They say the sea is empty.
They lie.
The sea is crowded with ghosts.
With broken promises.
With the names of men who believed themselves captains.
And with beasts.
Not the kind with claws.
The other kind.
The ones we carry inside the ribs.
Last night, as the Black Wood drifted beyond the shipping lanes, past the satellites, past the cold blinking lights of modern ports, into waters no map respects—
I understood something.
The enemy is never the empire.
Never the cannons.
Never the storms.
The enemy is older.
Closer.
Breathing with your lungs.
I am the lion and his lair.
I am the fear that frightens me.
I am the desert of despair, and the night that refuses dawn.
Where can a man run, if the beast lives in his chest?
Where can a captain hide, if the mutiny begins in his own thoughts?
Caonex stood alone at the rail.
The engines were silent. The sails hung like tired flags. The crew pretended to sleep.
But no one sleeps at sea.
Not truly.
He watched the water the way condemned men watch the floor.
As if expecting it to open.
As if expecting judgment.
Because every leader knows the same secret:
We do not command ships.
We command illusions.
We say forward, and pray the tide agrees.
We say survive, and pretend survival was our choice.
Life is a dream, says the old philosophers.
But the ocean is worse.
The ocean is a dream that dreams us.
Some nights the Black Wood groans like an animal.
Not wood.
Not metal.
Something deeper.
As if the hull remembers every battle.
As if the ship itself fears sinking.
And I wonder—
Is she haunted?
Or are we?
Perhaps the curse was never the ship.
Perhaps the curse is consciousness.
To know we are small.
To know we are temporary.
To know the sea will erase us as easily as chalk.
Yet still we sail.
Strange, isn’t it?
Knowing the lion waits in the dark, and stepping forward anyway.
Knowing destiny laughs, and still drawing the sword.
Maybe courage is not strength.
Maybe courage is simply this:
to call the lion out—
and offer it your hand.
So if you board the Black Wood one day, and hear laughter in the fog,
do not look for monsters in the water.
Look inward.
That is where the oldest beasts live.
That is where every war begins.
That is where every legend is born.
👉 Begin the voyage: [/tales/begin/]