FULL STORY
CHAPTER 3
The roaring of the storm outside was nothing compared to the deafening silence that gripped the upper deck of the Leviathan. Two hundred hardened pirates, men who had spent their entire lives cutting throats for a handful of silver coins, stood frozen in place. The cold, driving rain lashed against their weathered faces, washing away the blood of the royal guards they had just slaughtered, but none of them wiped their eyes. Every single gaze was locked onto me.
I stood at the top of the wooden companionway ladder, shivering violently in my soaked, threadbare rags. The heavy iron cutlass in my hands felt like an anchor dragging me toward the deck planks, its blade dripping with the thick, foul, black fluid of the sea beast I had fought in the deep dark of the hold. My bare feet bled into the cracks of the salt-crusted timber, the pain distant and dull compared to the white-hot fire burning beneath my ribs.
Admiral Craig stood on the elevated poop deck, his flawless white-and-gold uniform contrasting sharply with the grim, shadow-filled chaos of the battered flagship. He looked down at me, his sharp, aristocratic features twisting from a look of cold, mocking amusement into a thin, calculating squint. The silver rapier in his hand gleamed under the flashing lightning, its tip pointed carelessly toward the deck.
“Well, well,” Craig sneered, his voice cutting through the whistling wind with the precision of a surgeon’s blade. “The little gutter rat has crawled out of the bilge. Look at him, Vance. Is this the great threat the High King has spent fourteen years searching for? A starving, half-naked beggar boy holding a piece of rusted iron he can barely lift?”
Beside the Admiral, Quartermaster Vance shifted nervously, his fat, scarred hands gripping the railing so tightly his knuckles turned a sickly white. He looked at me, then looked down at the companionway where the black blood still pooled, and a flicker of genuine terror crossed his greasy face. He knew what was downstairs. He knew what he had tried to feed me to.
“That’s him, Admiral,” Vance barked, his voice cracking slightly as he tried to regain his bluster in front of the royal soldiers. “That’s the boy. He carries the mark. I saw it with my own eyes under the lamp. Don’t let him speak, my Lord! End him now and let’s secure the ship!”
Fleet Commander Thorne, bleeding heavily from a deep pike wound in his thigh, leaned against the shattered frame of the mainmast, using his massive iron executioner’s sword as a crutch. His single good eye moved slowly from me to the Admiral, and then down to the silver sapphire compass that was still vibrating against his own chest beneath his heavy fur cloak.
“The boy stays alive, Craig,” Thorne growled, spitting a mouthful of red blood onto the white boots of the royal guards who surrounded him. “You’ve breached my harbor, you’ve murdered my crew, and you’ve broken the ancient laws of the Black Fleet. But you will not touch a single hair on that lad’s head until I hear the truth of what happened fourteen years ago.”
“The truth?” Admiral Craig let out a sharp, aristocratic laugh that was entirely devoid of warmth. “The truth belongs to the man with the largest fleet, Thorne. And as you can see, your little pirate kingdom is currently surrounded by three royal dreadnoughts. You are in no position to demand anything.”
Craig turned his back on the Commander, walking slowly down the wooden steps until he stood on the main deck, only ten paces away from me. The ring of armored royal guards moved with him, their heavy steel shields forming an impenetrable wall between me and the rest of the surviving pirate crew.
“Give me the boy,” Craig ordered his men coldly. “And if the old cook tries to interfere, cut him into fish bait.”
“The old cook is dead, Craig,” I said, my voice quiet, but carrying a strange, hollow weight that made the nearest guards pause.
I stepped forward, my bleeding feet sinking slightly into the wet, splintered timber. I didn’t tremble anymore. The cold rain felt like a blessing, washing the grime from my eyes, clearing away the years of fear and submission that had kept my shoulders hunched and my head bowed. I lifted my chin, staring directly into the eyes of the man who had ordered the murder of my entire family.
“Barnaby died protecting me from the monster your quartermaster threw me to,” I continued, my knuckles turning white around the hilt of the heavy cutlass. “He died keeping the promise he made to my father fourteen years ago. The promise to keep the last true bloodline of the Sea Throne alive.”
A low, collective murmur ran through the surviving pirates. Men who had been shouting for my blood half an hour ago now looked at each other in stunned confusion. The name of the Sea Throne wasn’t just history to them; it was the legend of the golden age, the time before the High King’s navy turned the northern reaches into a graveyard of heavy taxes and iron gibbets.
