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<span class="mu-i">“I’d be lying if I told you I knew.”</span> Sir von Rhum says with a careful shrug. <span class="mu-i">“But I can tell you what I think. Once, a little ways south and west of here, I was stationed on a Cantônian cog. The Old Glory. We were a fleet of three, merchantmen on our way back from Cathagi that had strayed from our intended route. It came for us in the fog.”</span>
You glance up. The light in the lodge room has darkened slightly, a cloud passing overhead outside no doubt. But ominous all the same. You look back at the man across from you. <span class="mu-i">“What did?”</span>
<span class="mu-i">“A serpent. Unblinking eyes wider than your squire is tall. A maw of needle teeth big enough for an armoured knight to charge straight down its gullet with room to spare on either side. We peppered the damn thing with blade and arrowhead even as it crushed one of the ships in its coils, the Armitage I think it was called. I’ll never forget how it let us go, turning on the screaming sailors cast overboard. Plucking those poor souls beneath the waves one by one, the shimmer of its fins and crest beneath the water. Black as pitch.”</span> Sir von Rhum pauses, his eyes telling you it’s not a sight too far from his dreams these nights. He brushes off the melancholy look with another swig, wiping his mouth and pointing at you with the hand wrapped around the mug. <span class="mu-i">“If you ask me, and you did… these rumours of silent black sailed ships, drifting in the fog and crewed by the damned hungry for sailors souls is all hogwash. No. That’s what lurks out there in the west. A monster. A sea creature so big that folk mistake its fins for sails in the distance. The kind of beast that would make the one that attacked us look like a minnow.”</span>
<span class="mu-i">“But… Cain sailed west.”</span> The scripture is silent as to what became of him in his self-imposed exile. But surely a watery death at the hands of an unseelie leviathan was not his final fate. <span class="mu-i">“Saint Cain and his Ten Thousand.”</span>
<span class="mu-i">“Aye, so it’s written in the Book of Brothers.”</span> Sir von Rhum nods, eyes not meeting yours. <span class="mu-i">“I just hope he had the good sense to turn south at some point.”</span>
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