“You don’t scream in the Locker. You forget how.”
Built into the lowest hold of The Leviathan’s Spine, the Locker isn’t visible to anyone who hasn’t been dragged there. It’s sealed behind a bulkhead with no handle, opened only by a key Davy wears around his neck — and even then, only when he's ready.
The entrance is just a crawlspace behind a wall of fake barrels.
You'd never know it was there — unless Davy wanted you to.
The Locker isn’t a place for containment. It’s a place for erasure.
Not dim. Void. There is no light source, and the walls are coated with matted pitch to absorb any flicker that might sneak in.
Prisoners lose track of their hands, their heartbeat, and their time.
The walls are lined with compressed cloth, bone dust, and sea-leather, engineered to kill echo.
You can scream — no one hears it. Not the crew. Not the rats.
Davy has funneled just enough thick, humid ocean air through barnacle-lined vents to keep prisoners alive — but just barely.
There’s no breeze, no sense of movement — only stagnant air and your own breath.
The room is deliberately sloped, and the floor has uneven planks. You can’t tell what’s level or where “down” is. This causes vertigo, panic, and eventual spatial disorientation.
No chains.
No guards.
No sound.
Just your mind — and your guilt — bouncing endlessly off the black.
Time becomes a liquid nightmare in the Locker.
Most prisoners beg to be let out by the third day.
By day five, many can’t remember their names.
By day ten, they hallucinate voices — usually Davy’s.
Some, after release, say they heard the ocean asking them questions.
“It’s not the dark that breaks you. It’s what you start to believe about yourself in the dark.”
Only Davy decides who goes in.
The crew may vote on punishments — but the Locker is sacred. His alone.
No one speaks about what happens inside.
Not because it’s forbidden. Because no one who’s been inside wants to remember.
You leave changed — or you don’t leave.
Some come out sharper. Colder. More obedient.
Others crawl out broken, used only for grunt work until death.
A few have come out smiling — and those ones worry even Davy.
“There’s a second voice in there. Not Davy’s. Not yours. Something older.”
“They say he built it from the hull of a ship that betrayed him — and never repainted it.”
“The walls breathe when you're inside.”
Fear of the Locker keeps the crew in line more than Davy’s blade.
It's not a punishment for disobedience. It's a test of belief.
“If you still think you know better, the Locker will prove you wrong.”
It's his final tool before exile, death, or promotion.
Before the crew. Before the legend. There was only Davy, the sea... and silence.
Before the mutiny.
Before the codes.
Before the Spine even had a name.
There was just a man, a leaking ship, and a single black parrot who watched everything without judgment.
Davy built the Locker with his own hands, nailing planks into salt-soaked walls in silence.
No witnesses.
No plans for use.
Just something he knew he needed to do — something the sea whispered while he drifted alone between islands, broke, nameless, forgotten.
And when it was finished, when the last board was in place…
He opened the door, stepped inside, and sealed himself in.
For three days, the parrot waited.
It didn’t fly away.
It didn’t squawk.
It just sat on the mast, head tilted, watching the closed hatch — like it knew something sacred was happening below.
No light.
No sound.
No reason.
No voice to curse.
No god to blame.
No enemy to plot against.
Just the weight of his own breath and the endless slow spiral of his thoughts.
He had nothing.
So he became nothing.
When he emerged, it was just before sunrise. He was barefoot. His coat had been folded and laid at the hatch — like he’d planned the moment of return.
His eyes weren’t wild.
They weren’t broken.
They were cold, sharp, and still — like a blade that had been quenched in a deeper fire than steel could know.
He said nothing.
Just took his coat, fed the parrot a bit of dried meat, and walked back to the helm.
The ship didn’t rock as much after that.
The wind came a little more when he called it.
No crewman has ever heard Davy mention that night.
No journal contains it.
The Locker has no inscription to mark its first use.
But some whisper that whatever he faced down there — it wasn’t madness.
It was clarity.
"The Locker doesn’t teach you how to survive. It shows you what kind of monster you’ll become when there’s nothing left to fight but yourself."
To this day, Davy’s parrot is still aboard. Older now, feathers grayed and ragged — but sharp-eyed and still watching.
It never squawks when someone is sent to the Locker.
But it always perches at the hatch and waits — just like before.
Some say it still remembers.
Others think it saw what Davy became.
Once, a dying crewman asked him why he made the Locker.
Davy didn’t answer at first. But just before the man passed, he leaned in and whispered:
“Because I had to find out if the sea had a soul.
And if it did — whether it was stronger than mine.”