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thenightwinggraveyard · 6 months ago

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😂 Actually, do you have cool Naruto fic recs for someone who's never seen the show? I keep itching to start it so I can understand some of my friends' interests better but I would just rather... read things. And I know that the fics might not be accurate to personalities or plot, but if you have anything beginner-friendly or fun that might help my brain get more excited to make the effort and watch, I'll take it. I personally like relationship drama but I'm cool with whatever you've got.

i do!!! i watched naruto as a kid but i completely forgot most things so i got into it again by fanfiction. also as a side note; i apologize but i don't read from narutos point of view very often if at all as that is just a personal preference of mine, just a warning in case thats what you were looking for-- and my favourite character is sakura which you'll probably see lmao 😅

without further ado, here are some;

BEGINNER FRIENDLY NARUTO RECS

Pray My Name by Chancy_Lurking [G] [ONE-SHOT]

"Your name sounds like the kind of thing you say when you’re afraid,” Sakura finishes. “A prayer,” Sasuke offers without looking away from the window. (Team 7 takes a quiet moment to talk about what their names feel like.)

notes: there isn't much of a plot with this one but its a wonderful showcase of the bond that team 7 shares/could share. it floats beside canon not really connected but it could be, and i think its just a great introduction to the way team 7 should be imo!!

tdlr; team 7-centric, friendship/love, acceptance

Terror feeds the Soul by Pleasedial123 [ONE-SHOT]

Sakura is not an idiot. She was praised for her intelligence, reached Top Kunoichi at the Academy for her brains. So it doesn't take her long after being placed on the powder keg that is Team Seven to realize she is going to die. Kakashi, career shinobi since age-six, has no idea what the hell is going on with his little pink-haired student or why there is such fear in her eyes. So he gives her head-pats. That's what you do for scared puppies isn't it?

notes: some really good characterization with this one and a deeper look at the subtle hint of corruption/injustice in the shinobi world that canon already gives us.

tdlr; sakura-centric, sakura & kakashi, good characterization, worldbuilding

Just Killing Time by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling) [G] [ONE-SHOT]

After Wave Country and before the chuunin exam, Team 7 kills time while waiting for Kakashi to show up.

notes: an adorable small fic consisting of freindship and the idea of found family, they're just cute little kids in this and it makes me smile so hard.

tdlr; team 7-centric, friendship, found family, fluff

An Improper Apology Properly Backfires by rex101111 [G] [ONE-SHOT]

Sasuke Uchiha apologizes, or at least makes an attempt. Sakura thinks he could do better than THAT.

notes: its not every day i find a sasusaku fic that i genuinly enjoy, but this one both cracked me up and actually convinced me that they could work as a couple lmao, after some bad canon events, this fic shows a completely done sakura dealing with the fallout and it is gold. featuring naruto and kakashi as unwilling bystanders.

tdlr; sasuke/sakura(canon ship) and team 7-centric, anger issues, canon compliant(mostly), humour

Wildflowers and Incisors by Chancy_Lurking [T] [ONE-SHOT]

There’s a boy Sakura loves the way Naruto loves Sakura, in a shameless and open, but painfully unequal way. There’s a boy Sakura loves the way Hinata loves Naruto, in a way that feels no more like a choice than breathing. Neither of those boys need pretty girls. “We are all really pretty, though,” Ino assures her with a haughty sniff, crossing her leg the other way so her calf rests on Sakura’s shin. “They’re going to be strong, maybe even the strongest ever in the Hidden Leaf,” Sakura says and Hinata doesn’t need convincing, they both know it, so she doesn’t belabor the point. “So, we have to be stronger than them.” (The girls of Konoha band together as friends. Girlhood is easier in a group.)

notes: a wonderful look at the kunoichis in naruto, with friendship for once more important than love. gives them the character development and attention they deserve, but didn't quite fully get in canon.

tdlr; naruto girls-centric, girlhood and friendship, good character development

The Language of Faces by Empatheia [T] [ONE-SHOT]

Ino decides to help Sai learn to function in society. Sai does his best to keep up.

notes: now we're taking the focus off the main characters of naruto to focus on some great side characters-- ino and sai are both charecterized awesomely in this fic. they're awkward and don't really know how to function in society (being a ninja will do that to you) but they clearly grow to care and love for eachother dearly.

tdlr; sai/ino-centric(canon ship), great characterization, awkward first dates

Pushy and Loud and Brave and Proud by bluecatcups [M] [ONE-SHOT]

When Temari meets Shikamaru, she is twelve years old and she is everything she has ever been; pushy and loud and brave and proud. This is the story of who Temari becomes.

notes: thanks to this fic i fell in love with temari as a character. it is a character study at its heart and therefore it has SUPERB characterization, with believable romance and a theme of self-love. i adore this fic.

tdlr; temari/shikimaru-centric(canon ship), character study, romance, found family, self-love (TW for smut and suicidal thoughts)

NOT SO CANON COMPLIANT FUN

coming from afar & reaching for the stars by SafelyCapricious [G] [ONE-SHOT]

