Ira'shkan - The silent flames

A lonely dhow cut quietly through the calm, fiery waters of the coming dawn. The air was heavy, lukewarm shawl draped over the Silent Sea, a promise of the scorching heat to come. Master of the dhow Harun stood at the bow, his face a hard mask of sea-weathered leather, eyes sharp with the perpetual suspicion of a man who trusts only the tides. But he was not the one to see it.   Young Rashid, perched high in the foremast - his eyes sharp as a hawk - gave a low, guttural cry that was immediately swallowed by the oppressive quiet of the sea. The vessel he spotted was adrift aimlessly. It sat low in the water, yawing slightly, a broken, inert shape on the horizon like a splinter of charcoal against the dawn. No signal flew, no figure moved on deck; the silence itself foretold ill tidings. The crew, lean men used to the back-breaking pull of the nets, watched the approaching wreckage with a fearful silence and grim faces.   The smell hit them first: a sharp, metallic tang of burnt salt and raw thunder that lingered heavily on the calm sea. As they drew closer, the damage seemed like the ship had been burned. But this was not the brown-black char of a common fire, but a deep black, an almost soot-blackness - a black that seemed to drink the light of the coming day and shroud the ship in sorrow. Timbers were broken and split, ropes reduced to dust and whispers of ash.   Harun vaulted the rail himself, his heavy boots crunching on a mix of sea salt and fine, dark powder. The deck was a display of absolute, impossible destruction. The crew were all at their posts: hollow husks scattered across the deck, fallen like puppets with their strings cut . No blood had been spilled, and not a single hair was singed. The skin on their faces was tight and unnaturally pale, stretched over bone as if they had aged a thousand years in a forthnight. And every single face he looked at was frozen in a perfect, wide-mouthed scream, white eyes staring at a horror that had ripped their souls from their bodies with hands of dread and fire.   A wet, broken whimpering drew Harun to the foremast. Clinging to it's remnants was a single, shaking survivor. He was young, but his hair bleached white by terror and eyes glazed with fever and pain. Tattered clothes were fused to his skin in uneven, painful patches of black char. His mouth formed formless words, but no sound came out. When Harun roughly pulled him free, the man's vacant eyes fixed on him with a terror that bored right trough him. A string of wet, senseless gasps escaped his lips, the only living sound on this bark of the dead. His hand rose, trembling violently, pointing at the water, then at the sky, before falling to his side, all strength sapped. “It angers, it burns..,” he rasped, the word a dry, rasping cough that repeated again and again.   Harun released the man, allowing him to slump against the mast base. The captain had seen a thousand sights on the oceans, but never this: ruin and stillness and a terror that lingered even beyond death. He glanced over the black deck toward his own vessel, then further to the the horizon, begging for the coming day to rise so the winds could take him away from this nightmare.