Floating Cauldron

By Joseph Sullivan

The Floating Cauldron was one of the most renowned ships on the high seas, looked at with both suspicion and wonder. It was captained by the legendary Gelthak, a great alchemist whose work had brought him ill renown on land, so he had taken to practicing his craft on the high seas. It helped him avoid persecution from local authorities who mistrusted him, and it enabled him to trade with those who did appreciate his work far and wide.

The wayward wizard Reltanna Lirane was one of the latter, and she had arranged to meet him at the docks of the Free City, not only so she could purchase rare ingredients from him, but perhaps to learn even more from him about the secrets of his craft, so she could improve her own alchemical knowledge.

But she became impatient when the ship did not arrive on schedule. At first, she was hoping it was only a day’s delay, and so she stayed nearby, but as time went on, she grew frustrated.

Has Gelthak just forgotten about me? She was about to leave the Free City and call the whole thing a wasted endeavour when a sailor burst onto the docks, looking delirious and half-deranged.

“You are Reltanna Lirane, yes?” he wheezed, clearly out of breath. “The one that the Floating Cauldron was supposed to meet?”

“Well, supposed to, indeed!” she huffed. “And you are?”

“My name is Bojim,” he coughed. “I was one of the sailors onboard the ship. It got wrecked a few days east of here…I barely made it out alive…”

Reltanna was disappointed, and not without sympathy for the young man, when another thought struck her. If it had recently crashed, she could find its wreck, and both aid any survivors that remained, and scavenge whatever she could find.

“I can arrange for passage to the wreck,” she said. “Can you take me there?”

“I don’t think you want to go there…too dangerous…”

“Oh, but I do,” Reltanna grinned. “And I have enough coin to make it worth your while, too…”

***

The travel to where Bojim indicated went quicker than expected, because Reltanna had been able to afford a carriage pulled by horses, while Bojim had made his journey from the wreck on foot. Along the way, Reltanna grew more and more eager as the possibilities of what she could find grew larger and larger in her imagination.

When they finally reached it, she got out of the carriage to investigate, but Bojim refused.

“Nothing out there but death, wizard,” he said gravely. “Of a kind neither of us could understand…”

Reltanna shrugged it off. Maybe something Bojim couldn’t understand, but not me.

But when she walked over to the cliff’s edge to look down at the site, even she could not believe what she saw.

The wreckage of the Floating Cauldron blighted the mouth of the river like an ugly sore. The waters around the shipwreck were beyond polluted, full of different colours surrounding its hull. Crimson red streams poured out of the hull, making it look like the ship itself was bleeding, orange drops had found their way onto land and had set some of the dirt aflame, green bubbles sizzled in the water near a large collection of fishbones, and an unnatural blue was seeping into the river. It looked like something out of a distorted dream, but there it was, right before Reltanna’s eyes.

Reltanna was fascinated and horrified at once, and in equal measure. Whatever had happened here was clearly accidental, as a result of Gelthak’s experiments meeting unforeseen circumstances, but this was something one-of-a-kind that Reltanna was sure had never been covered in arcane lore before. If she could get close enough to study it intensely, her name would go down in alchemical history, perhaps even more than Gelthak…

But as she contemplated her name rising in the esteem of many, something rose from the waters below her. Out of the ship itself came something. At first, it resembled the eruption of a slow geyser, but it quickly became much bigger. It was a mosaic of different colours, and began to take on a dark and ghastly appearance. The land around it began to wither and die, as the amorphous glob took the shape of a huge, mountainous puddle, until, like a person, it began raising something that looked like a giant arm.

Reltanna screamed and ran as the arm came crashing down where she had just been standing, taking a chunk out of the cliff with it. 

“You were right, Bojim!” she cried as she ran back to the carriage. “We have to go!”

She took a look behind her at the creature whose birth she had just witnessed, with Bojim unwilling or unable to do so. She was glad that the thing seemed to be too slow to follow her. But she couldn’t help but think, as an arcanist herself, of her own culpability.

Is that what I would’ve learned to create?

About the Author

Joseph Sullivan is a writer and support worker living in Melbourne, Australia.

He is an avid writer of speculative fiction, having been an ongoing contributor to AntipodeanSF since 2022. In addition, he is a regular reviewer for Aurealis, and has written nonfiction for them as well.

You can find his work at <https://josephsullivanwriter.blogspot.com>.