They were sailing towards Prosper, from the West to the East. That meant the winds were against them, but the Shore Begone was a carrack, a sort of intermediate sized vessel between the gigantic galleons and the smaller, more maneuverable, low-hulled schooners. Its three masts had auxiliary sails that caught and turned the wind to be able to sail even against the prevailing air currents.
Ulric wouldn't have thought that five professional sailors, three somewhat acceptable warriors, and one rookie Glade Chief would be able to handle the largish vessel. Reality was, in one of those rare turns, not so disappointing, the crack team guided the running of their carrock like a sculptor guides their chisel. Erswinn had picked his men well, as had Nanya. Their Captain was a wizard of the wheel, turning the boat so surely into good wind that it seemed like he could see it. On Varda? Maybe he could.
It took three days of learning the ropes, literally, before he was good for much, but Ulric was pulling his weight now. Tying lines, pulling sail, even helping to rudder through rough surf, he was having maybe the most outright ebullient time of his life. Sailing was now his third or fourth favorite thing.
Few things would have surprised Ulric Einar like discovering that he greatly enjoyed being a pirate.
He was a man of letters, learning, careful calculus, and scientific rigor. Or had been. And, if the last eight days of travel on the Shore Begone were to be used as evidence against him, a love for the open seas and disregard for life and limb that would have put him on any sea dog's crew.
Vatyn was a gift to the world. Harsh, choppy seas, changeable winds, incredibly forceful currents, it had it all. And the storms. Ye gods the storms.
********************Three Days Out From Bartala, Shore Begone*********************
From his perch on a bit of rigging that had needed tending, under the watchful guidance of one of Clan Bitznez old salts, he watched the roiling black clouds gather, felt the push of winds that said the weather system was going to blow in on them in a couple of hours. The sailors were taking it seriously, lowering sails, battening down the hatches, or whatever the fuck nautical people were on about when they were making sure the bulkheads were sealed. He finished the knot he’d been working on, much, much more slowly than the canid Beastkin. Despite their large, powerful mitts, they were deft from practice.
Waves grew choppy, he heard them slapping against the ship, felt the pitch of the boat change with increasing frequency. The captain of the ship was turning into the waves, riding them more evenly, now that they were decided that going around the blow wasn’t going to happen. The nasty business of dark skies ahead was only the tip of the iceberg. The entire horizon was dark, a big one was rolling through. Thusly set in their course, the ship was turned to ride it out.
A throaty tenor above him, one of the crewmen sitting in the crow’s nest yelled, “Friend of the Clan!” to get his attention, then pointed a claw to the deck below while they shouted, “Get below! And lash yourself in your hammock! Vatyn has a test for us today, to see if we are worthy to sail her!”
He did as ordered. He liked sailing, and learned quickly, but he still had to be told what to do, and the heightening winds promised that, when they were under that set of clouds, he probably wouldn’t be able to hear what the crewmen said. Already, dark palls of grey, curtains across the sky, were falling as heavy rain cut loose from the storm.
Hand over hand, bare feet finding the next step of sturdy rope, he retreated from the rigging to the not quite polished deck below. Solid hardwood gave him a sense of security. At the instruction of the Wolven clansmen, he went below, finding the hammock he’d been assigned in the hold. The hold held little, at the moment. Mostly foodstuffs. Empty barrels, some, though most of those were being hauled above, lashed to the deck to fill with rainwater. They shouldn’t want for that, not by what he had seen.
Ulric went to his hammock, a surprisingly comfortable affair of canvas and netting, and got into it. He wasn’t alone, many of the sailors had already completed their duties and were already ensconced. That didn’t worry him. The sailors ran a bit of rope through the netting of their hammocks, in a cross, to make a harness and slipped inside of it, effectively tying themselves in place. That worried him. It meant that the pitch of the ship was going to exit safety thresholds. On a boat this big, that kind of angle meant big, big ass waves. He found the little line of rope tied to the hammock, whose purpose he had not understood before, but now did, and mimicked the tying of the harness over his chest that would keep him from falling as the ship buoyed over the waves.
