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See, here, the ship. The broken wood, the splintered underbelly sliced open upon the rocks like elk, strung up for harvest. See also the ghost, which lingers on the nearby shore like a warning, a lighthouse illuminated far too late. See the way the sun casts down on the dried sections of wood, the bloated planks beneath the water, bleaching what it touches and denying the rest. See the teeth. The jagged mouth. The rocks which called down their doom, and the determination of the blood to spill itself out many years ago, still lingering on the rot.
Grantham Blakeley had been a sailor. He'd been a damned good one, if one asked his old crewmates. And he'd been loyal, almost to a fault, to his captain, for who else was he to trust when the sea tore open its maw, and the skies pelted down torrents, and the waves lashed like tongues on the wood?
He'd left behind a wife and daughter, whom he said he would see again come the next season, and he would not set foot on a boat for a long while after. He had kissed his daughters head and held her for a while, and kissed his wife like breathing was only done through her, and set onto that ship. He would not see them again. He would instead be tied by a mutinous crew to a post in the ship as it continued to sail, always watched over by Gable.
He'd known Gable for many years. The pair had always been at odds, but nothing serious, nothing deadly. They'd had their differing opinions on the Emperor and their perspectives on their towns and they'd carried out their duties with a friendly enough cooperation, but Grantham could tell there was something about Gable that he didn't have the words to describe. A look in his eye, something mean, like he was waiting to make his problems the business of everyone around him. But he was still outwardly friendly, and Gable had many allies on the ship. And Grantham knew an angry man at sea was not one to be trifled with, whether he wished to voice his concerns or not.
This was his fault, at the end of his life, that he'd not said something sooner to the captain which, if he'd known, perhaps could have survived and saved them all. Saved Grantham. For when all was said and done, he was still tied to a post, and struggling against the binds, and staring up at Gable, sweat on his brow as he looked to the other man above him, and thought of his wife and daughter back home. Gable only knew bare details of his family, as Grantham had seen to this, and made it a point to keep Gable out of his private life. On the ship, they were crewmates, but upon land, strangers.
Maybe he should have told the captain of Gable's strangeness, his wanton actions and lack of concern for anyone but himself. He dressed it up in worry over the others on the ship, but Grantham saw differently. When a storm was on the horizon, and his captain wished to sail through it as they had done countless times, who was Grantham to object? He knew the ship could handle it, even though it rocked and creaked in odd ways as time went on. He had faith in it. He and the captain both.
Grantham looked out over the shoreline, towards the Mouth of the Panther. How many years had he been here? He watched the waves lap against the splintering wood, and the bloated belly of the boat, and the bleached heights of it, and knew that he'd been a fool. He should have left for another ship long ago. But he couldn't. They'd been a crew, and he cared for them, or maybe he didn't, it was hard to say anymore. He couldn't think the words in their order, or think at all, sometimes. During the garish mid-daylight hours, he was nothing, a speck of debris on the wind with no mind nor tongue to speak his thoughts in, but during the night, he was the figure on the shore which lead bandits to abandon their camps and guards to flee for the nearby town. He ambled aimlessly up and down the shore, and carried himself with nothing but slacked shoulders and a wish on his lungless breath for someone to put an end to Gable. To free the both of them, though to which eternities they do go, he had no idea.
During the time he was not nothingness, or the Forlorn Watchman, as the nearby residents of a town would exclaim upon seeing him, he was Gable's prisoner. Gable, whose body took on wraithish appearance in death, whose spectre hovered over his bones in the morning hours, Gable, who named him idiot and fool. Grantham could not face Gable, though he was forced to do so, his skull turned forever with empty eyesockets towards the phantom which hovered over him, speaking a language only the dead could speak, and knowing only what those aboard the Emma May could know. Taunts, mostly.
Where flaw and fault meet, there is a thick and heavy line. A flaw, for Grantham, had always seemed something which could be buffed away and made clean, but a fault was a chipped piece of ceramic, unfixable, and so Grantham lived with the fault that he had not seen through Gable at the start. That he'd not done something to fix what Gable would do to the people aboard the ship. They would run aground. They would not make it out of this, Grantham - whether through injury at the post or the wreck itself - would never see his family again, and Gable would forever watch over him. Leering down at him from a place beyond ghosthood, for whatever Gable had become was far worse than any spectre.
Grantham would continue his slow march along the shoreline, every night, with the dark speckling the horizon in stars, and the sun painting orange on the heels of the mountains, thick trees smocking the distant lands he could never travel to again. His tongue became a foreign lump in what was once his mouth, but his call was a simple one, much like a bird. He would call for release, but neither guard nor fighter nor citizen nor mage heard him, heeded him.
So he was again, by morning, Gable's prisoner, the wraith his warden, the sun his enemy and the moons his gods. Grantham Blakeley was this and nothing more, a strip of meat lodged in the Mouth of the Panther, stuck between its teeth.