Riv woke up a few moments later, none the worse for wear besides feeling like he had taken a dump in an icy part of the sea. As soon as Marco confirmed no longer-term issues, he sped back to the island to find the old man who was the key to everything.

When they found him, Thatch was sitting in the same part of the temple as he had been when they first met. Hunched over, he was busy tracing something in the sand with a stick. He looked up as they approached, as bland and unsurprised as if he’d been expecting them at this exact time and place and no other.

"You saw it," he said. It wasn't a question. He could apparently read it on their faces.

Marco nodded. "We boarded it. Explored the ship a bit, even spoke with your captain."

Thatch didn’t reply right away. He waited.

"He called you the Anchor," Marco said. "He wasn't able to speak as clearly as we would have liked, but he said that to help them, we’d have to kill you."

Thatch didn't flinch. He looked down at the sand again. “That’s what I figured it might be. I thought the captain might have not wanted that, though. We sailed together a long time.”

“He was going between killing you and not. I don't know what he was like in life, but I can tell you he wasn't himself. He told us what we asked, what he could spit out. But unless he was the kind of guy who attacked peaceful people…”

“He wasn't,” Thatch interjected.

"Then yes, he was affected by something."

Thatch’s face softened slightly.

“What does it mean, though?” Elisa asked. "Can one person anchor an entire ghost ship?"

Thatch shrugged. “I was the last to see it. The last to carry its memory. Maybe that's all it takes. Or maybe I'm being punished for surviving where nobody else did.”

"Can you release it?" Elisa asked. "Even if it's tied to you, there might be some way."

"You think I haven't tried? I’ve tried. Every day, I try. I think about it, talk about it, and scream about it. I even pray. Nothing works."

"You don’t want to die,” Marco said. "And we aren't going to kill you."

"No. But I want them to rest." Thatch etched out a bit more of the sandy soil at his feet with his stick. "It might not matter anyway. I made a promise to you if you could free them, right? You held up your end of the bargain. Tell me what my end was.”

The silence stretched. The sea rolled in and out. Elisa was the one who cut the awkwardness.

"You said you’d give us what the temple gave you,” Elisa said softly. “But only if the ghost ship was destroyed. We haven't done that.”

“It is a problem. Tell you what. Feed me again. Let me sit by your fire. And I'll try to think of a way everyone can move on. Happily,” Thatch grunted.

They made the walk back slowly. Riv wasn’t fully recovered, which made for a nice balancing of pace between Marco's crew and the old man. Besides that, it wasn't like anyone was in a hurry. The ghost ship had implications for all of them, and even though nobody there was considering putting an old man down to get more power, just the fact that it had to be considered weighed in the air like lead.

By the time they reached the beach again, the sun was lower and the tide was high. Elisa fired up her hands and got their cookfire going while Marco prepped the food with the help of a fast-recovering Riv. Dried fish, a few leftover vegetables, and some grain went into a battered pot. Elisa added the last of the spice mix, sniffed the steam, and made a face.

“I'm sorry if you were expecting much variety, Thatch. I tried, but that smells exactly like the stew we made before,” Elisa said as she ladled out Thatch’s bowl first.

"Because it is," Thatch said. “Ship food gets repetitive no matter what you do. But even repeated stew has character. I miss that sometimes. The routine. You had to rely on people to make it tolerable.”

“Ugh,” Elisa said. "If Riv is my best chance at making this taste good, I might just skip this particularly meal."

"Write in your diary about it." Riv snorted. "The sad soup that friendship couldn't fix."

Thatch chuckled from his log, a dry rasp of a sound. It was a nasty thing, and Marco got the sense it was getting worse. Before, the old man had at least been able to mask whatever was wrong with him when he wasn't too close to a coughing fit. Now Marco could hear whatever was happening all the time.

“You all always argue about dinner?” Thatch asked.

