The Three Bone Inn

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The stench of death clings to every fabric, fills every room, and burns your lungs. Even inside your room at the Three Bone Inn, in the light of leviathan oil candles and perfumed by incense made from the Gaoler’s Rose, the smell of decay clings to you.

Outside, bonecarvers and paid companions hawk their wares. Beyond, the pits. The damned, prisoners from nearby Foolsgate Prison, cut the fetid tar from the dying earth – until it claims their lives as well. Free labourers, and the luckiest of the imprisoned, fill the black mass into steel barrels and send it on. To the dark iron tracks of the railroad, or down to the harbour where dozens of ships, ships like yours, await, ready to carry the cargo onwards, back to Barenhaven.

You are the First Officer on the Demeter. Soon you will return, leave the tentative, smelly safety of Corpser’s Point and journey out on the Sea of Mists. Soon you will brave pirates, human and other, out on the endless, fog-shrouded ocean. Nameless horrors will try to claim you: mind, body, and soul. The Sea itself, the merciless elements, will try to break your ship and to shatter your bones. But for now, you can relax.

But who are you, braver of the tides? What face smiles back wryly from the feysilver mirror? Whose clothes and gear, whose past, lies strewn around the modest room?