Captain Elias Thorne was a man of the sea and impossible promises. He swore to his dying wife he would return home from his final voyage across the treacherous Cape Horn.
His ship, the Salt Spray, hit a squall two weeks later. The storm was unnatural, all green lightning and winds that shredded canvas like paper. The crew abandoned ship. Elias was left alone, holding onto a broken mast and a single item: his wife’s compass.
It was a simple brass compass, but the needle didn't point North. It pointed home. It always pointed directly toward his wife’s cottage on the cliffs of Cornwall.
For days, Elias drifted on wreckage. He fought off sharks with bare hands and survived on rainwater. The needle on the compass never wavered. It showed him not the magnetic north of the world, but the gravitational pull of love.
He was eventually rescued by a whaling vessel bound for South America, taking him further away from the compass's direction.
Elias eventually made it back to a port in Peru. Broke, weary, and years later, he had almost given up hope. He looked at the compass. The needle still pointed home.
Finally, decades after he left, a weather-beaten, gray-haired man stepped onto the docks of his home port. He walked up the familiar cliff path to the cottage. The roof was new, the garden overgrown. A young woman was hanging laundry.
She looked exactly like his wife, only younger.
"Who are you?" she asked, startled by the stranger.
"I am Elias Thorne," he said, holding up the compass, his voice hoarse. "I promised my wife I'd return."
The woman gasped, looking at the compass that had been passed down generations. "My grandmother... she always said you'd return. She passed last year."
Elias looked at the compass. The needle was now spinning wildly, lost and aimless for the first time. The journey was over, the promise kept, just a moment too late for the woman who had guided him home.
He didn't use this power for wealth or fame. He used it to subtly guide lost students toward the right textbooks, preventing tiny, minor misfortunes.
He found work on a merchant ship heading east. He used the compass to secretly navigate, shaving weeks off the journey time by finding impossible currents and avoiding hidden doldrums.
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