The captain calls out in his booming voice. "Haul it in!"

Kit shakes his head. "Only just tossed it out, and we're pulling it right back in? What a pain." Still, he and Ngāk quickly pull in the net, while Dā and Ngum watch to free the net if it gets caught coming back in.

Yep, Narāy doesn't envy them, and is real glad they hadn't pulled in a catch or he'd have to draw the shield closed and spend the next half hour shoving corruptive mana out of the ship. Instead, the shields were never pulled down and he gets to lean on the metal railing and relax until they next need checking and patching.

Once the net's back on deck, the crew moves fast. Ngum hauls on a halyard and the big rectangular sail drops from where it's bundled against the bamboo yard, the waxed bamboo-fiber cloth snapping taut as it catches the wind. Kit and Dā work the sheets, angling the sail to take the storm-wind on their quarter, while the captain leans into the steering oar.

The deck tilts beneath Narāy's feet as the Kruwē picks up speed, her steel skeleton groaning softly, the outriggers slicing through the chop. He grabs a stay to steady himself and watches the dark smear of the storm behind them. It's gaining.

They're sailing far from home, here. They've been at sea for six days already, having sailed the thousand kilometres to this more enclosed sea with markedly more fish. But that means that while he knows they're sailing towards islands, he hasn't heard from any other sailor anything about those islands, and only knows how far he is from them in the vaguest terms; ...Probably at least hundreds of kilometres, but he'd be shocked if it was more than 400.

After thirty minutes of sailing, anxiously checking and rechecking the storm behind them, and the ship's speed as reported by the mage, it's becoming clear that they're probably not going to make it to safety before the storm hits.

They keep sailing, obviously. But the dread is building, tension palpable in the air. At some point Ngum and Ngāk grabbed the oars lashed along the gunwale and started rowing. Everyone knows it won't do much, but it's better than watching that dark wall creep closer and doing nothing, and the captain hasn't called them off yet. Kit and Dā are obsessively working the sheets, trying to push the sail to its limits and get the most out of it possible, and then Kit accidentally drops his line and Dā explodes at him. Says that if he's not going to do his job, why doesn't he join the fools rowing.

"Dā. Cool it. We've got plenty enough to worry about here."

"...Sorry, Captain." Dā's jaw is still set tight, but he shuts up and the deck goes quiet for a while. It takes him twenty minutes of ranting inside his mind before he cools down enough to mutter a quiet apology to Kit.

Narāy is quiet too, now; every couple minutes he lets the captain know his new feeling on the direction and distance to the block of mana that sits under the shrine in his apartment. (Mages can get a really quite accurate feeling for how far they are from mana they've Claimed, when they've got as much practice at it as Narāy.)

And in the in-between he stirs and stirs their containers of mana, and double checks that their membranes are intact. He has the feeling he's going to need every drop.

He acknowledges each update, tracking the position of the ship in his mental map and occasionally muttering a couple lines of prayer.

Around an hour after they first spotted the storm, the wind starts building around them. It's the first touches of the storm reaching out to caress them, light things that promise their mistress will be harsher when she arrives, and laughing at them for thinking they can outrun the winds.

The captain booms out once again. "Oars away." In a slightly quieter voice (but still quite loud, really; this is a man used to shouting over the wind, despite the wind's best efforts) he says, "Rest while you can."

Ngum and Ngāk nod, getting up, stretching, taking some small sips of water, and staring quietly at the darkness, nerves twisting in their chests.

The winds are getting progressively worse, and the sky is getting darker. The sea swell is starting to build, occasionally pitching the boat severely as they hit a larger wave. And a bit past two hours in, the first small drops start landing on the deck. The rain starts deceptively light, even thirty minutes into its pattering on the bamboo flooring. Still enough to make it hard to see the approaching stormfront, though. And the waves are getting bigger.

Yeah, this looks like a big one. Keep occasionally stirring the mana containers, and hope with all his being that he'll get to sit on his daughter's verandah again, bouncing her little Krisnā on his knee.