It had been two weeks since the trial. Two weeks since Sasuke had been given the choice of surrendering his eyes and being allowed to leave, or being stuck for five years without ever being allowed to leave the village. He had chosen the later. And Sakura isn't avoiding him on purpose, but it's still happening and she's kind of okay with it.

notes: a not so romantic retelling of sasuke coming back to konoha. i really enjoy the way sakura is characterized in this and the way all her friendships are potrayed (especially her and sai they are besties). instead of running into sasukes open arms, she decides she doesn't mind keeping to herself.

tdlr; sakura-centric, friendships, good charecterization, awkwardness, self-love

Rules Were Made to Be Broken by MotivationIsDead [T] [COMPLETED]

Kakashi wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t hallucinating. Or suffering from heart failure. “I thought you were dead,” he said blankly. He might’ve been going into shock. Obito winced and rubbed the back of his head with a sheepish grin. “Yeah,” he said, tone stilted. “There’s actually quite the story behind that.” “I should hope so,” was Kakashi’s bland response.

notes: kakashi and obito if obito decided to not go through with his villainous plan. it is a ship, but the way the bond is potrayed just hits so good. something more than friendship and simple love and instead a deep trust, with banger characterization and development. a couple steps away from crack, i laughed so goddamn hard.

this entire fic can be summarized by;

kakashi and obito: fuck it we ball.

tdlr; kakashi/obito-centric(fanon ship), fix-it fic, humour, BAMF kakashi and obito (has an ongoing sequel!!)

Smiles in Spring by Kalira [T] [ONE-SHOT]

One spring day when they are very small, Ino meets a little girl with shy eyes, a beautiful smile, and pink hair, and immediately knows what she wants in her future. Ino's never had any qualms bending the force of her will on the universe to be sure she gets whatever she wants.

notes: ino and sakura are made for eachother in this fic and the progression of their relationship is adorable. some bonus friendship with shikamarau and choji.

tdlr; ino/sakura-centric(fanon ship), romance & friendship, fluff

Genuinely Delighted by Chancy_Lurking [T] [COMPLETED]

"Lee, in spite of how brash he might’ve seemed, still appeared to be incredibly considerate and Shino would feel wrong to just brush him off. His enthusiasm about asking Shino out was completely genuine, and that was enough to make Shino feel flattered. And anyway, Lee would probably prove to be much more pleasant company than some of the other guys Shino knew."

notes: just a fluffy post-canon fic about some more wonderful side characters, with romance and friendship. lee and shino are so unexpected but work so well in this fic.

tdlr; shino/rock lee-centric(fanon ship), romance & friendship, fluff

In The Forest by Senka Hitomi (LadyTegan) [T] [COMPLETED]

When the genius of Konoha returns from a mission in a catatonic state, it is up to his old teammate to delve into the depths of his mind and pull him back out. But the dangers of the mind are many, and the road to finding him may be more difficult than she could have imagined.

notes: god i could gush about this fic for so long. everything about it delights me, the characterizations, character development, relationships and just the careful way the plot was constructed. it comes together to form a very inrtiguing and engaging fic.

tdlr; shikimaru/ino-centric(fanon ship), romance & friendship, amazing plot, great characterization

On Qipao, Flirting, and Buying Drinks by needdl [M] [COMPLETED]

Tenten turned beautiful when she was nineteen.

notes: an if neji lived au done so well. the romance is both believable and beautiful.

tdlr; neji/tenten-centric(semi-canon ship), romance & friendship, fluff, coming of age (TW for smut)

About Face by wroth_and_ruin [T] [ONGOING]

A little yellow-haired boy saves Sakura from the bullies. And everything changes.

notes: one of my all time favourite fics it is full of character and life, and the friendship between sakura and naruto is so pure yet all-consuming. they are eachothers persons, eachothers sun, and the world that is being crafted is so engaging. featuring kakashi with teenage angst.

tdlr; naruto and sakura-centric, friendship, found family, fix-it fic, character and plot development, worldbuilding

HONOURARY MENTION

Retrograde Motion by Crunchysunrises [T] [ABANDONED]

From sixteen to eleven didn't feel like a big jump until she realized that she was now the best ninja in their class. And that tiny Sasuke hates her for it.

notes: the reason this is an honourary mention is because this is the fic that got me into naruto! the first one i read, and the first one that captivated me to read all 100k words (yikes..). so despite the fact that its abandoned im still gonna share it with you in case it interests you ;)

tdlr; time-travel, sakura-centric, great characterization, shit gets done

(i didn't even realize so many of my fav fics were done by chancy_lurking!!! huge shoutout to them they are awesome)

i have some more but i think i'll leave it at this; i hope you find at least one fic that enraptures you!!

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jgmartin · 1 year ago

Text

OPERATION EDENFALL

The sail was classified.

Whatever we were doing out there, they didn’t want anybody to know– not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the public and certainly not us, the crew. They kept us in the dark, fed us the lie that we were heading out on a routine patrol.

