No one knows how Jasmine managed to evade death. What people do know is that she was acting strangely after waking up, muttering to herself and covering up all the cracks on the ship with anything she could find. Everyone attributed it to stress and trauma. She was alive after all, deemed perfectly fit by all the medical officers onboard. But then the crew started dying one by one. It was slow, a person every other month or so, and at first they seemed like accidents. A deckhand that slipped and cracked open their head, a watchman that fell from a mast, a cook that was on the wrong side of a cannon mishap, etc. But Jasmine was always nearby, and eventually, she was caught hanging a steward. Jasmine confessed to 8 counts of murder but insisted that they were all necessary, that she was doing it to save everyone else. Even as she was being hauled off to the brig, she kept insisting — kept begging them to let her continue.

Jasmine has found that she just can’t seem to be killed. A knife through the heart, a leap off a bridge, a short fall at the end of a long rope. She keeps waking up an hour later with the same suffocating panic she felt the first time. Most would consider such an ability a blessing, however, Jasmine knows it is anything but that. In the dark nothingness and all-encompassing cold, it lurks in the splintering edges: a hunger with eyes of pitch and a maw of giant, gnashing teeth. Jasmine doesn’t know if it’s simply toying with her or why she was picked, but she is certain that the monstrosity is keeping her alive so it can drag her into the depths itself. Every day, she can feel its presence, like some fly in the back of her mind, and every time she comes back to life, she feels like she lost a piece of herself in the process. Every so often, the sky seems to bend and sound turns to static before reaching her ears. When that happens, she is convinced that unless she gives the terror something soon — someone soon — then the cracks in the world will open up and swallow her whole.