Cutlass Oath

The rum was gone. Three bottles of it, the good stuff from the cove at Isla Perdida, and now my mouth tasted like salt and regret. I wiped my sleeve across my lips and squinted at the horizon.

“Captain says we’re close,” called out a voice from the crow’s nest. It was Rummy, a boy of maybe twelve with ears too big for his head and a nose that ran constantly. He’d stowed away three weeks ago. I still hadn’t decided if I’d throw him overboard or keep him.

“Captain says a lot of things,” I muttered.

The *Sea Serpent* groaned beneath me. She was a good ship, old and scarred, with a hull that had kissed more reefs than I cared to count. But she held together. That’s what mattered. A ship that holds together and a crew that doesn’t stab you in the back. That’s the whole damn secret to surviving out here.

I turned from the railing and walked aft. The deck was quiet. Most of the crew were below, sleeping off the night’s festivities. We’d raided a merchant vessel two days ago. Nothing special. Some silk, a few crates of spices, a chest of silver that turned out to be mostly copper with a silver plate on top. The captain had been furious. I’d found it funny. Still found it funny.

The captain’s cabin door was shut. I knocked twice, the way he liked.

“Enter.”

I pushed it open. Captain Mordecai sat behind his desk, a map spread out before him like a woman he was courting. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, with a white beard that reached his chest and eyes the color of storm clouds. He looked up at me and did not smile.

“Pirata.”

“Captain.”

“We’re close.”

“So I hear.”

He tapped the map with a thick finger. “The island of Xibalba. The treasure of the Sunken King. Every pirate from here to the Shattered Coast has looked for it. They’ve all failed.”

I leaned against the doorframe. “And we won’t?”

“We won’t,” he said. “Because I have something they didn’t.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a small, leather-bound book. It was old. The spine was cracked, the pages yellowed and warped from salt spray. He tossed it onto the desk.

“The journal of Captain Elias Blackwood.”

I picked it up. The leather was soft, worn smooth by years of handling. I opened it to a random page. The handwriting was cramped, frantic. *The natives call it the Eye of the Abyss. They say it can see through time. They say it can show you the moment of your own death.* I closed the book.

“Blackwood went mad,” I said.

“Blackwood found the treasure.”

“And then went mad.”

Mordecai leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his weight. “Madness is a risk I’m willing to take. Are you?”

I didn’t answer. I looked at the book in my hands. It felt warm, like it had been sitting in the sun. But we were in the cabin, and the sun was on the other side of the ship. I put it down.

“When do we arrive?”

“By nightfall.”

I nodded and turned to leave. But I stopped at the door. “Captain. What did Blackwood see? In the Eye, I mean. What made him go mad?”

Mordecai’s face was unreadable. “He saw himself. Standing on this very island. Holding the treasure. And then he saw himself again, a hundred years later, still holding it. Still waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For someone to take it from him.”

I left the cabin. The air on deck felt colder than before. The sun was high, the sky clear, but there was a chill that crept under my shirt and settled in my bones. I walked to the bow and stared at the horizon.

There was something out there. A smudge of darkness against the blue. Land.

Rummy slid down from the crow’s nest and landed beside me. “That it?”

“That’s it.”

He squinted. “Looks like nothing.”

“That’s how they hide the good stuff.”

He laughed. It was a kid’s laugh, high and unbroken. I envied him that. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like that. Probably never. Probably before I was born.

The island grew as we approached. It was a jagged black rock, covered in jungle so thick you couldn’t see ten feet in. The trees were twisted, their branches reaching out like grasping hands. The beach was black sand, volcanic and sharp. It crunched under my boots when I stepped off the longboat.

The crew followed. Twelve of us. Mordecai at the front, the journal in his hand. He didn’t need to read it. He knew the way. He’d been studying it for months, he said. Dreaming about it, he said.

I didn’t like the way he said that.

The jungle swallowed us. The air was thick and wet, heavy with the smell of rotting vegetation and something else. Something metallic. Blood, maybe. Or copper. Or both.

We walked for an hour. The path was narrow, barely visible. Mordecai led without hesitation. He knew where he was going. That should have comforted me. It didn’t.

The trees opened into a clearing. In the center stood a stone altar, covered in moss and vines. On top of it sat a golden eye. It was the size of a human head, carved from a single piece of gold, with a pupil of black obsidian that seemed to swallow the light.

“The Eye of the Abyss,” Mordecai whispered.

He walked toward it. His hands trembled. I’d never seen him tremble before.

“Captain,” I said.

He didn’t stop.

“Mordecai.”

He reached out and touched it.

The world went silent. The birds stopped singing. The wind stopped blowing. Even the blood in my veins seemed to pause.

Mordecai’s body went rigid. His eyes rolled back. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He stood there for a long moment, frozen, his hand on the golden eye.

Then he screamed.

It was not a human sound. It was a howl, a shriek, something ancient and terrible that had been waiting inside him for a long time. He fell to his knees. The eye tumbled from the altar and rolled across the ground. It stopped at my feet.

I looked down at it.

The obsidian pupil stared back at me.

And I saw myself. Standing in this same clearing. Holding the eye. But I was older. My hair was gray. My face was lined. And I was alone. The crew was gone. The jungle had grown over the path. No one had come for years.

No one would ever come again.

I blinked. The vision vanished. Mordecai lay on the ground, gasping, his face pale and wet with sweat.

“Pirata,” he whispered. “Don’t look.”

But I had already looked.

And I knew, with a certainty that settled into my chest like a stone, that I would never leave this island.