Let the record show that I did not want to be a captain.
I want that at the top of the log, in ink, where the historians can find it. I walked out of the grass with a sword, a hawk, and a firm policy of never being in charge of anything again. The Long Gold had other plans. The Long Gold usually does.
We held the first muster on a night the Ghost Tide was blowing hard enough to qualify as a crew member. It kept trying to take the door off the borrowed hall, and every time it succeeded a little, seven heads would turn like it might be the sea coming back early. It was not. It was Wyoming. There is a difference, but some nights it’s thinner than you’d think.
Seven of the marooned signed the Articles. I will not tell you their stories, because their stories are theirs, and because rule one of this company is that every crewmate’s past is a locked chest and I am not in the business of lending out crowbars. I will tell you what I observed, as is my duty as keeper of this log:
One of them brought their own quill. To a muster. In this century. That one’s going to be a problem, and I mean that as the highest compliment this company issues.
One asked, before signing, whether we had a dental plan. I told them the sea took our dental plan. They nodded like this was a reasonable answer, signed anyway, and that is exactly the caliber of judgment we’re recruiting for.
The signing table wobbled. It wobbled all night, and the Bosun, showing the kind of initiative that gets people promoted to Bosun, held it steady with one knee for the entire ceremony. This is why the Bosun’s own signature wanders uphill on the page like it’s trying to escape. Future scholars will call it a flourish. It was a knee cramp. Both things can be true.
The candles were electric. I want to be upset about this, but the hall had opinions about open flame, and frankly a company that plans to wave steel around in public should probably be on record respecting a fire code. Put THAT on the recruitment flyer.
Somebody asked me, midway through the evening, where I came from. The hall got quiet the way halls do when everyone’s been wondering the same thing and one brave idiot finally says it out loud. So I bought them a drink. That is my answer, and it is a good answer, and I have budgeted for it.
There was applause when the seventh name hit the page. There was, and history will confirm this, cake. Nobody consulted the Captain about the cake. The cake simply appeared, the way Swordhaven appears to those who need it, which raises theological questions I am not equipped to answer in an official document. It was chocolate. The Quartermaster has already logged it as a company asset and I have already logged my objection to the Quartermaster.
Here’s the part I’ll say plainly, because the Ghost Tide can’t be bothered with poetry and neither can I. Seven people stood up in a windy hall on the floor of a dead ocean and signed their names under a flag that didn’t exist a season ago. They didn’t do it because it makes sense. It does not make sense. We are a navy with no water, sailing grass, waiting on a tide that left before any of us were born.
They did it because everybody, sooner or later, gets left behind by something. And the only cure ever discovered for that is a crew.
The sea left. We didn’t.
And apparently we brought dessert.
Logged under a hard west Ghost Tide, first year of the Company. The hawk was watching from the rafters the whole time. The hawk declined to sign.