Ascension part 1: Chronicles of the Twenty-One Butterflies, #4

By Chris Seabranch

Buckeye travels west of Gallows Sound to search for a lost family member. However, during her travels, she finds out that she has most worrying heritage that links her to a person she despises. At the same time, one of her crewmembers is captured by a feared organization of slave traders and Buckeye is forced to not only save her friend but also an old enemy. If she fails, not only the Twenty-One Butterflies will suffer for it, but everyone else as well. 
Ascension part 1 is the fourth book in the Chronicles of the Twenty-One Butterflies pirate fantasy series. If you have not read Butterflies Islands, Maelstrom, or Wailers, I suggest you start there to get the most out of Ascension part 1. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Seabranch
• Release date: Jul 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536526400

Book preview

Chapter I

Richard knew he only had at most a few days left to live in. Maybe he would die that very night. Maybe the next day. He did not know, and he no longer cared. His weak hands struggled to hold the quill as he wrote on the first of the yellowed pages of his ragged diary.

My dearest loving daughter

If you read this, I am already dead. As I write you this letter, I see your face before me and I love you more than my humble words can express. You were my everything, and you still are. A day hasn't passed where I have not thought of you and missed you.

I am sorry for leaving you and your mother. It wasn't by my free will. Know that I tried with all my strength to come back to you so I could once again hold you in my arms and tell you how much I love you. However, I couldn't. Recently, I escaped my imprisonment, and I have since then tried to find my way back home to you, my beautiful little girl. Now I cannot go any further. Both my legs are broken and so is my spirit. I have not eaten for many days, my strength is gone, and I am lost. Soon, I will die, and when I do, your face will be the last thing I will think of. It is okay. I die in peace. At least I got to spend twelve wonderful years with you and your mother. I knew more love in those few years than most people know in a lifetime and I wanted to tell you this.

I leave you this, my diary. In it is the story of your family. Your story. I have only recently discovered all of it. You are not like everyone else as you will one day discover. Be careful when you do. Many people will find it hard to accept you and some will pursue you. But stay on the path and see where it will take you. You are destined for great things.

With all my heart.

Your father

Richard.

Richard set the quill down and blew on the ink to dry it. He closed the diary and tied a red ribbon around it before resting it on his chest. Tears washed white lines down his dirty cheeks and his nose was running.

'Goodbye,' he whimpered to the dark sky above him and held the diary tight to his chest. Even the sobs hurt his aching body.

He looked around one last time. He did not have much hope of seeing anyone, but it could very well be the last time he would see anything at all. The sun was setting over the small Island. It was not so much an island as a rock in the middle of the furious sea. A quarter mile square of barren, rocky landscape with no trees, no plants, and no life. He was a castaway. A slip from a cliff had broken his legs when he climbed to look for eggs. However, there were no eggs on the island. There was nothing to eat at all and the sea around the bleak island was empty of fish.

He crawled on his hands and knees back to the shallow cave, in which he had slept for seven days. During the nights, he blocked the entrance to the cave with stones. He had written 'HELP ME' on one of them in case someone came around after dark. But no one came. The island was haunted in the most literate sense of the word. Souls of dead sailors were the only visitors at night. Evil spirits, sent by the demons of the sea to terrorize the hearts of men, swept across the island's rocky surface. After a few nights on the island, castaway sailors went mad from witnessing these glimpses of hell.  Usually they ended up taking their own lives in the sea to escape the horrors that appeared after dark. Richard was close to that point himself. He had seen what the evil spirits wanted to show him. People screaming as a black fire ate their flesh until their stripped and blackened bones were the only things left. Even after death, the bones wrenched in pain. Torture too abominable to imagine. Rusty saws, tongs, chains, and machines created by sick minds made God-loving people scream out loyalty to the masters of the underworld. And there were creatures. Horrible creatures. Disfigured and malformed beasts gnawing at the limbs of people still alive. Richard could take it no more. He wanted to gouge out his eyes to be free of the images, but he knew that they were all in his head and he could not escape from them.

