I began my life as the son of a merchant captain, floating from island to island with my father seeking solis and saffron while my mother tended the books at home. My father had a nose for spices, picking out the best specimens and haggling like a demon for the lowest prices. My own contribution was less valuable, simply recording and indexing the prices and volumes of shipments. Most of my time was spent wastefully, practicing dueling with the sailors and gamblling my take of the profits my father accorded me. Skill with the axe and chain was my focus in those days, and I fancied myself quite skilled with them.

This particular day, my father had gone to a meeting with a new merchant group who had started to work the isles we had taken as our exclusive territory. His intention was to set a timetable with them that left both of our groups happy, so that neither ship would dock at a port that had already been cleaned out. I was nursing a hangover, so he sent me away with the promise that we would have dinner together to discuss the deal. With me were Alphonso and Ricardo, the two youngest sailors on the ship aside from myself.

Alphonse was a thin, tall man with jet black hair and eyes. He was apprenticed to our quartermaster, and his sinewy limbs concealed an explosive strength. In our duels, he favored a hook and truncheon, making him a hard target for my chain.

Ricard was almost aggressively average, brown hair, brown eyes, brown clothes. He was the son of our navigator, and his prowess with magic of wind and wave was outpacing his mother’s. He duelled rarely, but when he did, his cutlass and buckler style was an acrobatic, stunning sight.

“Thomas?” started Ricard, “when were we to be back at the ship? I was distracted by a sprite when Joseph was going over today’s timetable.”

I shrugged. “Mid-afternoon, but I’m sure they won’t miss us. We aren’t loading till tomorrow morn, and the decks are being resealed and enchanted. We’d just be in the way.”

“Easy for you to say,” Ricard said as he and Alphonse stood. “If you’re late, your father will sigh. If we’re late, we’ll be scrubbing the head for weeks.”

“Fine,” I sighed, rising as well. “I’ve a flask of Jarl Untervin’s finest in my quarters that would take the edge off of the skull-knocker anyway. Come lads, let’s go bother the cook for a game.”

With a laugh, we set out from the hilltop terrace we had used for our recovery. The walk back to the docks was a short one, though we made it longer by greeting the ladies who were lucky enough to cross our path. We had to drag Alphonse away from a well endowed seamstress who had called him over. He left her with a wink as we pulled him away.

As we approached the docks, there was a large crowd being held back by several burly men in leathers. Smoke curled over the western dock, where we were moored. I looked at my two companions and nodded at the ladder to the shore beneath the docks. We snuck behind the crowd and climbed down the ladder. Ricard shook his head “what could have caused a fire on the dock? Why would enforcers be blocking the fire brigade?”

“Hell if I know, but we’re getting the ship cast off until it dies down,” I growled, “if we have to load by barge, that’s still better than the ship burning. Our flame seals were being reapplied, we’re going to burn if the dock does.”

We jogged beneath the docks, growing more worried as we went. The smell wasn’t burning pine, which suggested that it was a burning ship, as the docks were old pine. It took several minutes to navigate the shoreline, and if it hadn’t been for the strong breeze Ricard whipped up, we’d have died from the smoke stopping our lungs. As we approached our ship, our fears were realized. The foredeck was ablaze, and for some reason none of our sailors were extinguishing it. Worse still, the closer we got, the more it became apparent that the shouts we heard were sounds of battle, not firefighting efforts.

“What thugs would be bold enough to attack the Lucent?” asked Alphonse, as he drew his hook from beneath his coat.

“I don’t know, but they’re going to regret it,” I said, whirling my chain from its coil around my waist. I knelt down and boosted Alphonse up to the side of the ship, where he began climbing with his hook. A few feet up, he offered his hand to Ricard, who I boosted as well. With both of our strengths and a massive burst of wind he called, he all but flew to the deck, where he dropped a line for us to climb.

As we reached the top, Ricard was already locked in combat with a man wearing a hounskull helm, chain, and a breastplate, wielding a halberd. On a caravel. Needless to say, Ricard was having fun dancing through the rigging and pushing the fool toward the rail. Knowing that he had it in hand, I searched for my own opponent.

Across the deck, three men were holding the gangplank with quick halberd thrusts. All of the were equipped identically to the first, which was surprising. No port thug should be able to afford good steel armor, nor would any group so drilled as these be caught raiding ship holds. These were mercenaries, expensive ones at that. Alphonse was running to the hold to retrieve his steel mace and help take care of the shouting from below, so I moved in toward the gangplank to help our crew board.

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The shouting of the crewmen before them held the attention of my targets, so I was able to bring myself to just behind the furthest man back, and wrapped my chain around his throat as he went for a lunge. His weight, and that of his armor, all but pulled me over, but I dug in my heels and twisted, bringing him down to the deck. I kicked him into the railing, freeing my chain as his companions turned to look at me, just as I had intended. That moment of distraction was enough for Jacquard, one of our mates, to rush up the plank and bull one of the men overboard, though he also fell into the water. No real issue there, as we required all of our men to learn to swim, but that was one less fighter to retake the Lucent.

