The wooden floorboards of the great black warship rumbled beneath my bleeding knees, slick with salt water, old vomit, and the spilled ale of men who forgot the meaning of mercy a long time ago. The freezing wind of the Northern Sea tore through the gaps in my thin, tattered shirt, biting into the fresh welts on my back left by the Quartermaster’s heavy leather whip. I was nothing but a ghost on this ship, a shadow that lived on the moldy crusts of bread thrown into the dark corners of the cargo hold. They called me a stray dog. They called me an orphan deckhand who should have drowned the day my mother’s small fishing boat was smashed to splinters by the Black Fleet.
But tonight, the crew didn’t want me to just clean the decks in silence. Tonight, they wanted a show.
First Mate Brenda stood above me, his massive boots pinning my thin fingers against the rough wood. He was a mountain of a man, his face scarred from a dozen coastal raids, smelling of stale rum and rotting teeth. He gripped the collar of my torn shirt, lifting my frail body completely off the deck with one single, heavy hand. The entire crew gathered around the main mast, their torches flickering wildly against the pitch-black sky as the storm raged around us.
“Look at this little rat!” Brenda shouted, his voice booming over the roaring waves. “Thinks he can hide in the bread barrels while real men bleed on the rigging! The High Admiral’s tax is due, boy, and every soul on this vessel pays their share in sweat or blood!”
I couldn’t speak. The hunger had hollowed out my stomach, leaving me with barely enough strength to breathe. I could only look up at him, my eyes filled with tears, begging for a mercy I knew did not exist on the open ocean. The pirates laughed, slamming their iron cups against the wooden railings, their faces twisted in cruel amusement. They wanted to see the boy broken. They wanted to see me scream.
Brenda dragged me across the soaking wet deck toward the center of the ship, where a heavy, rusted iron cage hung from the main yardarm. The storm cage. It was used to punish mutineers, leaving them suspended between the sky and the freezing sea while the waves crashed against their bones.
“Let’s see if the little sea dog can swim inside the iron box!” Brenda roared, slamming the heavy iron door open. He threw me inside like a sack of garbage. My head hit the rusted bars, and the copper taste of blood filled my mouth. He locked the heavy chain, leaving me trapped in the darkness as the cage began to swing wildly over the black, churning waves.
But as the ship tilted violently into a massive wave, the storm lantern hanging from the mast swung low, casting a bright, harsh light directly across my face and neck.
From the shadows of the upper deck, a heavy pair of boots slowly walked toward the railing. It was the Pirate King himself, the legendary commander who ruled over the entire sea empire. He had stayed silent, watching the cruelty with cold, uncaring eyes.
Until that very second.
The Pirate King suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. His hand gripped the wooden railing so hard the ancient wood began to creak. The heavy iron cup he held slipped from his fingers, crashing to the deck and spilling dark red wine across the pale wood. The entire crew froze, the laughter dying in their throats as they looked up at their terrifying leader.
The King’s face had gone completely pale, his eyes locked onto the side of my neck, where the torn rags of my shirt had fallen away to reveal an old, silver-white burn mark.
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CHAPTER 1
The wooden floorboards of the great black warship rumbled beneath my bleeding knees, slick with salt water, old vomit, and the spilled ale of men who forgot the meaning of mercy a long time ago. The freezing wind of the Northern Sea tore through the gaps in my thin, tattered shirt, biting into the fresh welts on my back left by the Quartermaster’s heavy leather whip. I was nothing but a ghost on this ship, a shadow that lived on the moldy crusts of bread thrown into the dark corners of the cargo hold. They called me a stray dog. They called me an orphan deckhand who should have drowned the day my mother’s small fishing boat was smashed to splinters by the Black Fleet.
But tonight, the crew didn’t want me to just clean the decks in silence. Tonight, they wanted a show.
First Mate Brenda stood above me, his massive boots pinning my thin fingers against the rough wood. He was a mountain of a man, his face scarred from a dozen coastal raids, smelling of stale rum and rotting teeth. He gripped the collar of my torn shirt, lifting my frail body completely off the deck with one single, heavy hand. The entire crew gathered around the main mast, their torches flickering wildly against the pitch-black sky as the storm raged around us.
