"Possessed Iron doesn’t always look broken. Sometimes it’s just quiet. It learns. Waits. Whispers to itself in dead languages. I saw one of the Ironsaints cry once before we purged it. Or maybe it was leaking coolant from an eye-port, I don’t know anymore. We don’t always purge them because they’re dangerous. We purge them because they remind us of when we built something that stopped needing us.” - Field Notes of Cinder-Caster Vol Aneth, circa 472 A.S.

  I locked the helm door behind me. It wasn’t a heavy lock, just a manual lever and a soft chime from the control panel, but it clicked into place with a satisfying thunk. Might not stop anything serious, but it’d slow someone down. If someone was still aboard.

  I didn’t think they were. But I also didn’t think I’d wake up in a pool of someone else’s blood on a ghost ship with no memory of how I got there, so clearly, my instincts were having a rough week.

  The helm chamber was shaped like a dome, half-oval, with reinforced viewing glass arching overhead in a wide curve. It was meant to offer a full view of the skies ahead, maybe even some navigational overlays if the systems were functioning. Right now, though, it was useless. The outside was nothing but a thick, grey soup, cloud cover, fog, static haze. Nothing moved. No landmarks. No nearby isles. Just lightless, colorless mist pressing against the glass like frosted glaze.

  I didn’t like how quiet it was, but the ship wasn’t dead, thankfully. It was breathing, systems low, but online. There was air moving in here, power trickling too. That meant some of the ventilation control still worked, even if the visuals didn’t. Which told me we weren’t quite in the Churn… but we weren’t far from it either. Worrying to say the least.

  I moved carefully around the edge of the room, pistol lowered but ready. Scanned for signs of recent activity. Most of the panels were clean, obviously in use. A few of the others had grime around the seams, like they hadn’t been touched in decades. There was dust in places it shouldn't have if this ship had a full crew. No personal gear. No spare tools. Just the core interface column in the center of the room and an old-style spinal mount chair facing it, bristling with jacks and thread ports. I approached it slowly. No signs of tampering. Nothing fresh.

  The blood trail ended just a few meters inside the helm. A few boot scuffs showing someone turned around, some of it had dried, but not completely faded. I followed it with my eyes, then crouched near one of the dried smears and touched two fingers to the stain.

  Still sticky, but congealed. Whoever it belonged to had been bleeding before I woke up, hours, probably. I checked the rest of the room for drag marks, boot scuffs, anything. Though besides the main trail I followed there was nothing indicating a struggle. Just… the trail. I stood up slowly and stared at the spine mount seat.

  Now that was a problem. The seat was old, a full-rig neural interface, probably second-gen or older, used by some heir to a noble house in Ashen Crown no doubt. It still seemed functional by the look of it, though most of the wiring had been sheathed in maintenance tape and it didn’t look to have been used in whatever had happened. No blood on the padding.

  But it was the only place someone could’ve sat and controlled this ship directly, and it seemed clean enough. I looked at my right hand, the one with the glove jack, and flexed it once.

  “Not gonna do much,” I muttered. “Still, better than nothing.”

  I sat down and the seat hissed slightly, adjusting under my weight. I keyed the glove connector into the nearest access port and waited. The data bridge flickered to life, rough and slow, but it synced after a few seconds. My gauntlet lights flared blue. A simplified interface bled into view across the console before me. The voice of the Wakesong followed immediately after, as always:

  “Welcome, Captain Holt. Access granted. Helm systems online.”

  Still weird. I cracked my neck to help with the stiffness and began to navigate the interface carefully, avoiding the full neural uplink triggers. The glove jack wasn’t enough to interface with the deeper systems, but it let me poke around, surface-level command prompts, passive diagnostics, energy routing. The basics.

  First thing I checked was the visual array. And it was… dead. The external feeds registered nothing but ambient mist. Sensors were fried or blinded, or the ship had been parked here, intentionally, in some kind of blind zone. That felt deliberate, and more than a little dangerous.

  I flicked over to the helm logs. Nothing recent. The last five entries were corrupt or blank. Then I accessed the navigation array. Still locked. The system wanted a full link-up to open anything deeper. And I didn’t have the jacks for that. No cranial thread, no spinal port. Just the glove.

  “Damn Ashen Crowns, they love their spine mounts.”

  I leaned back in the chair, staring at the blank window ahead. Still no motion in the fog.

  "Where the hell are we," I murmured, more to myself than the ship. “And what happened?”

  I tried one last angle, manual trace. Punched in a coldscan of the ship’s local record buffer. Any signal pings, proximity flags, ambient chatter. Anything that might indicate how we got here. The ship’s systems buffered for a moment. It loaded and loaded but nothing appeared. Until one name popped up.