“Silence!” Vance screamed from the upper deck, his face flushed with rage. “Don’t listen to the brat! He’s a stray from Port Sterling! He’s trying to save his own skin with an old kitchen maid’s fairy tale!”
“Is it a fairy tale, Vance?” I asked, turning my gaze upward toward the man who had beaten me for three long winters. “Then why did you run like a dog when the lantern hit my shoulder? Why did your hands shake when you saw what was burned into my flesh?”
With a deliberate, slow movement, I used the tip of the heavy cutlass to rip away the remaining shreds of my torn shirt, exposing my left shoulder fully to the driving rain and the flashing lightning.
The cold white light of the storm illuminated the skin. The raised, pale tissue of the old burn mark stood out in sharp relief against my pale, bruised skin. The three broken anchors, perfectly detailed, curling around the jagged edges of a royal crown. It was the absolute, undeniable seal of the Missing Fleet—the personal crest of Admiral Valerius and the true royal line of the ocean empire.
Admiral Craig’s eyes locked onto the mark, and for the first time since he had boarded the Leviathan, the smug, untouchable confidence vanished from his face. His jaw tightened, and his fingers twitched against the silver hilt of his rapier.
“So… the old servant did manage to smuggle you out,” Craig whispered, his voice so low it was almost swallowed by the roaring wind. “The kitchen maid and the disgraced palace guard. Valerius thought he could hide his precious little prince in the gutters of a frontier port. He thought if you lived like a dog, you would die like a dog, completely forgotten by the world.”
“My father died fighting your traitors on the steps of the White Palace, Craig,” I said, stepping closer, the tip of my cutlass dragging along the deck planks with a high, scraping shriek. “He died believing that the sea would eventually find its balance. And tonight, the tide has turned.”
“The tide is made of water, boy, but my empire is made of iron,” Craig snapped, his voice rising in fury as he realized the effect my words were having on the surrounding men. The royal guards were looking at each other, their discipline wavering as they realized they were standing in the presence of the true heir to the kingdom they had sworn to protect.
“Kill him!” Craig roared, pointing his rapier directly at my throat. “Kill him now! Ten thousand pieces of gold to the man who brings me his head!”
The three armored guards closest to me hesitated for a fraction of a second, their royal training warring with the sudden, ancient terror of committing regicide against the true blood of the throne. But the promise of gold was a powerful motivator. The central guard, a massive man in a polished steel breastplate, let out a grunt of determination and lunged forward, his heavy broadsword coming down in a lethal, diagonal cleave meant to take my head from my shoulders.
In the past, I would have fallen to my knees. I would have curled into a ball, weeping, begging for mercy, waiting for the boot or the blade to finish me. But tonight, the heavy naval steel in my hands felt like an extension of my own bones. The black blood of the deep sea beast still burned on my skin, and the memory of Old Barnaby’s final breath gave my arms a strength that didn’t belong to a fourteen-year-old boy.
I didn’t step back. I stepped into the blow.
With a short, brutal upward sweep, I brought Barnaby’s heavy cutlass up to meet the guard’s broadsword. The collision of steel on steel was like a thunderclap. Sparks exploded in the rain, the sheer force of the impact vibrating through my arms, but I didn’t break. The guard’s blade was deflected upward, leaving his unprotected throat exposed beneath the rim of his helmet.
Before he could recover his balance, I spun, using the momentum of his own heavy blow against him, and drove the point of the cutlass straight through the soft leather collar of his armor, deep into his throat.
The guard let out a wet, choking gasp, his eyes widening in absolute shock as he looked down at the boy who had just taken his life. I ripped the blade free, and the massive warrior crumpled to the deck planks, his armor clattering against the wood as his life blood ran out into the rainwater.
The entire ship went dead silent again. The laughter was gone. The mockery was gone. The pirates of the Black Fleet let out a roaring, unified cheer that shook the wet canvas of the sails above. They had just seen a starving cabin boy kill a fully armored royal knight with a single, flawless martial stroke—a strike that could only have been taught by the ancient masters of the Royal Guard.
“He carries the blade of Valerius!” Fleet Commander Thorne showed his teeth, his voice booming across the deck as he forced himself to stand upright, ignoring the blood pouring from his thigh. “Look at him, you lawless dogs! That’s not a slave boy! That’s the blood of the men who built this fleet before the High King turned us into outlaws! Are you going to stand there and let these palace lapdogs murder the last true king of the sea?”