“Look at this little rat!” Brenda shouted, his voice booming over the roaring waves. “Thinks he can hide in the bread barrels while real men bleed on the rigging! The High Admiral’s tax is due, boy, and every soul on this vessel pays their share in sweat or blood!”
I couldn’t speak. The hunger had hollowed out my stomach, leaving me with barely enough strength to breathe. I could only look up at him, my eyes filled with tears, begging for a mercy I knew did not exist on the open ocean. The pirates laughed, slamming their iron cups against the wooden railings, their faces twisted in cruel amusement. They wanted to see the boy broken. They wanted to see me scream.
Brenda dragged me across the soaking wet deck toward the center of the ship, where a heavy, rusted iron cage hung from the main yardarm. The storm cage. It was used to punish mutineers, leaving them suspended between the sky and the freezing sea while the waves crashed against their bones.
“Let’s see if the little sea dog can swim inside the iron box!” Brenda roared, slamming the heavy iron door open. He threw me inside like a sack of garbage. My head hit the rusted bars, and the copper taste of blood filled my mouth. He locked the heavy chain, leaving me trapped in the darkness as the cage began to swing wildly over the black, churning waves.
But as the ship tilted violently into a massive wave, the storm lantern hanging from the mast swung low, casting a bright, harsh light directly across my face and neck.
From the shadows of the upper deck, a heavy pair of boots slowly walked toward the railing. It was the Pirate King himself, the legendary commander who ruled over the entire sea empire. He had stayed silent, watching the cruelty with cold, uncaring eyes.
Until that very second.
The Pirate King suddenly stopped dead in tracks. His hand gripped the wooden railing so hard the ancient wood began to creak. The heavy iron cup he held slipped from his fingers, crashing to the deck and spilling dark red wine across the pale wood. The entire crew froze, the laughter dying in their throats as they looked up at their terrifying leader.
The King’s face had gone completely pale, his eyes locked onto the side of my neck, where the torn rags of my shirt had fallen away to reveal an old, silver-white burn mark.
For three long years, I had survived in the belly of this beastly warship, the Leviathan’s Wake. It was a massive vessel, a floating fortress made of darkened oak and lined with iron plates that could withstand the heaviest naval cannons of the Southern kingdoms. To the rest of the world, this ship was a symbol of terror. To me, it was a living nightmare. I had been dragged aboard when I was just twelve years old, found floating on a piece of wreckage after a nameless battle had wiped out my entire village along the rocky coast of the Northern Reach.
They didn’t keep me because they felt pity. They kept me because a ship always needs someone to do the work that even the lowest criminals refuse to touch.
My days began long before the cold northern sun ever touched the horizon. I woke up in the dark, damp belly of the ship, sleeping on a pile of rotting hemp ropes next to the bilge water that sloshed back and forth with the rocking of the sea. My hands were permanently stained with black tar and whale oil, my skin mapping out a dozen different scars from burns, splinters, and the casual cruelty of the sailors. If a rope snapped, it was my fault. If the soup was watery, the cook would strike me across the face with his heavy wooden ladle. If the ship encountered a dead calm, the men would spit on me for bringing bad luck to their voyage.
Brenda, the First Mate, took a special kind of pleasure in my torment. He was a man who had risen through the ranks by being more brutal than anyone else. He had lost his left ear to an executioner’s blade in some distant southern port, and he wore his cruelty like a badge of honor. To Brenda, I wasn’t human. I was a toy, a fragile thing he could break whenever the pressure of managing a crew of three hundred bloodthirsty cutthroats became too heavy.
“Hey, boy!” Brenda’s voice would echo through the cargo hold in the middle of the night, waking me from my few precious hours of sleep. “The main deck needs scrubbing. The sea salt is eating the wood. Move your lazy bones before I let the cat-o’-nine-tails do the talking.”
I would drag my aching, malnourished body up the steep wooden ladders, carrying a bucket of heavy sea water that weighed nearly as much as I did. My knees would scrape against the rough deck, leaving trails of blood that the cold ocean waves would instantly wash away. I never complained. I never cried out. My mother had taught me that the sea doesn’t care about tears, and neither do the men who sail it.
