Winds of Fate [Books IV - VI]

Chapter 181.3: Chosen One

Damned.

The crew cannot gasp anymore, only stare. Uriah swallows hard, touching the slice of Van Der Decken over his own left chest, because Anton's is sitting right at the center. Aggy winces and looks away. Ben closes his eyes, for tears had swelled in them. Eleanore does not leave. She meets her beloved's resolute gaze.

Anton nods and closes his shirt. "I was eighteen," he begins, fingers trembling. "It was 1700. I was newly-married, happy, and foolish as all young men dangerously tend to be."

Eleanore shivers. "Anton?"

He dares not look at her. He isn't ready, after all, to bare everything of himself here and now in the mess hall. "If you knew the lives of all of us who agreed to Jones," Anton says, "Van Der Decken, me, and this fellow at the Fountain of Youth, the other one, Cortez, who wielded the Sword that conquered the Aztecs, we all fell for our desires. I... I had. I traded my own heart to an ancient evil for..."

At this point, Eleanore cannot bear the anguish on his face. She holds his hand.

"It is my heart that Jones is now using to roam the waters." Anton does not hesitate. "Eleanore is correct. The greatest battle is not out on sea, crew. The war begins with you. Do not give your heart over to the darkness. Never." He sighs. "Never..."

Maddy quietly agrees. Eugenie trembles, but Victor nods eagerly. James and Aggy look at each other, while Gunther uneasily looks at Puck and Boomer beside him. Ricky solemnly agrees. At the far end, Thibaud thinks quietly beside Isabelle, who has only looked at the table while listening... and Uriah, shaken, only nods too, for he now understands a larger part of the whole.

Nigel closes his eyes, a decades' worth of a most solemn secret now unloaded from his shoulders.

Eleanore presses his hand, but Anton mutely refuses to speak further. She takes a deep breath and allows him to stay back once more. "It is not magic we need," Eleanore tenderly says, "it was never about magic or manipulating the world around us, just how Jones plays with humans. The answer has been, and always will be, love."

The crew now all look at her with fear, for what she is saying, for who El Diablo truly is. For a moment, Anton almost regretted that he said the truth to these pirates.

But Eleanore doesn't waver. "Love led me here."

And she smiles to him.

Warmth spreads to his cheeks, and he entwines their fingers together. Eleanore is not done, nor does she linger, she turns to her crew. "It was not power I wanted, it was love. It was not victories I needed, but forgiveness—for all I have done and desired in my selfishness. For all I have harmed..." She tears up. "You feel, as well as I do, that we never truly forget those we had to kill in battle... those we had to rob... and our fellow pirates, felled beside us."

Douglas covers his face with his hands and pauses to take a gulp of water. The crew become morose at this. Of course, they know. Those screams, the blood... the later battles became bearable, but all in all, in the quiet of the night, even the silence and darkness refused them comfort.

There, in the darkness, they remember too well. Anton knows. He stares at his shaking hand, that sword hand of his, so mightily trained in destreza, worthy of a royal knight and noble don, that many fell from his blade. It trembles now, not out of the curse of Jones, no, but of his own soul withering from all the evil he had brought upon his being. He looks up. The younger ones, generally spared more times from doing so, just ponder quietly. But those who have been decades out on sea—

The sea, where the Captain takes on the symbol of Divine justice and mercy, almost as if they are out of Heaven's cradle... out of God's reach...

Now they all come to the same throes of realization, that perhaps, they have all been wrong; that perhaps, their methods had been horribly unjust, no matter how cruel the world on land has been... that, perhaps, when they are looking up at the skies, Someone was watching them, waiting...