Up and down the coast, they said.

Back in no time.

But that was before the storm. It was before the sea turned into a maelstrom and the night swallowed the sun. It was before the captain slit his throat on the bridge, and before the crew tossed themselves overboard.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m a retired navy veteran, and I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t. It’s the sort of thing that might get me killed, but I’m long past caring. I’ve got one foot in the grave anyway. Doctor says it's terminal. That means I can tell you whatever the hell I want, and short of conscripting ghosts to arrest me in the afterlife, the Powers That Be can go fuck themselves.

My name is Walter. This is the story of Operation EDENFALL, and how our world ends.

The sail began like any other. Our destroyer sat tied up alongside, our crew formed up in neat lines running from the jetty to the lower decks. We were storing ship. Food. Supplies. We brought on anything the next mission might need. It was a normal, run-of-the-mill evolution– all the way up until the moment they arrived.

The Secret Ones.

Nobody on board seemed to know who they were. Government? Civilian? It was anybody’s guess, but what we did know is they were weird fucks. They wore masks of crimson, tight balaclavas without holes for their eyes or mouths. When they arrived, they shoved past our line on the brow and ordered the quartermaster to fetch our captain.

“We need to speak,” they said.

And that’s just what they did.

I watched from the edge of my vision as all six Secret Ones surrounded the captain, the group mumbling words too quietly for me to make out. Their conversation lasted twenty minutes. By the end of it, the captain was frowning– he quickly stepped into the quartermaster shack to make a call ashore, and he looked nervous.

Terrified.

When the call finished, he muttered something dismissively to the Secret Ones before vanishing below decks. The rest of us were left scratching our heads. We had no idea what we’d just witnessed, but by the end of the day, we’d come up with more than a few theories.

Some said the Secret Ones were actually elite special forces, something beyond even SEAL Team 6. That’s why they wore the masks. That way, nobody could see their faces, or what they were looking at, or read their lips.

Others said they were intelligence operators. That they had access to such sensitive intel that they could only learn a fraction of it each, just in case one of them got captured by the enemy. Only together could they divulge their secrets in their entirety.

Briggs, a stoker from down in the engine rooms joked that they were illuminati. Lizards from mars.

Me?

I didn’t know what they were. To be honest, I didn’t really care either. All I wanted was to get the damn sail over with so I could get back home and see my wife. Abby and I had just had our first child, a beautiful baby girl named Alice. That’s all the navy was to me. A way to give Alice the life I never had– a happy life.

And when we set sail that day, I still believed that.

What a naive idiot I was.

About an hour after leaving the wall, the ship dropped anchor. A pipe blared through the intercom system, mustering the crew in the hangar. When I arrived, I found the captain standing at the front of all 200 of us, three of the Secret Ones on either side of him. They looked just as creepy as ever. Silent. Unmoving.

The captain cleared his throat. He told us this was difficult for him to do, but prior to our departure he received word that our mission had changed. Murmurs erupted across the crew. He raised his voice, cutting through the chatter.

“The sail is no longer expected to be routine, and I’m telling you now that you’d do well to expect the unexpected.”

He nodded to our medical officer, who looked deeply uncomfortable. She began moving through our ranks, dropping a pill into each of our hands, instructing us to keep it on our person at all times. Whatever you do, she said, don’t eat it.

“What is it?” Briggs asked loudly.

“Cyanide,” the captain replied.

I swallowed. Thankfully, the crew erupted into laughter, and so I joined them. It had to be a joke. What an absurd thing to say…

“Honestly, sir,” somebody called from the back, “Is this a malaria pill? Are we deploying? Cause I should let my wife know–”

“It’s cyanide, sailor. If you know what’s good for you, you won’t lose it.” The captain sighed, looking at the Secret Ones who stood like gargoyles on either side of him, and then shook his head. He stormed off, and the Secret Ones followed.

That night, Briggs died.

He tried the capsule. He swore up and down that the whole thing was a dumb joke, some government psyop to see if we were all gullible idiots. “There’s no fucking shot this is real,” he proclaimed loudly in the mess, holding it aloft with a smirk. “The officers don’t even trust us to clean toilets unsupervised, you think they’d let us carry around cyanide?” He popped the pill into his mouth. Washed it down with some orange juice.

His last words?

“Tastes like Smarties.”

Briggs died quick.

He died in a seizing, sputtering mess of shit and piss, but once his organs gave out it was only a matter of seconds. Carrying his corpse to the medical bay, though? That took minutes. It took minutes that felt like hours, like years. Once we dropped him on the doc’s slab, she did what she could to resuscitate him, but you could tell in her face that she knew it was a lost cause.

By then, Briggs was already gone. Long gone.

After that, we all assumed we’d turn the ship around and head back. We thought we’d at least drop off Briggs’ body, pay our respects, and take a day to grieve before resuming the mission. But the captain informed us there would be no funeral. There would be no grieving process.

In his words, “The show must go on.”