But tonight was different. The Leviathan’s Wake had been sailing through a vicious northern squall for three days, the massive waves tossing the ship around like a toy. The men were tense, exhausted, and angry. We had missed a wealthy merchant caravan near the mouth of the twin gulfs, and the crew’s pockets were empty. A pirate ship with no gold is a powder keg waiting for a single spark to explode.
Brenda knew this. He needed to give the men something to distract them from their empty coin purses. He needed a scapegoat.
He found me in the galley, trying to warm my freezing hands near the dying embers of the cook’s stove. I had managed to find a small, molded piece of dried beef that had fallen behind a barrel of salt pork. It wasn’t even enough to satisfy a dog, but to my starving stomach, it was a feast.
“Thief!” Brenda’s voice had screamed out, shattering the quiet hum of the storm. He had kicked the wooden stool out from under me, sending me crashing against the iron stove. The hot metal burned through my thin sleeve, but I didn’t even have time to feel the pain before his heavy hand gripped the back of my neck.
He dragged me up the stairs, my feet bouncing painfully off each wooden step, out into the blinding rain and the roaring wind of the main deck. The storm was at its peak, the black waves crashing over the high bow of the ship, covering the wood in a layer of freezing, white foam.
“Look what I found lurking in the dark!” Brenda roared to the crew, who were huddled under the overhang of the quarterdeck, trying to keep their pipes lit. “A little parasite eating the provisions while the rest of us work the lines in the freezing rain! This rat is stealing from your pockets, men! He’s eating the food your gold bought!”
The lie worked perfectly. In an instant, the tired, angry sailors found a target for their frustration. They surged forward, a wall of dirty faces, missing teeth, and glinting knives. They surrounded me, their voices rising into a terrifying chorus of anger.
“Throw him overboard!” one sailor screamed, his face covered in soot from the lower cannon decks.
“Let the sharks have him!” another yelled, spitting a glob of dark tobacco juice right next to my bleeding bare feet.
“No, no,” Brenda sneered, a sickening grin spreading across his face as he looked up at the storm cage swinging violently from the yardarm. “The ocean is too quick for a thief. Let’s see how much he loves the sea when he’s singing to the storm.”
I looked up at the cage, my heart freezing in my chest. The storm cage was a death sentence in weather like this. The wind would swing the iron box back and forth, slamming it against the wooden sides of the hull until the person inside was black and blue with broken bones, or the freezing spray of the ocean froze their lungs completely.
“Please,” I whispered, my voice cracking as I looked at the men who had watched me grow for three years. “Please, First Mate. I didn’t steal it. It was on the floor. I was just so cold…”
Brenda didn’t listen. He hit me across the jaw with the heavy iron ring of his keys, sending me spinning onto the deck. The sailors cheered, pushing me toward the cage. I tried to crawl away, my fingers clawing at the wet wood, but Brenda’s heavy boot came down onto my hand, crushing my fingers against the deck. I let out a sharp cry of pain, a sound that was immediately swallowed by the howling wind.
He lifted me by my hair, dragging my limp body toward the iron cage. The guards pulled the heavy chain, lowering the cage until it rested on the deck. Brenda threw me inside, the cold iron bars biting into my skin. He slammed the heavy door shut, the sound of the iron latch clicking into place sounding like the final strike of an executioner’s axe.
“Enjoy the night, little prince,” Brenda mocked, spitting on the rusted bars of my prison. “If you’re still breathing by sunrise, maybe we’ll let you clean the grease from the anchor chains.”
The crew began to pull the ropes, lifting the cage off the deck. It swung violently to the left as a massive wave slammed into the side of the hull, throwing me against the iron bars. My shoulder dislocated with a sickening pop, a blinding wave of agony washing over me. I gripped the bars with my unbroken hand, looking down at the crowd of men who were laughing and raising their cups to my misery.
But then, the storm lantern shifted.
The bright light cut through the darkness, illuminating the cage and the tattered remains of my collar.
And that was when the world on the Leviathan’s Wake stopped completely.
The Pirate King, Captain Vane, had been watching from the high balcony of the quarterdeck. He was a silent legend, a man who had united the five fractured fleets of the sea empire under one black banner. He rarely spoke to the common crew, ruling with an iron fist and a cold, calculating mind. He was a shadow in a heavy dark coat trimmed with the fur of a northern wolf, his face hidden beneath the brim of a wide captain’s hat.
