"He called himself a savior in the gutter; another named himself monster in the palace.
Both were the same wound, seen from opposite sides."
— Whisper of the River Watch
"Born in the storm, raised by the wave,
crowned by the tide, destined for the deep.
Blessed with salt, with fire, with breath of the abyss,
to walk where no shore binds,
to reign where the dark waters sleep."
-The Eternal Mariner
I was summoned by my father. That was strange enough. Normally he didn't give a damn what I did. Could drink, could gamble, could burn the house down — he'd shrug, maybe grunt. So when his handwriting showed up on a torn scrap of paper, I paid attention. The words were messy, not his usual stone-carved lines. First he wrote "Dungeon." Then scratched it out. Replaced it with "Ironreach." And Patrick's name.
That stopped me. Patrick's not the kind of name you write unless things are serious. He's the type that drags you into trouble, and the trouble sticks.
I sat there for a bit, note in my hand, thinking maybe if I stared long enough it'd explain itself. It didn't. So I shoved it in the drawer and went to dress. Black coat, stiff. Buttoned clean. Tied the knot at my throat until it felt like a rope. Looked in the mirror — respectable, or something trying too hard to pass for it. It didn't fit. Never does.
When I stood, my fingers brushed the wall. Rougher than it should've been. I leaned closer. Someone had scratched in a rune. LISTEN. The kind of word that stares back at you. Beside it, a mark I couldn't read, not any alphabet I knew. My stomach twisted. Someone's eyes were already here, hiding in the plaster.
I didn't wait around.
The tank was waiting in the corner, big empty water drum lying on its side like junk. Most folks would walk past it. Not me. It was the only way in or out of the house. No door, no window. Just that tank, covering the stair down. Don't ask me who built it. It's just there, and it works.
The fairy slid out of the tank when I called it. A puff of glow, wings made of dust caught in sunlight. It spun once, then pointed me toward the hedge outside.
Two shadows crouched there.
I strolled out casual, whistling like I didn't notice. Kicked a pebble down the path. Let them think I was blind. Then I swung around behind, quiet as smoke. Blade already in hand. Mine's no knight's sword. It doesn't gleam. Doesn't hum. It just bites. Ugly, sharp, reckless.
First man didn't even know he was dead. Steel cut his spine, and he dropped with a sound like a book snapping shut. The second spun, clumsy. I slashed him crooked across the back, and he folded, cursing once before the ground caught him.
I crouched fast, went through their gear. Radio. Rifle. No bullets loaded. And no rune etched on the shells — thank Christ. Those burn worse than fire. I spat, tossed the rifle in the ditch. Small mercy wasted.
Then I saw my jacket. Blood smeared across the front. My new suit. Figures. Peeled it off, cursed, stuffed it in a sack. Dug out the spare — baggy shirt, trousers too loose. Tied the hem so it looked like style. Popped an earring in, dabbed on powder and perfume. Clothes talk. Even when you're hiding, you're saying something.
I needed air, so I ducked into the bookstore on the corner. Smelled like old paper and cheap polish. Rows of books, neat and proper, like lies stacked on shelves. I picked one up. "The Garden of Silence." Next one: "The Unfaithful Bride." Another: "A Husband's Ashes." I flipped a few more. All of them the same damn story — someone cheating on their husband, someone betraying their vows.
I snorted. "What the hell is this? Propaganda? You lot printing manuals for unfaithful wives?"
The shopkeeper raised an eyebrow, half-smiling.
"Then again," I muttered, flipping another page, "women don't usually get to pick their lover. Not in this city. Not in most. Not that giving them freedom would change a damn thing. They'll always want more. Trust me. I've seen the future. A world of Karens and feminists."
The seller laughed, a dry chuckle. "You're funny," he said.
"Wasn't joking," I muttered, sliding the book back. That's when it hit me.
"Oh. Right. I've got a spy too."
My face twitched, nose scrunched like I was about to sneeze. One eye squeezed shut. In the corner of the room, a little critter stirred. Rodent. Three-eyed. The third eye sat in the middle of its forehead, shifting till its color matched mine.
I has let it scurry off in the morning. The rodent didn't have a plan. It had feet and a third eye and the kind of nerve that makes small things dangerous.
It slipped from under the bookshop door like a coin rolling free. First came the market—stalls jammed shoulder to shoulder, awnings patched in different shades of sun. Women shouted prices like prayers: "Fresh mackerel! Two for a silver! Get your salted kelp!" Baskets clattered, a boy ran a handcart, a seamstress argued with a cloth-dyer over a bolt gone wrong. The air was thick with smells: hot oil sizzling at a fry-stand, fermented fish that made your tongue curl, cumin and smoke and a sour tang of overripe fruit. Fingers reached, haggling hands slapped palms. The rodent threaded the legs of customers and the folds of skirts, ears flattening each time a sandal landed where it had been.
