He believed in it.
Even as he broke it.
Captain Bastian Dreyses was a brute—fierce, feared, carved from salt and smoke. My father, though he never treated me like a son. I joined his crew at fifteen, still half a boy, thinking I might earn his respect.
Instead, I learned the only thing he valued was victory. And the only way to earn it was blood.
Love was weakness. Kindness an open wound.
I was a weapon he forged for his war.
The Atlas was his gospel—until he gutted it like everything else.
He was blood-sworn to Captain Vale, the man who’d saved his life. Bastian repaid that debt by slitting Vale’s throat, stealing his ship, taking his crew, his coin… and his wife. Not just betrayal—Atlas sacrilege. It split the Eastern fleets clean in two, starting a blood feud that bled across years and oceans.
The Pirate Courts made an example of him.
I was there when they dragged him in chains to the Maelstrom Gallows. Salt spray in the air. The crowd pressed close. The sea roared below like it already knew it would be fed. They lashed the anchor chains to him while the judge read the sentence.
He never begged. Never cursed.
Just stared through the crowd like he was still captain—still untouchable.
Then he spat in the judge’s face and laughed—a sound that cut through the wind like steel on bone—right before they tipped him into the deep.
I watched from the front row. The jerk of the chain. The last flash of his face before the water closed over him.
And I felt nothing.
No grief.
No rage.
That kind of emptiness doesn’t fade. It settles into your bones.
The Black Marrow chose me not long after. She wrapped herself around me like a noose. Claimed me before I knew enough to run. I was twenty when I took the helm, hands still trembling, the crew watching like they’d just seen a ghost climb aboard. They didn’t cheer. They didn’t trust a boy with salt barely in his veins. They thought the ship had made a mistake.
Maybe I did too.
But I kept the wheel.
I bled for their loyalty. Fought for their trust. Taught them I wasn’t my father—but I wasn’t soft either. One shattered alliance at a time. One corpse at a time. I turned doubt into fear, fear into respect.
By the time they stopped questioning me, the boy they remembered was long gone.
Only the captain remained.
And beneath it all was a fear carved so deep it felt etched into bone—that I’d become him. That the sea had already gutted from me what it once gutted from him: the softness my mother knew before it drowned.
I saw that fear in my mother's eyes. In the way her gaze lingered too long on my hands—scarred, callused, built for breaking. In the hesitation tucked behind her smile. She never said it aloud, but I knew she was waiting for the moment I’d turn into him completely.
She died not long after I took the Black Marrow.
Alone.
I wasn’t there.
That was when I finally saw him in myself—not the captain, not the myth—but the man who abandoned the only good thing he had.
