Chapter 4
Whispers of the Crown
Barnaby discovers the Sunken Crown can break the curse and offer redemption, but its power is tied to his own past betrayal.
The ship groaned around him, a sound like a man reliving a wound. Barnaby pressed his back against the salt-slick wood of the mainmast, trying to steady his breath. The spectral crew had melted into the shadows after their cryptic chorus, leaving him alone on the deck with the creak of rigging and the whisper of a wind that smelled of rot and distant lightning.
He had been on this damned vessel for what felt like hours, though the bruised sky showed no sun to mark time. The sea around him was black as oil, and the stars were wrong—clustered in patterns he had never seen in all his years of honest sailing. Every instinct screamed at him to find a way off, to swim for any shore, to escape this floating tomb. But the rowboat he had used to board the ship now sat in the captain’s quarters, and the water below churned with shapes that were not fish.
A door scraped open behind him.
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