Calypso
06-23-2004, 02:19 PM
The Captain’s whore. That was what they called her, and I’ve known no other name for my mother. Owned, for twelve long years I was owned by the crew and by the captain. I don’t remember my mother, she was shot and cast overboard in my first year. I ate scraps at the table like a dog, biding my time.
I was Cal, the whore’s son. Never Cal the captain’s son, or swabbie, or even slave-boy. It was a rough and ugly time.
Only one old man was kind to me, the cannoneer for the “Scarlet Dawn,” a haggard old man in his seventies or beyond. He called me Alexi, and sometimes spoke in a strange language that sounded of metal grating on stone. I slept near him in the cannon deck (infrequently used as a brig, as well), but he never let me touch the guns themselves. “Alexi,” he’d tell me, “There be timing for metal when you old.” The old man was gaunt and covered in tattoos with strange, tribal symbols covering every part of his body. At night, he taught me how to use the brightly colored inks to stain my skin, using a needle-pointed dagger to carve pictures onto my flesh. By day, he taught me to carve wood, to repair the damage to our ship after a long battle, and to stitch sails and clothes where bullets had ripped through them. There were many such battles, and many such holes. I became useful, the beatings stopped.
We captured a young nobleman in my twelfth year. He was twenty, perhaps, and a dandy to boot. The bosun and the men took turns… with him. I turned away in horror, realizing that I was coming of age, and that I’d quickly get the same brutal treatment. Already I’d felt eyes upon me. I knew I had to go, and soon.
“Runes,” the boy rasped to me one night, not long after we’d captured him. “I need paper, ink. I must write.” I lied and told him there was no paper aboard, unless it was in the captain’s quarters. He grew frantic and his eyes were constantly searching the hold like a caged animal’s.
One night, after the men had been especially brutal with him, I took the tattoo ink and design paper from the old man, and carried them to the captive.
His eyes lit at first, but as he beheld the dagger and the inks, and the sad, stained state of the paper, his face fell sad, and tears welled in his young eyes. He spent hours scrawling, but after a short while, cursed and hurled the paper to the ground.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It must be perfect, and I can’t do it. Not with the ship moving, and the—” he vomited into a small bucket in his cell. I took the ink and paper from him and put it back into a small, carved box near the old man’s hammock.
“Can it be carved?” I asked. There was a strange, quizzical look in the young man’s face as it emerged from the bucket.
I worked hard with the fine carving tools aboard the ship, but the process took days, and nearly two full cords of wood. I threw them overboard in small pieces, these failed “runes,” as the captive called them. But there was progress with each failure. Finally, after a week of carving, skinning the wood down, buffing, sanding, and polishing, it was done right. He asked how far we were from shore, and I told him. The captive nodded, huddled over the rune and began to chant, almost giddily.
The captive’s cell made a loud groan, the wood straining and tearing for an instant, and then the cell burst, sending timber through the hull, blasting the ship open. Well above the waterline, I looked out in amazement to see the night sky outside. Waves, crashing on the side of the ship, splashed drops of water through the hole. I heard commotion above.
“Come with me boy,” he said. “You have the gift!” He leapt through the hole and into the ocean, and terrified that the crew would murder me (for damage to the ship, not to mention helping the prisoner escape), I followed him into the sea. The waves tore at me as I struggled to keep my head above water. I washed up naked on the shore, struggling for breath with nothing in the world but a tattoo on my skin of a grinning skull with a dagger in its teeth.
***
I gathered scraps for clothing, and followed the young man a long while, to the heart of a forest, where his master lived in a tower that was pulled up from the roots of the earth itself. I trained there, and proved apt. In time, the Master dismissed many of his students, focusing on a few who he said, “understood the Way.” The young man who’d been held on my ship was dismissed, but I felt no loss for him. As soon as I’d entered the tower, I had become obsessed with magic. In my studies, I came upon a secret. A secret of sorcery that I never passed on, not even to the Master.
On my eighteenth birthday (or thereabouts, for I did not know my true birthdate), the Master released all his students, except for myself. “Calypso, you are the heart of sorcery. I give you run of the tower, make use of it as you will.” The Master stayed on in the tower’s highest room, and occasionally I would hear strange sounds emanating from his chamber, screams of pain, music of unimaginable beauty, or just a dull muttering.