The ship entered into a state of lockdown. No outgoing communication. No incoming. River City. That meant we had no way to call home, and no way for home to call us. We were isolated. Alone. And then, if you can believe it, the captain had the nerve to get on the PA system and tell us that things were going to get worse.

“Briggs’ death,” he began, “while tragic, is just the tip of our iceberg. I wish I could share more details of what’s to come, but the truth is we’re going into uncharted territory. There are no certainties. All I can say is that by the end of this Briggs’ won’t have died for nothing. Where we go, history will follow.”

The crew became furious.

It seemed insulting, dismissive to treat the death of a crewmate like just another day at work, particularly in peacetime. At sea, there’s always a sailor that does the heavy lifting when it comes to morale. They bring a smile to every face they pass. Their jokes turn bad days into hilarious memories. That was Briggs. He wasn’t just a talented engineer, but a fantastic friend. His loss was a hit to the crew. A big one.

After that, many of us threw our cyanide caps overboard. We hated the memory they represented– the loss of somebody so important.

It’s something many of us would later come to regret.

In the days following Briggs’ death, the ship never held an official funeral, but the crew mourned in our own ways. We swapped stories over soup. We decked his rack out in old photos of him, the more embarrassing the better– just the way Briggs would have wanted it. It became a sort of memorial, a place where we could make peace with his passing.

But as the days ticked on, things became darker. The crew’s morale dipped further and further, and soon, it seemed as though we were all coming undone. We no longer traded our favorite memories of Briggs. Now we were trading conspiracy theories, our best guesswork of just what the hell our ship was doing out here.

It’s China. They’ve got a secret weapon and we’re gonna dismantle it. I saw this YouTube video about it. If they catch us though, they’re gonna torture the fuck outta us, so that’s why Skipper gave us the cyanide.

Fuck that. Are you listening to yourself? You sound nuts. It’s Russia, gotta be. They’re going nuclear and we got early word so now we’re out to sink their subs. What do you mean why? They can’t second strike us after we glass ‘em, can they? It ain’t genocide if we got no choice.

I didn’t know what to think.

I’d never experienced anything like this, and so I just woke up, did my watches, and went to bed. Rinse. Repeat. I tried not to talk about what was going on because every time I did, Briggs inevitably came up and the memory hurt like a knife to the gut. He and I had gone through basic together. We’d sailed up and down the Pacific Northwest and made a game of finding old coins in every port. So I just kept my head down. Did my work.

I was doing that work when the captain’s warning came true. When things got worse.

It was a night watch and I’d been steering the ship on helm. One moment, we were sailing through smooth waters in a bright, cloudless night, and the next moment it all vanished. Darkness stole the evening like a lightswitch set to off.

I recall the watch officer moving onto the bridge wings and staring up at the sky, trying to determine if the moon had slipped behind a cloud. When he came back, he looked confused. Shaken. It was odd to me because we had radars so it wasn’t like we were navigating blind. He called the captain and reported that the moon was missing. Gone.

“Stay the course,” the captain commanded.

“But sir–”

Click.

The watch officer looked at me, shook his head. “He hung up,” he said.

The next morning the sun never rose. The sky remained as black and haunting as the night before. Around this time, the Secret Ones began acting more bizarre. Whereas before they more or less stayed put in their cabins, now they wandered the ship aimlessly. They’d mumble nonsense under their breaths as you passed them in the flats. They’d run their hands over surfaces, stare blankly at bulkheads.

Every so often, you’d catch a couple of them heading to the upper decks with a small ham radio and a portable antenna. They’d set it up and sit there for hours. Mostly they didn’t speak into the microphone, just sat and listened to the static buzz of the speaker. Sometimes you’d hear them screech into the mic. Once, I even saw one crying. He sat there, silently sobbing into the microphone while rocking back and forth.

Events like these transformed the crew’s theories. Talks of Russian or Chinese super weapons mostly vanished, and now the prevailing theory was that we’d been dispatched to make contact with aliens. According to Reynolds, he overheard some officers whispering about a downed spacecraft. We were on our way to investigate their SOS signal.

That’s why the sky’s gone all fucky. It’s alien cloaking technology designed to keep their craft hidden. If we get it first then we’ll be able to travel to different planets and shit. The guys in red work for NASA. Space Force. Whaddya mean how do I know? I asked one.

No way. I told you the Russians were gonna nuke us and now they did. Why do you think it’s so fucking dark, man? Nuclear winter. Duh. All the ash and soot blotted out the sun. Read a book someday and you might learn something.

Neither theory was close to the truth.

None of us had any idea just how bad things were, or how bad they were going to get. If we had, then we’d have staged a mutiny right then and there. We’d have turned the ship around and gone back the way we came, blown the whistle and made damn sure the people who orchestrated this thing ended up behind bars.

But we didn’t.

Instead, we trusted the captain, and we trusted the navy.

Instead, we sailed into the night.

The following week passed in confusion and despair. The crew became irate. Shipmates who were usually chipper began snapping at one another, fighting over the tiniest things. Small comments became loud meltdowns in the space of seconds. Cold coffee led to fist fights. Missing toilet paper left a sailor with a black eye and a bloody nose.