The sun slipped below the horizon and blackened the desolate island. Dark-green shadows slowly crawled out of the sea and up the beach. They were people, transparent apparitions that carried with them a whisper of death. Richard heard them call out his name, telling him to follow them. Davy Jones' locker awaited him below the surface of the sea. From his shelter, he could see them slowly approaching. First, they crawled along the ground like wounded animals, dragging their feet behind them and clawing their way forward with crooked fingers. Then they staggered onto their feet. Richard could see right through them. Their hearts had stopped beating hundreds of years ago and their lungs breathed air no more. They were nothing but evil and death held together by what were once the souls of men.

'Get out of my head!' Richard cried while he feverishly stacked stones in front of the cave entrance to keep the spirits out.

Darkness engulfed him completely and the dark-green shadows glowed in the pitch-black night. There were hundreds of them. Men of all races and ages and a few women too. Captains and slaves, shipwrecks and castaways. In death, they were all the same. Tormented souls coming back from the realms of the dead to clutch with cold hands the still beating hearts of the living. They were close now and Richard stacked the last stones in front of the cave entrance. It was a shallow cave, only reaching six feet into the cliff. Puddles of dirty water covered the cave floor.

The broken man scrambled to the back of the cave and curled up against the wall, shivering in fright. His heart beat in terror as it had done during the seven previous nights. The beating hurt in his chest and he stared at the wall of rocks he had created in front of the entrance. Through gaps between the stones he could see the fluorescent shadows on the other side. Then the spirits stuck their arms through the wall. They reached out for the man inside, their nails clawing at the cave walls and floor.

'Come,' they whispered. Their voices were coarse and devoid of emotion. 'Come with us to where you belong.'

'Leave me alone!' Richard screamed and banged his head against the wall to silence the voices.

Someone laughed outside the cave. A deep and disdainful laughter echoed in the shallow cave and made gravel fall from the ceiling. A large animal snorted and moved around big stones. Richard cried. He was an open wound and the night was the salt.

'No, please don't. Please,' he pleaded when the spirits started to show him what awaited him in the afterlife. He saw an inverted cross, a barbed whip, and his own flailed skin laying on the ground beside him. Two twin-headed dogs were tearing at it from either side.

'I can't take it any longer. I can't take it!' Richard wept.

The barbed whip cracked in the air and drew a bloody line across his back. Even if it was only in his mind, his entire body reacted to the pain and twitched in the dark cave while he screamed out in agony. A horned and naked demon pulled his arm back to crack the whip again. It had the body of a man and the head and tentacles of an octopus, and it towered fifteen feet above him. The demon's muscles tensed as it prepared to tear the flesh of the bound man with the whip once more, but suddenly, it stopped. A pink butterfly fluttered through the air and landed on its shoulder. It looked as if the butterfly burned the demon. Its red skin sizzled on touch and sent black smoke in the air. The demon dropped the whip from its hand and roared in pain so loud that Richard had to cover his ears. At the same time, the sky turned from black to light blue and a girl appeared. At the sight of the girl, the demon turned and fled back into the dark, terrified of the glowing red dagger in her hand.

Richard relaxed. The nightmares were gone. He could see only the young girl standing in a field of tall yellow grasses. She looked strong. She had powerful shoulders and a tight grip around the hilt of the glowing weapon in her hand. Blond hair cascaded all the way down to her lower back. She stood with her back to him and he could sense that she protected him. Protected him from giving way to insanity and following the evil spirits. Outside the cave, the souls of the dead retreated into the sea and disappeared like fog in the presence of a bright sun. They stopped calling his name and a murmur of fear spread out over the barren island and replaced their luring whispers.

