...something new being writing about ships.
A tall, thin man walked along the deck, the sound of his feet against the wood perhaps the only audible noise besides the light movement on the sails in the wind. He had left his station at the poop deck to engage in an investigative stroll along the length of the ship; since the boredom of the watch had set in, he had felt a need for his mind to focus on something. Despite the nighttime darkness, there was a glow through the moonlit sky that illuminated the waves as they moved slowly by, and, for a while, the man stood there entranced by them as if it were the first time he had seen the sea.
He had paused somewhere adjacent to the mainmast, and with a quick glance to the mammoth oak structure standing upright to his right, he carried on his leisured walk, leaving the end of the quarterdeck and proceeding onto the slightly lower main deck. It was eerily silent, as it always was, and sometimes he believed it was if time itself had froze, and it would take all his mental capacity to comprehend they were actually making headway when no sound could be heard and no motion could be observed.
Luckily, the delusion was broken by a loud groaning emitted from the ship, as if was retorting to the man’s conviction that it was doing no work. A wry smile formed on the man’s face, and he rearranged his slightly lopsided bicorne to a straighter disposition. He passed a few crew and nodded in recognition, before reaching the forecastle, the bow of the ship, and he stood almost where the two sides joined, and the bowsprit protruded forwards, like a signalling desire of the ship to power ever onward. The man overlooked the figurehead, which hung below the prow, the spiritual embodiment of the great beast of the sea they called a ship. There hung a vicious snake, slithering and vicious, its sharp teeth and tongue looking fearfully alive – an apt figure for a ship that had been launched as The Serpent’s Breath.
“She always manages to squirm our way out of the tightest spots…” he muttered quietly to himself, voicing the ship’s notorious reputation for evading entrapment by enemy fleets, causing some to call her a blessed ship. The man, though, knew it was her speed and well-oiled crew that kept it alive, and was also why it was used extensively as a scouting frigate.
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