Aug 8, 1722. Aboard the ruined pirate barge off Port Royal. Nearly swimming with the sharks…

Sebastian slammed into Tristam like an irate harpoon. Claws and teeth ripped into the necromancer like a savage whirlwind.

Tristam shrieked. The magic flames around his hands shredded away as he threw his arms over his face. With him distracted, I yanked my sword free of its scabbard, then rushed forward.

Before I got close, he backhanded Sebastian across the jowls with a fist, sending him tumbling to the deck.

“Damn beast!”

The necromancer turned on me with a glare. Sickly greenish-black vapors curled off his fingers as I felt him draw down the Etherwave Arcana. A second later, the acrid smoke erupted into spectral green fire. He lashed out with a burning hand as I closed the distance between us.

Morowen told me almost nothing could destroy the Codex. I hoped that story had been true.

It was.

The instant that the Codex touched the flames, it soaked them in like a dry sponge. Its cover was still steaming when I bashed the book across Tristam’s jaw. His head snapped to the side before he stumbled against that solid haze of dark fog surrounding us.

I glanced at the Codex, the fog, then narrowed my eyes at Tristam.

“You’re not free yet, are you?” I murmured.

Wide-eyed, Tristam lunged for my throat or the book, maybe both. Instead, he met my sword when I rammed it through his undead guts.

I shoved him off my blade with a shoulder, pushing him back against that boiling, foggy wall of darkness. He stood up and started to pull down more power when Sebastian spat at him.

The gargoyle’s spit-tar splattered across Tristam’s face, while stray tendrils of it smeared over part of those rotten dragonfly wings. Tristam fell backwards again, then to my surprise, was stuck to that hazy mystic boundary. That was something I’d think about later.

Now tarred in place, I got my first real look at Tristam Greenholm. I really hoped it would be my last.

The necromancer was a twisted mockery of his thayan ancestry. Pasty, drawn skin was stretched over a too-thin body. He looked like every pallid, nightmarish drawing of a vampire come to unlife. Fangs? I had no idea, but his eyes were solid black, just like his ragged, torn dragonfly wings. His ratty clothes hung loose and threadbare, out of style by twenty years.

Last was where I’d hit him with the graveyard syrup. That had made a line of burn scars over his sunken face.

“What are you?” I asked, horrified.

Tristam hissed back like a furious, maligned snake. I raised my sword, now decorated with a dark ichor from when I’d stabbed him, and backed up.

“Give it to me!” he spat.

Those ragged thayan wings tore like tissue as Tristam ripped himself loose of the tar. Once free, he reached again, skeletal hands clawing for both myself and the Codex.

I side-stepped and slashed, cutting away more of those ragged wings. The necromancer growled, but another hot blurt of tar from Sebastian stopped him in his tracks. I bolted for the edge of the hellish haze.

“Sebastian!” I called.

He raced over the wooden deck toward me in a scramble of manic claws. Tristam recovered, nearly flying at us like every bad myth of a vampire taken shape.

Icy cold fingers lightly brushed along my neck like the tender caress of Death itself. I shuddered, ducked, then half-turned for a quick swipe behind me. It wasn’t a serious cut, but I still connected.

Tristam howled, falling to the deck with a thump while sporting a new, dark charcoal slice along his neck that he didn’t seem to notice.

I ran for the ghostly wall of dark haze, betting on a guess that Tristam couldn’t follow me. Behind me, he got to his feet in a half-crouch, like a deranged predator. He charged even as I dove for the swirl of sooty fog.

That slam of power from before hit all at once and wrapped around me like a weighted net. I curled to my side, shoulder first, as the deadly enchantment draining my life tried to keep me there. Invisible threads with countless hooks tugged at my heart, trying to steal the air from my lungs.

Suddenly, I was through, still clutching the Codex even as the sword slipped from my hand.

I hit the deck sideways and bit back a yell when I landed on my left shoulder. Needles of pain traced a manic path along my arm between back and fingertips. I groaned, holding my arm.

All at once, Sebastian was there to help. He immediately braced against my good shoulder and applied a sandpaper tongue and wet nose to my face. I coughed out a rasping, dry chuckle.

“Yes, thank you, Sebastian. I’m alive.”

Quick as I could, I forced myself up and rolled to my feet. After that, I scooped up my sword.

Behind us, I saw the shadowy apparition of Tristam Greenholm pound spectral fists against that clouded mystic barrier. He screamed, but I couldn’t hear a word over the wind and sea.

I glanced at Sebastian, who barked at me furiously.

“He’s not a ghost, Sebastian.” I shook my head. “Tristam is something else. An actual vampire? A revenant? I don’t know. This is a problem for a fully trained wavebinder. I’m just an alchemist.”

Sebastian scratched the deck with his claws, then huffed at me.

I sighed, looked at my sword, then at Tristam. At the other end of the barge, Lysander and the others were in a hard fight against Lucas and the last of his tree-skeletons. My friends were winning, but only just, and it showed.

“All I know are potions, poisons, and cures,” I murmured. “They’ll have to do.”

I tensed as a cough wracked my chest while ghostfire flared around my hand. Once it stopped, I quickly tucked the Codex under my arm, pulling the last vials of graveyard syrup and undead repellent off my belt. Calculations ran through my head like a waterfall of numbers and ingredients.

“They should mix fine and last long enough on my blade to stab Tristam a few times. Maybe it’ll act like a…”

“No,” said a now familiar soft, deep voice in my mind. “You hold the anchor. His anchor. Bind what cannot die.”

I shook my head, well past worrying that I looked addled for talking to myself or the fire on my hand.

“What?”

I drank in another breath of salt-smoke air. Something nearby was on fire other than me.

“His anchor?” I echoed thickly.