A town crier trundled by, bell heavy in his fist, voice booming garbled proclamations—taxes, curfews, a notice about a lost girl—his words bouncing off stone and tin. Children chased each other, shrieking laughter, snagging on the rodent's tail before it slid free into a puddle of spilled ale. A dog barked. A peddler hawked amulets that promised luck, and an old woman spat and shook a fist at a man for cutting in line.
The rodent darted beneath a stall of bright umbrellas, eyes catching glints of coin and string. It skirted past a cart where a woman bashed a pot, singing to a rhythm only she knew. A laundry woman hauled steaming clothes, wrung them hard, and when she emptied her bucket the dirty water hit the stone in a splash. The rodent froze at the edge of her shadow. A shout—"Get out, you pest!"—and the bucket tipped. Cold, foul water slammed over the little body and shoved it like a thumb across wet glass. Instinct took over: it wriggled, claws scrabbling leather, whiskers slick. The crowd's noise blurred into a single dull drum.
Down it went—caught in the flow, a tiny dark comet—into the sewer-mouth where rubbish fed the current. The tunnel swallowed light and sound. For a moment the world narrowed to the slap of water and the hollow echo of dripping. The tunnel curved; rats, larger and dull-eyed, parted and hissed as the three-eyed thing flashed past. Somewhere above, distant and distorted, someone chanted: "Orati geyo." The syllables folded through the stone like a name or a summons; the rodent's third eye shivered and matched the tone, pupils sliding toward the color of that chant the way a compass needle points to iron.
The drainage ran like a river that had forgotten it was supposed to be small. The rodent rode under the city's belly—memories of kitchen grease, scraps of rope, and the occasional lost coin. Old runes carved into the brick threw odd shadows; the current tugged at the tail, carried it past iron rings for boats and a rusted grate that once locked a door.
At last the tunnel spat it out into open air with a puff of brine and gull-cry. It landed on the slick edge of a quay where the smell widened into salt and tar and fish guts. Ships groaned against ropes. Lanterns bobbed like tired stars. Crates stamped with foreign letters leaned in rows; nets lay in haphazard piles; a man cursed as he dragged a barrel that had rolled free.
This was the south coast —the place where the city wore its edges raw. The quay itself was a patchwork of wood and stone, planks replaced a hundred times over, grooved deep with years of boots. Warehouses hunched at the waterline, faces of soot-darkened timber and iron clamps. Banners from other ports snapped in the wind, colors dulled by sun and salt. Bargemen shouted orders, and the shipwright's hammer rang steady, like a pulse.
Nearby, crews unloaded fish boxes under a spilling sky; sailors argued over a crate of spices whose scent sliced through the brine with pepper and lemon rind. Lantern Quay's lamps swung and threw long arms of light that trembled on the black water. In the distance, the taller masts of merchantmen cut the horizon, their sails furled like sleeping beasts.
People here moved with purpose. Dockhands were short, thick-armed from hauling, faces creased in lines earned by wind. Merchants stood like small islands of finery—cloaks that didn't match the rest of the quay, belts heavy with seal-stamped notes. Beggars sat under stairs with palms cupped open. Children eyed ropes as if they were tightropes to cross for coin.
The rodent was gone, swept down into the drain like it was part of the city's sewage from the start, and maybe it was. But at the coast, where the gulls screamed and ropes creaked against swollen planks, I finally showed my face. The water looked sickly green under the sun, but it smelled like freedom.
Serwyn was there. Leaning by a cargo stack, arms folded. She had the kind of look that made you wonder if she was waiting for you or just happened to exist in the same air.
"So. Rhys Orr," she said, like she'd been rehearsing the name.
I smiled, half out of habit, half out of boredom. "It's actually Orrel. I cut it short. Gave it the ore vibe."
That earned a curl of her lip, not quite a smile, not quite contempt.
"You plan to be a hero now? Working as a deck scrubber on Cain Malrick's ship?"
"Every hero's got to start somewhere. A mop, a broom, maybe a little sea scum in between. It builds character."
"You're right," she said, but her voice dripped sarcasm so sharp it might as well have slit my throat.
I leaned against the rail, staring out at the mist rolling in. "And you'll be working here too."
Her head snapped toward me. "No, I won't. I told you, I'd rather work in a bar, a café, anything else. I don't want to wash the floor."
I shrugged, watching the tide gnaw at the posts. "Doesn't matter what you want. You don't have a choice."
The words hung there, heavy as anchor chain. For a moment the sea hushed, gulls cut their noise short, even the ropes on the masts stilled like they were listening.
Her breath hitched. Arms folded tight, shoulders curling inward, she looked like someone suddenly colder than the ocean wind could make her. The fog from her lips trembled in the air, white ghosts of things unsaid. Her cracked lips parted and a whisper crawled out, brittle as glass:
"We always have a choice."
