Ayn shrieked as well. The hand gripping the back of her armor yanked back. Kayara was beside her, a grim look of determination on her face.

  “Thanks,” Ayn said, or tried to. The faces drowned her out.

  Air came from their mouths, swirling along the pool basin, picking up speed, momentum, and sand until the pool filled up with spinning grains. The vortex whipped around the boulder. Bits rubbed off, joining the vortex as the rock shrunk into nothing. Faces rose to the top, spinning, screaming, still made of sand, yet somehow holding shape, and the vortex rose with them. It covered the sextant from view, forming an impenetrable column that stretched into the sky. The trees and greenery around the oasis’s edges came loose. The howling maelstrom sucked it all in, forcing Ayn and her party to backpedal or be sucked in, too.

  Bren’s mouth moved. Ayn couldn’t hear a thing outside of the roaring wind and shrieking faces, but she got the idea from his look of frustration and flailing hands. He’d focused on fire and earth spheres. Good offense, good defense, and utterly worthless against a sand monstrosity in the middle of a desert.

  Ayn didn’t like her or Kayara’s chances, either. The angry mass looked like a mob, but there wasn’t anything solid to it. Any physical attacks would get nowhere, to say nothing of the risk of getting caught up in the storm. At the rate the thing was rotating, it’d eat their life away faster than Sheyric could heal, and Bren’s Stoneskin would disintegrate much like his boulder.

  The party clustered closer. Ayn stayed in front, sabers drawn, eyes stuck to the storm as her mind whirled. Her shield could buy them time, but if they didn’t figure out a way to hurt it, none of it would matter.

  Come on. She had to think of something, yet no matter how hard she tried, nothing came to her…and neither did the vortex. Ayn relaxed her stance and frowned at the wall of spinning sand. It had grown so fast and violent, devouring the oasis in seconds, then…stopped.

  Finally, something clicked in Ayn’s head. She spun to face her party, almost knocking Kayara and Bren down, and told her plan in an excited voice. It took her two entire sentences before she remembered no one could hear her.

  With a frustrated growl, Ayn jabbed a finger at Bren, then crouched, doing her best to shield the patch of sand in front of her from the wind shear coming off the vortex.

  Pebbles, she wrote, scribbling quickly before the letters blew away. Lots.

  Bren’s face twisted up in confusion.

  Ayn made a cradling motion with her arms, then scribbled some more. Here. Hold.

  Bren looked more confused, but nodded. That was fine. He didn’t need to fully understand. She just needed the weight.

  Kayara put a hand on her shoulder and crouched. Me, too, she scribbled in the sand.

  Ayn shook her head. More people meant more risk. Kayara’s grip on her shoulder tightened until tears sprung to Ayn’s eyes.

  Then. No one.

  Ayn groaned, an useless complaint whipped away faster than the words they wrote. Kayara had made up her mind, and nothing Ayn could do would dissuade her.

  Fine, Ayn wrote with an angry flair, slanted and near impossible to read.

  Kayara nodded curtly and let go, cradling her arms so Bren could fill them with pebbles.

  Ayn sighed and copied her. The pebbles built up. It was a beginner spell, useless in most ways except for weighing down certain traps or mechanisms. Today, it would prove far more vital. At least, that’s what Ayn hoped.

  With arms full of rocks and the vortex roaring, Ayn and Kayara turned and stepped into the spinning sandstorm.

  AEGIS OF AGILITY ACTIVATED

  Sharp grains of sand buffeted the shield. Kayara stuck to her side under the shield bubble. Ayn did her best to ignore Aisha’s constant racket as she placed one foot steadily in front of the other. She should have just turned off the notifications. All sight of their surroundings had vanished as soon as the vortex engulfed them.

  The shield bubble kept a clear area around them, and Ayn could see the now thankfully face-free ground, but she had lost all sense of distance. She moved as quick as she could. The pebbles kept the wind from picking her up and tossing her, yet she had no idea how close she was to the sextant. She’d hoped her shield would last long enough to get the sextant and get back out, but the absorption points were bleeding away. They were already below half.

  Ayn sped up. Kayara matched her with ease. What if she’d turned after entering the vortex? She could be going around in circles. What if she couldn’t even see the sextant in all the damn sand? She hadn’t thought of that.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Her chest tightened as her shield hit its last few points. A dark shape shimmered in the wall of sand in front of her. Small, dark, triangular. Maybe it was the sextant, but it hardly mattered. Her recklessness had caught up to her again. The Aegis burst. The wall of sand curved in, its surface howling for their deaths. Kayara wrapped her arms around Ayn, and in an instant, they stood on a little island in the eye of the storm.

  Ayn stood stiff, arms still cradling the pebbles as she watched faces swirl and howl around her, waiting for them to dive in and take her life. Like at the outer edge, they didn’t, seemingly only capable of forming within the drained pool.

  Kayara let go and bent down. The howling vortex collapsed, and the faces disintegrated. Great clouds of sand puffed up as it all hit the ground.

  The silence screamed louder than the storm.

  “Got it,” Kayara said. She held up the sextant, somehow gleaming and dust-free, then turned and hopped off the island into the once more dry and still basin of the pool.

  “What just happened?” Ayn asked, more to her herself than anything.