Richard felt an inner peace and breathed slowly. He lay laid on his back in the shallow cave with eyes closed, seeing only the young girl in his mind’s eye. Her golden hair blew in the wind and more butterflies gathered around her. Then she turned around so that he could see her face. He glimpsed out through half-open lids, and tears streamed from his eyes and fell heavily on the stones. It was she. It was his daughter and she was beautiful and strong. When he left her, she was only twelve years old, but now, she was a young woman with both the world of the living and the world of the dead trembling before her. He reached out his arm in the dark cave. He wanted to touch her, his hand caressing her cheek, and he smiled.

'My beautiful daughter. I love you so much,' he said.

'I love you too dad,' the young girl answered. She knelt down and kissed him on the forehead.

He felt his breathing becoming troubled. Time was near and a warm feeling spread throughout his chest and stomach as his organs shut down one by one.

It was pitch-black outside the cave, but then the sea started to glow in a ghostly green light and tentacles as thick as a man's thigh began to move up on land. The ten-armed demon was back and stretched its reach toward the shallow cave. If the man inside it would not come to them on his own, the demons of the sea would themselves drag him into his watery grave.

Richard heard the tentacles come. They brushed against the stones outside. The sound of a thousand men who moaned in pain followed. A scream of unimaginable agony pierced the night, but Richard kept his eyes closed. He did not want to see the monster that came for him. He wanted his daughter’s face to be the last thing he would see alive, not the haunting nightmares.

The young girl laid down beside him and put her head on his chest. She held his hand and kissed him on the cheek. He hugged her tight and cried.

'Brother, why did you do this to me?' Richard sobbed, remembering how his brother had ripped him from his family and sold him into slavery far away from home.

The young girl comforted him.

'I will get him dad. I will make him pay,' she said. 

'I'm afraid,' Richard whispered. He could hear the tentacles just outside the cave.

'Don't be. I'm here with you. I will protect you.'

The young girl got on her feet. A red glow surrounded her. It became brighter and brighter until it filled the entire cave with a warm light.

'A Queen!' the spirits whispered on the other side of the stone wall. Fear filled their voices and they kept their distance. 'A Queen!'

Richard felt the warm glow on his face and all troubles left him. His daughter was going to be all right, even if he was no longer around.

'Take care of your mother. Tell her that I thought of her every day. Tell her that I love her,' he told the young girl and smiled. 'I am ready now.'

He breathed out one last time, and as he passed away, the cave turned into a dark tomb.

In the black night outside the cave, the tentacles disappeared back into the sea. The young girl had cheated the demons of the man's soul. Only a dark voice remained.

'The Queen will be mine,' it whispered hatefully, but no one was around to hear it.

Chapter II

'You want us to kill the Governor while we are at it?'

Shasta stared at Buckeye through the dark of the late but warm evening. It was a valid question. Buckeye was bound to ask it herself sooner or later. If she got the chance, would she assassinate the man who had taken away so much from her? Would she murder the person who had taken away her mother and at the age of fifteen, forced her to accept a marriage to a perverted man twice her age? Stevens was a brutal man. Last year, he sacrificed the lives of five-thousand slaves in an attempt to wipe out the Twenty-One Butterflies. His deed had cost the lives of all of the slaves plus hundreds of innocent people from God's Mercy. Stevens deserved to die. Gallows Sound would be better off without him.

Buckeye watched the guards in front of the Governor's massive white colonial mansion. There were more of them than she had feared. Red uniforms kept circling the building. Fifteen, maybe twenty of them. Only God knew how many more stayed inside the large mansion itself or in the barracks in the back of the property, not to mention the nearly rabid dogs that barked and snarled in their pens close to a small cluster of trees next to the barracks. If she tried to kill the Governor and he yelled out, she and Shasta would not be able to escape. Buckeye took a deep breath and ducked her head behind the bushes again. She had often thought about killing Stevens. She had thought about wrapping her hands around his throat and look into his eyes as he slowly suffocated, watching his eyes open up wide and his pupils dilate. The last thing he would see in this world, would be her face. She was the same young girl that he had planned to wed to Alfred three years before, well knowing what bestialities Alfred would have inflicted on her had she not escaped. However, she was not a scared little girl any longer. She was a feared pirate Captain who already had many men's blood on her hands.

