the ghostly buccaneer

The wind whipped at my tattered jacket sleeve. The unholy mixture of salt, blood and sweat sickened me. My severed stump floated on the waves, sailing true north, until the menacing visage of the great white crested the surface and swallowed my dearly departed appendage.

Across the water, standing astern, laughing, the ghostly flicker of the Buccaneer gripped my eye. But with relief I heard his mast crashing into the sea. Our gamble had worked. The Hell Frigate drifted away helplessly.

The hunt was just getting started. I knew it would continue throughout the Seven Seas and into my nightmares.

a darkness of mind

Drake’s fate was determined the day his father was killed.

Ghosts do not often commit murder. They haunt. They instill fear. They might so inhabit a person’s psyche as to drive her to suicide. But actual slaughter is rare.

Drake’s father was murdered by a ghost, and on that day Drake became a ghost hunter.

He inhabited the darkness. He learned about betrayal and lonely hearts and the isolation of eternity. He drank in whispers and sang of misfortune.

He became a lost soul. So it was that upon his death, he knew that he himself would become a ghost.