FULL STORY
CHAPTER 3
The sound of my own royal title echoing through the damp, rotting timbers of the lower cargo hold felt completely detached from reality. Prince. It was a word meant for tapestries, for golden cups, and for high stone balconies overlooking sunlit cities—not for a starving twelve-year-old child shivering in wet straw, covered in his own blood, inside a cage meant for a wild beast. Yet, the legendary Fleet Commander, a man whose very name made coastal governors tremble and surrender their treasuries, remained pinned to the filthy deck before me, his forehead pressed firmly against my bare, cut feet.
The silence among the crew was so profound that I could hear the rhythmic drip-drop of the spilled red wine falling through the gaps in the floorboards into the dark bilge water below. The brutal pirates who had been laughing hysterically just moments prior were now staring at my neck with wide, unblinking eyes. The swinging lantern continued to sway, casting long, erratic shadows that made the three-headed sea crest on my skin look alive, as if the legendary monster of the deep was waking up from a twenty-year slumber.
First Mate Borach was the first to break the paralysis. He pulled himself up from the shattered pieces of the wooden cargo barrels, his face smeared with dark blood and splintered wood. He wiped his broken jaw with the back of his massive hand, his eyes burning with a mixture of intense pain and desperate, defensive rage. He looked at the kneeling Commander, then at the surrounding crew, realizing that his absolute authority over the men was disintegrating in real-time.
“Commander, look at what you are doing!” Borach spat, his voice muffled by his broken teeth. He took a cautious but aggressive step forward, pointing a trembling, calloused finger at me. “You are losing your mind to an old ghost story! The boy is a nobody! He was found in a ditch after the sack of the Southern Reach! Look at his hands—they are calloused from scrubbing our filth. Look at his ribs—you can count them through his shirt! He is a common street rat, not a sovereign of the sea! That mark on his neck is nothing but a twisted burn from a branding iron. Some slave trader probably marked him like a hog so he wouldn’t lose him in the market!”
The Commander didn’t move immediately. He remained on his knees, but his breathing changed. The heavy, ragged breaths of shock transformed into a slow, terrifying rhythm. When he finally stood up, the sheer physical presence of the man seemed to fill the entire hold. He didn’t look at Borach; he looked at the younger guard who was still holding the keys to the cage, his hands shaking so violently that the iron rings were chiming like bells.
“Bring me the Log of the Lost Sovereign,” the Commander said. His voice was incredibly quiet, yet it carried an edge sharper than any steel blade in our armory.
“C-Commander?” the guard whispered, his face turning gray. “The forbidden ledger? The one sealed in the iron lockbox under the charts?”
“Bring it,” the Commander repeated, his eyes fixed on me, staring into my face as if searching for the features of a dead friend. “And bring the silver oil of the high temple.”
Nobody dared to move for a long three seconds. Then, the guard scrambled up the wooden steps, his boots clattering frantically against the ladders. Borach watched him go, his breath coming in short, angry gasps. He knew what that ledger contained. It was the ancestral record of the Great North Fleet, the holy document that listed every child born to the Royal Admiral House before the High King’s assassins burned the grand palace to the ground during the Night of the Blood Tides.
I sat back against the iron bars of the cage, my small body shaking from the freezing cold and the sheer terror of what was unfolding. The giant timber wolf, still terrified by the Commander’s presence, crept closer to me, its massive, furry shoulder pressing against my hip. It didn’t bare its fangs. It lowered its head into my lap, letting out a low, mourning whine, as if it recognized a sorrow that matched its own. My thin fingers instinctively buried themselves in the thick, coarse fur of the animal’s neck. The contrast was absurd—the ship’s executioner acting as a protective guard for the boy it had been ordered to tear apart.
“Listen to me, men!” Borach shouted, turning his attention to the crowd of pirates who were huddled near the stairs. He was trying desperately to salvage his mutinous position. “The Commander is compromised! He is old, and his mind is broken by the grief of a war we lost two decades ago! We are pirates! We sail under no king, no prince, and no laws but the code of the black flag! Are we going to let a starving child dictate where we sail? Are we going to kneel to a boy who spent yesterday cleaning our latrines? If the High King finds out we are harboring a remnant of the old bloodline, he will send three fleets to hunt us to the ends of the earth! We will all hang from the gallows of the White Citadel!”
