Seaborn

Was it me? I wasn’t stunned by the inference that I could start a mutiny – I’d come a long way since sailing on the Essential – I was stunned that my father called me Domenic.

Not ‘Dom’ as in my alias, Dom Harter. Domenic. He knew.

As I considered my father I couldn’t help but think that of course he knew. Disgraced or not, withdrawn or not, he was a Captain! And he would face me and my questions with dignity!

Would he?

Taking off my necklace and disengaging my ability, I dropped the persona. Dom Harter wasn’t the one who needed answers. Yet, as much as I tried to think of what I wanted to say to him, I could only voice one question: “Did you know?”

“Not at first,” he said, for some reasoning willing to converse even as he analyzed me without my enchanted screen. “Your story was suspicious but you were supposed to be on the other side of the ocean. We don’t know when you slipped away, but I’ve been in touch with command via my communications abilities and it seems your crew on the Death’s Consort made contact with a jarl in the Isles. They declared you were no longer on board, and that they would no longer attack our ships and expected to be left alone.” My father shrugged. “They’re still debating whether it’s a trick, but haven’t been able to find your bloody ship anyway so the point is moot. Once we realized you were at large, my suspicions grew.”

I nodded along to what he said, but he’d misinterpreted my question. “I meant,” I said. “Did you know mom was pregnant? Did you know I was born before that quest popped up?”

He huffed and reached for his bottle before letting his hand drop in his lap with a smack. “I took a second lieutenant position out of Pristav – a position that wound up cementing my career. Brennon Marston wrote to me to let me know that Madeline – your mother – was with child. He was very noble about it, seeing as how he wanted to marry her anyway. He even promised to raise the child as his own.” My father shook his head, his voice developing a rasp. “The honest, foolish, crazy bastard would have tried, too. Then he had to go and get himself killed.”

“You knew,” I whispered. “You knew you had a son, but never reached out …”

“Reaching out would have been an admission old man Marston would have jumped all over!” Darius exclaimed. “He blamed Michaels and I for Brennon’s death – though how we were to blame hundreds of miles away I can’t explain. If he’d had an inch of rope he would’ve tried to hang me with it. I couldn’t have reached out if I’d wanted to!”

If he’d wanted to …

“And then in Tulisang,” he said, standing. His voice was menacing. “That bloody quest! It didn’t warn me that my long lost son was the fool who’d signed his soul away to Davy Jones. I didn’t even consider hiding the details of that quest from command.” He leveled his finger at me. “You know what happened to me when the dots were connected? Do you understand the humiliation I was put through? And the only one – the only one! Michaels wasn’t punished for taking you on and dragging you out to sea, he gets his promotion to admiral. Madeline wasn’t punished for raising you into the hellion you are, she gets a nice tea time with the royal family while her blessing from you makes everyone think she’s a lovable, docile lady and not a wrung out whore. But I had my name dragged through the mud! I had every honor I’d earned ripped from my uniform!”

My father continued to rant, but I stopped listening as my blood rose around my ears. “Your humiliation? Your humiliation? You dare speak of the woman you abandoned and the bastard you ignored and claim to have suffered humiliation?” My voice matched his, neither of us stopping to let the other have their say. “You abandoned your first responsibility! You could have been the father who was always gone at sea. You could have been the father who only showed up to pay his dues for his mistake. You could have taken those leadership levels you fostered in the navy and done some real good with them by being the leader of your own bloody household! But you didn’t even show yourself!”

We shouted at each other, our words locked inside the room with us thanks to his privacy spell. I couldn’t even recall all the words that passed through our mouths, besides that we accused each other of every wrong we’d ever done and many we probably didn’t deserve. I don’t know if it was something particular I said, or if my father just wore out his patience, but he suddenly stopped talking and his glare carried a different kind of message.

Cyrell Darius has tried to engage you in mental combat!

I may have been able to resist his attempt to pull me into Tadra, the mental realm, but in the moment I didn’t want to. If my father wanted to slip into the mental realm to have this talk, I was more than ready to oblige him.

It had been months since I’d engaged anyone in the mental realm. I was caught off guard by the pulling I immediately felt – my mind was naturally establishing itself in my own domain, but someone was roughly trying to pull me away from it. I recalled what Marcus Renshaw had taught me – being in someone’s mindscape was like giving them a defensive advantage. They held greater power there. What concerned me more than that, though, was my curse limited my movement here. The one time Marcus had tried to show me his own mindscape had overwhelmed me – and he didn’t have any hostile intentions.