But those were manageable problems. not so far out of the ordinary that we weren’t equipped to understand them, to deal with them. But what happened in the gym between Myers and Ashely? That was something none of us were equipped to deal with.

It started with Ashely spotting Myers on the bench press. I don’t know what was said. I wasn’t there. All my information is second-hand but according to witnesses, an argument started when Ashely accused Myers of sabotaging her marriage. Words flew. Myers went to rack his bar, but Ashely kicked the bar back down on his neck.

Two hundred and fifteen pounds. It nearly decapitated him.

From what I hear, it’d have been better if it had.

Myers was still alive when the doc arrived. His limbs were twitching weakly, his body suffering periodic spasms as it lay in a pool of its own blood. His neck had been partially severed, his head hanging on by a thick strip of flesh.

His eyes though, his eyes were still moving.

Ashley sat in the corner, screaming that she didn’t mean to, that she never wanted to hurt him but something forced her. “I couldn’t stop myself,” she said over and over. “I’m sorry,” she bawled as they dragged her away, locking her up until they could sort out just what the hell happened.

Myers didn’t live much longer. Mercifully, the doc put him out of his misery the fastest way she could think of– by finishing the job. The rest of us got to work at cleaning up the blood in the weight room. As for Ashley? She died an hour later. Turns out she’d held onto her cyanide capsule, and lucky for her, she got a chance to use it.

At the time, I felt for both of them. I hated the idea that Myers was made to suffer the way that he did, but I also felt awful for Ashley because I knew, deep down, what she meant. I think all of us did. She never wanted to hurt Myers. Something had brought a shadow out of her, a monster that should never have existed.

A dark miasma had infected our ship, it’d seeped into our hearts and minds, making us angry, desperate things.

That night, I thought of Ashley. I thought of what she must have looked like after she’d swallowed her cyanide cap, of how easy it could have been to escape this nightmare if I’d never flushed mine. But then my thoughts turned to my wife, my daughter. Guilt filled my stomach like a pit of vipers, snapping at me for daring to think of leaving them behind.

It took time, but eventually I drifted off. My dreams that night were messy things. Hopeless. I dreamt of Briggs’ spirit wandering the ship, unable to find peace so far from home, trapped in this steel cage drifting through endless night. I dreamt of him going through the mess, from bunk to bunk, killing all of us. “It’s for your own good,” he’d say, before reaching into our chests and stopping our hearts. “Somebodys gotta look out for you, right?”

I awoke in a cold sweat. My mind felt like mush, and I hastily brushed my teeth before stumbling through the flats like a zombie. I had to get to my watch on the bridge. With each step I took, my ears rang, and my vision seemed to stutter like television static. I half wondered if I’d been drugged, if maybe there’d been a carbon monoxide leak from the diesel pump below our mess, but then something caught my eye.

The Secret Ones’ cabin. Its door was cracked open, barely an inch.

It was never open.

I crept forward, peeking inside to see that the lights were out. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but once they did I saw one of them sitting at a desk with their back to me. A low sound played throughout the room. It resembled music, but it was decidedly off-tune and uncomfortable, like a violin’s strings being stripped and sanded. Grimacing, I stepped inside, using the ‘music’ to cover my footsteps as I eyed the Secret One sitting rigid in his seat.

My jaw dropped.

He wasn’t wearing his mask. At least, not properly. It was lifted up just above his eyes– except he had none. No eyes. No nose. He only had a tiny hole where there should have been a mouth. My heart hammered, suddenly understanding why these creeps were running their hands over everything on the ship, why they’d stand they were in utter silence staring at bulkheads. They were navigating. Scouting.

Listening.

The Secret One lifted a finger to his face, traced it along a series of wounds, some still fresh with blood. I brought a hand to my mouth, stifling a gag. He plunged his fingernail into his cheek, whimpering as he slowly dragged it through his skin. Slowly, he began to peel back a strip of flesh. Then another.

He placed them down upon the desk, humming in tune with the distorted music. The flesh began to writhe. It began to twist, reshape itself. The Secret One touched it, felt it in his hands as he moaned in low ecstacy. Reaching down, he opened a drawer. Took a file folder out of it and opened it, placing it upon the desk. He scribbled something on the paper, then closed the file and replaced it in the drawer.

What the fuck…

The cabin door creaked. I froze, watching as the thin beam of light from the flats grew, widening as I watched in abject horror as another Secret One entered the room. It stood, staring in my direction through its crimson mask. It cocked its head sideways. Took a step forward. My body rippled with goosebumps, flushed itself with adrenaline as I wondered if this Secret One was different. Perhaps it still had its eyes. Its nose. Perhaps it could see me.

It mumbled something incoherent. The Secret One that had been sitting mumbled something back, and then turned its seat, looking toward me. It rose from its chair. My skull pounded. Like a freak storm, a pulsing headache rose from nowhere, growing in pain until I wanted to scream.

