Dead Lands

I raised my sword in a hopeless attempt to parry, barely managing to avoid the first blow chopping me in half. My arm shook with the impact. With a second blow, my sword flew away from my trembling hand, and I barely dodged the third by dropping to the floor of the deck.

Fortunately, before my assailant could finish me off, a hail of lethal ice spikes slammed into it. I winced at the gruesome scene that ensued, before getting up and running toward a group of crew members.

They were all wielding bows and tossed one to me, which I reflexively caught, followed by a quiver of arrows which I barely held on to. 

"Why are you all using bows? Where are the guns?" I queried desperately as I started nocking an arrow. 

One of them gave me an odd look. "What are guns?" he asked quizzically.

I cursed under my breath and started trying to shoot the enemies while hopefully not accidentally killing some of my allies. Frankly, I can't tell if I shot more foes than friends in that battle, but all I can recall is that at some point, the tide turned when a glowing figure appeared and started wiping out our enemies.

Later, someone told me that the glowing figure I had seen was our captain, who had been 'away'. I had no idea where he was while we were fighting and dying, but I was just grateful that he had returned before we were all dead.

After a short cleanup and a ceremony for the dead, we gently wrapped our fallen comrades in cloth and dropped them into the ocean, while dumping our dead foes overboard. Or to be more accurate, everyone else did so while I was busy trying to survive my motion sickness. 

Apparently, I was the only one who had motion sickness on the whole ship, because I saw no one else belowdecks. After some time, some of the crew came to visit me, chatted for a bit about events I had no recollection of and left after wishing me well. For the most part, I nodded along and pretended I was too sick to talk much. I also learnt that my name was apparently 'Timmy'.

It was the first time I had learnt the name of one of the bodies I had inhabited. Of course, they were all illusions, but it still felt like I was in a stranger's body due to how realistic all of the people around me seemed.

The next few days were relatively peaceful. Whenever the ship was rolling less and my seasickness subsided, I spent the days wandering the ship or sometimes acting as lookout. The ship seemed to be self-maintained, and remained clean despite me never once seeing a soul cleaning the decks. Moreover, the sails seemed to be always full and I once witnessed what I was told was a rudder turning by itself.

Unfortunately, these uneventful days were not to last. For a terrible score of days, we braved typhoons that could have swallowed countries, tempests that would have ended any lesser vessel, and even the ship being struck by lightning for hours - though I noted that the lightning seemed to strike only at our ship.

Nevertheless, these perils too passed in due time, and I was slowly feeling a bond with the crew mates who I interacted with on a daily basis. Sometimes I had long talks with an old, scarred veteran while watching the sunset, or laughed at sailors' jokes with a small group while the stars came out all around us. 

As the days went by, I felt myself settling into the life of a sailor. Few things reminded me of the cruel fact that this was all a farce, that none of the things I saw, the friendships I forged were real. Sometimes, as the blood-red sea faded into darkness while the sun drowned beneath the waves, I could almost convince myself that I was on Earth, with a group of lifelong fellows on a journey to the ends of the world.

Then one day I woke up feeling terribly upset, and not merely due to my roiling stomach. There was a strangely somber atmosphere in the air, and as the light faded into night, I made the mistake of asking the veteran an uncharacteristic question while we were conversing quietly.

"Hey, Jack… where are we headed to?" I asked.

He stared at me for a moment, then let out a laugh tinged with sorrow, even a hint of grief. 

"I didn't think you were the joking type, Timmy…." he answered, not meeting my eyes.

"I mean it, Jack. Where is this ship going?" I questioned, feeling an atypical surge of annoyance.

Suddenly he turned to look at me. I flinched at the pain, the despair in his eyes that teetered on the brink of madness. "We're going to the Dead Lands, my boy. That make you happy?" he asked in a voice somewhere between rage and bleak humor. 

I stayed there by myself for a long time after he left, recalling the deep emotions in his gaze, hating myself for the grief I had caused him. Yet even as I fell into a dreamless sleep, I couldn't help but think how out of character it was for him to snap at me….

Perhaps it was a sign of the destruction to come.