I resisted the pull, ineffectually at first but enough not to get dragged away. As Marcus’ lessons reasserted themselves my domain began to appear around me – my black-hulled ship was still filled with chains and skeletons to haunt me, though they were fewer than before.

The immediately noticeable anomaly was that my ship wasn’t on an endless sea of blue – or red, as it sometimes appeared. Immediately off the starboard beam was a sheer cliff, with a palace on top. A moment later the cliff had shrunk down to nothing and the palace was nearly on par with my deck, looming above me. It looked like the sketches I’d seen of the royal palace, only it had been sheared in half as though with a razor blade, rooms and hallways open to the sea. My father stood in the central hall of the edifice.

“So Jones did instruct you on mental magic! Nevertheless, even that ancient ones’ tutelage hasn’t done more than put you on even footing with me.” He stretched out his hands, and ephemeral banshees of wind screeched out of the open palace. My father was attacking me! His banshees dove for my ship, but I denied them their reality. The arms of Cherry, the juvenile Charybdis, erupted from around my ship and dissipated the banshees as they swiped through them.

When those arms grabbed at the structure of my father’s palace to pull it all into my sea, however, blades of air cut through the arms readily and they didn’t regenerate until they’d returned across the demarcation between our split mindscapes.

My father didn’t try another attack immediately. His palace sunk down a little lower so he finally was at eye level with me. He studied my ship closely, as well as the corpses on board. One was standing very close to me – I recognized it as the woman aboard the Mockingbird I’d tried to have mercy on by numbing her to pain before killing her.

There were many faces that haunted my dreams, but her tears could always be counted on.

My father was staring hard at the mental representation I was saddled with. Slowly, the thing faded and crumbled to dust on the sea breeze. My father and I looked at each other – both of our expressions inscrutable.

“I don’t suppose you could make the others go away, too?” I said offhandedly.

My father let out a breath he’d been holding, and the representation of the woman snapped back into place on my deck. Too bad – I would have liked to be able to spend time in the mental realm again without their constant reminders. Darius sat down where he was and crossed his legs: a traditional meditative pose.

I copied him and took a deep breath. “I never set out to get revenge on you. The quest in Tulisang was just as much a surprise for me. Stars, I’d sold myself on being perfectly happy never knowing who you were or seeing your face. I didn’t mean to cause the cascade of things that happened when I accepted Jones’ ultimatum, I’ve just been trying to ride out the waves ever since, you understand? Once I got the quest, I had to face my feelings a bit more, but I still never had any intentions of pursuing it …”

I rambled, trying to explain things to my father. Trying to create some bridge we could use to communicate. I didn’t notice the sea behind me turning brown and filling in as soil, not until the rocking of my ship stopped.

I cut off what I was saying and shot to my feet even as the masts grew bark and limbs. The steps turned into a stone waterfall, the cleats into flower bushes, and the deck into a manicured lawn.

That bastard! While I was opening up my heart, he was subverting me? I called out to my power to define the realm around me, but it felt distant and muted.

“Harumph,” Darius stood, dusting himself off. “That’s better. Now we can have a real talk.”

As he said ‘real talk’ a cocoon of air wrapped around me and hugged me tight, restricting my movements.

“Domenic, you may be a product of your circumstances but that doesn’t change a simple fact: we are at odds with each other. We are against each other at a greater level than father and son – we represent two different factions, ideals of different ages! The way things are when such battles occur is not complicated. Whoever has more power; whether it manifests as higher levels, more skills, better equipment, or just plain better luck takes the victory and writes the history. In the face of such a simple answer, no personal stake or emotional investment is needed.” My father leaned close and said quietly, “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to enjoy putting you down and dragging your wretched body through the king’s own palace for how you’ve screwed up my life!”

I’d been trying to fight the sheet of air that bound me, but the sheer venom in Darius’ voice shocked me. It … broke something inside me. A piece of me – of every man – that wants to hear their father’s support. ‘You’re a good man,’ ‘You did well,’ ‘I’m proud of you,’ these are phrases every son wishes to hear. Instead, I was hearing my father spit out the words that had lingered in my insecurities for my whole life.

I wasn’t wanted.

I set my teeth and pulled on my curse, and one of the skeletal specters standing idly on the lawn/deck turned aggressively to my father. It took a hard effort on his part that pulled his immediate attention away from me, but my father caused each specter to be forced away or transmuted. His mental magic was more powerful than my curse, here.

But what was I, apart from a cursed sailor? What did I have beyond what I’d been forced to become?