  Buried in the system metadata, flagged as a low-priority log with a playback date from three days ago. Thessel. Just the name. No message attached. No coordinates. Just a trace of input, like someone had keyed it in… and then deleted the rest.

  I stared at it for a long moment. My throat felt dry. Thessel Holt. My adoptive father. Marked as dead. Vanished, more likely. A ghost in my past, in this ship now too, apparently.

  I tapped the entry. An error prompt appeared, ‘No content found.’ Figures. I sat there in silence, letting the helm hum softly around me. The blood trail still stuck in my head. No corpses. No message. Just Thessel’s name from three days ago and a ship that claims I am its captain.

  I needed to see more. I needed to know what the hell this place was. And most of all, I needed to make sure I wasn’t still sharing this ship with someone who didn’t want to be found.

  I stood up, slowly. The stiffness in my legs hadn’t gone away, but the adrenaline made it easier to move now. The helm hissed as I left the chair, the screen fading to standby.

  Before I left, I crossed the room and keyed the manual security panel again.

  "Lock door. Authorization Captain Holt, override manual.”

  “Confirmed.”

  The lock clicked shut. Last thing I needed was someone stepping in while I was gone.

  I holstered Portem-Beta again and checked the magazine coil, still steady at full power. No drain from the earlier boot. I retracted the muzzle slightly to keep it close-quarters, then turned and headed for the side exit where the blood trail continued.

  Stolen story; please report.

  There was more ship to explore. More questions waiting just past the fog. The door sealed behind me with a hydraulic hiss, leaving the helm locked and the mist-blind window at my back.

  I moved slow, pistol low, following the corridor into the next set of chambers. The lights buzzed overhead, steady for now. My boots echoed on the floor panels, quieter than before, but nothing compared to the wardrum that was my heartbeat. I told myself to focus. To clear my head. Instead, I kept hearing one word over and over again.

  Thessel.

  My steps stayed even. My breathing didn’t change. But I could feel it, the numb pressure behind my ribs. That weird, dissonant buffer that kicks in when the world flips a table and your brain decides, not yet. The butterflies in my gut were having a riot. I felt like someone had poured ice water into my stomach and lit a match in the center of it.

  Ten years. Ten years. I’d stopped hoping a long time ago. The last time I saw him, he was heading out on a salvage run. Standard route, nothing dangerous, at least, not by his standards. Just another job. One of dozens. He didn’t say goodbye. He never did. That wasn’t his way.

  Three days passed. Then five. Then seven. I searched for weeks. Every contact. Every port. Every rumor. Every damn whisper of a ship going dark or a beacon going cold. And what did I get? Nothing. Not a signal. Not a trace. Just gone.

  I didn’t talk about it after that. I buried it under scrap work and contract runs, letting the unanswered questions rot in the back of my skull. Eventually, even Portem stopped asking. And now, now, here, on a ship I’ve never heard of, in territory we have no reason to be in, his name shows up in the system buffer like it was just typed in yesterday.

  I didn’t believe in fate. Still don’t. But this? This felt like a hook in my spine. I passed through another corridor, this one narrower, lined with storage lockers and embedded supply shelves. No signs of recent use. I scanned for more blood, more debris. Just a few dried smudges of coolant here and there and the blood splattering continuing down the hall. Though the footprints weren’t fresh anymore.

  As I moved, the numbness began to wear thin. Anger came next. Not the loud, screaming kind. Just that slow, tight boil behind the eyes, the one that builds when you’ve been lied to for a long time. Or maybe not lied to. Maybe just… left behind.

  He knew I was looking. He had to know. He left a trail now, or at least somebody did. Why not then? Was this the plan all along? Some drawn-out game? Leave the kid just enough pieces to follow the breadcrumbs ten years later?

  I stopped walking and leaned against the wall, breathing through my teeth. The pistol hung loose in my hand now, grip slick from the heat building in my palm.

  “You’re dead,” I whispered. “You’re dead, and I buried you, and I let it go.” My voice cracked a little at the end.

  I shook my head and kept walking. Slow steps. Steady pace. Emotions were just noise right now. They got in the way. I needed focus. But my mind kept drifting.

  He raised me, taught me to understand the language of the vox anima before I could write my own name. Taught me how to feel when a core was about to overload by the way the charge hummed against the air. How to talk to possessed iron I had all the cards, how to bargain my way out of a sticky situation.

  He wasn’t warm. He wasn’t quite kind. But he was there. And then he wasn’t. Every theory I ever had, hijacked, lost in the Churn, picked off by scavvers, turned rogue, it all dissolved over the years into static. I let it rot. I finished building Portem. I built a life. I moved on. Now? Now it felt like someone had torn open a healed scar and told me to guess whether the thing inside it was poison or gold.

  I reached a sealed door marked with some faded, illegible code glyphs, maintenance bay, maybe. No lock. Just pressure-sealed. I pressed the panel. The door hissed open.

