"It isn't working."
The witch was staring into his own ring of salt with obvious desperation on his face.
"What did you just say?" Mariana got up and examined the banishment sigils. To be frank, she neither expected nor wanted this to work. Daniel was so important to her that she would have loved nothing more than to have him visit her while she was unaware of his presence, but for the sake of other people on this ship, she had to pretend otherwise, and it was not always easy.
Like it had not been easy to hide the smile that forced its way out of her facial muscles when she had realized that yes, indeed it had been him. Like it had not been easy to say that she was concerned and wanted this madness to end as soon as possible. She was lost, between two worlds, but the pull of the realm of her normal privateer life was losing to the allure of being captivated by his dark heart…forever.
She felt something within her start to twitch. She didn't know how, but she had to get these people out of her cabin.
She had, well, lots of things to do, and a wild curiosity that forced her to examine some things on her own.
"It is not. Working," Roinar repeated, now with an emphatic stern quality in his voice. He had been trying to cleanse, banish, and cleanse again for almost three hours now, and although there had been no demonic apparitions of any kind after the musicians had left with their instruments, the witch still claimed that he could see signs of something creepy happening.
He dropped a handful of rusty nails onto the floor. They landed in a certain way, of course they did, nails could hardly be expected to levitate. Roinar shook his head.
"Notice how they form an inverse spiral, Captain Adams? This is not a good sign. This is something that may indicate a malevolent presence."
Mariana tried to act shocked.
Yes, she felt like she was in danger. No, it did not feel like it was necessarily a bad thing, but what did a silly little lady like her know? She was upside down now. Danger felt like safety. Her own bed felt like the fear of death itself. She craved to be shocked and humiliated by the presence of the pirate king, a man whose mere energy could pierce flesh, or that was how she saw him, at least.
"Just try to sleep with one eye open," Roinar said. "The Potion of Life made me sleepy, and I will not stay awake for anything, whether it should be the doom of gods or men. Good night, Captain Mariana, I hope that the light of the morning -"
"Cut that, you sound so tired. Go rest. I will not die, and if I do die, then you surely have the knowledge needed to bring me back," Mariana said, trying to gently shoo the witch away from her cabin.
"Well, if you say so," Roinar said with the defeated dignity of a scientist who couldn't swoop in and correct misinformation.
In fact, deadrousing did not actually bring back a person's sentience, it merely drew the essence of mannerisms and personality traits back into the world of the living. Thankfully, this dreadful art had almost vanished, since it had been customary to bury the dead under the waves.
Mariana didn't sleep, not a single wink, no, she couldn't, but the bed was soft and tempting and she would have liked to give in to its fateful embrace.
Soft surfaces were no match for the way Daniel's muscles felt under his skin, though. She remembered that feeling of being next to him, so close that she could hear his breathing. It was an ascetic way of resting; in him, there were so few things that were soft. Even his mind felt sharp when she rubbed her words against his ingeniosity.
She sighed, crumpling up the annoyingly rough blanket so that she could imagine him there in her bed.
She shed a few tears.
Still, she did not give in to sleep until she decided to turn on her back.
It was strange to wake up in the middle of the pitch black tropical darkness and find a new position to sleep in. Mariana rarely, if ever, fell asleep while on her back, but now she was facing the ceiling of the cabin, with her arms pointing to her sides like she had been casually floating in water before waking up. A little, nervous burst of laughter escaped her throat, and she started to stretch - except that she couldn't move.
She realized that she was only able to breathe. She could blink her eyes, but she couldn't keep them shut. A panic fell over her, a thick, oppressive layer of fear…what was this, some dark witchcraft?
Then she heard breathing from the corner of her cabin.
She couldn't see what was happening there, but she could certainly hear someone or something breathing, and the sound got closer. She didn't hear any footsteps. From this, she thought that it could be the cat, but that notion had to go as she saw a humanlike form, a shadowy entity creeping towards her. It was most definitely not the cat.
She tried to scream for help, but nothing came out. Her breathing got shallow. She was panicking properly now, with the creature getting closer to her every time her heart did that THUNK. THUNK. THU-THUNK.
She could even hear her blood flowing inside her head.
She wanted to beg the creature to not show its face to her. Whatever she was up against, she somehow knew that she would be so scared by the features of the entity that she would never recover. Perhaps her heart would stop.
It was so close now, next to her, and she could feel a current of air coming from its mouth, cooling her skin a bit.
Then it got up on its legs and something extraordinarily strange came over her terrified mind.