The Void of the Black Tide

Captain Algol Deathmoid stands with the newly created crew of The Perished.

*Four Horsemen Studios Graveyard Skeletons are featured for storytelling embellishment and are NOT Corsair Creations Co products.

There was no sky there, only pressure, endless and ancient. A place where light was never welcome, and darkness thrived. From this wound in the world, a place not meant to hold anything, something began to congeal.

First, there was a folding, like waves turning inward. Currents collapsed into one another, twisting the water into impossible shapes that seemed to go against nature itself.

What formed was skeletal, but not true bone. The body was etched from the negative space between currents, its surface refracting nothing. Limbs stretched in slow spirals, joints clicking softly like stone thawing after millennia. A spine grew upward, vertebrae assembling from whirlpools collapsing in reverse. A skull crowned last, with eyes both too alive and too cold to be of this world. When his form completed, the water flinched. Around him, the seabed shuddered and even death could feel what had been born.

The trench, once dormant, reacted like a mind refusing its own thought. There was no name yet. No voice… Something worse… Understanding. His first thoughts were not his own. The moment he existed, he saw the war.

Flashes crashed into his mind like a storm at sea. A reef turned prison, marked with sorrow. A god weeping as he strikes down his child. Another laughing as fire devours coral palaces. And something else, lurking behind them all… watching… calculating… waiting.

He was not there, but he remembers. And that is enough to damn everything. From those fractured memories, a thought forms. "They had no shape. No truth. Only failure dressed in power. This world was forged from confusion… and sealed with mercy. Neither belongs here anymore."

He stood in the Black Tide unmoved and the sea parted. He stepped once.. pressure rippled and currents scattered. Something in the water recognized him — Not as a god, but as proof that the sea still holds secrets it regrets. And then, reality began to yield.

Somewhere within the depths, he could sense a presence. Something long abandoned. By the sheer force of his will, the ocean retreated, and he plunged his hand into the darkness. What he retrieved… half-buried in the trench edge, did not gleam, almost as if it were the absence of light.

Ornate and marred, the hilt broken, the edge dulled by time and memory. Symbols, curved and ancient, spiraled down its length. It belonged to someone who thought fate could be guided.

The blade flickered with his will… glowed dull, then darker. He broke it, and then reforged it. The symbols burnt away and a new inscription bled into the steel, "Ruin by Silence."

Upon grasping the handle, the trench cracked and a vision seared into him like a hot blade. He saw the Tide-Realm Isles, scattered like broken teeth across the ocean. Temples sunken, altars defiled. He saw fragments of godhood left unclaimed. Waiting… whispering.

"This…" he breathed, "…is what remains of failure…It must be erased."

He took the blade and carved the water, invoking his will. Ruined iron stirred from the trench walls. Driftwood and skeletal frames snapped together with a violence that seemed eager. Bones, too long buried, rose like chains rearranging to match his desire. With slow patience, he formed the beginnings of his vessel.

From ripples in the water, he drew shapes, which crawled into existence. Neither dead nor living, their bones held fractures that did not heal, glowing faintly from within, like they remembered dying, but not who they were. They did not ask why they served, nor did they speak. They answered only to vision. As they took their place beside him, he continued to carve. But the deeper he went, the fainter the responses.

Something within the trench resisted his will. The weight of his influence thinned with each new soul carved from the depths. They came slower… fainter. Their forms still incomplete, nothing but fractured silhouettes. He observed the failing force, the effort it took to mold will from void. “This power wanes. It is not enough.”

He stood at the prow of his forming vessel, the stillness of the Black Tide coiled tightly around him, pressing into the gaps of his mind. Then a fracture beneath his own thoughts. Pressure… shaped like a suggestion.

He turned his head as if something had stirred beside him, though nothing was there. Yet he felt it: A presence unseen… threading through the water, like a hook pulled just beneath the skin of the world. He saw it. A place forgotten by design.

"The Grave," he breathed, though no one taught him the word. And suddenly, he knew its direction. There, something waited. He gripped the rail of the ship with fingers born of entropy. "I must find it," he decided. Not realizing the thought was not born… but offered.

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The Marrowstrike. The blade forged to ruin by silence…

Deathmoid stands aboard The Repossession, poised to strike at the heart of the Tide-Realm.

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