Therapy Bits

Thanks Di for the prompt words! They were navy, force, and army.

Three Things Challenge #MM136 | pensitivity101

He was a force to be reckoned with. A veteran of the merchant navy, Captain Elias Voss had salt in his blood and storms in his eyes. Forty years at sea had carved his face like driftwood—weather-beaten, scarred, but solid. People said he could smell a squall before the sky even darkened, and that Poseidon himself thought twice before testing him.

His ship, The Brine Widow, was no beauty—her hull bore the scars of a thousand voyages, her decks creaked like the bones of old men—but under Elias’s command, she moved like a living thing. She had outlasted newer, flashier vessels that had long since been swallowed by the deep. Her crew revered her like a temple, and her captain like a god.

But this voyage was different.

Elias had been hired by a private collector from Lisbon—a quiet man with ink-stained fingers and an obsession with maritime lore. He sought the wreck of La Santa Adela, a Spanish galleon lost two centuries ago in the South Atlantic, said to be carrying a cargo of cursed silver and a map written in the blood of a conquistador.

Elias didn’t believe in curses, but he did believe in instinct. And something about this job made the hair on the back of his neck stiffen. Still, he took it. Not for the money—but for the chance to test himself once more. One last trial before he considered hanging up his compass and pipe.

They found the wreck after eleven days of drifting through dead waters—miles of ocean with no fish, no birds, no sound. The seabed around La Santa Adela was a graveyard of sunken ships, far more than any reef or storm could explain. And when their diver first returned with a coin in hand, his eyes wide and mouth moving silently, Elias knew: the stories were true. Something lived down there. Something ancient and hungry.

The nights grew stranger. Compass needles spun lazily. Men spoke in their sleep in tongues they didn’t know. One by one, the crew began to crack—sober men began to drink; brave ones stood trembling at dawn. But Elias remained unmoved. He paced the deck like a sentinel, whispering to the sea in the old sailor’s tongue, half-forgotten chants learned from voodoo priests in Haiti and mad fishermen off the Azores.

The collector vanished on the twelfth night. Vanished—as in, not a drop of blood, not a scrap of cloth. Just a trail of wet footprints leading to the stern, then nothing.

Elias made the call before the sun rose. They would burn the wreck. All of it. Silver, map, legend—damn the profit. Whatever had been trapped down there didn’t want to stay buried. He gave the order and lit the first torch himself, tossing it overboard as the barrels of oil followed.

The ocean boiled.

Waves like walls slammed into The Brine Widow, and voices screamed from below—not human, not even close. The ship he’d commanded for twenty years held steady, though the wheel fought him like a beast. When dawn came, the sea was still again. Empty. Quiet. And La Santa Adela was gone, as if it had never been.

Elias never took another commission.

But on calm nights, when the moon is high and the wind dies to a whisper, he stands at the edge of his dock in Faro, staring out into the dark. Listening. As if waiting for something to rise.

He was a force to be reckoned with—but even forces must rest, eventually. And even gods, sometimes, feel afraid.