longer.blue

Rolling on his back, Oliver squinted faintly at the noon sun and tried to take stock of his current miserable stake in life. The ship, the Dulcina, was beyond saving, its wooden corpse rent into thousands of pieces. A scant few undamaged crates and barrels still floated amongst the remains, hopefully provisions he could use and not just dozens of pounds of gunpowder. At this point, they would be far too soaked to even do him the courtesy of blowing him up. The men? He saw a few bodies but dared not look at them for too long. They were almost as mangled as the Dulcina, and Oliver could barely handle his own guilt and his anger towards the captain. The captain! Nowhere did he see the captain, and he wasn’t sure whether or not to be grateful for it. If there was good in the world, then Captain Ambrose was dead and his damned book destroyed by the sea. There was nobody around, but that meant nothing out here. It would be astonishing if he had survived, but so had Oliver. The possibility of righteous justice being undelivered pained him deeply, but the certainty that without rescue he would soon face justice himself merely filled him with a quiet dread.