Artist:  Marmoratus
Artist Posting: Unposted, huh.

Story:

It's the same salty air; brine come to lap at hands that haven't dipped below them all that often in their many years sailing on it. Red coming off them in ribbon clouds that are dissolved easier than words flow in a confession booth. It stings, but the cuts were welcome; they would be things to anchor her story when it got diluted with whiskey and women. That was the last of the bodies, and this ship no longer belonged to the dead. It was not the last of the blood, storms could not wash the grain of this vessel clean.

Sullen were the men pushing corpses over into the sea, but bubbling under that cold façade was the inevitability of a new future. Fear and relief fighting just as hard with each other as this crew had within the last hour. One fist rose into the air at portside, the fox too big to be a fox calling out in a raucous, celebratory cheer. Wordless, filled with rage and reassurance. Together, the crew looked up from their minds. Men and women, new and old to their shackles, surfacing for the first time in years for some of them. Freedom. As bare as could be. The first of, what the fox would promise, many to come. Pirates to pirates. The ship would atone under its new captain.