Chapter Text
There were two things Captain Will "Treaty" Jones of the Royal Araluan Navy was entirely unfamiliar with: the concepts of love and of his personal safety. While the former one had led him into some precarious political situations against his volition, the latter one had caused his current predicament. And he had no one to blame but himself.
A multitude of different aspects has led him to make this terrible judgement; for one, he wasn't travelling with his trusted crew so he lacked a sense of connection to these people and therefore didn't care as much about their safety as he normally would. He did his best to ensure that they would arrive at their destination in one piece lest it would be against his morals, but he was more careless than he normally would be. Nor did he know the full extent of these sailor's capabilities. Captain Will also didn't have his first mate here to tell him that he was a madman.
Secondly, they were on a time crunch, and Captain Will wanted to return to well-acquainted harbour cities as soon as possible either way. So who could blame him for wanting to take a short cut through that narrow channel piercing through a cliff-side mountain like a weaving wire?
And lastly, probably the most decisive factor that had led him to his decision, he had felt the resident siren of that channel fighting with a sea witch. A fight between these two magical species was common yet overwhelming nonetheless, so most people stayed out of their quarrels.
But Captain Will wasn't most people. He had seen enough of such fights to know that both would only be focused on their opponent for a long time, ignoring everything that happened near the surface.
He had thought that they would be fine, so he had issued his command. If he had known that the siren and the sea witch would stop fighting half-way through their traverse, or that they would not hesitate to team up and sink his ship within seconds, Captain Will would have made a different call.
But he hadn't, and now he was sinking to the rocky bottom of the channel. Really, he had nobody to blame but himself.