“Only when we have it,” Riv said, shivering. He had given up on the cooking a few seconds ago, and now was in the process of propping himself against the base of a tree and bundling in a blanket. “We've been pretty lucky in that respect, though. I thought we'd have more problems staying supplied. I’m pretty sure that I can count the number of times we went without dinner on a single hand though.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

They ate around the fire. As the food warmed them and the dark settled in, conversation finally started to pick up where it had left off before things got heavy. Aethe told a story about a legendary bow, a sort of Elven fairy tale about a weapon that could shoot an arrow high enough to burn it in the sun itself. Elisa responded by talking for a bit longer than anyone wanted to hear about the origins of that kind of myth, and Riv responded to that by pretending to fall asleep.

"Jerk." Elisa snapped her notebook shut with faked offense in her body language, but she was laughing with everyone else. "Although he really is asleep. I suppose all the activity tired him out."

Marco was confused for a second before he realized who she was referring to. He looked at Thatch. For a while, the old man had tracked the conversation, smiling and laughing at the banter without actually participating himself. Eventually, he had stretched himself out more comfortably on the sand, which led to him now slumped over completely.

"Should we wake him up?" Aethe asked. "I wouldn't want to sleep on the sand."

"I doubt he minds. And the fire will burn for hours yet. Besides, he looks peaceful." Riv leaned back in the sand himself. “Let him rest.”

The crew rested for a few more minutes in near silence before Marco moved. It was that peacefulness that Riv had mentioned. The old man could hardly breathe most of the time. He hacked and coughed with the best of them. To sleep silently without so much as a snore or sound should have been beyond him. When Marco laid his hand on the old man's shoulder, he confirmed that it was. All things were now.

“Hey, man,” Riv said. "I thought we just decided to leave him be."

Marco looked at his crew before delivering the pronouncement. "He's dead."

There was a bit of silence before the crew sprang into motion. Riv found his shovel, Aethe scouted out a good grave, and Elisa draped a piece of cloth over the old man. Marco carved him a headstone, something roughly anchor-shaped. It was a good choice for a man they knew very little about but who likely loved ships. Most sailors Marco knew of in Gulf Isle's cemetery had something similar.

Aethe spoke up when it was all done. “I can't believe he just died like that. I hate to use the word, but isn't this a little too convenient? Too much of a coincidence?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.” Elisa kicked a bit of loose soil that Riv's filling-in had missed onto the grave. "I think some people just hold on until they don't have a reason to stick around anymore."

“Or a reason to go,” Riv said. "I think both were true of him there, at the end."

"Should we say something?" Aethe asked. "Do your people do that?"

"We do, sometimes. The problem here is we don't know that much about him." Marco thought for a second. "He seemed like a decent man. He cared about his friends. And he didn't think his life was more important than letting them go. Besides that, we don't know a lot about him."

"I think that's enough," Elisa said. "Just that. And that's what we'll tell people about him when we get the chance. I do wish he had stuck around long enough to hand over that temple, though."

“You know what? I think he might have,” Marco said. "Let's go check it out."

They returned to the temple just after midday. The sun burned down out of a clear blue sky, casting hard shadows across the path as they made their way back. The forest was still silent. Marco wondered what Thatch had eaten during all his time here, if birds and little beasts hadn't been an option.

When they reached the clearing, the black stone temple was mute, inert, and waiting.

“Over there.” Aethe pointed.

Near the back, where Thatch had been sitting before, there was something in the soil.

Marco crouched beside the message, read it a few times, and sighed.

"That’s why he was sitting here when we got back, I think," Elisa said. "He was writing this. Thinking it through."

As they stood over the inscription, the temple changed. It wasn't anything truly perceptible in the sense that they could see or hear it, but with the sense of the temple's location they had all been granted it was something every member of the crew could feel.

A pulse of something moved through the stone. A seam opened in the floor, revealing a simple black pedestal. Upon it sat a stone disc, covered in faint glowing lines.

Marco took the disc. A pulse of light ran through the floor, then flickered out.

A new message appeared:

The glow from the pedestal faded, and the plinth on which the stone disc sat slowly sank back into the floor, vanishing without a sound.

"Well," Riv said, after a long moment. "That solves the inheritance problem."

"And gives us another one," Marco muttered. "Hostile control? That could mean anything."

"At least we know where to go. And we’re better prepared for it. Stronger," Aethe said.

Marco looked down at the words Thatch had left again.

"Yeah," he said. “Thanks to Thatch, yeah.”