Then, anticlimax, he waited. The wolf faced crewmen laughed and japed, made light. There was a slight hint of worry there though. These sailors knew what they were about to experience. It was Serious Business. That didn’t stop them teasing one another, bragging, or declaring the greatness of their Clan though. Fatalism was a large part of the identity of the professional sailor. They knew the sea was greater than they, knew it swallow them all whole if it desired. What would be, would be. Which was not, unfortunately, a skill Ulric had and he was turning into an anxious mess as the swells beneath the ship began to take on a palpably larger note, and the sound of the wind on the hull grew loud, resonant, like they were inside the body of a cello.
“Here she comes now, you mangy seadogs!” the Cook taunted, “I hope you ate well, before we join the sand below!”
What a comfort.
The Cook, a cook by virtue of being the oldest and least physically fit of the bunch, not for any particular gift over a stewpot, as all here knew well, was not wrong about the storm’s arrival.
Gusting winds pummeled the ship. The sails would have been ripped clean from the rigging had they been up, even the semi-magical fibers of the rope and canvas used on Varda unable to withstand what had to be at least two hundred kilometer per hour windspeeds.
A gut-wrenching rise lifted the floor seventy degrees and the daring shouts of sailors filled the hold as Ulric clenched his hands around the harness and they rode down what felt like a mountainous wave, his weight held almost entirely by the harness as they fell.
Like the rollercoasters of the Before, the ship barreled down a massive trough before rising up an equally massive crest, the Captain at the wheel on deck guiding the Shore Begone through the teeth of the storm. Rain was sheeting down outside, the roar of it filling the air. The Captain must have had gills to breathe out there, he mused between appallingly sudden changes in tilt.
Ulric’s core pulsed in his chest and he looked down between the clawlike hands gripping harness for dear life, to see why the little magic engine in his body had bucked. Light from a porthole flared brilliant silver and he knew.
Thunder boomed, loud as anything he’d ever heard. Deafening crashes of sound started and did not stop.
And, here on the open water, in the heart of Prespang, Ulric was again in the presence of Ceraun.
He felt it, gathering all around. He felt it sitting atop the atmosphere, binding sea to sky. Pulses of his core mirrored by pulses of lightning from the sky, lances of power that split the darkness to the beat of his heart.
Time vanished and it was all Ulric could do to hang on to himself. Ceraun was close. The memories of his awakening came back to him fresh and, not knowing what else to do, Ulric worked his core’s energies, forming the shell that was designed to isolate you from outside mana while you stabilized your transforming nexus.
[Core Capacitor]
Ulric shed the mana within himself, all once. He emptied himself of the power that chased itself inside him, wrapping it around the ship, eyes closed and unaware of what he did at a conscious level. All he knew was he had to do something or he was going to vanish, carried away by the storm. Ceraun was close.
The shell, after an eternal moment, snapped together, and the call to oneness became quieter, less insistent. Peals of thunder didn’t come any slower, nor did the flashes of light that accompanied the rise and fall of the deck get any dimmer. But he wasn’t being stripped away from himself, and, just right now, that was good enough.
“I’m in a Faraday cage.” He half giggled to himself, unheard thanks to the sturm und drang outside.
It was an island of safety in a way. Wrapped in his mana, the electromagnetic essence would pass around the ship, would effectively ignore it. They were safe. As long as the ship didn’t come apart in the towering waves and drown them all.
Hours passed, they had to have, but he didn’t know. All his life hung on holding the shell together, maintaining the separation from the force that motivated lightning mana. Ulric never even noticed when he stopped rocking back and forth in his harness, when the pitching waves grew calm.
A voice loud right next to him cried, “By my grannies teeth! Is it you holding the lightning out?!”
Ulric opened his eyes and found the Captain, sodden to his bones, fur matted, looking mostly like a drowned dog, looming over him. The others were freeing themselves from their harnesses. It would appear, that the worst of the storm was passed.
He couldn’t feel the Prime’s influence anymore, not even a whisper. The pulses in his core were gone too. Like unclenching a fist held too long, it was difficult to unwind the shell, but he let it go.
