Arrehp shuffled back toward his original bench, the cold night air biting at his exposed ankles. But as he neared the spot, the shapes of two mariners hunched over their dice game materialized from the gloom—their whispered curses and the clatter of bone dice against wood unmistakable. One glanced up, teeth bared in a silent warning. Arrehp froze, then retreated without a sound.
The next empty bench he found was near the galley’s midsection, where the stench of tar and old fish clung stubbornly. He draped the scratchy canvas over himself like a shroud, but the bench’s uneven planks dug into his ribs. Every shift sent a fresh splinter pricking through his threadbare shirt. Across the aisle, a chained rower muttered in his sleep, legs twitching as if still pulling at an oar. 
Somewhere above, a sail snapped taut in the wind. The wolf had been right—the weather *was* turning. The ship groaned like a living thing, timbers straining against the coming swell. Arrehp curled tighter, tucking his hands between his knees. The dice players’ murmurs faded beneath the rising hiss of waves against the hull.
-
The dream came in fragments—shouted commands slicing through the fog of exhaustion, the crack of wet canvas snapping against wind, the phantom sting of rain already lashing his face. Arrehp watched the stars blink out overhead, one by one, as if smothered by a great black paw. He tried to count them—five left, then three—but the numbers slipped away like grains of sand between his fingers. 
Then the bell. 
A clangor louder than the forge-hammers of hell shattered the dream. Arrehp's eyes flew open to chaos: men and wolves scrambling, ropes whipping through the air like serpents, and above it all, the drumming of rain on salt-crusted wood. The storm had swallowed the stars whole. Wind howled through the rigging, and the galley groaned as a wave lifted her sideways, tilting the deck until Arrehp's fingernails bit into the bench to keep from sliding. 
"Oars! Oars now, you maggot-ridden sacks of shit!" A black-furred officer bellowed, his muzzle inches from Arrehp's ear. The human flinched, but instinct drove him to scramble for the oar alongside the others. His blistered palms screamed as he gripped the waterlogged wood. Through the downpour, he glimpsed the shoreline—a jagged maw of rocks, closer than any land had been in days. The galley lurched again, and the cliffs seemed to lean hungrily toward them. 
"Pull!" The command came from three throats at once—the ship's master, the whip-wielding mate, and the white wolf from before, who'd materialized at the bench ahead. His muzzle was peeled back in a snarl, but his eyes locked onto Arrehp's for half a breath. There was no comfort there, only the same animal desperation thrumming in all their chests.
-
A splintering crack split the storm's roar—not thunder, but the yardarm snapping loose from its lashings. The massive timber swung like a god's flail, carving a bloody arc through the rowers' benches. Arrehp barely registered the wet crunch behind him before something warm spattered his neck. He turned just as the beam rebounded, catching three more men mid-rise, their ribs collapsing like rotten barrels under the impact. One wolf's head snapped backward at an impossible angle, yellow eyes rolling white before he crumpled. The yard careened upward, trailing shredded ropes like entrails.
"Furl it! Furl the damn thing!" Geikabza's snarl cut through the chaos as she leapt over a twitching human impaled by splinters. Her claws scrabbled at the whipping lines, but the wind yanked the sail taut again. The yard jerked sideways—straight into the mast. Wood screamed. A hail of deadly shards rained down as the spar shattered. Arrehp threw himself flat, feeling a shard graze his scalp. When he dared look up, a fox soldier staggered past with a foot-long splinter protruding from his eye socket.
-
The mainsail cracked like a bullwhip in the storm’s fury. Arrehp barely registered the blur of motion before the yard swung sideways—wood and rope screaming against the gale—and crushed three chained rowers near the mast into pulp. Bone fragments skittered across the deck like hail. A fourth man shrieked as the spar’s edge caught his shoulder, shearing through flesh and lodging in his collarbone. Blood hit the deck before the next wave washed it into the bilges.
Geikabza was already moving, hat lost to the wind, fur plastered dark against her skull. She leapt over a dying man’s twitching legs and seized the loose brace line with her teeth. The sail billowed madly, threatening to drag her overboard until two more wolves threw their weight onto the rope. "Captain!" Her voice tore through the storm’s howl. "You’re murdering your own ship!"
From the helm, the captain bared his fangs. "We hold course! One more mile and—"
"You hold nothing but corpses!" Geikabza’s claws dug into the deck as another gust nearly upended them. The injured rower wailed as the yard shifted, grinding bone. "Furl it! Now!" 
The captain’s ears flattened. For three terrible heartbeats, Arrehp thought he’d let them all drown. Then the bark came: "Reef sails! Starboard oars in!"
-
The water in the hold didn't just feel cold; it felt alive, a heavy, clinging weight that sought to pull the heat from his marrow. Every step was a gamble against the unseen, his toes curling around slimy planks and dodging the jagged teeth of shattered crates. Arrehp waded deeper into the gloom, the sloshing of his own movements echoing like a slow heartbeat against the ribs of the ship. He spotted it—a heavy wooden pail, bobbing erratically near a pile of sodden canvas. He lunged for it, his fingers slipping twice on the wet rim before he clamped down, plunging the vessel into the brine with a desperate, splashing heave.
He turned back, the bucket now a leaden anchor in his grip. He had to lean his entire body weight forward to keep from tipping over, the water sloshing over the edges and soaking his already drenched tunic. When he finally reached the circle of gray light provided by the open hatch, he paused, frozen by a sudden, paralyzing uncertainty. He stood there, chest heaving, clutching the rim of the pail and staring up at the silhouette of the wolfess. He didn't know if he was supposed to climb out, or if he was meant to hoist the water up to her.
