Free Guild Wars: Sea of Sorrows by Ree Soesbee Page A

tossed the heavy timber back and forth in its stays. He wrapped the ropes around his fists, struggling to pull himself upright, but the effort was barely worth it. There was no way he was going to disentangle himself from the netting without a knife.
    Along the southern horizon, a dark line swelled against the gray-green clouds. It rose up from the sea, first a thread, then a rope, then a hand’s breadth of thickness, and then, impossibly, reaching higher than the forecastle—higher, even, than the ship’s yardarms on her great masts, all while it was still too far away to ripple the sea around the Indomitable ’s bow.
    It was a massive wave, a tsunami. Cobiah had seen storm billows in Lion’s Arch. One year when he was a child, there had been a great storm in Lion’s Arch. When the sun went down, a little cluster of sturdy houses stood along the sandy strip near the docks. When it cameup the next morning, after the storm had blown itself out, the sand was clear, clean, and empty. The houses, families and all, had simply ceased to exist. Later, sailors said those waves stood more than twelve feet high when they hit shore. Those storms were nothing compared to the wall of water filling the sky on the Indomitable ’s starboard side. Because of his awkward vantage point high amid the topsails, Cobiah was the first to see the wave coming. It crested more than twice as high as the ship’s great mast, and it was still growing. Cobiah struggled to understand—there wasn’t even a storm on the horizon. Something must have happened past Malchor’s Fingers, deep in the heart of the ocean of Orr.
    Desperately, Cobiah struggled to be free of the twisting ropes and tangled netting. He screamed for aid, but his voice was swallowed by the cheering on the deck below. The sailors had driven off the sea monster, and now they were celebrating. Tosh was lifted on the shoulders of the older sailors, thrusting the harpoon over his head in glee. Vost thumped his shoulder and yelled his name with pride.
    They were cheering far too loudly to hear Cobiah. Only Sethus remained below the broken mast, chopping desperately at stays and ropes to separate the sinking canvas from the galleon’s rigging. He looked up at Cobiah, white faced. “Hold on, Cobiah! Don’t let go of the mast!” Seconds were passing, but they felt like hours. The sailors never even saw the wave until it was too late.
    It rolled across the ocean’s surface as fast as flickering lightning, closing the distance in breaths. The wall of water was curved at the top, snarling with white foam, sweeping aside everything in its path. The ocean dropped beneath them as the tsunami pulled close, and the Indomitable groaned and settled in the water. Cheersturned into shouts of fear as the sailors finally saw the wave. Cobiah’s stomach whirled, sickened by the motion of the great galleon in the ragged swell of water. The tsunami bore the ship aloft in slow motion, pitching her inexorably forward. For one horrible breath of time, the Indomitable stood on her stern, nearly perpendicular to the ocean floor.
    From his perspective at the top of the mast’s rigging, Cobiah felt the graceful rise and tilt, the sway of rope and the twist of the galleon in the current of the wave. It felt as though he were riding some kind of wind beast, lifted into the air on graceful, weightless wings.
    The wave crested with maddening slowness. If there were screams on the deck below, they were muffled by the sound of rushing water, and Cobiah couldn’t hear them. If the sailors prayed to the Six Gods, their cries were lost in the crash of the crest against wood. Everything seemed overwhelmingly bright, and loud, and terrifying. Cobiah was pitched higher and higher still as the galleon rolled, until for just a moment, he saw over the peak of the massive wave. There, in the center of the darkest, deepest ocean in the world, at the very heart of the Sea of Sorrows, Cobiah saw something that should not