Buckeye rubbed her left palm with her right thumb as she dwelled at the question. Her hand buzzed. It had started doing so on the day after her eighteenth birthday. On some days, she felt it more than on other days. It was not uncomfortable, though. More as if energy flowed through her body and ended up in her palm. The buzzing most often appeared when her heartrate increased. Excitement, adrenalin, anger - among other feelings - brought it out. Sometimes, she also thought she could hear voices inside her head, speaking to her in a strange language that she did not understand.

She poked her head above the bushes again and tried once more to count the guards. After a while, she gave up. They all looked the same and it was impossible to pick one out of the line and then count the guards after him as they walked around the building until the first guard appeared again.

A dog howled in the black night. Buckeye hated the Governor's dogs and the howl gave her goosebumps. Stevens had inherited the vile creatures from Johnson. Some of them had probably chased her through the jungle a long time ago. They were vicious beasts that would tear a person into pieces if they got the chance and if no one stopped them.

Buckeye breathed out through her nose and breathed in deeply. She was not there for Stevens and she would not risk Shasta's life because of her own desire for retribution.

'No. I just need to get my mother out,' she said.

Shasta nodded and focused on the mansion across the lawn. Freeing Buckeye's mother would be tough enough on its own. Buckeye had chosen stealth over brute force. As Captain of the Athena, she could have attacked the Governor's mansion with the full force of the Twenty-One Butterflies, but she had chosen to go on her own and not risk the lives of her fellow pirates over a personal issue. Shasta had come with her, simply because she refused to stay back onboard the Athena. She had not come as the Quartermaster, but as Buckeye's friend.

'So, what do we do?' she asked. The tall, dark-blond girl clutched the hilt of her unsheathed cutlass in her hand. The guards walked with only thirty feet between them. It would be impossible to get to the mansion without them seeing it and a physical confrontation would be inevitable. Her body tensed in anticipation. She was athletic and strong and could cut down a good handful of the guards before they even had a chance to react to her assault.

Buckeye leaned over and gently removed Shasta's hand from the hilt. They would not force their way into the Governor's mansion. She pointed at a window on the ground floor of the building. The window was open and a breeze made light-blue curtains dance like colored ghosts on a background of candlelight.

'Through there,' she answered her question.

Shasta looked at the window that was on the side of the mansion facing them.

'Oh,' she said and let go of the cutlass. She counted the seconds between the guards as they walked in front of the window.

'Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. It's impossible. They are walking too close to each other to sneak into the house between them,' she warned.

'I know. That is why I need a decoy so I can slip in unnoticed.'

Shasta frowned and shook her head. 'No, no! I am not letting you go in there alone. It's out of the question. I'm coming with you.'

She looked determined, but Buckeye had an expression on her face that in no uncertain terms said: 'if you have a better idea, now is the time to tell me.' But Shasta did not have a better idea. They would never be able to get inside the mansion unnoticed unless someone distracted the guards and since they were only the two of them, it had to be her. Besides, Buckeye was the Captain. If needed, she could always pull rank on her.

'Okay, okay. I'll do it then,' Shasta muttered after a while. She unbuckled her belt and handed her sword to Buckeye. 'Take care of it,' she said and raised her eyebrows as a friendly warning.

After she had handed over her sword, Shasta hid a dagger in her right boot and unbuttoned two buttons in her black vest and white shirt, revealing a little more than just the cleavage between her well-shaped breasts. Finally, she tousled her hair until it looked like she had just spent an hour in the hay with someone.

'How do I look?' Shasta asked and moistened her lips with her tongue to make them shiny.

Buckeye had to smile at the transformation. In the matter of a few seconds, Shasta had gone from being a feared pirate Quartermaster to a tempting femme fatale. She was deadly with swords and knives, but her feminine appeal could just as easily bring men to their knees. No man could resist her looks when she played the role of a playful teenage girl in need of male company.

