The earsplitting thunder of enemy cannons shattered the coastal silence. Hundreds of miles from the open Caribbean waters where his mission began, Lieutenant William Kendrick could scarcely process the nightmarish reality unfolding across the Golfo Dulce's placid shores.

One moment, the 32-gun Royal Navy brig HMS Prometheus patrolled sedately through the lush Central American inlets hunting pirate insurgents. The next, Kendrick's wooden world erupted into a tumult of splintering oak and screams as heavy ordnance rained from the jungle canopies ashore.

"By God, we've been ambushed!" Kendrick bellowed through sprawling gunsmoke. "All hands to quarters! Return fire on those thrice-damned rebel cowards!"

But it was too late. The piraguas' first broadsides had struck their mark squarely, ripping gaping holes across the Prometheus's underside that spilled their doomed cargo in horrific display. Barrels of gunpowder and ammunition reserves tumbled onto the main deck, many fully ruptured and already belching plumes of their volatile greyblack contents into the thick gunpowder haze searing the air.

Realizing the disaster's inevitability, Kendrick barked a final order to abandon ship before the hungry flames licking up the masts reached them all. But at that moment, another catastrophic rum-keg explosion rocked the shuddering Prometheus, sending the lieutenant hurtling shockwave-first into the shallows.

His body slammed like a scorched doll across the brine, every nerve ending screaming as the flames pursued across the oil-slicked maelstrom. Yet even as willful darkness rushed his vision and saltwater filled his lungs, the inferno's roar dimmed behind the distant rumbling of a far deeper consciousness awakening.

An ephemeral force suffused within Kendrick then, as if some great spirit current enveloped his drowning self in an impossible cosmic cradling. Unfurling from the shipwreck's crematorium into a realm of pure corruptible multitude, Kendrick's consciousness expanded into that otherworldly watercourse beyond all comprehension.

All at once, he witnessed a cosmic infinity of fractal possibility streams branching outwards - lifetimes without end spiraling across a luminant nexus of intersecting eventualites. Kendrick's own damned essence drifted across those numberless seaways as a single droplet to be gathered within the metaphysical tides.

Yet something within him refused dissolution into those infinite spiritual expanses. A lingering connection to his fragile former frame, burnt and bloated though it remained within the physical plane, anchored the ephemeral ember of Kendrick's spirit in place. Tethered to that inky drowned corpse like a soul-chain, he strained against the impermanence consuming his intellect. He would NOT surrender selfhood so insubstantially into the void!

In that moment, Kendrick's wavering ego seized what few dissolving memories still sparked - images, sensations, the very core of longstanding identity crystallizing through blasted shards of his final visceral horrors. The blackened tastes of smoldered gunpowder resurfacing upon his spirit's tongue. The last expedient visions of charcoal mast-beams and smoldering hope splashing across quenching brine. The righteous fury surging through his ruined breast when death found him...demanding vengeance against those traitorous rebel scourges whose barrage brought such sprawling devastation!

At the pinnacle of its defiance against oblivion's dissipating pull, Kendrick's soul essence spontaneously reassembled back into spectral avatar - twisting itself into an abstract new manifestation mirroring the unforgettable events of his mortal curtain. An ominous silhouette matching the officer's scorched human likeness...yet simultaneously elongating into formless ocean miasma and leaping amber conflagrations haunted within.

As ribbons of incarnadine aurora manifested in winding trails across its indistinct surface, the spectral Blazetide sprung into waking unlife. The new entity felt itself immediately untethered from all substantive planes, ripped simultaneously from the material world it once knew yet unable to surrender attachments and return to its spiritual source.

For Kendrick's damned essence had been infused, quite literally, with the chaotic clash of elements comprising his gristly dissolution into the Costa Rican brine decades earlier. Within Blazetide's streaming blue shade eternally churned those same currents of murky offshore waters desperately inhaled during death's expiring throes. Yet singed across his apparition in flailing bursts of angry orange energy seethed the impressions of that same saltwater's searing vaporization into dense explosive vapors.

Every particle fueling Blazetide's half-drowned, half-cremated spirit was saturated in the primordial clash waged until his ultimate destruction. The iconography of sea's liquid clutches indistinguishable from the cleansing fires that claimed his ship. Each memory of thrashing against Poseidon's depths hopelessly intertwined with the phoenixian conflagrations consuming all around in electric blue heat.

In fact, the very essence comprising Blazetide's uncanny manifestation of waking Purgatory reflected both the drowning AND the uncontrollable internal powder magazine deflagrations at his core - the sulfuric gun smoke igniting precisely through contact with those same invading waters. The undying officer's frequen cy now resonating across ethereal dimensions as a unique otherworldly expression of perpetual drowned combustion, forever cycling between charged immolation and sputtering re-quenching upon those wreckage-marinated shoals.

Surrounding itself in the crackling funeral pyre tatters still drifting across its parent anchoring in the material realm, Blazetide essayed its first wavering movements. But the phantasmal naval officer spirit found itself spontaneously beginning to replicate motions from life's final moments endlessly. As if the unnatural duality permeating its very essence compelled this new ghost to rematerialize the trauma indefinitely....

Flailing waterborne motions punctuated by stretches of still near-catatonic paralysis. Desperate gesticulations as of being tossed about in a stormy riptide, interrupted by sudden stillborn rigors mimicking violent bodily convulsions. Ephemeral facial impressions sometimes regaining form in haunting tableaus of silent screaming agony, transfixing against the infinite loop of merciless cyclical transformations yet exhibiting no perceptible release. Neitherdead nor alive - only trapped and repeating Kendrick's final fatal transition through a lens of perpetual recursive agony echoing across all dimensions his spirit clung selfishly into.

Blazetide lashed through each neverending reincarnation cycle with omnidirectional lashings of sapphire etherflame and raging saltwater currents clouding his occult shape like funerary chiffon. A sequence unpredictable yet destined to stoke the accursed spirit's ceaseless restless wanderings between essence realms. Some patterns coalescing into temporary figurines of the belching flintlock cannon that first blasted his hull into oblivion. Other passages reflecting dread impressions of being dragged downwards by his lower extremities as if through a dimethyl-dense mire.

Yet whether manifesting as haunting tableaux or raging phantasmagorical squalls enveloping all nearby environs in their spectral bluster, Blazetide's cursed essence continued its anguished looping subroutines as if preordained. Fragments of scathing heat signatures and bioluminesce intermingling across sequences that stretched the mortal concept of hours, days, or aeons into inconsequential distortions.

For revenge was the only eternally manifested constant radiating through each completed cycle. Vengeance for Prometheus's crew. Vengeance for his own damned state, bound between immolation and drowning into infamous unlife. An incantation funneling Blazetide's entire measureless soulfont into a singular riptide raging against any and all potentialities where even the slightest peace threatened those sacred injuries emblazoned across its luminous miasma.

Until all maritime dimensions shudder in fear of the vengeful spirit's coming storm, William Kendrick shall endure his cursed duality as the Blazetide wraith. His soul forsaking redemptive paths to float adrift through everystream, brandishing the scorched and drowned echoes of mortality ripped away so that none may suffer ambiguous demise in anonymity or without reckoning.

The sea shall sear all in Blazetide's wake. Or be extinguished in trying...