I studied magic on my own for years with no tutelage. In this time, I worked with many elements, looking at the Master’s notes and distilling what I could from them. His power was in life, earth, and flame, and careful meditation. I took his work and used my experience in carving to put it into glyphs of power, both on wood and in sigils, tattooed onto my flesh. I gathered animals and plants from the forest beyond the tower, and I worked experiments on them. In my sixth year of experiments and magic, I left to collect specimens for a powerful new spell. From the room above I heard screaming, but this was no strange thing.
When I returned, the tower was gone.
A hole had opened in the earth and swallowed the Master, the tower, and a small part of the forest as well. I watched a tree, already halfway fallen into the trench, creak and tumble into the abyss. It fell a long, long time, and never did I hear it reach the bottom.
Tears rolled down my face. I did not weep for him. I cared little for the old man, in truth, but for my research… for my years of work, and the Master’s precious collection of scrolls and spells… now I had nothing. The rabbit I’d collected for my spell, I ate instead. I followed an old creek for miles, coming to a small town far from the Master’s tower. The town had a port. All I possessed was the robe on my back and the ink on my skin.
***
Returning to the sea was a natural choice for me. I was a man now, a commander of mystic energies. I had no fear of being Cal, the whore’s son again. I was Calypso, the mighty sorcerer. I wanted to take to the sea again, to find myself there, and to exact revenge against the element that had made my formative years such brutal torment.
In the port city, I was amazed by the bodies of the men and women around me. Huge, strong bodies, they seemed like ogres to me. Whatever muscles I’d had in my youth were gone, evaporated into the long nights of study. I’d never lifted anything heavier than a book. Though I was accustomed to pain, (for the magic burned my soul as often as it flowed easily from my fingertips), the sheer power of the humans before me was staggering. I feared the crushing mass of humanity, longed for open air, and fewer folk.
I signed on with “The Capital Venture,” a cargo hauler, where I served with the ship’s doctor, learning the fundaments of healing the injured. Though much of the crew thought of me only as the doctor’s assistant, the captain alone knew the truth. I used my magic in secret, healing the injured as best I could, and hiding my powers from the superstitious sailors. My training as a boy, mending sails, proved useful in stitching skin as well. We sailed many seas, and my heart was at peace with the world. Until we came upon the reef.
The ship was far from any known reef, far from any island or landmass. It was as though the ocean reached up and scuttled the ship. I was on deck when it happened, and was tossed far into the waves. Again, they crashed against me, again they raged and tore at my skin. Again, I washed ashore with nothing but the runes on my skin and the soaked tatters of a robe.
Splinters of the mast washed ashore, and I used the largest piece as a walking staff, supporting me as I walked along the beach, searching for survivors. I cradled the long stick, hobbling along with blood oozing down my leg from some kind of wound. A sharkbite, perhaps. I lacked the focus to cast my magics, and I stumbled along, eventually losing consciousness and collapsing to the beach just outside the bustling port city of Martown.
Three years (and two mysteriously wrecked ships, The "Enforcer" and the "Lyonnaire") later, I took a position aboard the “Cando,” a smuggling vessel with a captain interested in using my abilities to “procure” cargo. With my eloquently carved staff in hand, I boarded the vessel, determined to make my mark on the ocean at last. The first prey we found was a long, strangely familiar ship. As we grew closer, a chill swept up my spine and sweat beaded on my brow. I knew this ship. I knew it.
I’d never done it before, casting all the destructive magics at once. It took an hour, an hour in which we approached the “Scarlet Dawn,” gaining ground every minute. The spell erupted in a hellacious rupture of fire, cracking earth, and disintegrating flesh. I watched as the men aboard the “Dawn” melted into the deck, pools of black, molten bone, and listened to the cheers of my fellow crewmen as their enemies died without a fight.
But it didn’t end there. In the sky, clouds gathered, and drops of rain fell down. They were not made of water, but of red magma, pouring from the clouds and melting through the sails and hull. The sailors screamed; the boat shook. The waters grew choppy and began to fall. Suddenly, the waves around us were higher than the rails, then higher than the mast. We were sucked into a whirlpool that carried us into a trench on the ocean floor. The whole thing took under a minute, and as we crashed to the muddy ocean bottom, the captain and remaining crew were thrown overboard.
In an instant, the sea rushed in, filling the crack in the world, drowning the men, and covering me with water. This time, I was prepared. A charm on my wrist (carved from the figurehead of the “Enforcer”) protected me, allowing me to hold my breath as I rose, gently, to the surface. A shark swam near and I smacked it in the head with my staff. Not particularly effective, but enough to persuade the beast to look for other prey.