A murmur of uneasy agreement rippled through a few of the older, hardened pirates. Borach was playing on their greatest fear—the total annihilation of their lawless lifestyle by the organized, relentless forces of the High King’s Royal Navy. They looked at each other, their hands moving back toward the hilts of their daggers, their loyalties tearing down the middle.
“He speaks the truth about one thing, Commander,” a veteran pirate named Kael muttered, stepping out from the crowd. He was a man with a wooden leg and eyes like cold flint. “The High King’s fleet is already closing in on our stern. If this boy is who you say he is, he isn’t a savior—he’s a death warrant painted on our hull.”
Before the Commander could answer, the young guard returned, diving down the stairs into the hold. In his hands, he carried a heavy, dust-covered iron box wrapped in oiled leather and a small crystal vial containing a thick, shimmering silver liquid. The guard approached the Commander with his head bowed, holding the box out like a sacred relic.
The Commander took the box, drew a small brass key from a chain hidden beneath his thick wool vest, and inserted it into the ancient lock. The mechanism turned with a heavy, satisfying click. He opened the lid, revealing a thick, sheepskin ledger bound in weathered whalehide, its edges darkened by time and sea salt.
He walked into the cage, completely ignoring Borach’s furious glares, and knelt beside me once more. The giant wolf shifted slightly but did not move away from my side. The Commander uncorked the crystal vial, pouring a few drops of the shimmering silver oil onto his thick, calloused thumb.
“My Prince,” he said, his voice thick with reverence. “The High King’s assassins used a forbidden alchemical fire to destroy your family’s palace. It left a specific type of scar on those who survived—a mark that can never be replicated by common branding irons or slave masters. The silver oil of the northern temples only reacts to the deep, localized heat memory of that specific royal fire. If you are a common slave, the oil will do nothing but soothe your skin. But if you carry the blood of the Admiral…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He reached out his hand, his thumb wet with the silver liquid, and gently pressed it against the three-headed sea crest on my neck.
The moment the silver oil touched my skin, a strange, deep warmth bloomed within my chest. It wasn’t painful like Borach’s whip; it felt like a long-forgotten memory waking up in the dark corners of my mind. The silver liquid began to glow with a soft, ethereal luminescence, absorbing into the silver-white tissue of the scar. Within seconds, the three-headed sea crest didn’t just stand out—it began to shimmer with a distinct, faint blueprint of light, revealing a series of intricate, microscopic royal runes that had been completely invisible to the naked eye for twelve years.
The Commander let out a ragged sob, dropping the crystal vial, which shattered on the floorboards, sending the silver liquid pooling into the straw. He quickly turned the pages of the whalehide ledger, his eyes scanning the faded black ink until he reached the final, uncompleted entry dated twelve years ago.
“Born in the winter of the Great Frost,” the Commander read aloud, his voice booming through the hold so that every single pirate could hear every syllable. “To the Grand Admiral of the Seven Seas and the Lady of the Northern Cliffs… a male heir, marked at birth with the secret runes of the sea throne within the family crest. Named… Jonathan.”
Hearing my real name spoken aloud for the first time in my entire existence felt like a thunderbolt striking the ship. Jonathan. Not Runt. Not rat. Not slave. Jonathan.
A flood of fragmented, chaotic memories suddenly rushed into my mind—the sound of a woman singing a beautiful, haunting melody over the roar of crashing waves; the smell of burning pine wood and rich velvet; the terrifying image of black-clad soldiers bursting through a heavy oak door with torches, their swords dripping with blood; and a tall, magnificent man in silver armor pushing me into a dark, secret passage beneath the floorboards, whispering, “Run, Jonathan, run to the sea… the ocean will always remember your name.”
“It is him,” the Commander declared, standing up and turning to face the crew, holding the ancient ledger high above his head. “Look at the runes! Look at the silver light! This is the boy we swore our lives to protect before the betrayal! This is the true heir to the Sea Throne, the final surviving bloodline of the Great North Fleet!”
The effect on the crew was instantaneous. The pirates who had been hesitating dropped their weapons to the floorboards with a series of heavy metallic clangs. One by one, the hardened, scarred killers sank to their knees, bowing their heads in deep, superstitious reverence. They were lawless men, yes, but they were also men of the sea, and in our world, the bloodline of the Grand Admiral was closer to the gods than any earthly king. To abuse his heir was to invite the eternal wrath of the ocean itself.