“I uh, probably,” Ulric said, not completely with it yet, “Sorry.”
“Hah! Sorry he says!” grinned the wolfish features, and a hand clapped down on the meat of his shoulder, then repeated it five or six times, pummeling him with enthusiasm as the soggy man laughed uproariously
Many of the other sailors joined in, sharing their Captain’s gaiety.
He was starting to get his head together, in spite of the throbbing ache of holding the shell for so long and draining himself of mana to do it. They were out of the storm. Holy shit.
“Come on up then, let’s have a look at you! I was certain we were headed for the bottom, cooked before drowned!” the Bitsnez shipmaster announced, clawed hands gently helped him up.
A little wobbly, partly because he was in mana exhaustion and that carried with it one hell of a headache, and, partly, because he was busy putting the experience into perspective, he let himself be guided up the stairs to the ship’s lower deck, to the sight of clear blue majesty overhead, and only a few scattered whisps of cloud. The seas were calm, Vatyn’s surface not quite still, but not choppy.
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“Wow!” Ulric ejaculated, “What a banger!”
He turned to see the crewmen beginning to ascend to their posts, untying the sails, preparing to get the ship underway again. Ulric focused his attention on the Captain, who wasn’t quite dripping water, but who was still most certainly soaked.
“It worked then? Ceraun, it couldn’t get through to the ship?” Ulric asked, unnecessarily.
Instead of suggesting he might be slow, the Captain just nodded his muzzle, and turned to look out over the ocean, toward the line of receding black clouds, the storm that had passed them over.
“I don’t know exactly what you did, Friend of Clan Bitsnez, but, yes, it worked.” The mature Beastkin told him, beginning to squeeze out his tail as he did.
“Like nothing I ever saw, that one. Lightning fit to fill the skies, I didn’t need to feel the waves beneath me, I could see where I needed to go, even through the rain!” the Grey furred man said, shaking his head.
“I knew we’d had it,” the Bitsnez clansman said, laughing at the close shave, as the old salts did, “Skylances like that, one hit and I would have been killed, the wheel unattended, we’d have rolled, gotten buckled by the sea, broken up and tossed beneath. And then, just about the time I figured to shit myself, a shimmering violet light encased the ship, and all the lightning that came near traveled to it and vanished into the water.”
The Beastkin looked to him wonderingly and concluded, “I never seen anything like it. And hope not to again.”
“You and me both, brother.” Ulric agreed.
********************Present Day, Shore Begone************************************
Shore Begone was a hell of a boat. He’d underappreciated the ship builder’s art before. Not anymore. Two more storms the fine vessel had weathered, though nothing like what happened that first time.
Ulric saw more distant ones that might have come close though. Fortunately, the winds carried them wide. The seas out there, beneath vast thunder heads, saw the fingers of the Prime Elemental of lightning reaching down to touch the water. Raining bolts that flickered from cloud to wave, or danced across the clouds in webs that boggled the mind for their scale.
They'd skirted narrowly around a few electrical storms that turned isolated regions of water into a plasma lamp. No ship could have survived that insane lightning rain.
It was still sobering to know how eerily close death had been.
Later that day, after escaping the Vatyn’s challenge, they’d come across another ship, or what had been one. It was scorched kindling, drifting in the waves. A multitude of bodies still floated with what was left of their vessel, Humans and Beastkin alike.
Shore Begone sailed past that reminder of the fickleness of the seas and no one laughed for a while.
It’s funny how not all dyings are sad things though. Not really funny “Haha”, more like funny “This is how it is, so get over it”
The day after the storm, four days outside of the harbor of Bartala, which Ulric had closed behind them by breaking the levers that lowered the ship blocking gates, they encountered several ships bearing the flag of Prosper's Magistrates, the enforcers of the Merchant Lord's laws.