Her eyes shined wet, not with anger, but with the kind of sorrow you don't point at because it's already a blade against her throat.
I caught it. I could've answered. Could've said something clever or cruel, something to make it lighter, but I didn't. My mother was right—I wasn't a smooth talker just likemy father. And in that silence, I felt the weight of her words sink deeper than mine ever could.
The crew had been watching. My curry-yellow eyes must've made me look younger than I was, because one of them—a lanky guy named Flint—sidled up and grinned like he was my uncle. "You want me to set you two up?"
I told him no. Not the time. Not the place.
We climb to the master's deck where the wood smells older, the planks have teeth, and the rail is the thing you lean on when you want to pretend the horizon listens. That's when the boss walks up the gangplank and everything tilts.
The men on the dock move like tidewater — a parting, not violent but practiced. People know a storm when it walks. The boss wore his pardon like a mask.
His name is Cain. Cain Malrick. Most pirates—or ex-pirates—carry the stench of ale, beard thick enough to hide spare knives, dreadlocks that could strangle a man not Cain anyway. The courts of men said he'd been pardoned by His Majesty's grace — but men whispered that no scroll, no seal, no crown forged by human hand could have absolved him. Only the sea itself had pardoned Cain Malrick, and its forgiveness had cost a toll of blood so vast that men swore tides still turned red in places he'd sailed. His name was no longer spoken, but sung in salt, etched in storms, remembered by the drowning.
He had hair the color of rust and blood, but he was no ginger. Too much salt, too much fire, too much storm in that mane for such a common word to cage it. His jaw was cut from stone, clean-shaven, none of the wild beards or twisted dreadlocks that most sea-dogs carried to prove their brutality. Cain needed no such props.
A single golden earring hung from his left ear — not ornament, not vanity. It burned like a captured sun, glinting with a blaze that no storm could dim. Men swore the rune carved into its clasp bound a star itself, stolen from the firmament during a night of slaughter when Cain had fought something no ship lived to tell of. Some said it held a shard of drowned heaven, a relic too dangerous to belong to any mortal man.
"Born in the storm, raised by the wave, crowned by the tide,destined for the deep".
Whom ever heard it knew it could be only one man, Cain.
He wore a coat of impossible grandeur: thick red leather, patterned in blue thread, its weight like an executioner's robe, it leather made from the flag of the mad dogs. Upon its back sprawled the corpse of a siren, embroidered in sapphire and silver and it scales — harpoon-pierced a hundred lounged on the siren back, her blue blood stitched and dyed into rivulets that bled down into the scarlet leather. The scales upon her were no mere threadwork; they were her actual scales, stolen from the carcass of the drowned enchantress and worked into the coat by hands long dead. When he moved, the garment shifted like struggling flesh, as though the siren still tried to writhe free of her death.
Cain was shirtless beneath it, as always, his chest broad, scarred, sun-seared. Each scar a story, each one beginning in violence, none ending in mercy. Across his back churned a tattoo of the black sea, waves frozen mid-tempest, ink so deep it seemed to move when the firelight caught it. From his shoulder blades spread auspicious Chinese clouds, curling like wings — and when Cain raised his arms, they unfurled with him, as though the man could lift himself from the earth like some forgotten dragon. At the base of his neck, a compass tattoo pointed to nowhere men had ever charted.
Rumors clung to him like salt:
"They say he once fought the King's Watchdog barehanded, and fed the beast its own teeth."
"He laid with a kraken once, aye — said her arms made a warmer bed than any maiden's sheets."
"Malrick killed a man so clean the man's shadow kept fightin' three days after."
"He spat into the sea, and the tide turned back — afraid to touch him."
"Some swear he keeps a piece of drowned heaven in that earring, and that's why storms follow him."
Men laughed when they told these stories, but not for long. The laughter always sank into silence, into the uneasy realization that no one could prove a single word wrong.
So when Serwyn, brave in her ignorance, asked softly, "And what of your enemies, Cain Malrick?" — her voice not mocking but concerned — the tavern itself seemed to lean closer.
Cain drew in a breath, lips parting to speak "I have no foe-"
But before he could finish, the entire room answered for him as if they new his catchphrase already, as if pulled by one tide, one tongue:
"By mast and marrow, by storm and sorrow — the sea has sworn my foes no morrow."
It rolled like a prayer, like a curse.
Cain only smiled, slow and merciless, then spoke at last, his words sinking deeper than the tide:
"Blood makes the waves remember; bones make the deep forget. My enemies are both."
No one remembered Cain Malrick as he truly was. They remembered storms, drowned crews, leviathans butchered in the black water, and the laughter of a man who claimed the ocean itself bent for him. Some said he had been hung once, and cut himself free before death could take him. Others swore he had eaten the heart of a kraken and lived. All agreed on one thing: Cain Malrick moved like the sea itself — vast, merciless, and impossible to hold.