Only Borach remained standing, his face contorted into a mask of pure, desperate madness. He looked at his men kneeling on the floor, his absolute control over them completely broken. He knew that the moment this voyage ended, or the moment the crew reached a friendly port, he would be executed for what he had done to the royal child. He had no choice left but total mutiny.
“You are all fools!” Borach screamed, his hand flying to the heavy hilt of his iron broadsword. He drew the massive weapon with a screech of steel, his muscles bulging as he stepped toward the cage. “I don’t care if he’s a prince or a god! He’s a liability, and I am ending this fantasy right now!”
Borach lunged forward, raising his heavy broadsword over his head, intending to drive the blade through the iron bars of the cage and split my head open before anyone could stop him. I froze, unable to move, staring at the incoming death.
But the Commander was faster. With a speed that defied his age and size, he stepped in front of the cage, his cutlass flashing through the dark air. The sound of their swords colliding was like a crack of thunder inside the enclosed hold, throwing sparks across the wet straw.
The two massive men engaged in a brutal, close-quarters struggle, their boots grinding against the wood as they fought for control of the ship’s destiny. Borach used his sheer weight to push the Commander back, his teeth bared as he pressed his blade down against the Commander’s defense.
“The crew is mine, old man!” Borach hissed, spraying blood and saliva into the Commander’s face. “The ship is mine!”
Suddenly, a massive shudder ran through the entire frame of the Black Leviathan. The ship tilted violently to the port side, the wood groaning in agony as a massive wave crashed against the hull outside. From the deck above, the frantic, terrified screams of the lookouts pierced through the ceiling.
“Sail on the horizon! Royal flags! Three warships of the High King have surrounded us in the fog!”
The announcement struck the hold like a physical blow. The High King’s navy had finally caught us, and they had caught us in the middle of a internal mutiny, deep within the belly of our own ship.
The Commander utilized Borach’s momentary distraction to plant his heavy boot directly into the First Mate’s chest, throwing him back against the wooden barrels once more. The Commander didn’t pursue the strike; he turned to the kneeling crew, his eyes burning with tactical focus.
“The judgment of Borach will wait!” the Commander roared, his voice restoring order to the chaotic room. “Our Prince is on this ship, and I will burn this vessel to the waterline before I let the High King’s assassins take him a second time! To your stations! Prepare the cannons! Prepare the red fire! We fight for the true throne today!”
The pirates scrambled to their feet, their fear replaced by a sudden, fanatical devotion. They poured up the wooden steps, shouting battle cries that hadn’t been heard on the northern seas for twenty years.
The Commander turned back to me, his expression softening as he reached into the cage, his heavy hand gently touching my shoulder. “My Prince, I must secure the deck. I will leave four of my most trusted guards here to protect you. If the ship goes down, they have orders to put you in the longboat and fly the white sail. Do you understand?”
I nodded slowly, my voice still caught in my throat. I watched as the Commander picked up his weapon and turned to leave, but before he reached the stairs, he stopped and looked at the bleeding, broken First Mate who was struggling to stand in the corner.
“Tie Borach to the iron mast in the center of the cannon deck,” the Commander ordered the remaining guards. “Let him feel the true weight of the storm he has created. If we survive this night, he will face the Prince’s justice in front of the entire fleet.”
The guards lunged forward, tackling the weakened First Mate to the ground, wrapping heavy iron chains around his arms and chest despite his furious, bloody screams. As they dragged him away, his eyes locked onto mine, filled with a terrifying, venomous hatred that told me this nightmare was far from over.
The hold emptied out, leaving me alone in the cage with the giant timber wolf and the four heavily armed guards standing watch at the door. Above us, the deep, muffled roar of the ship’s cannons began to boom, shaking the very framework of my reality as the battle for my forgotten past began.
CHAPTER 4
The battle raged for what felt like an eternity. Below the deck, the world was a chaotic nightmare of deafening noise, choking black smoke, and the violent, unpredictable tilting of the ship. Every time our cannons fired, the massive recoil shook the iron cage I was trapped in, sending old dust and splinters raining down on my head. I could hear the distant, muffled screams of men dying on the deck above, the sharp thwack of iron-tipped arrows embedding themselves in the oak planks, and the terrifying crunch of wood splintering as the High King’s warships returned fire.
Through it all, the giant timber wolf never left my side. It lay with its massive head resting across my knees, its body trembling slightly with every blast, but its golden eyes remained fixed on the wooden stairs, ready to defend me from any intruder. The four guards the Commander had left behind stood like iron statues at the cage door, their heavy shields raised, their hands white-knuckled around the hilts of their axes. They didn’t look back at me. They didn’t need to. Their posture alone told me they would die before they let anyone pass through that door.