“No!” a massive, scarred pirate named Logan roared, lifting a heavy boarding axe into the air. “For the Missing Fleet! For the Prince!”
The battle erupted again with a violence that made the first clash look like a tavern brawl. The pirates of the Black Fleet, suddenly infused with a wild, fanatic fury, threw themselves upon the royal guards with no regard for their own safety. They fought like men possessed, their axes, cutlasses, and daggers tearing through the armored lines of the High King’s soldiers.
I didn’t wait for the guards to come to me. I charged directly toward Admiral Craig, my eyes locked onto his white uniform, the heavy cutlass held low and dangerous at my side.
But before I could reach him, Quartermaster Vance scrambled down from the poop deck, his face a mask of desperate, cowardly rage. He drew his heavy steel cutlass, his fat body moving with a surprising agility born of sheer survival instinct, and intercepted me before I could close the distance to the Admiral.
“You think you’re a king, you little piece of trash?” Vance screamed, swinging his blade wildly toward my chest. “I broke your mother’s back in Port Sterling, and I’m going to carve that mark right off your rotting shoulder!”
Our blades clashed with a vicious, ringing shriek. Vance was twice my size and possessed decades of brutal, lawless experience, but he was fighting out of fear, while I was fighting with the weight of an entire murdered dynasty behind my arm.
He drove me back, his heavy blows raining down on my defense, forcing my bleeding feet to slide across the wet, slippery wood. Every impact felt like an iron hammer hitting my shoulders, but I refused to fall. I remembered every boot he had put into my ribs. I remembered every night I had spent shivering in the bilge while he drank rum in the captain’s cabin. I remembered the sound of Barnaby’s chest crushing beneath the fallen timber.
“You’re nothing, Vance,” I hissed through my gritted teeth, parrying a brutal thrust that grazed my cheek, leaving a thin line of red blood. “You’re a traitor to your fleet, a traitor to your crew, and a coward who sells children to buy his own life.”
“I’m the man who’s going to bury you!” Vance roared, lifting his blade for a massive, two-handed overhead strike that would have split me in half.
It was the exact mistake I was waiting for.
As his arms went up, leaving his front completely unprotected, I dropped to one knee, letting his heavy blade slice through nothing but empty air above my head. Before he could recover his balance, I lunged forward with all my weight, driving the point of Barnaby’s cutlass directly through the center of Vance’s thick, leather-armored stomach.
The steel tore through the leather, through the fat, and deep into the spine behind it.
Vance froze. His heavy cutlass slipped from his fingers, clattering uselessly against the wet deck. He looked down at the blade sticking out of his middle, then looked at me, his eyes wide with a sudden, pathetic desperation.
“Please…” he whispered, his greasy fingers clutching at the iron of my blade. “Donald… please… I was only following orders… Craig paid me… he promised me the flagship…”
“My name isn’t Donald, Vance,” I whispered back, my voice cold as the Arctic sea as I gripped the hilt with both hands and twisted the blade with brutal precision. “My name is Prince Donald of the Sea Throne. And your service is finished.”
I kicked him hard in the chest, ripping the cutlass free from his body. Quartermaster Vance let out one final, wet choke before falling backward into the pooling blood, his lifeless eyes staring up at the dark, storm-filled sky.
I stood over his body, my chest heaving as the rain washed the traitor’s blood from my blade. But as I looked up, looking for Admiral Craig through the smoke and the screaming chaos, I realized the battle was far from over.
The Admiral had retreated back to the safety of the poop deck, surrounded by a tight, impenetrable phalanx of his personal bodyguards. He looked down at Vance’s body with total indifference, his silver rapier already clean and sheathed at his side. He turned his gaze toward the harbor mouth, where the three massive royal dreadnoughts were slowly turning their hulls, their hundreds of cannon ports opening like the black eyes of an awakening monster.
“You’ve won a minor skirmish, boy,” Craig shouted across the deck, his voice cold and detached. “But you cannot fight the whole world. My dreadnoughts have already targeted this vessel. In three minutes, a single unified broadside will turn the Leviathan and everyone on it into splinters and ash. You will die here, prince of nothing, and the truth will sink with you.”
The pirates around me froze, their victorious cheers dying down as they looked out at the massive black hulls of the royal warships looming through the fog. Craig was right. We had won the deck, but we were entirely at the mercy of the High King’s long-range guns.