The hesitation lasted only a second before a clawed hand shot down into the hold. Quartermaster Geikabza didn't wait for him to find his footing; she snatched the handle with a violent jerk, hoisting the bucket upward with a strength that seemed effortless despite the storm's sway. In one fluid motion, she pivoted and thrust the pail into the arms of a passing mariner, who scrambled toward the gunwale to heave the contents back into the sea from whence they came.
Before Arrehp could even exhale, a second bucket plummeted toward him, cutting through the air with a whistling hiss before slamming into the water beside his hip with a jarring *thwack*. 
"Faster, licehead!" Geikabza roared, her voice echoing down the shaft of the hatch. "Move the water or you'll be sleeping in it! Keep it flowing!"
-
The sea had a way of pretending it was finished with you, only to deliver a final, crushing blow just as you began to hope. For an hour, Arrehp had been a piston of meat and bone, pouring every remaining drop of his soul into the oar, his vision tunneling until the world was nothing but the rhythm of the drum and the image of his mother's face. But the current was a patient predator. The galley, robbed of its momentum and crippled by exhaustion, finally surrendered. There was no sudden scream of alarms, only a sickening, guttural shudder that vibrated through the very soles of Arrehp’s feet. The stern kissed the jagged teeth of the lee shore with a sound like a mountain splitting in two.
The impact was a physical wall. Arrehp was launched forward from his bench, his body skipping across the wet planks like a stone over water. His forehead collided with the heavy oak framing of the oar-lock with a dull, wet thud that extinguished the world. Darkness rushed in, smelling of brine and old fish, and he drifted in a weightless void where the screams of the dying sounded like distant birds.
He was a passenger in his own skin when the second strike came. The ship groaned, a long, agonized wail of twisting timber, as the port side slammed into a hidden reef. The galley didn't just stop; it tilted violently, the deck becoming a sliding board of chaos. Arrehp’s limp, unconscious form was tossed like a ragdoll across the starboard deck, sliding through the slurry of seawater and blood until there was no more deck to slide upon. He vanished over the gunwale with a muted splash, the ocean swallowing him whole.
The cold was not a temperature; it was a shock that felt like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It ripped the consciousness back into his lungs with a violent, gasping shudder. Arrehp broke the surface for a fraction of a second, his mouth opening in a silent shriek as he sucked in a mouthful of freezing spray and salt. He flailed, his arms churning the churning foam, but the water was a thick, suffocating blanket. He had spent his life on the soil of Ienrrarg, far from the depths, and he discovered in that moment that he did not know how to swim.
He sank, the bubbles escaping his lips in a frantic, silver stream. Below him, the dark green depths of the coast beckoned, and above him, the surface was a shimmering, unreachable mirror. Panick seized his chest, tightening his lungs until they burned. He kicked blindly, his heavy, sodden clothes dragging him down like lead weights, while the wreckage of the galley—and the screams of the wolves and humans alike—began to fade into the oppressive silence of the deep.
-
The world was a chaotic symphony of saltwater and screaming wind, but the only thing Arrehp knew for certain was the white-hot agony in his scalp. He was being hauled through the churning froth like a landed fish, his head snapped back at an angle that made the horizon a dizzying blur of charcoal sky and obsidian water. Every few seconds, the current would claim him, pulling him back into the suffocating brine, only for a powerful, clawed grip to cinch tight around his hair and wrench him upward. He tried to gasp, but he only inhaled a spray of brine that tasted of old copper and dead things. He couldn’t see his savior—only the rhythmic, desperate splashing of powerful limbs and the occasional glimpse of white fur drenched in gray foam.
They were no longer in the open sea, but the safety of the shore was a murderous illusion. The coast was a jagged graveyard of basalt and shale, and the tide played a cruel game of toss with their broken bodies. Arrehp felt himself slam into a submerged ledge, the impact knocking the remaining air from his lungs in a wet rattle. He began to slip away, the darkness calling him back with a seductive, numb warmth, but the grip on his hair tightened with a ferocious, guttural snarl. He was dragged forward, his chest scraping against the barnacled rock, and shoved upward into a narrow crevice. There, huddled together in a space barely wide enough for two, they clung to the stone as the tempest howled around them.
The night became a blur of shivering violence. The storm did not simply rain; it assaulted the cliffs with the force of a siege engine, sending plumes of freezing spray ten feet into the air. Arrehp lay curled in a fetal position, his fingers numb and bleeding as he clawed at the slick rock to keep from being swept back into the maw of the Atlantic. Beside him, the white wolf was a pillar of radiating, animal heat. The creature’s breathing was a ragged, wet wheeze, and every time a rogue wave crashed over their ledge, the wolf would shift his weight, pinning Arrehp against the stone with a heavy, protective limb to ensure the boy wasn't reclaimed by the tide.
Hours bled into an eternity of salt and shivering. Arrehp drifted in and out of a feverish stupor, his mind flickering between the image of his mother’s hearth and the terrifying reality of the wolf's golden eyes watching the horizon. Whenever he lapsed into unconsciousness, a rough, calloused tongue would swipe across his cheek—a primal, insistent command to stay awake. They were two wreckage-drifted souls, stripped of rank and race, reduced to the singular, animal goal of seeing the next breath.