Why it's called the Crimson Current

The sailors huddled in the center of the ship. No one dared make a sound. Only their strangled pants and the steady lapping of waves against the groaning hull pierced the heavy silence. Even the slightest sound felt like a physical blow. Already tense muscles pulled taught over bone. One of them, either the bravest or the most foolish, crept toward the rail on the very tips of the toes of his worn leather shoes. Only a dozen or so creeping steps from the huddled mass, a plank creaked beneath his foot. The crew drew a collective breath. They held it.

A second past.

Two seconds.

The brave sailor’s tense shoulders relaxed as he let out his shaky breath. Before his lungs had loosed the breath completely, it was ripped out of him with a shriek of undignified terror. With a flash of polished ore, the first of the crew vanished from the deck, leaving behind only the echoes of his scream and the splash that followed.

The waves lapped at the hull.

The men huddled closer.

Time ticked on. With every excruciating second, the sailors grew more afraid. The inevitability of their deaths was as real as the rising moon that existed only where it blocked the stars. Every second marked another blackened point of light in their wide, searching eyes.

As suddenly as the first strike of lightning in a summer storm, the once quiet night was filled with a cacophony of screams. The hooked sailors clawed at the deck, the rigging, their comrades, anything they could reach, but every one of them was dragged over with no regard for the fight they gave.

Then came the second wave. From out of the sea, grappling hooks arched up over the deck and ripped sailors off their feet or tore through the deck and the rails to return to the water. The third wave, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, tore down the main mast with a sound like thunder, dragged nearly all of the crew overboard, and left whatever was left in tattered splinters, or scurrying over the claw marks and bloodstains of their drowned shipmates for something resembling cover.

The seventh wave was waited on for a while. Perhaps it was only thirty seconds. Perhaps minutes, hours, it might have been days had the sun become more than a sliver on the horizon. The last of the crew was spread over the deck. One huddled by the remains of the mast, a small group amassed by the locked captain’s door, someone was curled up in the middle of the deck, praying to some god or other who’s eyes had been turned long ago, and only two had gone below decks.

For the seventh time, hooks on sleek black rope traced their graceful courses onto the ship. The praying man was cut off by his own screams. The man by the mast ran to his aid. His hands gained no grip on the silken rope, which slipped through his hands only for them to catch on the base of the hook. His feet were dragged across the torn wooden slats of the deck and into the open air where the rail had been ripped away.

His grip released a moment too late and he plummeted into the waters only a beat slower than his still-shrieking comrade. The water hit him like the stone roads of the hometown he wished he never left. Those wishes were then replaced with the absolute cold that filled his complete body and mind. His lungs begged for the air he had lost with his vain screams. Strong hands like iron shackles clamped onto his limbs and dragged him down, down, down.

The last thing he saw through the water like warped glass before the light left his eyes forever, was the gaping hole in the hull of his ship like the maw of an unforgiving beast, with the spears of the fishlike creatures that swarmed it as its jagged teeth. Then, plumes of red bloomed from his chest like the petals of some morbid flower, with the polished tip of a spear in the center.

When the ship didn’t return to port, more were sent. One after the other they went under, and one after the other the seafaring humans gave up their trade. Maps were redrawn with warnings on the water where the currents ran crimson.

“Here there be monsters”