But I couldn’t. If I made a sound, then they’d know I was here.

If they didn’t already.

The first Secret One stepped toward me, and I took a step back in concert with its own. I hoped I could use the sound of its footsteps to mask mine. It reached toward me. I clenched my teeth, shuttered my eyes and prepared myself for whatever nightmare was coming, but instead I heard the soft click of a locker opening. To my side, a locker door opened with a screech, and the Secret One reached into it to remove a ham radio and a… machete. My heart hit my rib cage once. Twice.

I felt faint.

Then they left. Both of them turned, walked away and left me in their cabin alone. Alone with the dossier.

I took a sharp breath and moved to the desk drawer, opening it and removing the folder. I thumbed through the documents inside, but they were incomprehensible. They appeared to be written inside a fever dream. Strange symbols. Meaningless numbers. Nothing about what I was looking at even approached the realm of sensibility, but it occurred to me that maybe that was the point. Perhaps this was a code.

I didn’t have time to decipher it, so I stuffed the folder into my shirt for later analysis. Right now, I was late. I hurried to the bridge, breathless by the time I made it for my shift on helm. I gave a hasty turnover report to Sandhu, the watch officer, and sat down in my seat. I took over steering, and my mind spun with what I’d just seen.

Were these Secret Ones some kind of cultists?

Was Briggs right all along? Were we sailing with the goddamn Illuminati?

Were any of them even human?

Before I could think it through, the captain interrupted my thoughts. He stumbled onto the bridge, looking halfway between drunk and dead. I’d heard rumors throughout the ship that he was in poor health, but this was the first time I’d actually seen him out of the cabin in… weeks. His face was emaciated. His cheeks were so sunken that the bones looked liable to pierce his skin, and I idly wondered if he’d eaten anything since we’d set sail.

“Evening sir,” Sandhu said, sounding uncomfortable. “Err, how are you feeling?”

The captain mumbled something unintelligible in response, brushing past her and practically collapsing into his chair. He buckled the seat belt.

Sandhu and I exchanged a look. She cleared her throat. “Is everything… is everything alright, sir? Should we be expecting heavy seas?”

The captain looked at her, but he didn’t seem to see her. His skeletal fingers gripped the armrests, and his lips began to move as though he were trying to speak but had no voice.

“I’m sorry sir, I can’t quite hear you. Could you speak a little louder?” she leaned forward, holding her ear toward the captain’s mouth.

“Goodbye,” he rasped.

“I’m sorry?”

“Goodbye.”

“Sir,” Sandhu began, but the captain cut her off.

Goodbye.

Tears leaked from the captain's eyes, and his body shook with tremors with each farewell he spoke.

“I’m calling the doc,” Sandhu announced, moving toward the phone. She picked it up, but before she managed to punch in the number, an orange glow appeared beneath the dark of the windows.

“What the…” she muttered, stepping toward it.

“Ma,am!” called Ramirez who had been standing lookout on the bridge wings. He rushed inside, his eyes wide. “Those… Those Secret types just lit a bonfire on our gun deck!”

“Come again?” Sandu rushed to the window, looked straight down and shock and rage filled her features. She ran to the bridge wings, shouted down to the Secret Ones to put the fire out this instant. A moment later, she screamed.

Ramirez, who had been gazing out the window, suddenly turned and vomited onto the deck. He stumbled, holding himself up against a radar console. “Oh my god…”

“Ramirez!” I snapped, shooting up from my seat. “What’s going on out there?”

“It’s Ashley,” Ramirez said, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. “It’s Ashely and Briggs… They’re chopping up their corpses on the deck.”

Sandhu stormed back inside, a fire in her voice. “Captain! Permission to mobilize an ERT to put those red-masked assholes in confinement! They’re desecrating our shipmates out there!”

The captain tilted his head, gazed straight through her.

Goodbye.

Sandhu cursed. She practically ripped the radio off the desk, punching in the number for the Executive Officer. “Ma’am?” she said. “It’s Lieutenant Sandhu on the bridge. Listen, we’ve got a situation up here. Those Secret types are cutting up the bodies of Briggs and Ashely on the gun deck, and they’ve got a fire too… Yes, you heard me right… Roger. Make sure the ERT is armed, at least one of those assholes has a machete… That’s just it ma’am. The captain’s well aware, he’s up here with me now, but he’s out of his mind. Keeps saying goodbye over and over… Thank you.”

She hung up the phone, grit her teeth. After a moment, she took a deep breath and looked at me and Ramirez. “We’ve got an ERT being deployed to lock those red-masks up. The XO is assuming command. We’re turning this ship around.”

Ramirez pumped his fist. “Finally!”

But somehow, even then, I knew it was too little too late. Whatever those Secret Ones had set out to do with Briggs and Ashley’s bodies, they’d already succeeded. The wind began to howl. Then it began to scream.

A wave struck us broadside. Then another. Ramirez stopped celebrating long enough to grab hold of the radar console, but then another wave hit us. A big one.

