The salt had worked its way into everything—the deck seams, the beef barrels, and the small space behind Harlan’s eyes where sleep used to live.

He didn’t need to look at the brass chronometer mounted beside his bunk to know the hour. When the frost began to bloom across the chimney of the oil lamp, turning its amber glow a pale, curdled blue, he knew it was three minutes past midnight.

Outside the cabin, the Aethelgard rode a gentle swell, her oak timbers groaning in rhythm with the tide. But the sound echoing down the companionway belonged to no wave. It was the slow, wet drag of iron-shod boots over timber—stopping directly outside his door.

“You’re late, Julian,” Harlan said.

His voice was thin, scrubbed raw by three weeks of relentless offshore wind. He didn’t lift his quill from the logbook. He kept his strokes even, recording latitude, wind direction, and the steadily diminishing barrels of ship’s biscuit.

The air in the cabin plunged, turning his breath to sudden, heavy plumes of white vapor. The scent arrived a moment later—not the clean, sharp salt of the open surface, but the heavy, suffocating reek of the deep sea: crushed kelp, rotting canvas, and cold copper.

Julian had gone over the rail during the squall at the Devil’s Teeth. The fore-topgallant sheet had snapped with a sound like a pistol shot, flinging him into the black water before anyone could shout. Harlan had worn the ship around, risking the jagged reefs to search the churning white-water for three agonizing hours, but the sea had taken its tax. No body. No shroud. Only a pair of oilskin trousers left drying near the galley stove and an unpayable debt to the deep.

The brass latch scraped upward with an agonizing, metallic screech. The heavy oak door swung inward, opening onto the pitch-black corridor of the lower deck. Nothing stood in the doorway, yet the draft that rolled in made Harlan’s teeth ache to the root.

“We brought her into harbor yesterday, lad,” Harlan said softly, setting the pen carefully into its brass inkwell. He looked directly into the frost-slicked dark of the doorway. “The anchor is down in twelve fathoms of mud. The sails are furled, and the crew is ashore at the tavern. There isn’t a line left to haul.”

The silence stretched, tight as a hawser under strain. Then came the sound—a wet, rattled exhale, like seawater being forced through a rusted pipe.

“...The watch... isn’t over...”

Harlan sat motionless as the cold bit through his woolen coat, sinking deep into his bones. He realized then that a haunting is not a monster born of malice or spite. It is simply a duty held too tightly—a man who died holding the line in the dark, refusing to believe his ship had ever reached the safety of the shore.

Harlan pulled the logbook closer, flipped the heavy paper to a fresh page, and dipped his pen back into the slush of frozen ink.

“Aye, lad,” he whispered, his breath clouding in the dark as he adjusted the lamp. “Then I’ll stand it with you.”