Fleet Commander Thorne staggered over to my side, his breath ragged, his heavy sword dripping with the blood of five royal soldiers. He looked out at the dreadnoughts, then reached into his vest, pulling out the silver sapphire compass that Barnaby had left behind.
The compass was glowing now—a deep, brilliant, unnatural blue that pulsed in perfect sync with the heartbeat of the storm. The needle wasn’t pointing north; it was spinning wildly, pointing directly down into the dark, violent waters beneath the ship’s hull.
“The compass isn’t a map, Donald,” Thorne whispered, his single eye wide with an ancient, reverent awe as he placed the silver casing into my bloody hand. “It’s a key. Your father didn’t just rule men. He ruled the deep. If you are truly his son… if you carry the blood of the Sea Throne… you have to call them.”
“Call what?” I asked, my fingers curling around the cold, vibrating silver.
“The things that live beneath the ice,” Thorne said, his voice shaking with a terrifying certainty. “The true lords of the missing fleet.”
At that exact moment, the lead royal dreadnought fired a single warning shot, the massive iron ball screaming through the air just inches above our mainmast, tearing away the remaining flags of the Black Fleet. The crew suddenly falls silent.
CHAPTER 4
The silver compass in my palm felt alive. The blue sapphire in its center throbbed with a rhythmic, violent energy, sending deep shocks of heat rushing up my arm and straight into my chest. The rain pelting my bare shoulders no longer felt freezing; it felt like a call. The howling wind was no longer a threat; it was a chorus waiting for its leader.
“Do it, boy,” Fleet Commander Thorne choked out, his massive body sinking to one knee as his strength finally began to fail him from the deep pike wound. “The dreadnoughts are priming their secondary broadsides. If you don’t answer them now, we are all ghosts before the next lightning strike.”
Across the deck, Admiral Craig stood behind the reinforced shields of his remaining guards, his arms crossed over his pristine chest. He watched me with a look of supreme, clinical detachment. To him, I was a cornered animal holding a useless heirloom. He had the iron. He had the empire. He had three massive war machines capable of leveling a mountain, and he knew it.
“Look at the pathetic display,” Craig shouted over the wind, his voice amplified by the natural curvature of the quarterdeck. “A dying pirate captain and a naked gutter prince praying to a piece of silver. Soldiers, match your targets! Prepare to send these outlaws to the bottom of the bay!”
Out in the dark harbor, the three massive royal dreadnoughts completed their formation. The black iron mouths of over a hundred cannons slid out from their side ports, tracking the wounded hull of the Leviathan with lethal precision. The glowing orange matches of the royal gunners flickered through the sea fog like demonic fireflies.
I didn’t look at the cannons. I closed my eyes.
I remembered the ancient sailor songs my mother used to hum to me in the dark corners of the Port Sterling wash-houses—the forbidden melodies she told me never to sing aloud. They weren’t just songs. They were commands. They were the ancient vocal frequencies used by the first Sea Kings to communicate with the primitive, terrifying forces that slumbered in the deep trenches of the northern shelf.
I opened my mouth and let out a single, long, vibrating note.
It wasn’t a human scream. It was a deep, guttural tone that seemed to rumble from the very bottom of my throat, mimicking the low-frequency hum of the sapphire compass. The sound resonated against the wooden hull of the ship, traveling down through the oak timbers, down through the copper sheath, and deep into the black water below.
“What is he doing?” one of the royal guards whispered, his shield lowering slightly as a sudden, unnatural chill swept across the deck. “He sounds… he sounds like the reef.”
“Keep your lines!” Craig barked, a sudden flash of irritation breaking his cold facade. “It’s a dying chant! Gunports, fire on my command—”
Before Craig could finish his order, the sea went dead calm.
The violent, white-capped waves that had been tossing the Leviathan like a toy suddenly flattened into a sheet of smooth, black glass. The wind stopped howling. The rain continued to fall, but it dropped straight down, whispering against the water. The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating, and absolute.
Then, the ocean began to boil.
A mile out, directly beneath the lead royal dreadnought, a massive, swirling vortex tore through the glass-like surface. The water turned a deep, bioluminescent green, glowing with an internal, terrifying light. The massive warship, weighing thousands of tons, began to tilt violently to the starboard side as if a massive hand had grabbed its keel from below.
