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# Waverider Expedition - Borealia

Leaving, but not forgotten

The Waverider froze into the ice before winter had even begun.

One day, the sea steamed black under low sun; the next, it cracked and folded, locking the ship in white stone. By morning she was still, her hull groaning against the pressure of a living sea. The men swung axes at the ice, but the cracks they made closed again by nightfall.

When the blizzards came, Solonex ordered the crew ashore. They built camp around an abandoned whaling outpost half buried in snow, four huts, a watchtower, and the bones of a boat that had failed before them.

Forty-three souls made landfall.

They burned half the timbers for warmth.

The first month held routine. Solonex kept the log, counting rations and rotation duties. Eira charted weather patterns and the drift of the ice. Selene tended frostbite and infection. Brannick cooked, cursed, and coaxed laughter out of men who'd forgotten what it was for.

Ulfar led the hunting parties. He said the land felt hollow, that sound traveled like breath in a cave.

At night, the sky pulsed with auroras-green and blue curtains folding over the stars. At first they lifted spirits. The crew sang beneath them. Then they began to notice: the lights dimmed when voices rose, and flared brighter when they fell silent.

"The gods are listening," a sailor said.

"No," Solonex answered. "The world itself is."

By the third month, the camp had gone quiet. The aurora never left the sky. Some swore it moved closer, the colors running like ink down the horizon.

The men began seeing things in the white: movement between ridges, shadows that didn't match their own. A sentry claimed he saw someone waving from the shipwreck at dusk-one of their lost deckhands, standing barefoot on the rail, smiling.

He went himself, knowing before he looked there would be nothing. But when he returned, his boots were soaked to the ankles and steaming as if from heat, not cold.

Rations thinned. Jokes grew brittle. Brannick rationed laughter like salt.

Selene saved her herbs for frostbite and prayed over the ones she couldn't save. Eira took to sleeping by the door, saying she could hear the ice shift in rhythm with their breaths.

When Ulfar came back from the hunt, he brought meat that steamed black when cooked. He didn't say what it was, only that the snow had melted where he found it.

The aurora turned red that night, deep and slow, like the beating of a heart.

Spring didn't come. The wind softened, but the ice held fast. Two men vanished from the outer huts. No struggle, no tracks, only the doors left open. Their bunkmates said they'd gone to follow the lights.

Solonex banned anyone from leaving camp after nightfall.

That rule lasted three days.

Then the stove went out. The sky pulsed red again, and the crew swore they saw figures in the light, tall, thin, human-shaped, walking just above the snow. Some of the younger sailors ran out calling to them. They came back hours later, eyes glassy, their skin unburned by frost, their breath faintly luminous in the dark.

They said they'd found warmth, but couldn't explain how.

The rest stopped asking questions. They worked, ate, slept, in silence.

Selene kept tending wounds no longer made by accident. Ulfar hunted nothing and returned empty-handed but swore the lights led him home each time.

Eira mapped the sky, marking each flare and pulse. She said the aurora spelled their names if you watched long enough.

Brannick burned the last of the oil and called it mercy.

When the thaw finally came, it didn't feel like salvation.

The ice cracked without sound, the sea opening in slow breaths. The Waverider drifted free, hull scarred but intact. The survivors packed what was left of the camp, half of them pale as glass, eyes reflecting the colors above, not like mirrors, but like windows left open.

They left Borealia without ceremony.

On the first night back at sea, the aurora rose again, brighter than ever, following them south. The crew gathered on deck in silence.

Eira saw faces in the light, forty-three, clear as memory, drifting through the colors. Each wore the same faint smile.

Solonex stood at the bow, jaw tight. "They're not lost," he said softly. "They're watching."

No one argued.

From the captain's log, final Borealia entry:

"We held through the long night. No deaths, though I'm not sure all returned whole. The auroras move with purpose now. They mirror what we remember, or perhaps what remembers us. Either way, they will follow." - Solonex, Captain of the Waverider

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