Like a combination of lawyer, judge, and executioner, those individuals were the direct will of Prosper, writ large. Ulric smiled when he considered that three of them, besides the one that was likely still running through Bartala's gutters at the moment, were now food for whatever Piscium inhabited fair Vatyn's salty waters. Of those, he had seen many, and even caught a few, when the crewmen showed him how to deep-sea fish. He was pretty sure they were joking about catching a Leviathan that would eat the ship for his trouble.
He knew at least a couple of those specimens were some godsdamned spooky looking sharks. One of the fuckers was transparent, right up until they opened their gnashing jaws. Then it was all hard lines, black eyes, raking fins, and about four rows of serrated teeth that did to meat what a wood chipper does to…well…basically anything. The other one was a little less sinister and more overtly hazardous, since its long tail fin, like a thresher shark on steroids, could sling compressed water blades that could bite through hardened wood hulls.
[Blue Slashtails] was what those were called and the entire crew mobilized to put harpoons into the water when a trio of them came at the boat from the water line. The water blade would destabilize beneath the surface of the sea, pulled apart by the water around it. Just above the surface though, it performed only a bit worse than Ulric's [Water Jet] spell, which could carve steel. Or [Forest Lord] bone. Needless to say, a few of those to the Shore Begone's structure and they'd have the Vatyn spilling into the boat, some fifty kilometers away from solid ground. At least the bastards tasted good. Shark fin soup was a euphemism for ecoterrorism in his homeworld but it was damned fine eating here on Varda. The rest of the animal got used in a variety of ways, which fascinated the land lubber from a distant world.
The oil from its swim bladder was of particular interest. The stuff burned like absolute hell fire. Ulric's mana sense pinged hard on Incendere, once the thick, goopy, tar-like substance was freed from the organ that housed it. Sounding off against it with his core, he would have thought he was looking at a campfire in a leather pouch. Wild stuff.
Some people liked the teeth, finger length, incredibly sharp and serrated for arrow heads. Ulric thought the Iriel'en Hunters had the better idea with their hand long almost miniature spear head arrow tips. Whatever got shot with one of those stayed shot. Vardan monsters didn't like to give you second tries at killing them before they played some nasty trick or another to take you with them. The little teeth did make reasonable shave razors though so his beard was kept under control while the crew traveled.
Anyhow, his thoughts wondered again.
Ulric had found that, in terms of ship to ship battle, if the two ships came to a boarding scenario he had the ultimate trump card. [Stormfire] was the pinnacle of ship destroying technology from a middle range. The magic used lightning mana to ionize the air around a core of fantastically hot fire, feeding the flames as it traveled, heating itself and gaining destructive power, until it tore itself apart and evaporated, somewhere in the four hundred meter mark. At two hundred fifty or so meters though, the lance of Ceraun infused Incendere was incredibly violent in its combustion. A wooden vessel hit by the spellform was not seaworthy after. Period.
That initial hypothesis was tested against those first four of Prosper's vessels.
The day had started peacefully enough but the call of their spotter broke that up, sometime early on the fifth day away from Bartala.
“Flags!” Shouted the Clanswoman from the crow’s nest, sending the crew into a frenzy.
The Captain angled the rudder to take them slightly closer, just close enough for their spotter to identify the flags as being those of Prosper. Once that had been ascertained, the Captain asked Ulric what he wanted to do.
“How do you lads feel about piracy, when it comes to Prosper’s ships?” He answered that question with his own.
A good few cheers rose up and the friendly grin that he’d found a little scary from wolf faces became a little scarier. That grin was not quite as friendly.
“Since you offered, Friend of Clan Bitsnez.” the Captain answered, and cut the wheel the take them on a course that would cut off the ships.
It took a little over an hour and a half to close, even with a good wind. Varda was large and her horizons distant.
The spotter cried “A Magister! Large compliment of Prosper’s thugs to guard him, too!”
After that, a rolling report on the ship’s burdens: heavy on armament, light on cargo. Ulric didn’t know how the Beastkin on high saw from so far with such precision, but she documented weapons, food, camp gear, even wagons and draft animals in number and type too specifically to be guessing. It was a fairly easy puzzle to assemble. All the goods that might permit an army supplied by a city as its base to go abroad with heavy supply. Such as might be the case if you needed to put down a rebellion of Beastkin that had only recently been associated with the killing of several of the agents of a malicious Empire. The positions of the crew with regards to piracy sort of hardened up a bit after that.
