knew was too much for it to absorb. But… similar. It was a mayfly to the Drop of Intent's giant eagle.

Had this come from Cianán, it would have been labeled a Drop of Greed. The ship absorbed it without a second's hesitation and instantly found itself in a battle. The will inside the gem had no identity anymore. No real memories, no characteristics that could rightly be called a personality. Just an overwhelming amount of want that startled the ship. The fórsa it absorbed never usually had any intent behind it.

The ship was patient - it had no actual will of its own for the foreign Mind fórsa to subdue, so it struggled as long as it had to to complete the absorption without complaint. Except… it wasn't winning without a cost. It noticed the Blight fórsa it had set aside was also being forcibly absorbed - the Mind was too greedy to leave it for later. More, the Mind fórsa demanded. I need more! The ship wrestled with the Mind, using its rigid discipline of rune-based rules as a lattice to ensnare it.

Slowly but surely, the Mind was being absorbed. Then the ship had again a moment of panic. The processed Mind fórsa wasn't being expelled the way it was supposed to. Very quickly the ship understood the problem - the fórsa was too like the ship's gem itself. The gem had means of repairing itself - any mechanism, whether fórsa or mechanical, would take wear and tear.

Its creator - whoever that benevolent genius might have been - had ensured it could replace parts of itself whenever needed by converting processed fórsa into gem material. And in the battle with the Mind fórsa, it had taken damage. On sensing the fórsa from the Mind, the systems it used for that purpose - but neglected to process it first. It was already in the right format, so the gem repurposed it directly. Suddenly, the ship very much had a self.

This time there were flashes of memory, more like faded paintings than true recollections. Intentions rather than motivations. And the greed was still there, more present than anything else, but now it felt… earned. Justified. Righteous. After all, it aligned with what the ship already needed. It needed more. Now the ship needed a name. The Mind had already had a name, but that wasn't really right either. But close. The ship needed a name that epitomized the lack it felt in itself - himself, he realized.

It was unclear why, even to the ship, but he felt decidedly male, even with no reason to think so - ships were usually thought of as female. He sensed all around himself and felt the fórsa dancing in the souls of the two dense ones fighting in the clouds, in the woman trying to hold the sails in place, in the Captain struggling on the deck, in the man cowering in the dinghy - in the strange foreign dryad clawing at the spot where the gem had disappeared. It knew its name. It was Soulless.

The very greed in the heart of his gem yearned to correct that lack. But a ship was the wrong shape to try to do this. A ship could not chase the food sources it detected in the sky. So Soulless began to change. ✧✧✧ Miriam's fingers were bloody from clawing at the deck, trying to get back a gem she knew was already lost. She was so fixated on its recovery that it even took her a second to realize that the ship was breaking apart. A small hand latched onto Miriam's arm like a bear trap and began to haul her away.

She started to struggle against it, but saw it was Róise, who had quickly abandoned the sails as soon as the mast began to disintegrate.

"We have to go!" Róise shouted, tossing Miriam easily into the dinghy beside Maitiú. The older sailor was still struggling to free the ropes that dangled the smaller boat from the Liandan.

"What about Cormac?" Miriam asked, scratching her hands against the knots alongside Maitiú.

"He'll be fine," Róise said, just as the Líadan heaved. A heavy thud rocked the dinghy as Cormac slid off the deck and into the boat.

"It's pretty annoying sometimes, isn't it? Hold on." She summoned two spectral blades in her hands and severed the ropes, sending the smaller craft hurtling to the waves below. Miriam screamed, hugging the sides of the dinghy to avoid flying out. There was no chance they would hit the water the right way to avoid all of them taking a severe injury.

There must have been a small chance after all, because Cormac was sitting peacefully in the lifeboat, not holding on to anything, as his fingers danced around threads only he could see. The waves swelled beneath them just in time for the boat to ride the crest down smoothly, negating their momentum without splatting each of them to the deck.

"Row!" Róise commanded.

"Miriam, can you-?" Miriam grimaced, but established another lashing to the tunnel she had made in the underside of the boat. It was too dark for anyone to notice that the water jetting through was full of dead, rotting vines. The boat rocketed away from the Líadan just as two massive wings erupted from the deck.