Xavier came awake to a sound that caused him some confusion. Pushing away the covers of his bed, the sage perked his ears to listen. Certainly he must've been imagining the sound, that of a waterfall, but it was there none the less. Never one to leave questions unanswered, such as why he heard a waterfall while his ship was currently sailing the open seas, the hybrid slowly pulled himself from his bed. Plucking his coat from the hook on the back of his door, the Captain made his way out to the deck with the customary banging of his wooden door. The crew, upon seeing him, all gave uneasy smiles and kept glancing towards the prow of the ship.
"Now what's going on..." Xavier asked. The question was directed mainly to himself as he knew he wasn't likely to get a straight answer. The sage stalked up to the front of the ship and took a look over the railing, and what he saw made him clutch the rail till the wood creaked in protest.
Xavier's ship, the Stormrider, was aptly named. Even since the day he had it built, the vessel had always had danger on its heels. With expert craftsmanship and a skilled crew, she and her cargo had thus far been able to avoid that storm that had chased them across the globe. However, as Xavier stared down into the gaping chasm that had opened in the sea before him, he could not think that they would be so lucky this time. Before his beloved ship, it appeared as if the world had ended.
Barely a league from the prow of the ship the ocean simply stopped, and in its place was a dark hole in the world. The water of the ocean was pouring into this hole, swallowed as if by the mouth of hell itself.
Xavier stood there a moment longer before turning on his men, steeling himself for what must happen now. "How long's that been there?" he shouted at the nearest sailor, who just shook his head and shrugged.
"Just appeared a minute ago, Captain." Came the reply. Xavier paused just a for a moment before nodding to himself. It had to be done.
"Abandon ship!" He yelled, which caused all of the sailors to stare at him slack-jawed. The hybrid never would have given that order, either.. but he wasn't about to get fifty some odd men killed just because of a boat. "You heard me. Get moving!" With that, the sailors finally went into motion, most piling into the rowboats but a few others simply jumping off into the water below in their haste.
As for Xavier, he moved to the helm of the ship and took the wheel, his grip like iron on the wooden spokes. He knew he could not turn even a ship as agile as the Stormrider around in a current like this, but he had to try. The ship was not only his prized possession, but it also was a storehouse of magical artifacts. If those were lost, or worse, found by the wrong people... he didn't wish to be responsible for such a thing.
Within mere moments the ship began to tilt into the gap, the prow falling below the water line while the tiller came up from the waves, pouring water. Xavier clung tightly to the wheel now, no longer trying to steer the ship away from the chasm, and simply clinging to it in some hopes that he may survive whatever he was about to fall into. The wood groaned from the strain of its own weight, and then suddenly Xavier was staring at the black chasm head on as the vessel slid downwards into the darkness. Air whipped past his face, sea spray clouding his vision... then suddenly he was on the other side of the gap, still clinging to the wheel.
Facing down the length of the Stormrider, he saw what had become of him and his ship. It was a rift, as he suspected, but one that put him in a very odd position... for now he did not sail through an ocean, but through open air. The darkness was a storm cloud, through which he had broken to face the jagged terrain below, terrain that seemed to rush up to meet him. Before he could get his bearings, he saw the ruins of a broken and shattered city beneath him. With luck befitting his fortune thus far, a tall, craggy, stone tower seemed to be what was going to break the ship's fall towards the ground.
With coat whipping wildly behind him, and the air rushing past threatening to suffocate him, he held on for dear life to the wheel of the Stormrider as the apex of the tower met with the plummeting prow of his ship. The impact of wood and stone hardly slowed the vessel down at first, the timbers splintering with a mighty crash that threatened to dislodge the stubborn mortal from his perch.
The tower speared his ship like a soft-scaled fish, timbers flying past his head as the deck of the ship exploded behind him. The mast cracked in half, the sail causing it to catch the wind rushing past and go flying backwards towards the sage. Xavier had enough sense to throw himself flat against the deck as it came crashing by, destroying the helm of the ship. The sage slid down the deck, scrambling at loose timbers as the ship itself continued to slide down the weapon of its own destruction. Xavier caught a length of rope and held fast, dangling in open air as the Stormrider finally ground to a stop.
Suspended halfway down the massive, crumbling tower, the Stormrider was beautiful no more... and it left its Captain dangling by a rope in the middle of an accursed, foreign land.