  Inside, the lights flickered once, then stabilized. Rows of hanging gear, old maintenance suits, spare cabling, a few shelves of disassembled interface rigs. Most of it was covered in dust. Untouched.

  Except for one shelf. A half-finished spinejack unit sat there, cleaned and half-assembled, with the side panel removed and resting beside it. The tools had been laid out with precision. Not hurried. Not sloppy.

  Someone had been working here. And judging by the way the parts were arranged, methodical, efficient, even a little overengineered… it was his style. Wire cutters on the left, soldering iron on the right, magnifying glass directly overhead. I stepped closer, hand trembling slightly.

  Thessel’s work always had this subtle bend in the way he soldered components. Like a calligraphy signature, but in wiring. I’d copied it, once, and he laughed like I’d told a joke with a mouth full of nails. Said, “Make your own mistakes, Riven. Mine are spoken for.”

  The angle on the buffer node here matched that signature exactly. I pulled my hand back. I didn't want to touch it. Didn’t want to disturb it. Instead, I took a long breath and stepped out of the room.

  He was here. At some point. On this ship. Working on something. Leaving his name in the system buffer. Leaving no body, no note, no sign except a breadcrumb in a dead-end corridor.

  “You bastard,” I whispered.

  Silence followed, nothing but the ship, humming faintly beneath my boots, and the weight of memory curling its fingers around my throat. I stood in the workshop doorway a while longer, watching the dust particles drift through the shaft of light overhead. They spun lazily in the stale air, untouched.

  I stepped out of the room and continued to follow the trail, passing through a door. There was an odd shift, the smears on the floor returned. It was faint, barely visible under the right light, but once you knew what to look for, drag marks, pressure smudges, dark red-brown streaks that the ship’s lighting didn’t quite catch, you could follow it. A lazy curve down the hall, not straight, like whoever was moving… crawling? Possibly disoriented.

  It passed some kind of medical bay, something I would need to return to if I wanted to see to my wounds. The line curved hard to the right, toward a lower bulkhead near the cargo bay junction. I moved slower now, pistol raised again, my arm aching.

  The ship was quiet. Still. Not even the buzz of faulty wiring or the clank of pipes under pressure. Just the soft chime of the path lights, and the sound of my own boots on metal.

  At the next junction, the trail became clearer. Someone had used the wall for balance. A smeared handprint, darker now, drier. No gloves. Human fingers. The drag marks stopped, then picked up again a few meters down.

  It didn’t make sense. If someone had been this injured, they shouldn’t have gotten far. If I’d been unconscious, how long? Hours? A day? They should’ve bled out before making it halfway across the deck. Unless they weren’t bleeding out. Or they had someone who wasn’t injured with them.

  I clenched my jaw and pushed that thought away. There was too much I didn’t know. Guessing only made me more anxious. The trail led me down a side hall, past the emergency rations locker and a sealed mess hall that seemed jammed. Then it stopped.

  Right outside an old sensor array chamber. I paused, checking the walls, the corners, the air vents overhead. Nothing moved, and this seemed to be the end of the trail.

  The door was slightly ajar, just enough to fit a boot tip between the seal and the floor. It had been forced. Not blown open, not sliced, but pried. One of the brackets was bent. Improvised force. I reached out, nudged the panel. The door slid open with a scraping whine, one side dragging against the warped floor track.

  I stepped in, thumbed the side switch on Portem-Beta. The muzzle flared with a soft, directional glow. The beam cut across a room the size of a small hold. No furniture. Just a few modular consoles, most shut down, some with cracked screens. The sensor rig was dead, charred around the base, like it had shorted out or deliberately sabotaged. One side panel was halfway dislodged, revealing mangled cabling underneath.

  But that wasn’t the part that made me stop cold. It was the blood. Not a trail now. Not a smear. A pool. Centered right in front of the sensor rig. Some of it dried or burnt. And beside it, on the wall behind the console, something had been burned into the metal. I stepped closer, crouched, and angled the light upward.

  A glyph. No, many, many, glyphs. Carved deep with some kind of dagger that seemed to turn the metal to slag at the edges. It wasn’t Crown script or Embercoil, maybe Synod. Regardless, it was repetitively carved across the wall with jagged lines.

  It looked like the kind of thing Thessel used to draw on scrap panels when he was thinking, when he was trying to remember something from before he joined the Sigil. Looking back, the central sensor right was also covered in the markings. With a sweep of the light, almost the entire room was from this angle. I stared at the blood. The glyph. The dead console.

  “What the hell did you go missing looking for?” I whispered.

  please let me know. Like a messed up quotation or grammatical error.

  Also maybe one more chapter today. I made a few to start off but I haven't full fleeced them of errors.