The last mercenary had rounded on me, and with his back to the railing, I was out of easy tricks. The crew surging up the ramp was unarmed except for two men with marlinspikes, so I waved them to the hold with my axe while I lashed at the halberdier’s head with the chain in my other hand. My target and I stood for a long moment, his visor concealing his expression while I tried to grin like a maniac.

“You should surrender,” I said while feinting a lash at his legs, “my father and his men will be more merciful that way.”

“Your father is dead, and so are his guards,” the mercenary said in a low voice. “Soon, you’ll be buried with him.”

I felt a heat building behind my eyes. “You lie, dog. My father couldn’t be safer, the Ameduchi’s could have your whole company strung up with no effort.”

The mercenary laughed, and threw out a quick high low thrust I barely parried with my axe. “Who do you think hired me, boy?”

At that moment, my whole body felt like the blaze that had begun to surround us. Rage at the betrayal warred with the heartache and the fear. I could hear boots thundering up the gangplank behind me, the sound of clattering steel and chain telling me that bad had turned to worse. A flash of something bright had me dropping into a crouch, another halberd sailing over my head by inches. I dove and rolled through the flames, their heat strangely not painful, and I rose next to the foremast, now facing five mercenaries instead of just one.

A swirl of wind preceded Ricard landing next to me, bearing several small cuts along his upper arms, and a bandage wrapped around his forearm, just above his buckler. “We’re not getting help from below decks,” he said, gesturing at the blaze consuming the hatch, “they’ll have to put that out before anything in the quarters catches.”

“Right that,” I said with a laugh that I didn’t feel, “my Untervin’s would blow the ship to kindling if it went up.”

Sweat pouring from his face, Ricard shrugged his shoulders and winced. “If nothing else, I’ll take some of these bastards with me.”

I nodded, and we readied ourselves. The mercenaries were spread in a half circle in front of us, waiting for us to either fight or burn. The heat was invigorating, and I was sad to see it go as Ricard called a misty gale from the sea below to extinguish the flames between us and the center man. With a roar, I charged him, swinging my chain in a wide, overhead arc and bringing it down at his head. Ricard was right behind me, his cutlass whistling as he parried a strike from our right.

My chain was blocked with a flourish of the bastard’s halberd, and it tangled with the pole as he dropped it. Before I could capitalize on his disarmament, he drew a short sword with his left hand to parry my wild axe swings. As my rage built, the flames seemed to surge around us, smoke obscuring the sight of the left two men. My target was slowly beaten back as I dropped my tangled chain to wield my axe with both hands. Taking a dueling stance, one hand behind his back, the mercenary turned fully to the defensive, each parry and thrust carefully judged to use the least effort, while my arms were tiring from the assault at an alarming pace.

“Ha!” I heard Ricard shout from my right, a solid popping crunch and scream of pain telling me he’d managed one of his favorite tricks. The closest right opponent had collapsed to one knee, the other folded sideways against the deck, and the other was trying to cough up the lungful of water Ricard had condensed inside the poor fool’s throat.

As I turned back toward my own fight, a flash of steel had me jumping to the left. My opponent was kneeling, his right hand poised in a throwing motion. Behind me, I heard a wet smack, followed by a thump. My horror grew, and I looked again, to see the worst. Ricard, face down on the deck, a short steel hilt protruding from his lower spine.

I felt something then that I cannot easily describe, though the magi among you will know what I mean when I say my soul opened up, the rage and pain from torment after torment breaking through the wall between my will and my spirit.

The moment or lifetime, I’m still not sure which, passed through me, and I turned back to the now standing mercenary. He knew that I was finished. He knew nothing. I cried out, a wordless, primal call, and the fire answered.

Hungry flames leapt from the deck and covered the screaming fuel before me, no longer content with a meal of wood and pitch. I turned to my left and waved my hand, where the smoke parted way for its master. Two more sacrifices watched their kin sizzle and burn. One removed it’s metal cap, retching across the deck, while the other began to turn and run. I wasn’t willing to let good fuel go to waste, though, so I sent a portion of my remaining blaze to chase down the runner.

The final one, wiping its meat hole, stood and raised it’s spiked pole. I sighed, almost sad to see the foolish fuel try to escape its fate. My rage abated for a moment, and I pointed at the mercenary bastard with my axe. “Drop the weapon and surrender, or I’ll do the same to you,” I said coolly.

With a shudder, the man dropped his halberd beside him, and lay on the ground with his hands behind his head. “Don’t want to die like that, demon, please have mercy.”

I cocked my head at that, then looked around. Two men were cinders and blackened bone encased in slagged steel. My ship was still on fire, but that was ended with a thought and a clenched fist. The smoke dissipated as an afterthought, I walked to the hatch where the crew were still holding buckets filled with seawater. The deck was scorched, many planks were all but eaten through, our sails were tatters of charred canvas, and the foremast was going to need new rigging; but the ship was still floating, and all but the last of our boarders were dead, dying, or disabled. The crewmen at the front, however, were staring at me with a mixture of fear and awe.