Apollo looked at the axe. He thought back to the day that D-Rock had given it to him.
“I found it while fighting near the South Idol,” he told Apollo. “You’ll noticed that it is famed. I want you to have it.”
Apollo then thought back to when he was a little boy. When he need to move a little faster or if he needed to get started, his father would say, “More Scoach!”
Years later at the universities of his studies Axe made foray’s into language arts—and never found one containing something anywhere close to “More Scoach!” It seemed to have a Latin smoothness and a Germanic emphasis, or so Apollo thought.
But today was not a day for him to hurry and he frankly didn’t even want to start, and so he let the horse decide the pace, and unfortunately, he still got there.
There were pirates he hadn’t seen in a long time. All wearing black.
The girl who had thrice screamed her hate at him walked over and they hugged.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I know, I know…” Apollo replied.
The choir began to sing “Peril of the Sea” and their harmony and melody was soon joined by the mourning of a dozen trombones.
The speaker stepped forward and everything became silent.
“We cannot know why the Padres chose to take him from us at that moment. A baird once said, the Golden Damn is that only the good die young. If this is, words, from the Padres, we might say we could expect it even though we would never accept it.”
“We cannot know why the silver ship that was not ours brought his body back to us, or how it was flying without wings as it descended to the earth to open, or who those are who stepped out with the silver casket, or why they chose a metal that looks like silver except it isn’t.” The speaker paused.
“Some of you are calling them Valkyries, and my brother would have told you go with the simplest explanation that fits the facts and run with it like you playing a ball game.”
And then he started crying.
Another pirate walked up to him, and started crying. And then I heard running water.
I saw a dark room as I woke up. In a moment I could see if had the form of one of our standard dormitory rooms found on several islands. However, I could hear water and there was only one dormitory set up with a Roman aquaduct to continuously bring water to a shower room.”
“Ahoy mate!” D-Rock said as I walked in. “You look like you want to say something.”
“Uh, um, I’m not allowed to give you orders.” It was a part of a small game.
“You’re right, you’re not. But if you could, what would they be?”
“I want you to dry off, I want you get dressed and I want us to get going, More Scoach!”
“And what are we going to do?”
“I, hadn’t got that far yet. Besides, I didn’t mean to tell you not to take a shower, you need it. I mean…”
D-Rock laughed.
“No harm done, all pirates need to shower, especially after we fight. Tell you what, you go out to the sandboard in the back and write some ideas while I finish my shower and when I come out we’ll look at what you got.”
“Do you need to ride horse into town to get anything first?”
“No, I’m good there.”
I turned to go.
“Hey, Axe,” D-Rock called to stop him. “Do you still want your Island of Tomorrow with a giant gray castle in the center that looks like the Neuschwanstein castle in Austria?”
“Yes!”
“I was thinking of building it and making it similar to a university, although with quite a bit of fun stuff included.”
---
I found the Lion of Red Steel at the Sandboard.
“Are you O.K., Apollo?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t seem so earlier.”
“I dreamed that we were at a funeral for D.”
“Did he die while attempting to voyage to the second sea?”
“They didn’t say in the dream.”
“That’s a safe assumption to make though. We do a pretty good job of staying alive here on the islands and on the first sea. I guess you are out here to try and come up with some ideas for the voyage.”
“Yeah.”
“D-Rock has told us that it is fair to say the first crew to go out will not come back alive.”
“I know. He also said we are pirates and we see Death’s face, sometimes quite closely, every day.”
“And it doesn’t bother you that if you succeed and build a ship, you could be putting him on the boat trip that costs two coins…”
“Maybe on something like this there was never a choice, Leon. Pathways must be followed to destruction. But remember, all three of the Colombian ships made it back!”