The impact twisted the destroyer like a rubber duck in the bath. It knocked Ramirez sideways, tumbled Sandhu across the deck. I managed to steady myself against the helm console long enough to get my seatbelt strapped in.

“Jesus Christ,” I heard Sandhu breathe. “Is everybody alright?”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Rogue wave,” Sandhu muttered, getting to her feet. “It’s been three weeks of glassy seas, and then that comes out of nowhere. I’m telling you, this sail is cursed. It was cursed from the second we pushed off the wall.” She picked up the radio and began a shipwide announcement to commence an immediate rapid survey, but before she could finish another wave struck us.

Then another.

And another.

Sandu’s head slammed against the center console with a sickening crack. Her body collapsed to the deck motionless. I shouted out to her, but I couldn’t do a thing to help. I was at the mercy of the waves. I braced against the helm, my seatbelt squeezing painfully into my waist as more and more of the ocean crashed into our hull. Nearby, Ramirez was gripping a hand-hold and shrieking.

No, not shrieking. Praying.

The captain, sitting buckled into his seat, swung limply side to side as he continued his refrain.

Goodbye.

Lightning flashed.

For the first time in weeks, I glimpsed the pitch-black sky. Dark clouds spun around us, swirling as though caught up in a whirlwind, and within those clouds swam shadows. Faces. They gazed down at us, anguished. I saw Ashley. Briggs. I heard them whimper and howl, as though they were suffering a great agony.

Ramirez’s body arched, it twisted. He began to scream and holler, writhing in a way that made it seem as if he were being picked apart from the inside out. I wanted to leap from my seat. I wanted to help, but I knew I had to keep control of the ship. Right now, the only thing stopping us from capsizing was me keeping a steady course into the waves. Abandoning the helm in a storm like this would mean certain death.

“Heavenly father…” Ramirez groaned. Tears streamed from his eyes as he gazed up at the haunting faces of the dead, swirling in the clouds above us. “Forgive me… For what I do…” His hands gripped the guardrails that ran the length of the bridge, and he pulled himself against the violent movements of the ship. Slowly. Inch by inch. I watched helplessly as he reached the hatch leading outside to the bridgewings, knowing exactly what he intended to do.

After all, Ramirez and I had flushed our cyanide capsules together.

“Don’t…!” I called out, but I couldn’t think of a reason not to. Why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t I join him? Ramirez paused at the hatch, looked at me, and mouthed something I think might have been sorry.

Then he flung the door open. The bridge erupted with the deafening cacophony of the storm, and through the wind and the spray, I watched Ramirez throw himself into the sea.

I sat there, knowing sooner or later I’d follow him. Right now, I was dying in slow motion. The waves, already vicious, worsened. The swells now threatened to rise up and swallow the ship itself, reaching heights that resembled skyscrapers, or mountains. The ship’s hull groaned. It sounded as though the whole vessel was moments away from splitting in two.

Please, I thought to myself. Please let me make it out of here, if not for me, then for my daughter. My wife.

And then, cast in the flickering light of the storm, I saw my death. A wave. Larger than any before it– a goliath. The wall of water practically ate the sky, and when it came down upon us, I knew it was over.

My neck snapped sideways. My seatbelt tore into my waist. Suddenly, up was down and down was up. The ship tumbled in the rage of the sea, frigid water shattering the bridge windows as the captain and I drowned in darkness.

In retrospect, I don't know why I held my breath. After all that had happened, drowning would have been easy, preferable. But I did. I think I held it for Abby and Alice, gurgling as I desperately attempted to get my bearings. And then, as though by some miracle the water began to drain.

I gazed in disoriented shock as the ocean poured out of the broken bridge windows, Sandhu’s lifeless body following suit. It occurred to me that I was hanging upside down. That my seatbelt was digging into my waist, stealing my breath. Ahead of me, the captain was suffering the same dilemma, and this time he wasn’t repeating Goodbye. No, that brief moment of capsizing must have shocked him back into lucidity.

But if we didn’t capsize, why were we upside down?

I followed the captain’s gaze out past the broken windows, out into the black of night and there I saw something more awful than anything I’ve ever seen. I saw something staring back at us.

It was colossal. It watched us through the broken window, its eyes like three orbs of swirling obsidian. The captain reached into his pocket, pulled out his ship’s knife usually reserved for cutting lines. I wondered if he meant to fight that thing. To go out swinging. To get revenge on this monster for turning him into a mindless zombie and dragging his crew to their deaths–

And then he pressed the knife into the side of his throat. With a gurgling groan, he gripped it with both hands, and tore it across his neck.

Blood burst from him like a faucet.

The creature appeared satisfied. It turned its gaze to me then, and in its eyes I saw an abyss. A void. It was as though something had bottled all the pain of humanity and compressed it into a single point, like a collapsing star, before igniting it. What I saw was a new big bang. An entire universe built of our despair.

I twisted in my seat, panicking. It felt like somebody had poured napalm into my skull, and it was only then that I realized this monster was inside of my mind. It was tasting my thoughts. My memories. I clenched my fists, my fingernails digging into the bone of my palm and I set my jaw as I screamed my throat raw.

