#1347

Learning about the Genoese "Death Ships" of the Black Plague has been HAUNTING me for the last few days since learning about them (thanks Puppet History for the nightmares). Like imagine papà has gone away to a far away land to make money for your family and you're sad, and then you find out that land had been attacked by the Mongol's Golden Horde and that sounds scary and you're SCARED for papà once word makes its way to you, but there's hope because the Genoese merchant fleet fled Kaffa and are on their way home! So you sit on the beaches of Messina for weeks (months? idk how fast sail from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean was in the fourteenth century) until at last! You see the fleet! You see papà's ship! Only then the ships start running aground and sinking. But papà's makes it to the port! You join the mob of curious and worried onlookers and a man who looks like death itself, covered in dark lumps or even covered in the blood he has vomitted up onto himself, shambles out of the ship. Maybe it's papà, maybe you recognize him as one of papà's shipmates, maybe you can't recognize him at all because he is Dead Man Walking now. And a chill goes up and down your spine from the sight of this, and whether you realize it in that moment or not your innocent life has been shortened to a few months more at the most, but at least you'll see papà again soon