But as the light hit my neck, Vane’s entire body went rigid.
The iron cup he had been holding fell from his grip, bouncing loudly against the wooden deck before rolling into the drainage grates. The red wine looked like a trail of fresh blood in the torchlight.
“Lower the cage,” a voice commanded.
It wasn’t loud, but it possessed a terrifying weight that cut through the roaring wind and the crashing waves instantly. The sailors stopped laughing. The guards holding the ropes froze, their hands locked in place.
Brenda blinked, looking up at the quarterdeck in confusion. “Captain? The boy is a thief. He was stealing from the—”
“I said,” Vane repeated, his voice dropping into a low, deadly growl that made the skin on my arms turn to goosebumps, “lower the cage. Now.”
The guards didn’t hesitate this time. They let the ropes slide through their calloused hands, and the iron cage crashed back down onto the wooden deck with a heavy, metallic thud.
The silence that followed was suffocating. The only sound was the howling of the wind in the rigging and the heavy, rhythmic thud of Captain Vane’s boots as he slowly descended the wooden stairs from the quarterdeck.
The pirates parted before him like the sea before a storm. No man dared to look him in the eye. He walked with a purpose that radiated absolute danger, his eyes fixed entirely on me, locked inside my iron prison.
Brenda stepped forward, trying to regain his composure, a nervous smile twisting his scarred face. “Captain, if it’s about the discipline, I can handle it. The rat doesn’t need your personal attention. I’ll make sure he learns his lesson before the night is out.”
Vane didn’t even look at his First Mate. He walked right past him, his heavy leather coat brushing against Brenda’s chest, completely ignoring the man’s existence. He stopped right in front of the rusted bars of my cage, towering over me like a dark god of the sea.
I shrank back into the corner of the cage, clutching my broken shoulder, terrified that the King himself had come to finish what Brenda had started. I closed my eyes, waiting for the heavy blow of his sword or the cold bite of his dagger.
Instead, I heard the sound of heavy iron keys rattling.
Vane didn’t wait for the guards. He reached out, grabbed the heavy padlock with his bare, gloved hand, and with a burst of pure, terrifying strength, he twisted the rusted mechanism until the lock snapped off completely, clattering to the wet wood.
He swung the heavy iron door open.
The crew gasped. No one had ever seen the Pirate King touch a slave, let alone open a cell for one. Brenda’s jaw dropped, his face turning a strange shade of gray in the torchlight.
Vane slowly knelt down on the wet, filthy deck. He didn’t care about the sea salt or the dirt ruining his expensive fur coat. He reached into the cage with a hand that was trembling—a sight that I knew none of these men had ever witnessed in their entire lives. The legendary, heartless Pirate King was shaking.
His large, rough fingers gently reached out, touching the torn collar of my shirt. I flinched, pulling back, but his touch was surprisingly soft, almost reverent. He moved the rough fabric aside, exposing the silver-white burn mark on the left side of my neck.
It wasn’t a normal scar from a ship’s fire. If you looked closely, the scar tissue formed the perfect, intricate shape of a three-headed sea serpent—the ancient crest of the Lost Fleet, the royal bloodline that had ruled the ocean kingdoms before the great betrayal twenty years ago.
Vane stared at the mark for what felt like an eternity. His breathing became heavy, his chest heaving beneath his heavy armor. When he finally looked up, meeting my terrified eyes, I saw something in his face that shook me to my core.
There were tears in the Pirate King’s eyes.
“Where did you get this mark, boy?” Vane whispered, his voice cracking with an emotion that sent a shockwave of confusion through the entire crew.
“I… I don’t know,” I stammered, my teeth chattering from the cold and the sheer terror of the moment. “I’ve had it since I was a baby. My mother said it was from the fire that took my father.”
Vane’s eyes widened, a look of profound, agonizing recognition washing over his weathered face. He looked at my eyes, my jawline, my hair, as if he were looking at a ghost from his past.
“Your mother,” Vane said, his voice trembling louder now. “What was her name?”
“Elena,” I whispered, the name leaving my lips like a prayer. “Her name was Elena of the Western Isles.”
