The Black Rose Read Free

constructed entirely from alchemical piping and stone slabs. Several windows high above glimmered with artificial light. The sky was wrought with the perpetual storm of this place, lightning splintering the billowing clouds. A portal of dark energy enwrapped her, some invisible force pulling her backwards through it. The image of the alleyway was disappearing, becoming smaller and smaller as if at the end of a telescope. Her senses were gradually shutting down: she could see nothing, barely breathe, hear only the stifling silence of the Darkness…
    Ruth gasped and sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. She, too, was in a cabin of
The Golden Turtle,
though as captain she had considerably bigger quarters than Jack’s. She swung her legs over the bed and dropped down, seating herself at the table bolted to the floor in the center of the room. She pressed a key on the table leg, and an overhead lamp cast an orange hue across the room.
    She lay her forearm on the table, palm upwards. A tattoo, a stylized lion in black ink, was woven into her skin just below the elbow. This and the nightmare were the only remnants from her life before
The Golden Turtle.
    Five years previously, she had awoken aboard the ship with no memory of her former life or how she had arrived there. The captain, Ishmael, had told her she’d been hauled out of the sea, unconscious, close to drowning. With nowhere to return to, she had been enlisted in the ship’s crew and eventually adopted by Ishmael. It was only later, when she had come into contact with the Cult of Dionysus, that her recurring nightmare began to make sense. She had been imprisoned on Nexus but had somehow fallen or escaped into the Darkness and ended up in another world.
    Ruth sat back and gazed up at the lantern’s fiery pattern crisscrossing the metal ceiling. Jack, she knew, had had a similar family experience but without a parental figure like Ishmael as a guiding beacon at the end of it. She presumed Jack wanted to return to his home world, but she was secretly glad he was unable to for the time being. Her first proper talk with him, the night he had arrived on
The Golden Turtle,
had been the only time she had opened up to anyone but Ishmael. She considered seeing if he was awake now but dismissed the idea immediately. He wouldn’t want to be disturbed at this time.
    She stood, turned off the light, and went back to bed.

    Jack awoke properly to a knock on the door a few hours later. It was Aonair, a crew member he vaguely knew.
    â€œSardâr wants you to get to the command deck. We’re nearing our destination.”
    Jack washed quickly, changed into new clothes, and made his way across the ship to the command deck. There was obviously no natural lighting here, as they were underwater, but soft lamps lining the wood-panelled corridors mimicked the cycle of day and night. He passed various crew members and eventually came to the double doors emblazoned with a golden turtle symbol.
    This room was a large glassy dome, the head of the turtle, against which the dank water of their current passage pressed on all sides. Futuristic navigational machines lined the walls, operators sitting before the humming screens. In the center, on a lower level, a large oak table was bolted down, with a plethora of maps pinned to it. Three people stood around it. Ruth, adorned with her signature bandana, was directly opposite him; the elf Sardâr, Middle Eastern in complexion and wearing a tunic, studying one of the maps; and Bál the dwarf stood a little back from the others, distinctly out of place in his traveling gear.
    Bál’s first reaction to
The Golden Turtle
had been a mixture of wonder and gruffness. He came from a world, Thorin Salr, which roughly resembled Earth’s Dark Ages. This ultrasophisticated technology had baffled Jack, so he could only imagine how Bál felt.
    â€œJack.” Sardâr gestured for him to join them at the table. “We’re