The Tethered Dark

Prologue

The fog came in three nights ago and has not left. It sits on Velmoor Harbor like a held breath, muffling the creak of dock rope and the lap of black water, swallowing the lights of the chandler's row until only their halos remain. The fishermen say it is unnatural fog — that it carries a smell, something between brine and burnt paper, that makes the dogs refuse to go near the water's edge. That is when the Ossian Mair drifted in. No pilot flag. No signal lanterns. No sound from the deck. The harbormaster's boy spotted her first, a dark shape resolving out of the gray like a bad memory, and by the time the watch boats reached her, the crew was already there — all twenty-two of them, seated or standing about the deck in perfect silence, breathing, blinking, alive in every mechanical sense of the word. They knew their names. They knew the ship. They did not know where they had been, what they had done, or why the hold beneath their feet was packed floor-to-ceiling with the most wanted stolen goods on the continent. The Port Authority has sealed the Ossian Mair at Berth Thirteen. The crew has been moved to the Quarantine Annex of the Saltmere Inn while officials argue jurisdiction. And the fog has not lifted. Somewhere in the hours between the crew's last memory and this gray morning, a deal was made — with something patient, something deliberate, and something that does not want to be found. You have until the memories are gone entirely. After that, the trail dies with them.