Suddenly, a massive explosion rocked the forward section of the Black Leviathan. The ship lifted out of the water, tilting so sharply to the right that the iron lanterns broke from their chains, crashing into the floor and igniting small fires in the spilled oil. The hold instantly began to fill with thick, acrid gray smoke that made my eyes burn and my lungs scream for fresh air.
Through the dense smoke, the sound of heavy boots echoed down the stairs—not the organized, disciplined rhythm of our crew, but the frantic, chaotic movement of a retreat.
“The main deck is breached!” a voice shouted from above. “They’ve boarded us! The High King’s elite guard are on the quarterdeck!”
A second later, a group of men tumbled down the wooden steps. But they weren’t our pirates. They were soldiers clad in polished silver armor, their breastplates stamped with the golden sun emblem of the High King—the very same emblem I had seen in my fragmented childhood memories of the night my family was slaughtered. They were tall, ruthless killers, their longswords dripping with dark pirate blood.
“In the back!” the lead soldier shouted, pointing his sword through the smoke toward the iron cage. “The Commander’s personal hold! There’s something valuable hidden down here—find it and destroy it!”
The four pirate guards didn’t hesitate. With a feral roar that echoed the ancient traditions of our warlord society, they lunged forward into the smoke, their heavy battleaxes swinging in wide, lethal arcs. The clash of steel against silver armor was deafening. The hold became a meat grinder of close-quarters violence. I pulled my legs in tight against my chest, burying my face in the wolf’s thick fur as the sprays of warm blood splattered across the iron bars of my cage.
One of our guards went down, his throat opened by a silver blade. But the remaining three fought with a fanatical desperation, their axes splitting open helmets and shattering breastplates with terrifying strength. They were outnumbered, but they were fighting for the survival of their true prince, and that knowledge gave them the strength of berserkers. Within minutes, the five silver-clad soldiers lay dead on the bloody floorboards, their polished armor ruined and stained with dark crimson.
The surviving three guards stood panting in the smoke, their bodies covered in deep gashes, but they didn’t drop their defenses. One of them, a massive warrior with a split lip, turned his head toward me, giving me a brief, bloody nod of reassurance before turning his eyes back to the stairs.
The sounds of battle above began to shift. The deep, rhythmic thudding of our ship’s cannons slowly stopped, replaced by the sound of cheering—not the polished horn calls of the High King’s navy, but the wild, chaotic roaring of our pirate crew.
A few minutes later, the heavy wooden hatch at the top of the stairs was thrown open, letting a flood of gray, stormy daylight into the dark, smoke-filled hold. A tall figure descended the steps, his silver-trimmed leather armor covered in soot and enemy blood, his breathing heavy but triumphant. It was the Fleet Commander. In his right hand, he carried a heavy, notched broadsword, and in his left, he dragged the tattered, golden sun flag of the High King’s flagship.
He walked through the debris and the bodies of the fallen soldiers, stopping right outside my cage. He looked at the three surviving guards, giving them a respectful nod, before looking down at me through the iron bars.
“The flagship has been sunk, my Prince,” the Commander said, his voice ragged but filled with a deep, unbreakable pride. “The remaining two warships are fleeing back to the Southern Citadel with their sails in tatters. The High King’s assassins thought they could trap us in the fog, but they forgot that the ocean belongs to the true bloodline.”
He reached down, took the iron keys from the belt of the fallen guard, and unlocked the cage door once more. He swung it wide open, stepping back to clear a path for me.
“The storm has passed, Jonathan,” the Commander said softly, using my real name with an emotional reverence that brought tears to my eyes. “The crew is waiting for you on the main deck. It is time for the final piece of justice to be served.”
I slowly stood up, my legs shaking from hours of confinement and fear. The giant timber wolf stood with me, its massive shoulder brushing against my thigh as I stepped out of the cage for the first time as a free human being. The three surviving guards instantly fell into formation behind me, their shields raised, creating a protective wall as we climbed the wooden steps into the daylight.
When I stepped out onto the main deck of the Black Leviathan, the transformation of the world around me was absolute. The violent sea storm had broken, leaving a pale, cold northern sunlight filtering through the retreating gray clouds. The deck was a scene of devastation—splintered wood, broken rigging, and the bodies of fallen men lay everywhere—but the entire surviving crew, hundreds of hardened, scarred pirates, were standing in a massive, orderly circle around the mainmast.