Then the words sank in past the pain. His anchor. Tristam Greenholm’s anchor. That Codex page wasn’t just some scribbled formula and elemental symbols to anchor that misguided ritual.

It was a specific anchor for him, and I’d stolen it.

“He’s tethered to that book because of what Morowen did and what he did, but I have his anchor.” I nodded. “I stole it by writing on the page, expanding what was there.”

An idea swirled in my mind even as I reached for my satchel. But it wasn’t there. A cold realization shot through me.

“Damn. I left it aboard the Duchess.” I blew out a hot sigh. “There’s no time to get it, I’ll need to improvise. I’ll need ink to draw a new anchor in the Codex based on what I remember.”

Nothing nearby looked helpful, until my eyes settled on the rough ring of dark dust on the deck that held Tristam captive. Sea swells crashed up and over the listing barge, splashing against that dust, smearing the deck with a greasy sheen.

“Ink. That’s ink,” I snapped.

Sheathing my sword, I raced for the circle, Sebastian on my heels. I stayed outside it this time, but close enough to reach it. Past the thin, sooty fog, Tristam beat his fists against the mystic wall, screaming incoherent rage.

The strange symbols still slithered like wild snakes in a hypnotic pattern. Beyond those, lay the ragged ink dust ring. My eyes snapped up to Tristam, then back to the ink. The panicked look on his face told me he knew what I was about to do. Desperately, the man stepped back, slamming fire enchantments against the sooty, ink boundary.

It held, but for how long was anyone’s guess. I’d fallen across that edge once, which may have weakened it.

“Watch him, Sebastian,” I said gravely. “If he sticks even one undead finger out of that fog, tear it off.”

Sebastian turned in a quick crouch, snarling at Tristam. The apparition didn’t look worried, only more frantic.

I set the Codex on the deck, opened to a blank page, then pulled out three vials. One was graveyard syrup, another was the undead repellent, and the third was empty. I carefully scooped a small amount of the ink dust, then mixed it with the two potions. Green fluid turned brown, then a shimmering black.

“Do I say anything?” I asked aloud. “Maybe it’s more what I write than what I say?”

Nothing answered beyond the roar of the sea, howl of wind, and the distant clash of nearby fighting. So, I went with what I knew.

“I’m a privateer of the sea, of the waves and wind…” I hummed softly.

A soft rush of the Etherwave Arcana flowed through me in reply.

Quickly, I snatched up a nearby finger of wood, a casualty of Ari’s recent fight against the tree-skeletons. I shook my makeshift ink mixture once more, dipped in the twig, and redrew the anchor page as best I could from memory.

From symbol to formula, I hastily recreated that page, or most of it. I replaced parts I suspected might help Tristam with my own designs. They were desperate, untried calculations and formulas that I half prayed would work. While I wrote, a strange glowing blue mist rose from the words, reaching toward Tristam.

Sebastian suddenly barked. I looked up to see the fog fading, like mist under a morning sun. Tristam grinned savagely, then charged. Frantically, I inscribed the last words at the bottom of the page.

“With this anchor lies Tristan Greenholm, bound by ink, flame, and surest will.”

Tristam yelled as he grabbed my coat, hands burning with more spectral green flames. I knocked his hand away, snatching up the Codex to defend myself.

Suddenly, wet ink shimmered. The letters burst to life, bright as a lighthouse beam. A blast of thunder rolled overhead as the purest white light I’d ever seen exploded off that page.

The blanket of white light snapped around Tristam in an instant. Glowing chains of lightning locked around him, trapping him before he touched me again. Then, with a blinding pop, those chains yanked him bodily into the book. He became nothing more than a lurid, chained illustration along the corner of the page.

After that, the Codex flew out of my hands onto the deck. The cover snapped closed like a spring trap with a crack of sharp thunder. A gentle steam issued up from between the pages.

Then, before my eyes, a symbol I didn’t recognize burned itself into the cover. It was a thin circle, and inside it was what could’ve been a letter ‘A’, or perhaps the stylized shape of an Arcane Gate. That emblem glowed once with a soft yellow-white light, then faded away.

I sat down on the deck, wracked with exhaustion and pain. Sebastian insistently bumped my leg with his horned head.

“We’re not done, I know,” I gasped.

A scream, ragged with rage, split the air the instant I climbed to my feet.

“What have you done?”

It was Lucas Argall.

I snatched up the Codex and reached for whatever potion I had left or my sword. It didn’t matter which, as the barge’s abused deck finally surrendered.

Wooden planks gave way with a groan underneath me and anyone nearby. I fell to the lower deck with Sebastian, while wreckage avalanched around us. My gargoyle scurried to safety in a scramble of claws and a flurry of wings. I covered my face, rolling out of the way.

By the time I stood up, Lucas had dropped to the lower deck with us. The wood wraith stood barely ten feet away, rage smeared across his mummified face. He still carried that gnarled, gray wooden staff, only now it was painted with a dash of blood at one end.

I quickly glanced up through the hole to the deck above, but I couldn’t see the others. All I heard was distant shouts and possibly a fight, nothing more. Overhead, more cracks ran through the Arcane Gate. A wall of storm clouds swirled overhead, stabbing lightning against the mystic arch.

“That was my last chance to be cured!” Lucas snarled. “I’ll kill you!”

“I’m sure you’ll try, Señor,” I replied with a small, tired smirk.

Lucas darted forward, but I was already on the move. I was nearly out of potions, but I still had a trick or two up my sleeve. Quick as a wink, I snatched a vial off my belt filled with a boiling, gray mist, then popped off the cork.

Smoke poured from the vial in a raging torrent. It billowed up and out, hungry to swallow the air. Gray clouds boiled around me as a dark grin spread over my face.

I melted into the rising fog with a deep, echoing laugh.