An hour later the storm has gotten very, very close. The waves are bigger, pounding against the hull of the Kruwē, the rain getting heavier. Kit and Dā have progressively reefed the sail smaller and smaller as the wind builds. The oars are stowed, the loose gear packed away, the loose lines tied. As always, Ngum took charge of rigging the safety lines along the deck; He's been paranoid his whole life about being washed off deck.

He's checked the mana containers are bolted down. He's moved mana from each container into its lock, to have easy access.

The crew has received firm instruction to stuff their faces before it hits, and have a good drink. It'll be many hours before they get another chance.

The edge of the storm passes over them like a great beast swallowing them whole. One breath they can see the dark wall thirty metres out; the next breath they're inside it, almost blind, the rain hitting exposed skin hard enough to sting. The sea, which had been building in swells they could anticipate, turns chaotic—waves coming from angles that don't match the wind, the Kruwē lurching and dropping unpredictably beneath them.

He's tied into the safety lines, and holding on tight, squinting out desperately to spot large waves as they move in. He rubs the salt water out of his eyes as a wave breaks over the top of him, and does it again a couple seconds later, and whenever they're clear enough he's staring around and calling out the waves.

And every wave called the captain is tracking, fighting the steering oar to turn the stern towards whichever one's biggest. They take a sizeable one to the broadside and the Kruwē rolls under them, but not all the way over, just tipping back in time. She crashes back into the sea, spraying plumes of sea water to meet the rain falling from above.

The sail is mostly reefed in, but mostly is not fully, and Kit and Dā are on the sheets constantly, letting wind from dangerous gusts spill out rather than fill the sail and snap the mast, trying to keep the ship moving through the storm so they can maybe reach the islands that might be right before them, offering shelter if only they can push through.

Ngum and Ngāk are bailing water, filling their buckets and tossing them overboard with the steady rate of men who know they'll need to keep this up for many hours; they can't burn all their energy now. When a big wave overtops the wall and threatens to fill the ship they'll bring a temporary burst of effort, but mostly theirs is slow, gruelling, mindless work.

And even as he's tracking the waves and hollering to the captain, Narāy is keeping the mana in motion, breaking it up where it starts to congeal, and waits for an emergency big enough he needs to burn some to save them.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, deep roars following the flashes of light that are the only distant things in view. A strong gust hits the sail just wrong and they can all hear something tear just after the captain booms out, "Drop the sail!"

Well fuck. Kit and Dā frantically reef the sail in fully and start to drop it, but the ship rocks under them and the net, never properly tied down after it was pulled in, slides across the deck. It tangles Dā's legs, trips him as he steps back to tension his line, and he plummets to the deck, followed quickly by the sail. "Shit!", cries out Kit.

Shit indeed. He takes hold of the mana in the locks, prepares to spring into action, but... stops himself at the last second. This isn't deadly. They can recover. This isn't the time.

All three of the others drop what they're doing to free Dā. It's dicey for a second as the Kruwē rocks and almost sends the net sliding again, but Ngum grabs it and Dā has his section locked down and they hold, get the man on his feet, and split up to properly secure the net and safely store the sail.

And Narāy relaxes his hold on the mana and gets back to watching the waves.

A fair amount of water has built up while Ngum and Ngāk were busy, and they bail quicker to try and get the level down, even as more waves top the wall and pour more freezing sea water in to join the rest. They'd be shivering if not for the labour, but as it is their shoulders are eventually starting to burn from the endless bailing, wave hits, bailing, another wave.

His voice is growing hoarse from the shouting over the wind, and his eyes are stinging and running so much they're close to useless. Kit joined him in spotting after the sail came down, but it feels like the number of waves doubled in response. Before the storm hit feels like a dream from long ago.

As the hours drag on his hands have cramped on the steering oar, even as he pushes through the pain because a bad wave at the wrong angle will have them joining the depths below.

Kit calls out at one point. "If we make it through this we'll have a right story to tell!"

Ngāk shouts back in a sardonic voice, "And if we don't there'll be no tales of our embarrassment!"

