Staktenwelk

A great whaling ship, impaled in ice. Mud men come here to freeze and die. It has many levels, they would drag up the carcasses through ports on the side of the ship when the sea was calm and then butcher the beast still living within the ship itself. They are the red decks for a reason. Whale ghost still haunt them, eerie songs and thundering roars. Occasionally one will haunt the frozen carcass of a mud man. The corpse will break, but the ghost doesn’t care. It will drag all the pieces of ice with it, until it is a storm of crystal shards. The uppermost decks are the captain’s quarters, the purple decks. There were five different captains, such was the size of the ship. One would be voted Captain-Ascendent by the crew, but that doesn’t matter now. Many riches probably still squander their time in those hallways and cubby-rooms, but no one could know, they haven’t been explored in a decade. Or more. The middle decks are the white decks where the crew quartered. They are still there. They have let the ice take them. The ice is that keeps them alive. Their blood is all white and frozen grit, sluggishly seeping through veins now cold and black with frostbite. The crew too, are sluggish, and cold, and black with frostbite. They miss their captains. The Captains don’t miss the crew. They are dead, and having a great time of it in the green decks of the mess hall. The black deck was mostly shorn off when the ship smashed its rude way into the glacier it now resides in. The engines it housed were too heavy. Probably they have rusted away long ago in the ice cold waters. What remains of the black decks are haunted by smoke-specters, the ghosts of the engines spirit-fuels. They are terribly cold too, though, everything here is terribly cold. In days long gone, the ship would hunt dream-whales, and bring their loaded cargo holds chock full of mystery-meat and fantasy-fat and belief-blubber. Sometimes Pearls-of-Wisdom too, though they always lie when they sell those, as they know they are merely the nacreated thoughts of the whales, but the punters can never tell the difference. When the captain’s had tallied up all the wealth thus earned, and given to each their share, the crew would shower wealth on their favourite captain, and he would be the new Captain-Ascendent. It was almost always Scarlet-Patches. The Red Deck’s crew was the biggest after all. Cinders-Flag sometimes got it. People always like it when their ship doesn’t sink. Captains Vermillion-Cape, Royal-Cutlass, and Ivory-Hook never got much of a look in, but that didn’t bother them much really. Sometimes the whalers would get into scuffles with krakens, leviathans, sea-demons, and man-anglers, but the mighty harpoon guns would often see them off without much hassle. Even a mighty sea-god has better things to do than pull out a six-fathom-long barbed spear from their soft and milky flesh. Very occasionally, the whalers would kill a sea-god, and drag it in through one of the whaling-holes and butcher it too, if it would fit in the boat. Mostly only Man-Anglers and Sea-Demons, but the takings were good enough from them to be worth dredging their colleagues from its guts. In the end, it was a tussle with a particularly vicious sea-demon that lead to the ship being gutted upon the glacier. The sea-demon didn’t escape death however, and even now, it rots and stinks beneath the ship, propping the floundering hulk with its death-gases and rot-vapours. The mud men come to the ship for that reason, they die near sea-demons. No one knows why though. The Captains tried their hardest to go down with the ship, but considering that the ship is still going down, they see this as a good excuse to declare themselves dead and thus escape all their former commitments, such as bringing their crew back to life, properly at least. They see their current deaths and the crew’s icy demeanours as a good half-measure, and besides, the Mess Hall is too warm for the crew so there’s precious little they can do about it at this point. They would very much like to go upstairs and pick up their belongings at somepoint, but Royal-Cutlass is too fat on Whale-Figment-Meat to get out of his chair let alone anywhere else. So they wait, and hope the stores of carcass-flesh remain long enough for them to starve Royal-Cutlass out of his seat. The crew for their part, have mostly given up on complaining to the captains. They mostly just mope about now. They are trapped on the boat, the Ice would melt anywhere else. Sometimes they will prime a Harpoon and spear and butcher a whale if one comes close enough. They rarely do anymore. The Whales know what the ship is now. Some have even started eating the sea-demon beneath the ship in an attempt to sink the ship completely, but it is a rather large sea-demon. So for now, the ship is going nowhere.