The ship stank of death.

You sat huddled on the cold, damp floor of the hold, your bloodied wrists hidden beneath the tattered fabric of your shirt. The vessel that carried you away from home was grotesquely rich: Spanish smugglers trafficking in human cargo had no concern for care or civility. To them, you were nothing more than freight — a hostage, a commodity, a body with a price tag.

Time in captivity stretched on like chewing gum, blind and sticky. The creak of ropes, the cries of gulls, the crash of waves against the hull, the muffled echo of foreign voices. You had learned to read the mood in their footsteps: heavy steps — a drunken sailor; light steps — a guard with a whip. Each day blurred into the next, only the weakness deepened, and the skin beneath your shackles burned raw with new abrasions.

And then, one morning, everything changed. The thin moan of the wind grew into a whistle. As if the very elements themselves were conspiring. The first blasts came like bolts of lightning. The ship shuddered, groaning as though it were alive. Water poured into the hold through shattered planks, soaked with salt and rot. Screams, the deafening thunder of cannon fire, the clash of steel — it all merged into a single, overwhelming roar.