Narāy's feels the shield near him flex slightly as a denser gust of ambient mana is blown into it, the tiny pockmarks in the surface growing minutely. He itches to set it right, fill the holes with fresh mana and restore the pristine smoothness, but he's had no opportunity to work repairs. He won't for hours yet. Still, the shields going down also won't kill them, or at least not quick. (Though he's certainly glad that, if they get prolonged exposure to the mana roiling outside, at least he's finished having kids.)

And then a line snaps, near the bow of the ship, and Ngum unties himself from the safety line to start making his way to secure it, holding onto the safety as he goes.

They're deep in the storm now, and have been for a while. The cracks and flashes of lightning nearby have been constant friends amid the monotonous-if-terrifying work. This one is particularly close, a sudden boom and pillar of light from above, bright enough to blind all for a second.

And Ngum flinches, loosening his grip on the line, even as a wave rocks the boat up and he stumbles slightly, and Kit calls a desperate warning for a wave that washes up over the wall, knocks Ngum over, and pulls him out into the pitch-black sea.

This is the time. He takes hold of the mana in the container locks and pops the locks open, spilling the mana out into the air, keeping it under control so it doesn't sublimate uselessly. Form a bundle of threads from one end of the blob, woven strong so he'll be able to pull the man back. Throw the mana out into the sea where he saw Ngum go over, force it underwater, and let it spread out, infusing into the water even as he strains to keep it from sinking too deep, from mixing with the ambient mana, from dissolving completely. Another mage might have struggled less with this but he's always sucked at applying force to mana at a distance, come on, where is he, this is seriously starting to—THERE. He pulls the mana together around Ngum's flailing body as much as he can, wraps it tight around Ngum's soul, and starts reeling him in with the rope he made earlier. A lot of the mana is lost to the depths, fading from his mind as he failed to keep hold of it during the recovery and it mixed irrevocably with the ambient. But the rest should be usable again.

He heaves the mana-rope one last time, only the safety-line keeping him from sliding along the deck as he yanks Ngum, coughing and spluttering, back onto the deck.

Dā and Ngāk rush over to he landed, and quickly tie him onto the safety line so there's no repeat of that. They get him on his side and Ngāk pounds his back, getting him to cough up any seawater that got into his lungs. Everything on deck is soaked, and they don't want to open the hold and fill it up with water, but Dā can at least take off his coat and wrap it around the man. He bellows to the captain over the howling wind, "We got enough for me to stick with him?"

The captain thinks for a second, before calling back, "Aye, stay with him for a bit!"

And so as Ngāk unhooks his bucket from where he stowed it and starts bailing hard to make up for being the only one, Dā sits down next to Ngum, huddled in close to give the man some of his heat. "You with us, Ngum?"

Ngum is shivering like mad, but manages to recognisably nod. "Y-Yeah, I'm here."

Dā, pulse still roaring in his ears from the terror of watching a man go overboard, starts on the important work of keeping up inane conversation with Ngum so he pays attention and doesn't fall asleep on them.

While the others went to Ngum's side, Narāy was already corralling the mana he kept control of and moving to the side of the ship Ngum went overboard on, with the controlled pace of someone who has long learned that haste makes mistakes.

When Ngum went over, he went over through the shield. There's a massive tear in it, now, and Narāy can feel it flapping in the currents of the chaotic mana pouring into their ship, even as he can feel that mana start to prickle against his soul. He steps right up to the gaping hole with his arm held out straight, pulling the wobbling orb of mana with him and flattening it out, catching the flapping edges with it and holding them steady, sealing the gap. Then, with the immediate problem dealt with, he carefully forms a solid thread from the wobbling orb of mana he's suspending next to him, with a needle-like tip, and punches it through the edge of the shield on one side, then the other, slowly stitching the hole closed. Once the stitching's complete and the edge is held tight together, he'll pull most of the mana orb back inside through the small gaps still present. With what's left outside he forms a layer of solid mana over the stitching and tear-line, making a temporary patch that'll be gas-proof against the ambient mana.

And with the shield sealed, he can finally get to the infuriating process of forming the blob of mana he's carrying into a hollow sphere, containing some of the chaotic mana in the air so he can shove it into the ship's manalock and shove it out. (For all his education and blessings, he's out here bailing exactly like the fishermen he's sailing with.)