Skeleton Crew

This is a story that begins long before the first scuttling creatures ever ventured onto Odd’s shores, back in the times of the First Journeys. Like most skeletons this one started life as a person, a pirate no less. Some say that they were aboard the First Ship to sail onto the Odd Peninsula and make a life there, while others scoff and claim the crew clambered up from the Great Void beyond the edge of the world. They are both wrong.

Here is how it happened. When they were a person, the Skeleton Crew joined a foolhardy mission equipped only with a rusty map proclaiming the whereabouts of a beautiful isles covered in snow white sand and dotted with a kaleidoscope of glassy stones. An old loon had given them the map, which is never a good starting place for an adventure, but they went anyway, told that they need only follow the light of the moon to reach this treasured shore.

The ship cut quietly through the night, and the sailor at its helm strained their one good eye towards the moon, intent to never lose it among the roving clouds. As they stared, they began to notice the moon shifting and shimmering in small and un-moon-like ways, flickering back and forth as if it was gliding through rough waters. Suddenly it was clear, it was the night of the new moon, and the ship was following the glowing tail of a leviathan. They rushed back to tell the crew of their horrifying revelation, but they all cried that it was nonsense, the careless hallucination of a one-eyed crone. And they sailed on, out into the moonless night.

As the night wandered off past the horizon the wind began to leak slowly from the ship’s sails until the last drop spilled wastefully upon the deck. Even the waves hid away in deep caverns, and the world was left perfectly flat. The ship stopped suddenly. They had reached the doldrums.

The doldrums have never been written onto any map, partly because cartographers shudder to imagine this consumer of adventure, and mostly because no ship had ever managed to return. They say that The Drunkard once dipped one toe into its turgid waters before even he had the common sense to turn back, but that is a story for another day. Ships never move in the doldrums, and the poor crew slowly withered away until only dust remained on the barren deck. Only the one-eyed sailor endured, sitting alone with their cursed self, when that same old loon flew back on windless winds to watch them die. They spoke in raspy whispers for only a moment before the bird nodded gleefully and then grabbed the sailor in its webbed claws and wrenched them off of that miserable ship. They flew to the isle of white sand, and the sailor lay peacefully on that pristine beach as they too eroded to nothingness, leaving not even bones. A troll’s age passed, and the bejeweled tides slowly seeped into the spaces that the bones had left behind until the old sailor’s body transformed into a petrified mosaic of sea glass.

Now, on lonesome nights when a false moon crosses the empty sky, they say you can hear the clacking of bones carried on a frigid breeze. These are only ghost tales meant to keep the children of Even huddled in bed, but on the darkest nights one-eyed sailors swear they see the soft shimmer of sea glass bones.