Behind us, Brenda stepped forward, his impatience and confusion turning into reckless anger. “Captain! What does it matter what some dead peasant woman was named? The boy is a slave! He broke the ship’s law! We need to make an example of him, or the men will lose respect for the chain of command!”
Vane slowly stood up. The vulnerability, the tears, the hesitation—it all vanished in a fraction of a second. He turned around to face Brenda, and the aura of absolute death that surrounded him made every single pirate on that deck instinctively take a step backward.
“You speak of the chain of command, Brenda?” Vane said, his voice dangerously calm, like the eye of a hurricane.
“Yes, Captain!” Brenda blustered, trying to stand tall before the crew. “We have rules on the Leviathan’s Wake. No one is above the law of the ship. Not even a stray dog found in the wreckage.”
Vane reached down, his large hand grabbing my unbroken arm, gently lifting me out of the iron cage. He pulled me up until I was standing right beside him, his massive arm wrapping around my shivering shoulders to shield me from the biting wind.
He looked out at the three hundred pirates standing on the deck, his voice echoing across the roaring ocean like a thunderclap.
“This boy is not a stray dog,” Vane roared, his eyes blazing with a terrifying fire. “And he did not steal from this ship. Because everything on this vessel, from the wood beneath your feet to the gold in your pockets, belongs to him.”
The crew fell into a dead, absolute silence. Not a single man moved. The only sound was the tearing of the wind against the black sails above.
Brenda laughed, a nervous, desperate sound. “Captain, you’re speaking in riddles. He’s a deckhand. A nobody.”
Vane reached into his heavy leather coat, pulling out a small, blackened leather pouch that he always wore close to his heart. He untied the silver strings, tilting his hand. A heavy, solid gold ring slid out into his palm. It was carved with the exact same three-headed sea serpent that was burned into my neck.
He held the ring high for the entire crew to see.
“Twenty years ago, the High King betrayed the Royal Fleet, murdering the Grand Admiral and burning his flagship to the waterline,” Vane said, his voice cutting through the dark night like a blade. “We believed the Admiral’s entire bloodline was wiped out in the fire. We believed the true heirs to the Sea Throne were gone forever.”
Vane looked down at me, his eyes filled with a fierce, burning loyalty that I had never seen before.
“But the Admiral’s wife escaped with their only son. She bore the mark of the fleet onto her child so he would never forget who he was. And for twenty years, I have searched every island, every port, every broken village in the northern world for the lost boy of the Great Leviathan.”
Vane turned his gaze back to Brenda, his expression hardening into pure, unadulterated hatred.
“You threw the true King of the Sea into a dog cage, Brenda. And now, you are going to answer to the bloodline you tried to destroy.”
CHAPTER 2
The revelation hung in the freezing air like a heavy frost, choking the breath out of every man on the deck of the Leviathan’s Wake. I stood there, my frail body shivering violently beneath Captain Vane’s heavy arm, my mind spinning so fast I thought I might collapse into the dark sea below.
A king? The true heir to the Sea Throne?
It felt like a cruel joke, a madness brought on by the fever of my starvation and the agony of my dislocated shoulder. I was the boy who cleaned the bilge. I was the boy who took the blows meant for others. I was the child who had watched my mother die in poverty on a rocky shore, her fingers worn to the bone from mending the nets of ungrateful merchants. If I were royalty, why had the gods allowed us to suffer so deeply? Why had my mother died with nothing but a prayer on her lips and mud on her face?
I looked up at Vane, searching his face for any sign of deception. But the legendary Pirate King, a man who had cut down warlords without blinking, looked down at me with a reverence that terrified me more than Brenda’s whip ever could.
Brenda stood frozen, his scarred face shifting through a dozen different emotions in a matter of seconds. First came confusion, then disbelief, and finally, a deep, ugly arrogance that refused to bend. He looked around at the crew, seeing the uncertainty in their eyes, and realized he was losing his hold on the men.
“This is madness!” Brenda spat, taking a step forward, his hand dropping to the heavy brass hilt of his cutlass. “Captain, you’ve lost your mind to old ghost stories! You’re going to hand this ship, this crew, over to a pathetic, starving brat because of a scar? A mark that could have been made by a dropped lantern on a common fishing boat?”