This time, I washed ashore with my staff, the small charms I’d carved from other lost ships, my robe, a number of magical tattoos, and one of the grips from the wheel of the “Cando.” Thinking of what a nice charm this small piece of mahogany would make, I swam towards the shore, and the winking lights of a nearby port.
I was Cal, the whore’s son. Never Cal the captain’s son, or swabbie, or even slave-boy. It was a rough and ugly time.
Only one old man was kind to me, the cannoneer for the “Scarlet Dawn,” a haggard old man in his seventies or beyond. He called me Alexi, and sometimes spoke in a strange language that sounded of metal grating on stone. I slept near him in the cannon deck (infrequently used as a brig, as well), but he never let me touch the guns themselves. “Alexi,” he’d tell me, “There be timing for metal when you old.” The old man was gaunt and covered in tattoos with strange, tribal symbols covering every part of his body. At night, he taught me how to use the brightly colored inks to stain my skin, using a needle-pointed dagger to carve pictures onto my flesh. By day, he taught me to carve wood, to repair the damage to our ship after a long battle, and to stitch sails and clothes where bullets had ripped through them. There were many such battles, and many such holes. I became useful, the beatings stopped.
We captured a young nobleman in my twelfth year. He was twenty, perhaps, and a dandy to boot. The bosun and the men took turns… with him. I turned away in horror, realizing that I was coming of age, and that I’d quickly get the same brutal treatment. Already I’d felt eyes upon me. I knew I had to go, and soon.
“Runes,” the boy rasped to me one night, not long after we’d captured him. “I need paper, ink. I must write.” I lied and told him there was no paper aboard, unless it was in the captain’s quarters. He grew frantic and his eyes were constantly searching the hold like a caged animal’s.
One night, after the men had been especially brutal with him, I took the tattoo ink and design paper from the old man, and carried them to the captive.
His eyes lit at first, but as he beheld the dagger and the inks, and the sad, stained state of the paper, his face fell sad, and tears welled in his young eyes. He spent hours scrawling, but after a short while, cursed and hurled the paper to the ground.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It must be perfect, and I can’t do it. Not with the ship moving, and the—” he vomited into a small bucket in his cell. I took the ink and paper from him and put it back into a small, carved box near the old man’s hammock.
“Can it be carved?” I asked. There was a strange, quizzical look in the young man’s face as it emerged from the bucket.
I worked hard with the fine carving tools aboard the ship, but the process took days, and nearly two full cords of wood. I threw them overboard in small pieces, these failed “runes,” as the captive called them. But there was progress with each failure. Finally, after a week of carving, skinning the wood down, buffing, sanding, and polishing, it was done right. He asked how far we were from shore, and I told him. The captive nodded, huddled over the rune and began to chant, almost giddily.
The captive’s cell made a loud groan, the wood straining and tearing for an instant, and then the cell burst, sending timber through the hull, blasting the ship open. Well above the waterline, I looked out in amazement to see the night sky outside. Waves, crashing on the side of the ship, splashed drops of water through the hole. I heard commotion above.
“Come with me boy,” he said. “You have the gift!” He leapt through the hole and into the ocean, and terrified that the crew would murder me (for damage to the ship, not to mention helping the prisoner escape), I followed him into the sea. The waves tore at me as I struggled to keep my head above water. I washed up naked on the shore, struggling for breath with nothing in the world but a tattoo on my skin of a grinning skull with a dagger in its teeth.
***
I gathered scraps for clothing, and followed the young man a long while, to the heart of a forest, where his master lived in a tower that was pulled up from the roots of the earth itself. I trained there, and proved apt. In time, the Master dismissed many of his students, focusing on a few who he said, “understood the Way.” The young man who’d been held on my ship was dismissed, but I felt no loss for him. As soon as I’d entered the tower, I had become obsessed with magic. In my studies, I came upon a secret. A secret of sorcery that I never passed on, not even to the Master.
On my eighteenth birthday (or thereabouts, for I did not know my true birthdate), the Master released all his students, except for myself. “Calypso, you are the heart of sorcery. I give you run of the tower, make use of it as you will.” The Master stayed on in the tower’s highest room, and occasionally I would hear strange sounds emanating from his chamber, screams of pain, music of unimaginable beauty, or just a dull muttering.
I studied magic on my own for years with no tutelage. In this time, I worked with many elements, looking at the Master’s notes and distilling what I could from them. His power was in life, earth, and flame, and careful meditation. I took his work and used my experience in carving to put it into glyphs of power, both on wood and in sigils, tattooed onto my flesh. I gathered animals and plants from the forest beyond the tower, and I worked experiments on them. In my sixth year of experiments and magic, I left to collect specimens for a powerful new spell. From the room above I heard screaming, but this was no strange thing.
