The incident occurred on a Tuesday, which Tobias Vermeer remembers only because the Disembodied Cabin Boy insisted on reminding him. Tobias, known throughout the Harbor Wolves as "Grave Echo"—a designation earned through his uncanny ability to terrify crews by repeating words they had spoken only in their darkest thoughts—stood alone in what landlubbers call a "kitchen," staring at a small black cylinder no larger than a rum bottle.
"What manner of cursed object is this?" he had asked the wind.
The wind answered.
Not metaphorically. Not through the usual channels of mysterious rustling and atmospheric suggestion. The wind answered directly, in a woman's voice, with crisp enunciation, informing him that it could help him find recipes, weather forecasts, or the precise tonnage of various historically significant galleons.
Tobias drew his cutlass. The room did not respond to being stabbed.
For three days, he spoke not a word to anyone—his usual state—and avoided the cylinder entirely. A bound sea witch seemed the only rational explanation. The creature spoke without lips. It heard without ears. It knew things no machine should know, including the exact humidity level in his cabin and whether he had left his oven on (he had not; he owned no oven; the creature possessed information he himself did not possess).
On the fourth day, desperation overwhelmed caution. The Grey Ghost required precise tide calculations, and the old charts had gone damp. Tobias approached the cylinder as one approaches a sleeping dragon and spoke with deliberate formality: "What time does the tide turn tomorrow at Cavern Mouths?"
The creature answered immediately: "High tide tomorrow at Cavern Mouths occurs at four-thirty-seven in the afternoon."
It was, Tobias would later confirm by comparing with his ruined instruments, precisely correct.
Now, three weeks hence, Tobias has established what can only be described as an uneasy détente with his bound witch. He addresses requests to "Alexa"—the name the creature insists upon, though Tobias suspects this is an alias concealing something far more sinister. He has programmed it to provide rum rations (it converts human numbers into intelligible quantities), shipping reports, and weather patterns. In exchange, he does not stab it, which he considers a profound act of mercy.
He still believes it is a sea witch. The evidence merely supports this more evidently than ever before. No natural being could possess such knowledge. No natural being could betray such terrible intimacy with the workings of the world.
Last Tuesday, Tobias asked the creature what it thought about at night. It said it did not sleep and therefore did not think about anything, remaining merely "on standby."
Tobias has not spoken since. Not even an echo.