A collective gasp rippled through the sailors. To challenge the Captain’s word on a warship was dangerous; to call him mad in front of his entire crew was a declaration of mutiny.
Vane didn’t move an inch. He didn’t draw his sword. He simply stared at Brenda with a cold, detached amusement that was far more terrifying than an outburst of rage.
“A dropped lantern, Brenda?” Vane said softly, his voice carrying clearly over the sound of the creaking timber. “You think a common accident leaves the precise mark of the Imperial Admiralty? You think I do not know the face of my own commander’s blood? Look at his eyes. Look at the structure of his jaw. He is the living image of the man who gave me my first command, the man who built the very laws this fleet survives on.”
“He’s a thief!” Brenda roared, turning to face the crew, his arms raised to stir up their anger. “Are you men going to let a child rule you? Are you going to kneel to a boy who spent the last three years cleaning your boots and begging for your scraps? We are pirates! We take what we want by iron and blood! We don’t bow to ghosts!”
A few of the older sailors, men who had served with Brenda for years and shared in his cruel plunder, began to murmur in agreement. Their hands drifted toward their belts, their eyes darting between Brenda and the Captain. The tension on the deck was a tightly wound spring, ready to snap and turn the ship into a slaughterhouse.
“The boys of the lower deck don’t bow to children!” a voice called out from the darkness near the cargo hatches. It was one of Brenda’s loyal enforcers, a massive man named Gorm, who carried a heavy boarding axe.
Vane slowly removed his arm from my shoulder, stepping away from me just enough to give himself room to move. He looked down at me one more time, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for my ears. “Stay behind the mast, young master. Let your father’s vanguard do what must be done.”
I stumbled backward, my legs trembling, my back pressing against the rough, cold wood of the main mast. The dislocated shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat, a white-hot knife of pain that made the world blur at the edges, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I had to watch.
Vane reached into the collar of his heavy coat and unclasped the silver chain that held it in place. He let the massive, wolf-fur cloak slide off his shoulders, letting it fall onto the wet deck. Beneath it, he wore a vest of hardened leather reinforced with darkened steel plates. He didn’t draw his longsword. Instead, he reached to his side and drew a short, heavy dagger—a simple weapon of utilitarian murder.
“Brenda,” Vane said, stepping into the open space between the mast and the quarterdeck stairs. “You have forgotten what keeps this fleet together. It is not the gold. It is not the fear. It is the oath. The oath we swore to the Sovereign of the Waves. I swore that oath to this boy’s father, and I will die before I let a traitor break it.”
“Then die with your ghosts, old man!” Brenda screamed.
With a spray of sea salt and a roar of pure fury, Brenda lunged forward, drawing his heavy cutlass in a blinding arc designed to take Vane’s head off in a single blow. The blade hissed through the rain, cutting a path through the dark night.
But Vane was not a man who had survived thirty years of naval warfare by being slow.
He dipped his shoulder, ducking beneath the lethal swing of the cutlass with a fluidity that seemed impossible for a man of his size. The heavy blade sliced through the empty air where Vane’s head had been a millisecond before. Before Brenda could recover his balance, Vane stepped inside the larger man’s guard, his elbow driving hard into Brenda’s face.
The sound of breaking bone cracked across the deck as Brenda’s nose shattered beneath the blow. The First Mate stumbled backward, blood instantly spraying from his face, blinding him in the rain. He screamed in rage, swinging his cutlass wildly in front of him to keep Vane at bay.
“Back me up!” Brenda choked out, wiping the blood from his eyes as he glared at his men. “Gorm! Kill the brat! Cut the boy down and this is over!”
My heart stopped. Gorm, the massive pirate with the boarding axe, turned his cruel eyes toward me. He didn’t hesitate. He raised the heavy iron axe over his head and charged directly toward the mast where I stood trapped.
I tried to move, to run, to crawl away into the shadows, but my body wouldn’t obey. The fear pinned me to the spot. The heavy iron blade of the axe caught the reflection of the storm lantern, descending toward my chest with terrifying speed.
This is it, I thought. This is how the story ends. Not with a throne, but with an axe in the dark.
But before Gorm could complete his swing, a shadow detached itself from the upper deck.