'They will not know what hit them,' Buckeye approved, but Shasta was still not comfortable with the situation.

'Just so you know it, I am not going to stay for long. I will ask what time it is and then I am gone. Understand?'

Buckeye nodded. 'You don't even have to stay for the answer.'

'I won't,' Shasta said a little annoyed that she had to play the role of the seductress. She could do it, but she would much rather fight the guards than flirt with them.

'Just be careful, okay,' Buckeye warned as her friend disappeared in the dark and she waited behind the foliage.

A few minutes later, a silhouette appeared on the white gravel driveway leading to the Governor's mansion. Shasta walked differently than she normally did, her hips swinging rhythmically from side to side as she slowly put one foot straight in front of the other. At the same time, she held her shoulder back with her arms dangling lazily down the side. It was an open invitation for eyes to stare lustfully at every curve of her nineteen-year-old body. Her long dark-blond hair framed her pretty face and even Buckeye could sense the aura of sensuality surrounding her.

'Who goes there?' one of the guards shouted as the silhouette came closer. He grabbed his rifle with both hands, ready to point and fire it if necessary.

'I'm lost, good sir, and I am waiting for my friend. Could you possibly assist me by telling me what time it is? I would be ever so grateful,' Shasta said and stepped into the light from lanterns that hung on the porch in front of the mansion. Normally, the Quartermaster shouted out commands to her fellow pirates with a booming voice, but now, her voice sounded girlish, almost childish.

Shasta played with a lock of her hair and acted the role of damsel in distress to perfection. The guard stood no chance against her youthful charms. He struggled just keeping his eyes off her voluptuous body that hypnotically swayed in front of him as she walked. Behind him, the other guards stopped on the porch one by one, creating gaps in the line of red uniforms. 

'I erm... I mean...'

The guard pulled out a pocket watch. His hand shook as he popped it open. A portrait of his wife was on the inside.

'It's quarter past nine, miss,' the guard said and forced himself to look into Shasta's eyes instead of at her breasts. When the temptation became too overwhelming, he simply closed the eyes to avoid looking down the young girl's cleavage.

Buckeye giggled. Shasta was a master of disguises. Her little performance had gathered all the guards on the porch and cleared her way to the open window. She freed herself from the undergrowth and dashed across the lawn. The window was only five feet off the ground and she easily got a hold of the sill and pulled herself inside, landing with a muffled thud on the red-carpeted floor of a big hallway.

Outside the mansion, Shasta had seen her friend disappear around the corner of the building. Her task was over and she blew the guard a kiss before she turned around and walked back down the white gravel driveway. Her hips still moved from side to side, and now that she did not face the guard any longer, he did not keep himself from staring mesmerized at her curves. When she had moved out from the light of the lanterns, he woke up from his trance and shouted to the other guards to get back to their posts.

'Why have you stopped? Nothing to see here. Move on,' he yelled, his voice cracking from embarrassment.

Easy. So easy, Shasta thought.

Inside the mansion, Buckeye leaned against the wall in the big hallway and listened. She could hear several male voices further down the hall and to the right. One man told another man an obscene joke and they both laughed. Typical soldier's talk. Buckeye looked around. She had been in the mansion three years before when Stevens had arranged her marriage to Alfred, but she had only seen the Governor's study, not the rest of the house. The hallway was richly furnished with large paintings of former Governors on the colorfully wallpapered walls. A golden chandelier with candles hung from the ceiling and upholstered red chairs lined the sides. A broad staircase led to the first floor on the right of the hallway and three doors opened up to different rooms on the left. Buckeye could hear footsteps coming from the direction of the guards, and she hurried out of sight and up the staircase, treading as carefully as she possibly could to avoid making any sound.

On the first floor, the staircase ended in another but smaller hallway with three doors to either side. At the far end of the