Ulric offered his assistance in “unleveling” the playing field.
It should be noted, at this point, that Ulric had not so far observed the existence of particularly effective explosive powders. There were a few examples of black powder, although he didn’t even consider that explosive, mostly because it wasn’t. Black powder was incendiary. At best, with the proper refinement, tedious grinding, sifting, and granulating, it could be a somewhat poor secondary.
His manufacture of RDX in Bartala might have been the first demonstration of what a properly purified and applied primary high explosive could do. He wasn’t worried that the alchemist he’d partnered with would attempt to recreate it, the man had a proper regard for his own life. When Ulric had conducted a heating and hammer test on a half teaspoon of material in the man’s presence, the alchemist had promptly noped out from the alchemical lab Ulric had created and wasn’t seen again there.
Some people had sense, Varda, mostly, seemed to breed a generally more sensible folk.
Ulric suspected that those who didn’t managed to create exactly the sorts of accidents that rendered energetics in the Before into something of a niche following of weirdos. Just the kinds of people that went on to become organic chemists. Mention in passing that you were forced to engage with something that had a combination of carcinogenic, toxic, and high sensitivity around those type and you could hear their erections. Psychos.
In any case, what Ulric had not seen on any ship was the presence of cannon. Some pointed questioning of the bosun had it explained that most ship combat was done via ballista, archery, ramming when achievable without destroying or damaging your vessel, and, mostly, a boarding action with bloody sword and axe work.
He took a backseat to the negotiations that were signaled between ships by way of a language of flags, like the signalers on the decks of aircraft carriers, but with a lot more sign language profanity and insults traded. The Captain had asked if Ulric could use his powers to assist in making sure none of those arms or supplies reached the Western Vatyn, where they might be used to permit a campaign against Clan Hora-Bitsnaz and he agreed happily, explaining exactly what services he offered.
After being offered a chance to abandon their ships, all but one to carry men, stripped of sails, to await a pickup from another passing craft, an inevitability since these maritime transport "highways" were much frequented, which offer was rejected, the pair of schooners or ketches, a galleon sitting low and heavy in the water, and a nimble frigate, were sent below.
A flare of Ceraun and Incendere, an ineffectual response from the magic wielding Magister, and the burning vessels were abandoned for the mercy of the seas.
He’d like to have been able to say that nobody died except for the Magister, but that would have been a lie. Many men and women who had placed their faiths, and lives, in Prosper, who had chained their fates to those of the Merchant Lords in their Golden Thrones, were lost. Ulric probably was directly responsible for the deaths of over a hundred. He hadn’t targeted the row boats. Had deliberately given the sailors and warriors an out. But, even so, the galleon in particular was carrying a large detachment of soldiers in its births and not nearly enough room was on the row boats to accommodate all those being carried.
War is hell.
Ulric wasn't fucking around any longer. He didn't need to observe himself an evil in action to destroy its sources. If the Merchant Lords were enabling their rule over the independent City States through the use of this so called "Federated Defense Corp", their own private army, whose main body was right now attempting to fight its way to the Iriel'en Havens, then everybody in that collective military was his enemy.
Similarly, if Prosper used its strangling laws to control food supplies, transportation, communication, and trade, then the Magisters who were scattered about seeing to the enforcement of those laws were all targets, extensions of the Merchant Lords' will.
Hence the piracy.
Three more ships bearing Magisters and the fires of war were destroyed. Only one accepted the offer to cast off sails and remain adrift for pick up. Those were handed a message to bear to their allies: The [Lord of the Ancient Glade] is at war, break with Prosper or join her doom. Melodramatic, but appropriate.
His terrorizing of the high seas fulfilled three distinct purposes: crippling communication, depriving the Merchant Lords' their diffuse presence in Prespang, and taking the ships that fed that fetid empire out of play.
