… has worked pretty well so far; time to attack.

You slowly twist yourself, quietly repositioning your body so that your feet touch the back wall and your body is poised to reach out with blade in hand. With pounding heart, you tap your toes twice against the wardrobes back panel, thumping a light beat through its ransacked frame. The man rummaging just a few steps away continues on undisturbed, cursing the lock as he scratches it with picks. Is he ignoring you? Perhaps he’s too engrossed in his work?

You tap again, twice beating the back panel with your black pump, waiting a few seconds after. Nothing. The man pulls and twists at something as he focuses on whatever locked place he found in the guts of all those draws. He could be hard of hearing; you’re not being subtle.

You kick the back panel, shaking the board above your head and rattling the wardrobe.

“What the fuck?”

His feet wonder out to you, stopping briefly before stepping to the now loose wardrobe doors and opening them.

Two scrawny ankles look at you.

As fast as you can, you snap the blade across the back of his right foot, grinding the sharp steel though the gristle of his ankle tendon. He screams, doubling up and dropping back, but your other hand grips him and drags him into the darkness by his bleeding leg. Hands grab the wood of the wardrobe frame, terrified, **** to stop his abduction into your inky blackness, and you shift your grip to his shirt, clawing him to you before lashing out at his throat, popping it. A look of horror paints his face as his blood paints yours, and a few more bites of your blade to his torso stills his childlike maddened thrashing to a dead and pooling heap.

Sure that the rooms balance of corpses to living had shifted to the formers favour, you push him away and begin to crawl your way out, sliding across a growing red river.

Free of the wardrobe, but standing in the wreckage of the room, you take a brief look at what the man was working on. A large square cupboard door stands behind the slats that held the draws in place, reinforced with banded iron, and little twisted picks lay about the lock in little disorganised heaps. The lock itself remains stubbornly closed, his work undone and its contents lost to you. With a frown that guides some blood into your eye, and the frantic blinking that follows, you decide not to waste any more time in this room and scoop up the half-filled sack, heading for the window and skipping somewhat disrespectfully over the captains corpse in the process. The familiar path is where you left it, and you navigate your way back to the grassy lawn without incident, careful not to rattle the bag and its contents too much. The fire can be heard far more clearly now, and the few natural clouds drifting above the warm summer night are painted with orange from beneath. You can’t tell where in the woods the fire has spread to, but from the stars shining through the thickening air, you know the direction you need to go and feel able to chance it.

A short distance into the woods, you see it, like a stalking beast twisting between the trees. It howls and billows its smoke, both up in rising chimneys and out to haze the air, drifting through the dry branches and bushes like morning mist. It quickly waters your eyes and leaves an ashen tastes seeping through your black facemask, and you pinch the material down by the nose, squinting through the sting for a way around the fires advance.

It moves like a spilling pool of water, radiating out in orange crackling tendrils that consume all. Retreating steps become running ones, but you aim ahead of it, feeling the heat dry your sweat as soon as it’s formed. You try and get around the wave, keeping to the general direction you need to go. Your right side burns. Your left side cools. Trees keep jumping out of the dark thick smoke, threatening to trip you and drag you down to feed the flames consuming them; you, the cause of all this; their destroyer. The way becomes ever harder to see as more smoke makes its way into your lungs, making you cough and cough and double up with wheezing, slowing your pace and letting the flames catch up. The roar of them deafens, as all-consuming as the fire itself, and it pounds at your head until you cannot hear the rattle of the sack, or your own feet, or your own breath or the pounding of your heart.

Suddenly, it clears.

Mostly it does. The noise is only lessened, but no woods crowd you on all sides and little smoke strangles the air or suffocates your vision. Instead it rises, caught and turned on the finest of breezes, and the chasing crackling thunder, still closing on your back, now wars with the sound of waves licking stones or sand, and the unseen swirl of hidden ocean currents. A grassy field is laid out before you, bumpy and uneven, stretching to the dark sea that ripples with the light of the stars. You look up at them, briefly. They have not lead you astray.

Making your way to the water, you come to the islands end. Sloped cliffs of rolling broken stones slide down into the shallow waters, turning to time worn sand and sinking further to the impenetrable shifting darkness of the archipelago bed. In the distance, an island, and floating in its waters should be your escape, if he still waits for you.