None of it lessened the agony.

The cyanide. Why did I throw out the cyanide? It would’ve been so easy.

Abby, I thought. That was why I threw out the cyanide.

Abby and Alice, my little angel, who would grow up with her father. Alone. Confused. No– I couldn’t punch my ticket. Not if it meant leaving him behind.

My thoughts rebounded against the monster. The love I had for my daughter, for my wife, seemed to grow and expand, filling the vast emptiness this being had left inside of me. Slowly, the napalm in my skull began to fade. The screams echoing from my mouth became gasping breaths. A voice reached me, a voice from somewhere distant and endless, and it told me to never return. To always hold onto what I have. Never let go.

Then, from beyond the shattered windows, the monster’s abyssal eyes closed.

And so did mine.

I awoke to the sun. I found myself floating on a piece of debris in a place I’d later discover was off the coast of Guam. The waves gently sloshed at my feet. There was no sign of my ship, my crew, or the monster that we’d discovered in the sea. It was quiet here. Peaceful.

Gulls squawked overhead and a bell rang. It drew my attention. Some distance away I saw a small fishing vessel, one that appeared to have diverted course to sail in my direction. Its crew members were tiny dots on the deck. They were shouting at me. Waving.

They saved my life.

But they weren’t the only ones I had to thank. No, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also thank the monster in the sea. A creature I came to know as Eden. Those documents I’d stolen from the Secret Ones, the papers I’d stuffed into my jacket, well they were badly damaged and waterlogged– but not unreadable. It took me time to translate them. I had to enlist the help of several individuals who I won’t name here for obvious reasons, but I will say that what we discovered was haunting.

We learned that we’d been fed a lie.

Or, at the very least, a partial lie. It turns out that the theory of evolution is missing components, that it’s only telling part of a broader story. See, the way we know things is that life originated from the primordial soup. We’re taught that this all began with basic organisms crawling out of the sea, but what we aren’t taught is that those organisms weren’t miracles. They weren’t a happy coincidence.

They were births.

A billion years ago, something came to our planet. It was a creature, one of unfathomable power from a distant galaxy. It settled deep in the ocean. There, it began to create life, learning as it went. These iterations would one day lead to the creation apes, then to humanity. What we discovered is that this creature was intelligent, but also lonely. It desired connection. In an effort to assuage this void in itself, it did something that it had never done: it imparted fragments of its own consciousness upon a lifeform. It linked itself to human beings.

But it backfired.

The link to this creature’s mind proved unbreakable. Even as it attempted to instill virtues within humanity, to inspire us toward love and compassion and peace, we fought against it. Rebelled. Our baser, primal instincts eventually won out. We fell again and again into cycles of violence and war, of rape and murder. We poisoned this creature– this Eden with our corruption, but still it persisted. It knew that to break its link to us would mean the end of humanity as we knew it, and that whatever empathy we had would become more violence. More rage.

Like a mother, it couldn’t let go of its child. It believed in us, trusted that we could do better, become better– if not then, then eventually.

But now, it’s been too long. This mental wound has festered, it’s gone untreated and Eden is paying the price. She’s dying. Withering away. All our hatred and greed, our thirst for destruction and division has reached a critical mass inside of her and she’s beginning to collapse. She’s filling up with our madness. The mother that once birthed us is now gone, and a monster has taken her place.

The Secret Ones knew all of this. According to their documents, they believed that she intended to finally cauterize her wound, to put an end to humanity before we could put an end to her. Their intention was to strike first. That’s what we were– my ship, my crew– a first strike against our mother. Our creator.

But the most terrifying thing?

The Secret Ones had no idea what would even happen if we succeeded. If Eden died. Theories posited were that she might simply sink to the bottom of the sea, rot away across decades until her bones washed ashore. Another theory posited that perhaps the madness we’d filled her with would leak out of her, like a nuclear core in meltdown, infecting the world in a miasma of insanity.

There were so many variables. Too many to account for. The only thing the Secret Ones appeared absolutely certain of is that we would lose our connection to her. We would lose our love. Our empathy. We would lose our very souls, and to them, survival was worth it.

But I didn’t think so then. I don’t think so now.

My empathy, my love is the only reason I’m writing this today. It was my wife, my daughter who saved me that night. When Eden looked into my eyes, when she expected to see the madness of human corruption she instead saw a piece of that dream she had so long ago. A dream of harmony. A dream of peace.

I believe that’s why she let me go. She recognized that there are still those among us who try to carry her torch, who live with love in our hearts. And it’s for just that reason that I know there’s still love in hers.

But that was all many years ago now. Times have changed. As a species, we’ve grown more divided, more angry and more vile and we rejoice in the failures of one another and criticize our triumphs. All around us, love is drying up. It’s smoldering in the embers of selfishness and narcissism, and when I see that, I can't help but wonder whether the Secret Ones eventually succeeded in their mission.

I can’t help but wonder if Eden is finally dead.

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