Fear that it was all over and doubt that I had any value flooded me. I’d escaped my ship, I’d escaped the direct control of Davy Jones … all to fall at the hands of my own father. The fear of impending doom rose up in me like when I’d been tortured at the hand of Lawless Jack.

The memory of how I’d suffered in those hours of terror-debuffed mindlessness brought up the memory of how the waters of the sea had taken that terror from me.

I wasn’t just a luckless sailor who’d been cursed by Jones. I was a sailor who’d devoted everything to the sea, and been gifted a perk in turn: Heart at Sea.

I remembered the words Marcus Renshaw had told me so long ago: “Rip the land apart to make room for the sea if you have to but keep your power base always in mind.”

“I am not a product of my circumstances, father.” I said, feeling my connection to the sea even as I was stifled here in my father’s mindscape. “I am a product of my decisions, and I for one will take responsibility for my actions!”

An ocean forced upward from deep below, threatening to rip my father’s entire mindscape asunder. He was not impotent, and turned his focus to holding the land together and denying the force under our feet.

And I let the heart of the ocean pour out from my own body.

My father wasn’t expecting to be caught on two fronts, thinking he was stymying me by pitting himself against the fountains of the deep. As I let the sea flow through me, as I let myself be the sea, his mindscape was flooded. The half-palace was drowned, and my father lost the battle against the waters ripping the land apart.

We were in my domain, now!

Darius tried to pull us back into his own, but couldn’t. He tried to flee to it without me, but I could now deny him that like he’d just been able to deny me. He wasn’t an amateur, and lacking the power of his mindscape accepted the reality of mine and turned on me with the power of an air mage.

Anyone who’d think that an air mage was useless underwater had never applied themselves. My father produced a sphere of air around himself so he could breathe, then thrust his hands outward casting a spell of sound.

Sonic damage ripped through me, carrying over to my real body as psychic damage. I froze ice as a shield around me. It muted the damage for a moment before shattering. I cast an amplified thunderclap of my own, immune to my own effect. Somehow the forces of my spell and his cancelled each other out. I shot towards him on a jet of water. He lifted a hand and cast a finger-width pulse of air at me. I froze all the water between me and him, and his little spell broke through several feet of ice! If I’d relied on a normal shield it would have punched right through!

Did he have spells for these things outside of the mental realm? How would I manage against him there? I’d have to hope the spell was so mana-intensive he couldn’t use it reliably.

I summoned a hundred watery arms around me, he surrounded himself with high-speed rotating blades of air. I try to suck him into a whirlpool, he turns insubstantial. I try to launch spears of ice at him, he dodges like a falling leaf. We counter each other at every step. Some things we do are the framework of spells, where he has a broader repertoire. Others are a manipulation of the world around us, which I currently control.

We’re in a near stalemate until I tried something that I hadn’t even begun practicing the spellform of in reality: dehydrate. It was a slow spell, and at early levels didn’t have a powerful effect. Expert water mages who studied it, however, could turn an enemy into a dry husk.

I began to pull the very liquid from my father’s blood. He flinched and tried to run, but could not flee faster than I could pursue. He tried to teleport away, but there was nowhere in this vast ocean we were in that I couldn’t see.

He dropped the field of air around himself, letting the ocean touch him. I felt the effectiveness of what I was doing drop, but this was my mindscape. If I wanted to pull the water from someone while we were in the middle of the ocean, they would turn dry as dust.

My father shouted in pain as he felt the damage I was doing to him – and to his real body.

I was slowly killing my father.

Did I want him dead?

He certainly wanted me dead.

In agony as his skin cracked and bled, then stopped bleeding, my father cast a spell out of desperation: lightning.

I’d seen that using shocking touch underwater turned it into an area of effect spell. I’d seen that when lightning was cast at me and struck the surface of the water, it was redirected to diffuse across the surface.

I’d never seen an underwater lightning bolt. It defied reality, and I don’t think either of us knew what to expect.

The answer? Pain. The water turned to cold liquid fire, flashing white under my clenched eyelids. It didn’t last more than a moment and the action caused my father to take even more damage at the epicenter, but it shook my focus enough that I dropped my dehydration spell and even lost partial control of my domain.

I grabbed control of it again, but my father had been waiting for such an opportunity and held onto it. He did not try and reinsert his palace on land. He chose to cut the infinite depths of the ocean in half, leaving a realm of infinite sky. He brought his will to bear on keeping it in place as he took to the skies, flying through the air.

Air was part of my magic, too, and I found that I couldn’t oppose him as easily as if his will had been an antithesis to my own. Fine, let him have a sky. Let the elements make war.

