Chapter 4

We were out at sea for a long time. It was an endless stretch of blue, or at least it seemed like one. However, one of the upsides was that it calmed everything down. After all that death and destruction, there was only the gentle waves that rocked our boat, moving us ever so slightly. A moderately large hole had opened in the hull, and we had tried to fix it by patching it up with what remained of the rattan. It didn't stop the water from entering, but it had definitely slowed the rate of water intake down.

At least, until the marauders. Looks like we were not the only people to go through green meadows, lasers and a kraken. In the past few days, we met several boats of people. Our fights usually ended in a stalemate, a battle that was stopped, not in sympathy or pity, but because any commotion might draw over the kraken…or something far worse.

The survivors had formed communities, and like any community, there were all kinds of boats. Some were there to buy and sell, some bartered while others just wanted to escape as far as possible from whatever they had seen and faced. Which I would understand. Not many people wouldn't run in the face of death.

Soon, I tied some boats together by their sides to form a large floating platform, and we decided on the name "Soul", simply because it sounded cool. People came together in separate guilds and instead of uniting to fight the kraken, to find a way to escape this place, they only saw their own lives in their own eyes. After guilds were introduced, it wasn't long before new information was circulated around.

The news spread like wildfire, and we quickly learnt that the kraken was more than just tentacles and jaws. It was blind, which explained the wild swings it took. However, when coming across other survivors, they all had one thing in common. All of them claimed that the kraken only appeared when blood was spilt into the sea. We made the hypothesis, I would say assumption, but Wisp insisted on the word choice to "show our standards", that although completely blind, the kraken had a very sensitive sense of taste and smell. Its hearing was average, around fifty yards or so, meaning silence was but optional. What we had to keep in mind was to never stay in places with blood, and never to spill even a single drop of blood into the water. The kraken not only ate flesh, but would also devour anything that was in the vicinity. Its teeth were serrated, so Wisp made an "educated guess" that it was a carnivore.

"What?" Wisp had said when Frey and I looked at him. "It's pretty obvious at this point."

The three of us also decided to call the bad guilds "Marauders". Because that's what they were best at, robbing supplies, beating people and taking over other floating platforms. They were the most powerful amongst the guilds, due to their violent ways. It seemed like that would be the case for the next few days, until another guild rose up. Hours? Days? Months? I lost track of time as Wisp had noticed that the days were irregular. We tried making a small sundial out of a needle Wisp had kept, I don't know how he managed to get all of that into such a skinny figure, but it didn't work either. Some nights would last for days and some days lasted less than a night. Eventually we gave up on even trying to guess the time.

Everything was routine. Frey hunting for food, me removing the water as the hole had opened even more, so we had to cut out the wood that stuck out like a splinter and refashion it into a makeshift container. It wasn't big, nor deep, but it was enough to manage on. And Wisp being a pain in the neck, as usual.

Screams rang out from a guild that called themselves the Flags, whatever that was supposed to mean. They weren't as thin as flagpoles, neither were they exceptionally patriotic for the guild, so why Flag?

Wisp squinted and looked over at them, before gasping in shock. "They're on fire." We stopped whatever we were doing and looked over.

People shrieked in agony as they toppled into the water, some still on fire. The cries of pain were unbearable to hear. Some people in the boats were making futile attempts to stop the flames and others writhed about as the blaze consumed them. Above, huge, black smoke billowed into the skies.

And all around the boats were none other than the Marauders. From that day…

Fire became the biggest threat to us.

(My apologies for the short chapter)