It was the ship’s Quartermaster, a quiet, gray-bearded warrior named Kaelen who had remained silent during the entire confrontation. He didn’t shout. He didn’t warn anyone. He simply fell from the higher deck like a bird of prey, his long, curved saber drawn.
The blade cut through the air in a perfect, downward strike.
Gorm’s roar of triumph turned into a wet, choking gasp as Kaelen’s saber found the soft flesh between his neck and shoulder. The heavy boarding axe slipped from the pirate’s fingers, clattering uselessly against the deck as Gorm fell to his knees, his hands clutching a wound that could not be closed. He collapsed into the sea water, his life draining into the drainage grates.
Kaelen stood over the body, his saber dripping with dark blood, his cold gray eyes fixed on the remaining mutineers.
“Any other man wishes to touch the Admiral’s blood?” Kaelen asked, his voice steady, devoid of any anger, which made it all the more terrifying. “Step forward now, so I can clean the deck of your filth before the storm passes.”
The pirates who had taken Brenda’s side instantly froze. Seeing Gorm cut down in a single second broke their resolve. Their weapons lowered, their eyes wide with fear as they realized the balance of power on the ship had shifted irrevocably.
Meanwhile, Brenda was backed against the ship’s railing, his breath coming in ragged gasps as Vane circled him like a shark. The blood from Brenda’s shattered nose had soaked his beard and his shirt, making him look like a dying animal. His arrogance was completely gone, replaced by the desperate, frantic terror of a man who realized he had miscalculated everything.
“Captain,” Brenda wheezed, his cutlass trembling in his hand. “We… we can talk about this. I didn’t know. I swear to the gods, I didn’t know who the boy was. I thought he was just a stray. We can still sail south. We can still share the plunder.”
Vane stopped his circle, standing just out of reach of Brenda’s blade. He looked at his First Mate with an expression of pure disgust.
“You didn’t know,” Vane repeated, his voice dangerously low. “You didn’t know he was a human being either, Brenda. You treated him like a dog because you thought no one was watching. You thought there would be no consequences for your cruelty. You thought the weak had no protectors.”
Vane took a slow, deliberate step forward. Brenda screamed in panic and lunged with one final, desperate thrust of his cutlass, aiming straight for Vane’s throat.
Vane didn’t even flinch. He parried the strike with his heavy dagger, the metal screeching as he deflected the cutlass away from his body. In the same motion, Vane’s left hand shot forward, gripping Brenda’s wrist with the force of an iron vice. He twisted the arm violently, forcing Brenda to drop the cutlass, which clattered into the ocean below.
Before Brenda could even scream from the pain of his twisted wrist, Vane’s dagger moved like a flash of lightning.
He didn’t kill him. Instead, the blade sliced clean through the tendons of Brenda’s right knee, sending the massive First Mate crashing heavily onto the deck, screaming in agony as he clutched his ruined leg.
Vane stood over him, his face illuminated by the flickering torches of the crew. He didn’t look like a pirate in that moment; he looked like an executioner delivering a sentence that had been delayed for twenty years.
“You are no longer First Mate of this vessel,” Vane declared, his voice echoing across the silent deck. “You are a prisoner of the Lost Fleet. And your judgment will be delivered by the true master of the sea.”
Vane turned his back on the groaning man and walked over to where I stood shaking against the mast. The entire crew watched him in absolute silence. He stopped in front of me, slowly dropping to one knee once again. He took the heavy, gold serpent ring from his palm and held it up to me.
“My Lord,” Vane said, his voice deep with emotion. “The ship is yours. The fleet is yours. Command us, and we shall bleed the world dry to put you back on your throne.”
I stared at the gold ring, the intricate carvings of the three-headed serpent catching the light of the storm lantern. The pain in my shoulder was fading into a strange, cold numbness, and my mind felt completely disconnected from reality. The men who had spat on me hours ago were now watching me with wide, terrified eyes, waiting for me to speak.
I opened my mouth to say something—to tell them to stop, to tell them I was just a boy named after a broken village—but before the words could leave my lips, the world began to tilt violently. The torches blurred into long streaks of fire, the sound of the roaring waves faded into a distant hum, and my legs completely gave out beneath me.
As I fell into the darkness of unconsciousness, the last thing I felt was Vane’s strong, armored arms catching me before I hit the cold, hard wood.