When I returned, the tower was gone.
A hole had opened in the earth and swallowed the Master, the tower, and a small part of the forest as well. I watched a tree, already halfway fallen into the trench, creak and tumble into the abyss. It fell a long, long time, and never did I hear it reach the bottom.
Tears rolled down my face. I did not weep for him. I cared little for the old man, in truth, but for my research… for my years of work, and the Master’s precious collection of scrolls and spells… now I had nothing. The rabbit I’d collected for my spell, I ate instead. I followed an old creek for miles, coming to a small town far from the Master’s tower. The town had a port. All I possessed was the robe on my back and the ink on my skin.
***
Returning to the sea was a natural choice for me. I was a man now, a commander of mystic energies. I had no fear of being Cal, the whore’s son again. I was Calypso, the mighty sorcerer. I wanted to take to the sea again, to find myself there, and to exact revenge against the element that had made my formative years such brutal torment.
In the port city, I was amazed by the bodies of the men and women around me. Huge, strong bodies, they seemed like ogres to me. Whatever muscles I’d had in my youth were gone, evaporated into the long nights of study. I’d never lifted anything heavier than a book. Though I was accustomed to pain, (for the magic burned my soul as often as it flowed easily from my fingertips), the sheer power of the humans before me was staggering. I feared the crushing mass of humanity, longed for open air, and fewer folk.
I signed on with “The Capital Venture,” a cargo hauler, where I served with the ship’s doctor, learning the fundaments of healing the injured. Though much of the crew thought of me only as the doctor’s assistant, the captain alone knew the truth. I used my magic in secret, healing the injured as best I could, and hiding my powers from the superstitious sailors. My training as a boy, mending sails, proved useful in stitching skin as well. We sailed many seas, and my heart was at peace with the world. Until we came upon the reef.
The ship was far from any known reef, far from any island or landmass. It was as though the ocean reached up and scuttled the ship. I was on deck when it happened, and was tossed far into the waves. Again, they crashed against me, again they raged and tore at my skin. Again, I washed ashore with nothing but the runes on my skin and the soaked tatters of a robe.
Splinters of the mast washed ashore, and I used the largest piece as a walking staff, supporting me as I walked along the beach, searching for survivors. I cradled the long stick, hobbling along with blood oozing down my leg from some kind of wound. A sharkbite, perhaps. I lacked the focus to cast my magics, and I stumbled along, eventually losing consciousness and collapsing to the beach just outside the bustling port city of Martown.
Three years (and two mysteriously wrecked ships, The "Enforcer" and the "Lyonnaire") later, I took a position aboard the “Cando,” a smuggling vessel with a captain interested in using my abilities to “procure” cargo. With my eloquently carved staff in hand, I boarded the vessel, determined to make my mark on the ocean at last. The first prey we found was a long, strangely familiar ship. As we grew closer, a chill swept up my spine and sweat beaded on my brow. I knew this ship. I knew it.
I’d never done it before, casting all the destructive magics at once. It took an hour, an hour in which we approached the “Scarlet Dawn,” gaining ground every minute. The spell erupted in a hellacious rupture of fire, cracking earth, and disintegrating flesh. I watched as the men aboard the “Dawn” melted into the deck, pools of black, molten bone, and listened to the cheers of my fellow crewmen as their enemies died without a fight.
But it didn’t end there. In the sky, clouds gathered, and drops of rain fell down. They were not made of water, but of red magma, pouring from the clouds and melting through the sails and hull. The sailors screamed; the boat shook. The waters grew choppy and began to fall. Suddenly, the waves around us were higher than the rails, then higher than the mast. We were sucked into a whirlpool that carried us into a trench on the ocean floor. The whole thing took under a minute, and as we crashed to the muddy ocean bottom, the captain and remaining crew were thrown overboard.
In an instant, the sea rushed in, filling the crack in the world, drowning the men, and covering me with water. This time, I was prepared. A charm on my wrist (carved from the figurehead of the “Enforcer”) protected me, allowing me to hold my breath as I rose, gently, to the surface. A shark swam near and I smacked it in the head with my staff. Not particularly effective, but enough to persuade the beast to look for other prey.
This time, I washed ashore with my staff, the small charms I’d carved from other lost ships, my robe, a number of magical tattoos, and one of the grips from the wheel of the “Cando.” Thinking of what a nice charm this small piece of mahogany would make, I swam towards the shore, and the winking lights of a nearby port.