Tied securely to the heavy iron mast in the center of the deck was First Mate Borach. His heavy leather vest had been stripped away, leaving his massive chest exposed to the biting northern wind. His body was covered in black soot from the cannon smoke, and his jaw was swollen twice its normal size from the Commander’s strike. He looked around at the crew, his eyes wild with a mixture of terror and lingering defiance, realizing that he had been completely isolated.
The moment my bare feet touched the wet planks of the main deck, the hundreds of pirates did something that had never happened in the history of this lawless ship. As one single, massive unit, they sank to their knees, their heads bowed low, their weapons pressed against their chests in a gesture of absolute, unconditional submission. The silence was deafening, broken only by the gentle lapping of the waves against the hull.
The Commander walked beside me, his long cloak billowing in the wind, stopping just a few feet from the bound First Mate. He reached out, unsheathing a beautiful, polished silver dagger from his belt—the ceremonial blade of the Grand Admiral’s personal guard. He held it out to me, the hilt facing my hand.
“The law of the sea is absolute, my Prince,” the Commander announced, his voice carrying across the quiet water to every man on the ship. “This man abused his authority. He tortured the innocent, he stole the dignity of the weak, and he attempted to assassinate the true heir to the Sea Throne to save his own treacherous skin. His life belongs to you. Give the word, and we will throw him to the depths.”
I looked at the heavy silver dagger in the Commander’s hand, then I looked at Borach. The massive man who had spent years making my life a living hell, the man who had ground his boot into my fingers and laughed as I begged for bread, was now shivering in his chains. For the first time since I had known him, his eyes weren’t filled with malicious cruelty—they were filled with the pathetic, begging terror of a coward who knew his time had run out.
I stepped forward, my bare feet making no sound on the wet wood, until I was standing directly in front of him. The giant timber wolf walked right beside me, its golden eyes locked onto Borach’s throat, waiting for a single signal to strike.
I reached out my hand, but I didn’t take the silver dagger from the Commander. Instead, I looked Borach dead in his eyes, my voice rising clear, steady, and filled with an ancient, royal authority that I didn’t even know I possessed until this moment.
“You called me a parasite, Borach,” I said, my voice echoing across the silent deck. “You told these men that my life was worth less than a moldy crust of bread. You believed that because I was small, because I was hungry, and because I had no one to protect me, you could destroy me for your own amusement.”
Borach swallowed hard, a tear of pure terror mixing with the sweat and blood on his scarred cheek. “P-Prince… mercy…” he whispered, his broken teeth chattering. “I didn’t know… I was only… I was only trying to keep order…”
“The true order of the sea is built on honor, not cruelty,” I replied, my eyes hardening. “I will not take your life with this dagger, Borach. That would be too clean a death for a man who builds his strength on the suffering of children.”
I turned back to the Commander, my expression resolute. “Strip him of his rank. Take his weapons, his gold, and his name. Put him in a wooden rowboat with one flask of sour water and two oars, and cast him adrift in the middle of the black currents. Let the ocean decide if he is worthy of survival. If the sea gods find mercy for a monster, then so be it. But he will never set foot on a warship of the Great North Fleet again.”
The Commander’s face lit up with a brilliant, proud smile. He slammed his fist against his breastplate, bowing deeply. “Your will be done, my Prince!”
The pirates on the deck erupted into a massive, deafening cheer, slamming their swords against their shields in absolute approval of my judgment. It was a punishment worse than death for a man like Borach—to be cast out, powerless and alone, into the very ocean he had spent his life terrorizing.
Four guards lunged forward, cutting Borach from the mast and dragging him toward the ship’s rail, ignoring his pathetic, desperate screams for mercy. They threw him into a small, weathered dinghy, lowered it into the cold, gray water, and cut the ropes, leaving him to be swept away by the dark, turning currents of the northern sea.
I walked toward the wooden balcony of the quarterdeck, the giant wolf following closely behind me. I looked out over the vast, open horizon, the cold salt wind lifting my hair and drying the old blood on my face. The weight of my past was immense, and the war to reclaim my family’s stolen kingdom was just beginning, but as I looked down at the hundreds of loyal men cheering my name, the fear that had defined my entire childhood finally evaporated into the mist.
And for the first time in many long, agonizing years, nobody knelt on my back again.