Ah, wait, forgot one, it was also incredibly fun. Fun in a wanton destruction kind of way, in the child pushing over a tower of blocks to see them fall kind of way. All his life, the one in the Before, he'd kept himself on a tight leash, adherent to the society and nation of his birth. He'd tried his hand at fitting in, restraining the growing urge to lash out at the myriad nagging wrongs that seemed to leap out at him, but which so many others either ignored or accepted. Not anymore. Ulric was free now. Free to act, to reach out and strike at the wrongs, to destroy the ones that perpetrated them.
Even better, he had a foe that liked to wear uniforms. White ones, which were easy to spot, and hard to miss.
"Honor!" the Captain of the ship cried, the grizzled sea dog, excusing the pun as they were all Lupid Beastkin, said something in their native tongue before translating, "We have sight of Port Edunshire! Eagle's Perch calls it fifteen leagues out, we can be there by sunsdown if the winds hold steady."
Alas, all good things come to an end. His pirate’s life was over.
These clansmen would be considered criminals when word came back to the Merchant Lords. Hopefully, the combined Clan Hora-Bitsnez would be well away to the remote barely tamed lands of the Outer Reaches. Horan Valley, the much-vaunted by Varrock domain of Clan Hora would not be easy to strong arm with the Orlethrem tying up most of its forces.
Ulric wasn't so idealistic that he thought there would never be a consequence for the actions of rejecting Prosper's authority, but he wasn't also so naïve as to think that it shouldn't be done anyhow. Besides, if he had his way, the Merchant Lords had an expiration date that was sooner come than later, including whoever was pulling the strings behind the scenes, running their centuries long con on Prespang.
In any case, he would disembark out of sight of this "Port Edunshire" and make his way on foot. The Shore Begone would turn, taking its brave crew back towards the Western coasts of the Vatyn, beyond Bartala, and to the small harbor held by Clan Hora-Bitsnez, and he wished them luck.
Resistance on the return trip should be light. There simply weren't many ships left in this part of the world.
After consulting the crew and polling their opinions, Ulric had burned every dock between here and Bartala as they'd gone.
No bullshit, no games, the Shore Begone sailed in just past dusk and sat some hundred meters off shore, with its stern to the ships lining the docks. A flight of flaming arrows fired from the pirate ship announced intentions, a universal notice for noncombatants to get the fuck out of Dodge. Then Ulric used [Core Capacitor], emptying his core completely to raze the port with [Stormfire]. Ships, piers, docks, even some of the stone pylons were obliterated. It wasn't nearly so thorough as his meticulous deconstruction of Bartala, but, then, that had been very personal and he'd had time. When the lightning empowered flames washed over the dockyards it ignited basically anything that burned and spread hungrily, good enough.
Most times the only people on the docks at those hours were guardsmen and he held no sympathy for the instruments aiding Prosper's oppression. All the same, he hoped that not too many people were caught up in the hellscape unleashed on the docks. Prespang's cities along the coast of the Vatyn were being used to fuel the war machine against the Orlethrem and against himself. Ulric was committed now to breaking that machine.
That didn't mean he had to like killing, even if it was supremely satisfying to be directly able to inflict grievous harm against the ones who had caused him, and those he’d called friend, harm. Matters were helped none that he'd once been on the receiving end of a mage's fire and knew the full extent of what he was doing to anybody who happened to be there. It was an odd thing, to savor the destruction of one’s enemies while lamenting their deaths. But [Stormfire] didn’t have a stun setting, and in war, everybody plays for keeps.
The Lupid clansmen were aghast at the scale of his assaults but cheered jubilantly for the destruction of Prosper's hold on the region. They knew what was at stake too: everything. The Merchant Lords would, one day, turn their eyes back on the Clans and would come to erase them, if he and they failed. He was not intending to fail.
That had gone on for the remaining twelve late spring days of his passage from Bartala, which brought them to this last day out at sea, some five hundred nautical leagues from that once great port to here, in the depths of Prespang’s Highlands. Prosper herself only lay some three more weeks by ship, curving around the coast to find the mouth of the Zelas.