We resumed our battle, and created a hurricane. Even without our direct manipulation, battle, struggle and fury were at the forefronts of our minds and leaked out in a form that us sailors knew too well. Tadra mutated our split mindscapes into a storm that would eclipse the monstrosities that built up along the Passive Ocean. Towering cliffs of water created canyons which the wind howled through. My father and I fought like elemental spirits, leaning more and more on our specialized fields of magic as we tired.

Father and son; each of us had our own mistakes and redemptions, both of us sought to force the other into submission. He wanted to erase me as the blight on his honor – redeem himself once more for the approval of those sitting in palaces. I wanted to force him to acknowledge me, to understand the conflict I’d dealt with as a boy, to just bloody LISTEN!

Whether it was because my father was flagging, or because I held the edge of having an affinity for air as well as water, I pulled out ahead. I shot from a wave and tackled my father out of the sky and into another wave – which was quickly bisected by air as my father fought back. We fell into the depths of the sea even as my father tried to force a field of air down around us. The result was like the eye of a storm drilling through the world – tumultuous water and air forming a storm wall around us as I pulled my father close and said what I had to say.

“I wanted you to be there! I wanted to love you! Even when I was the best seaman in port, I wanted to know if you would have approved of me. I was a man’s man when I approached level 10 and investigated professions, yet I still wanted to know what you would have thought!”

His fists were clenched around my shirt as we fell together through the soaking mists. His eyes held his anger, but he met my gaze as I asked him the question that was sitting like a dagger in my heart:

“Why didn’t you want me?”

To his credit he thought about my question, the moments passing through an eternity.

He didn’t have an answer that I could accept.

“You were a mistake, the consequences of a youthful dalliance that never should have happened.”

My heart seized with more pain than Jones ever put me through. Tears blurred my vision as I roared with the tempest in the pain and anger of rejection.

I withdrew from Tadra, fleeing the mental battlefield. My father didn’t try and force the battle, just as eager to escape as I was. We returned to our awareness in his cabin. I’d fallen to my knees, and he’d slumped back into his chair.

My health was at half though my body was unharmed, the psychic damage having drained my HP’s directly. My clothes and eyes were dry, though the latter were only so for a moment.

I’d exposed myself because I’d had to know after a lifetime of burying the issue, but my father had buried a dagger in my vulnerability. I was a powerhouse on the sea, but still vulnerable to my father’s words.

What did I want now? Did I want to kill him? Surely it would be fitting for the pain he’d caused me. Earlier I’d lost the desire because my need to know overwhelmed everything else, but now would I be filled with bloodlust?

I didn’t want to kill him. Not even after all the pain he’d inflicted on me, I truly didn’t want it. Why not? I couldn’t know: perhaps it was a reaction to having killed too many, perhaps it was because as terrible as he’d been at it, he was my father. I didn’t care. I’d decided what I was going to and I was going to walk away.

My father had been at only a sliver of HP when we’d returned, having taken a greater deal of damage during our mental battle than I. He’d also been low on mana, the privacy spell he’d cast continuing to drain him for the duration of our engagement. However, he’d had a health potion tucked into a drawer and downed it while I reflected, his HP steadily improving.

I stood and wiped my eyes. “I forgive you.”

“What?” he rasped.

“I forgive you!” I snapped, my tone a contrast to the words. “I’m not accepting any weight I don’t have to: and that includes your abandonment. As far as I’m concerned, you can have your wish now. Be free of me.”

He took no relief in my words. If anything, his face darkened more. “You think that your forgiveness will rectify the problems you’ve caused – the problem your very existence poses? No,” he stood, steadying himself on his desk. “No, ‘with power comes authority, with great power comes obligation.’ Cast off seed or not, you are my problem and I will fix this!”

I’d heard the quote he used on power cited by nobles before, usually the Marstons. I’d always thought their authority and obligations were hypocrisy after seeing the way they treated my mother, and had developed my own version of it. “With great power comes great suffering – usually by those who don’t have the power.”

My father – no, Cyrell Darius – growled and ended his spell keeping everything in this cabin private.

Then he pulled out an unknown flask from the open drawer on his desk and flung it to the deck at my feet.

When I was aware again, I was looking at the bright stars above. I thought the wetness I felt was the sea, but something wasn’t quite right about it. It was blood.

My blood.

I should probably care more about that.

Shouts were ringing across the deck, and someone helped me to me feet – Travis.

“Y’allright?” He said, hoisting me to my feet. He looked at my face closely, then prodded my head.