“Hold your positions!” the captain of the lead dreadnought screamed from his distant deck, his voice faint but panicked across the silent water. “Whale! It’s a whale strike! All hands to the brace—”
He never finished his sentence.
A massive, segmented tentacle—the size of an entire pine tree, covered in jagged, bone-white hooks—shot out of the water, wrapping itself completely around the mainmast of the royal dreadnought. With a sickening, explosive CRACK, the thick timber mast snapped like a dry twig, showering the deck with screaming sailors and heavy rigging.
Before the crew could even process the horror, three more tentacles erupted from the deep, binding the entire hull of the warship in a crushing, suffocating embrace. The massive iron plates of the dreadnought’s armor began to buckle and pop, the sound of tearing metal echoing across the bay like a dying scream. With a slow, deliberate, terrifying force, the beast dragged the entire multi-decked warship straight down into the boiling green water.
Within thirty seconds, the lead flagship of the High King’s navy was entirely gone, leaving behind nothing but a massive, gurgling whirlpool and a few pieces of shattered timber.
The remaining two dreadnoughts panicked. Their captains didn’t wait for Craig’s orders; they fired their cannons blindly into the dark water, the massive iron balls splashing uselessly against the surface as they desperately tried to turn their heavy hulls to flee the harbor mouth.
But the sea belonged to the true king tonight.
Two more massive shadows moved beneath the surface, their bioluminescent bodies longer than the ships themselves. The water exploded in fountains of white foam as two ancient leviathans—creatures that hadn’t seen the sun since the fall of the Missing Fleet—rose from the depths. Their massive, armor-plated jaws crushed the hulls of the remaining dreadnoughts, snapping the heavy warships in half like dry bread, sending hundreds of royal soldiers plunging into the freezing, unforgiving waters.
On the deck of the Leviathan, the silence was so profound you could hear the individual raindrops hitting the wood.
The pirates of the Black Fleet fell to their knees, their weapons dropping from their limp fingers. They didn’t look at me with curiosity anymore; they looked at me with a deep, religious terror. They had spent their lives fighting men, but they were now standing in the presence of a boy who commanded the monsters of the deep.
I turned my head slowly toward the poop deck, my eyes locking onto Admiral Craig.
The untouchable imperial commander was completely undone. His silver rapier was shaking in his hand, his face white as a shroud, his breathing shallow and frantic as he looked out at the empty harbor where his invincible fleet had existed just moments prior. The guards who had stood so proudly around him had scattered, throwing themselves to the deck, weeping and praying to whatever gods they had left.
“This… this is witchcraft,” Craig stammered, stepping back until his boots hit the rear railing of the ship. “You’re a monster… your entire bloodline was cursed… that’s why we had to erase you…”
“We are not a curse, Craig,” I said, my voice clear and solid, carrying effortlessly across the silent deck as I walked slowly up the wooden steps toward him. “We are the caretakers of the sea. And you are a thief who stayed in the palace too long.”
I reached the top of the stairs, standing only three feet away from the man who had ordered the slaughter of my family. He looked at my bare shoulder, at the Royal Mark that was now glowing with a faint, blue warmth, and his legs finally gave out. The Grand Admiral of the High King’s Navy fell to his knees before me, his silver rapier clattering into the puddle of rain at my feet.
“Please,” Craig choked out, his aristocratic pride completely shattered as he looked up at me with tear-filled, desperate eyes. “The High King… he has the crown… I was only his blade… I can give you the empire, boy… I can help you take the throne…”
“You couldn’t even keep your own fleet afloat, Craig,” I said coldly, lifting Barnaby’s heavy iron cutlass one final time.
I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t give him the mercy of a long speech. With a swift, clean horizontal sweep, I brought the heavy blade across his neck. The silver steel bit deep, and Admiral Craig’s head rolled across the wooden planks, his body slumping forward into the salt water, his blood staining the white uniform he had been so proud of.
I turned back to face the deck of the Leviathan.
Two hundred hardened pirates, along with Fleet Commander Thorne, were all kneeling before me, their heads bowed low against the wet wood. The storm above began to break, a single beam of cold Nordic sunlight cutting through the heavy gray clouds, illuminating the blood-stained deck and the heavy cutlass in my hand.
I looked down at the silver sapphire compass, which had finally stopped vibrating, its needle now pointing true and steady toward the center of the northern horizon—toward the White Palace and the stolen throne that was waiting for its true master.
The fleet that once hunted me lowered its flags as I passed.