You heft the sack, greyed with smoke, and wonder what to do with it. It weighs too much to swim with, and anywhere you stash it will be consumed by flames sooner or later.

What to do what to do…

Wilk looked at the horizon, and in the distance, he saw an island. He didn’t know all the islands of the archipelago, despite his high words to young girls with coin and determined eyes, but he knew he knew much more than most on the matter. The north had frozen islands that moved, and the south had islands that take days or weeks to sail around, and both waters were lousy for fishing so he didn’t pay them much mind. Instead, he’d fished these waters and the waters around them for going on ninety years, and every wave, every rock, and every ill look of the sky were like old friends to him. He knew these waters. Still, he didn’t recognise the island he was looking at.

For one, it was glowing.

“What in the name of the gods blackest curse has she done?”

He’d previously taken a young slip of a girl -much against his better judgement- to the island he was looking at. Her eyes had been full of naive dreams, of riches and fame and all the foolish things young people dream about. He’s taken her to a black den for money. He shouldn’t have done it, he knew. Bad folk hang about that island, and the girl was bait, not eel. And for what, 15 silver? His pride? If he was a good man, he’d have taken her to the wrong island, or back to her parents with a stern word about the dangers of rough folk. Instead he’d watched her swim away, and his reward was sitting here in his boat: worrying free the last few remaining years of life he had left, convinced he’d delivered a girl to her doom.

Now that island was ablaze, its bright glow reaching into the sky and spreading along the reflection of the sea. She’d proven neither eel nor bait, but instead a spark of calamity, burning out a sore spot long overdue for it, but it gave him new reason to worry for her. Sparks rarely swim free between the islands of the archipelago. He watched the growing funnel of smoke, wondering with ill ease if it did not carry the ashes of his charge. He was too old for this.

His thoughts strayed to his daughter and granddaughter. Both had died together in a bad birth. The girl looked about the same age as the babe would have been. The pantheon of the fates were always an ugly set, he thought.

The glowing orange ripple laid out before him began to split, cleaved steadily down its centre by the ungainly splashes of a floundering landlubber. Hope, but also risk. He picked up the oar that had been one of his travel companions for the last seventeen years, hefting it as a weapon in his old arms. There should be only one person who knew where he was, but this was also one of the nearest islands, and any rat fleeing a fire would be swimming to the nearest rock. Still, what would he even do? The seas breed rough people, and he’d survived pirates before simply by having nothing worth taking. If one of those youths tried anything…

The train of thought ended when he recognised the same scrawny arms, the same fragile looking face, gasping for air like a fish out of water, being bogged down by her black top which bellowed below the waves like the fur of a drowning cat. He smiled, briefly, swallowing it before it could be seen, and lowered the paddle down to her when she closed, using it to reel her in when she latched on.

Coughing and shaking with the oceans cold, she huddled up on the same step where she sat all the way to the island, catching her breath as he began to paddle.

“I need you to take me back to the island.” Her voice sounds raw, from lost breath and coughing, but she looks determined. “Just for a bit.”

Wilk had been oddly relieved to have her back. He knew little of her, and had not met her before she wondered into their chance encounter, looking for transport and no questions asked. It was safe to say that the girl was still a stringer to him. But still, his guilt at his complicity, letting someone who looked so **** do something so stupid, had been weighing on him all night. There was only one answer he could give.

“No chance.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“With-“ Whatever he was about to say next died on his lips as she held two items up to him. In one of her dainty hands held a signet ring, silver and glittering with a dark stone in its middle, and the other was holding what looked like droplets of frozen ice, dangling from a gold wire frame.

“Take your pick.” She responded, triumphant grin on her face.

The diamonds were worth more, he thought, though he had never come across anything more valuable than a pearl or two in his travels. Each earing looked enough to buy his house ten times over, or a hundred times. His fingers raked through his beard and he suppressed a smile again. At one point, he’d considered tossing the 15 silver she’d given him into the sea; what use was such wealth to an old man? He had no one to leave such things to, save his wife, and she could survive very well after he’s gone with all the junk she’d horded over the years.

He turned his head, rowing on. “Don’t think they would suit me.”

She smiles, pushing forward her other hand. “The ring then. I just need your help to pick something up off the back shore. Please?”

Sitting as she was, the island burned in the background, hiding her smiling face in shadow. Neither eel nor bait.

Measuring them both and feeling it was the safer choice, he turned his course and began to row toward the fire.