That hurt!

I slapped his hand away and reached into my bag for a healing potion. My bag wasn’t there. Speaking of which, one of my boots was gone too. What …?

I spotted my bag nearly tucked behind a barrel – no sign of my boot – and stumbled to it. Travis tried to help me, or rather restrain me, but I shrugged him off and picked up my bag, feeling the security it brought again. I’d gone without it most of my life, but after the number of times it had saved my life since I found it I never wanted it out of reach.

Travis helped me sit on the barrel while I downed a pair of health potions, one chasing the other. “What happened?”

“Dunno. Ye went inna Captain’s cabin and shut yerselves in quiet-like, then the next thing ‘boom!’ Ne’er saw anything like that,” he said with a nod towards the cabin.

I couldn’t say I had either, but it was easy to imagine. The cabin looked like a sphere of force had blown outwards and tried to break the cabin into the same shape. I’d leanred enough to know that there was magic wielded by a caster, and then there were things like the Captain had thrown – items usually within the purview of only the wealthy or powerful. The door had been blown off its hinges, and now lay in tow sections on the deck. I assumed the doorway had been my egress – though not without injury.

What of Darius? Had he thrown the flask as a suicidal attack? Why would he do that instead of any of the spells he surely had at his command?

“Uhh, sir?” Travis said, looking with me at the Captain’s cabin. “Wha … I mean, ye were discussin’ misser Lockwood’s mutiny, right?”

“Yes.”

“Do, uh … do you think the Captain …?”

His unfinished question was answered a moment later as Captain Darius stumbled through the broken doorway. He was bleeding, with glass still embedded in his skin and once again low on HP. His eyes locked on me with murderous intent.

I stood and rapidly cast my movement buffs. If my father wished to fight this to the end …

So be it.

Darius threw off the aid of the crew rushing to them with a wordless cry and an air blades spell that he’d developed into a storm of crisscrossing slices that a gymnast would be hard pressed to dodge. I didn’t try, instead summoning a whip of water and using it to lash myself to the rigging and jerk myself out of the way. Men cursed as Darius’ spell indiscriminately cut lines and flesh, fleeing the deck to hide and bandage wounds.

I summoned more liquid arms. I had a full mana pool to play with and most of my health. The Captain was low on both. I dodged around his next large single slice of air, though it sheared two of my whips that I had to re-summon. I landed on the quarterdeck out of his direct line of sight, the ruins of his cabin between me and the stairs.

I heard men shouting at Darius, asking what was going on or telling him he needed aid. He ignored them, appearing at the top of the stairs already partway through the casting for a lightning bolt.

I threw my readied blade.

My dagger sunk into his stomach just between his rib cage and his naval. He clutched at the wound and braced himself against the pain and 21 damage the strike caused. He lifted his eyes to mine as he finished his spell out of spite.

I’d read in one of Marcus’ books that some master air mages rendered lighting moot as a counter-spell by learning how to deflect it. After listening to Mr. Frederick talk about the flow of lightning, I thought that I could learn in the heat of the moment and deny my father his spiteful strike at me.

I was an idiot. I’d never cast lightning before, much less practiced deflecting it. Maybe I did something – the railing where I was steadying my other hand exploded – but I certainly felt that strike as it took 200 HP, once more leaving me dangerously low.

I did have the health to survive it, however. And I stood and met my father’s hateful gaze as he pulled the dagger from his own belly, adding another bleed effect to stack on all his others. He only had a handful of moments left without aid.

Yet he had over a hundred points of mana. His top spells were beyond him, but he could surely muster up something in the moments he had left. I’d have to dodge every strike to squeak by with the health I had …

He didn’t attack me. Instead, he turned towards the horizon facing Antarus as he collapsed to his knees, and used his mana to cast an air spell in the field he’d specialized in: communications. He reached all the way back to his nation to shout his message.

“Beware!” He shouted, clutching at his belly and groaning. “Beware the son of the Sea!”

He groaned again and fell forward on the deck. With his last breath he’d denounced being my father, instead claiming I was of the sea.

I’d laid claim to the name ‘Seaborn’ before I’d even learned my father still lived, however. His last breath wasn’t a twist of the knife in my heart, more like a cry that made me pity the man. For all his capability and power, he’d fled from a responsibility that could have been a joy. He’d fought to the death rather than accept forgiveness.

You have earned the title: Patricide!

Warning, this title carries negative effects in your area.

Looking at my father’s body, then to the horizon he’d called out to, I echoed his words to the world: “Beware of me.”