  Kayara glanced back, a hint of a smile on her lips. “I can teleport, remember?”

  With that, she returned to the guys, who stood, looking confused, at the edge of the basin.

  Teleported? But Kayara couldn’t teleport unless…unless she was about to be attacked. A wall of angry sand counted, apparently. That’s why Kayara wanted to go with her. Ayn thought about smacking herself in the forehead for her own idiocy, only to realize she was still holding an armload of pebbles. She let go, accepting the pain as a cluster of them hit her boots. One day, she’d think through her hare-brained ideas. Today was not that day.

  *****

  As with every path they’d taken, it only took a bit more trudging before The System teleported them back to the ship.

  John the archaeologist sat cross-legged on one of his dull tan cloth spreads in front of the stern’s hatch. He raised a cup of tea to his lips as the party stopped to collect their bearings. His eyebrows shot up. “Well, by the look of you, you must have got into a fight with the desert herself! I’ve seen less sand on sandworms.”

  Ayn glared. It was true, though. All of them, especially her and Kayara, were covered head to toe in a thick layer of fine sand. It had worked its way inside her armor, where it stuck to sweat. She was sure she’d never be clean again.

  John chuckled and stood up, dusting off his immaculate uniform. “Regardless, I, for one, am simply chuffed you’re back. How was the excursion? Fruitful?”

  Alarm bells went off in Ayn’s head. The archaeologist had stayed holed up in his camp for almost the entire time they’d been on the floor, yet as soon as they found the sextant, he was not only outside but also unusually curious about what had happened. It could have been just The System not-so-subtly pushing things along, if not for her Sixth Sense rattling her skull.

  She put up an arm to stop Kayara from moving forward. To be fair, she’d not moved from Ayn’s side, as if she too smelled something fishy.

  John harrumphed. “Well, come on, then. Let me have a look.”

  “How do you know we found anything?” Ayn asked.

  “Hmm? Well, how do you know you shouldn’t let me see it, eh? Besides, I wasn’t bloody asking.”

  Ayn jerked as something dark whizzed by. John raised a hand, catching the projectile with ease. Sun glinted off of a triangular piece of metal. The sextant.

  Ayn looked back at Kayara in surprise.

  Kayara’s eyes went wide as she flipped open a screen and scanned it. “It’s gone,” she said. “He took the sextant right out of my inventory.”

  John laughed, an oddly cordial sound Ayn would have expected from a close friend who’d heard an especially funny joke. “Sorry lass. You can’t keep what is mine by right. Just like I tried to tell those poor fools who trapped me here. I made a deal, signed by blood and paid by soul, and nothing shall keep me from it until the debt is paid.”

  Wind whipped up with each word, creating a heavy dose of déjà vu as sand picked up and swirled. A massive vortex formed around the perimeter of the broken ship. It sucked up the barrels they’d so painstakingly lined up, the wooden planks and metal bands breaking and twisting in the maelstrom.

  Ayn and her party tucked closer, as they’d done at the oasis, but this time, there was no bank to hide on.

  She reached out as the vortex rushed in, grabbing Kayara and Bren. They grabbed her arms, and she could only hope someone had done the same for Sheyric and the wolverine as she lost sight of everything.

  The wind roared in her ears. Her feet slid out from underneath her and in a breath, she was airborne. Kayara and Bren clamped down harder. The wind pulled away their yells.

  Ayn’s Aegis went up, then went down, the flying sand tearing away at it as efficiently as the oasis vortex. Ayn closed her eyes and held her breath against the onslaught. Right before she was sure she’d drown in dirt, if that was even possible, the pummeling stopped, and something firm appeared under her feet.

  She tried to wipe the sand from her eyes. It only pushed it in. Tears welled up and her attempt to clear her vision ended in a blurry, stinging mess.

  No few curses and complaints told her everyone else hadn’t fared any better, but the death grips on her arms released. Ayn blinked away the blur.

  Tan.

  At first, Ayn thought the sandstorm had pulled back and made another wall. But as her vision cleared, it proved to be not sand, but wood. Smooth wooden panels stood maybe ten feet in front of her, forming a wall which stretched left and right. A darker wood made up a ceiling and floor. Barrels and crates, identical to the ones they’d seen before, stood in neat rows and piles. Balls of floating light lit up the area.

  “Where are we?” Ayn asked.

  “The Bloody Serpent, my girl!” John’s voice echoed, disembodied. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “The ship?” Bren asked, his voice going up an octave.

  “Quite right, chap! Good to see someone was paying attention. I simply must thank you for finding my sextant. It was the one unaccounted for piece of the ship, and without it, she couldn’t come back together. As her captain, I wasn’t allowed to find it myself. Curses are such fickle things, aren’t they? All those rules and unnecessary hoops to jump through. Ah well, it’s behind us now. Thank you, truly, and for your role in restoring her to her full glory, I five you the ultimate reward—joining my crew.”

  Motes of light spiraled off the larger spheres, sinking into the floor around the party. Where each hit, bones materialized, creaking and clacking as they came together to form skeletons in pirate regalia, complete with muskets and sabers.

  “Joining my crew requires a bit of initiation, though. Do show some respect and die quietly, yes?”