The merchant convoys threading the Serpent's Teeth can sail easier this week, after what witnesses are describing as a bizarre and bloody confrontation ended the menace of a ghost ship that had prowled the region's waters for at least three weeks. According to Corra, a former first mate currently based at Driftwood Landing, the vessel destroyed her own skiff, the Dawn Chaser, three nights before she commissioned two independent operatives to investigate. She agreed to pay thirty gold pieces for the job, half advanced.
Corra identified the ship's banner as the crimson flag of the late Captain Callista Merrow, a mariner hanged some twenty years ago whose name carries weight along this coast. "I watched her hang," Corra said at Driftwood Landing's dockside. A piece of black timber recovered by dockmaster Pella after the attack, decades old, cold to the touch, and described by those who handled it as fundamentally wrong, was later identified as old-growth ship timber consistent with a vessel long submerged. Pella also reported strange singing from the sea the night of the attack, like a bow drawn across wet rope, after which gulls went silent along the entire stretch of coast.
The operatives Corra engaged, a ranger who goes by Garbo and a bard named Jamhorn, tracked the flag's dark influence to a ruined watchtower at Widow's Point before pressing east to the Serpent's Teeth. At the tower, they reportedly encountered the spirit of Merrow herself, who confirmed she had been dead two decades and was being compelled to rise against her will. According to the pair, Merrow named her former quartermaster, Vasha Kell, as the party responsible, and warned that Kell intended to strike a merchant convoy at the new moon, two nights hence.
"The plan was not, by conventional standards, a sound one," acknowledged Kest, a castaway smokehouse operator who resupplied the pair on the eastern isle and provided lamp oil and rendered pork fat for improvised incendiary devices. "Stupidest plan I've ever seen, in point of fact." Despite this assessment, Kest contributed three pounds of smoked pork to the effort, and confirmed greenish lights consistent with the ghost ship had been observed past the reef two nights prior.
Those on the eastern isle reported hearing fire and the cries of gulls before the new moon reached its height. The operatives had steered their rented skiff, the Mudskipper, into the channel as a bait vessel, its hold loaded with pork-fat firebombs, while a recruited flock of coastal birds, christened the Pork Gulls by Jamhorn in a torchlit address the evening before, dropped incendiaries onto the enemy deck from above. The plan called for Garbo and Jamhorn to board through a fog screen once the crew's attention was drawn, impersonating the very vengeance of Callista Merrow. The fighting was fierce, and Garbo was struck unconscious during close engagement with Kell herself. The battle turned when the gull contingent tore the crimson flag from the mainmast, at which point Kell and her remaining crew collapsed where they stood. Kest, watching from the eastern isle, later recounted that one of the Pork Gulls dropped a parcel of smoked pork squarely onto the fallen ranger's chest, at which point Garbo stirred. The flag now lies on the ghost ship's deck, tattered and inert.
The spirit of Callista Merrow, according to both surviving operatives, is finally at rest. The merchant convoy passed through the Serpent's Teeth unharmed. Garbo and Jamhorn are expected to return to Driftwood Landing to collect the remainder of Corra's payment. Dockside sources suggest Jamhorn may carry questions of a more personal nature, matters tied, it is said, to salt water, old bargains, and the deep sea.