#thus the Sail Chart was born

[wraithdolll]

sandwing garbo

[daemon-404]

"Crossbreeding" in Hyrule

Alright, so, this has been bothering me for a while. It's not a new topic, I know, but I figured I might as well put my spin on it. A lot of this is based on vibes alone, but I put as much justification in as I could. Hope this makes sense!

Here's a basic chart for the overview:

Ok, now for specifics (under the cut of course). Apologies in advance if this is offensive to any people who actually study biology as my knowledge is... unreliable (even though I'm very interested in it).

The Easy

Hylian/Sheikah

Hylians and Sheikah are pretty much the definition of "cut from the same cloth."

According to Skyward Sword, the Sheikah are "Hylia's chosen guardians;" they were created alongside Hylians as the sort of "favorite races" of the gods, unlike other species that popped up around the time (Goron, Parella, etc). With the inclusion of the other games, it's clear that they're not minor gods (like dragons or Great Fairies) either, since they appear as and are referred to as a race of people, whereas minor gods are more like magical individuals than a species.

Besides that, they look and behave almost exactly like Hylians, with the only biological difference being that Sheikah can live for an incredibly long time. In SS it might be a little bit encouraged by divine intervention, but with BotW we know for sure it's at least over a century, probably around 200-250 years average. Even that gets more nuanced with, for example, Niko showing up in both The Wind Waker and Spirit Tracks (something of a century later) suggesting that Hylians might be able to live up to around 120 years.

Basically, I don't think it's too bold to assume Hylians and Sheikah are completely compatible and probably biologically function more or less exactly the same way.

Gerudo I

Gerudo appeared significantly later in the timeline, with their first chronological appearance being Ocarina of Time. (I think it's been said that they sailed to Hyrule...?)

In any case, with only one male born every century, they rely on reproducing with other races. This is mentioned in OoT ("They say that Gerudo sometimes come to Hyrule Castle Town to look for boyfriends," Gossip Stone) and made canon in BotW, with the marriage of Rhondson and Hudson of Tarrey Town.

Additionally, their children are always 100% Gerudo (source).

This means they're not hybrid species. They just.. for lack of better way to explain, need to be fertilized to have their children. Generally that comes from Hylians, and thus probably Sheikah as well- which would make sense, seeing as all three of them are almost exactly the same in appearance- but maybe not limited to them. I'll get back to this later.

Basically, all of the the human-like species can have kids with each other.

Cool! But that's almost definitely not what anyone was wondering about.

-

The Less Easy

Zora

Here we are, the most "vibes-based" speculations I have for this post.

Zora... fish people, right? Wrong. What the hell are these things.

Scales, eggs, mammary glands (are they just fatty deposits???), both fish and sea mammal type tails and builds, even in the same family (Sidon is a shark but Mipha's a dolphin????)... not to mention that apparently, at one point, on the official zelda.com, it was said that they're not mammals.

Biological nightmares, that's what they are.

After a lot of consideration, they (specifically the Sea Zora, like in BotW, OoT and TP) are scaled, egg-laying mammals (both are technically possible IRL although not at once), due to most Sea Zora having mammal type head-tails. The difference in anatomy, patterns and resemblance to other species is just... something that happens. Maybe it's due to magic. Really, it's just a character design, video game thing. This isn't the 100% science based dragon game after all and I can't exactly hold them to evolutionary logic.

As you can probably tell, I'm leaning heavily on the "not mammals" thing being taken out of their description. After all, it was apparently over 10 years ago and things (namely: BotW coming out) have been changed. The devs change things after the fact a lot, so I don't think it's out of the question.

(I totally agree with this post by the way- I've just adjusted some things so that they're now specifically mammals and my speculations make a little more sense, even though it doesn't exactly make sense for their evolution. Call it a product of divine intervention... again).

Okay. Now that we've gotten that out of the way... Zora (and, consequentially, Rito) technically being mammals (dear Hylia that physically hurt to type) justifies a little bit more crossbreeding.

Due to vibes again, I think Hylians and Zora are male -> female compatible. Something how female Zora just won't give up on wanting to marry certain Hylians...

I think Zora have most if not all the Zora-specific traits in the egg itself, and Hylian sperm just happens to be compatible to kick off the fertilization.

However, male Zora -> female Hylian doesn't strike me as particularly possible, since I think the Zora part might contain Zora-specific features that just won't translate well.

For example (due to vibes of course), I like to think the head-tail is in the male part, making Hylian/Zora hybrid children tailless and Zora/Hylian children a little bit impossible.

insp 1 insp 2

Rito

Unlike the rest of the Hyrulean races, the Rito have an evolution we can track! They first show up- in the middle of their evolution, no less- in The Wind Waker.

They are a race of people that evolved- with the help of severe divine intervention, only a century in by WW's time- from the Zora.

Their evolution looks something like this, by the time of BotW:

During that middle period, I believe they'd be extra compatible with Hylians, fertile offspring and all. Their god-based evolution seems to have done a complete 180, so for the middle of that process where they have Hylian-like builds I think this makes sense. I mean... just look at them. That's a Hylian with a beak.

Now for the bird part. Notably, in Twilight Princess, a mural in Castle Town shows the Rito with an appearance much more similar to BotW:

And in the OoT manga, there's a short depicting a Rito-like race, the Watarara, who migrate through Hyrule sometimes but don't settle there. They have a much more bird-like appearance than WW's Rito.

I believe the "Rito" in TP are actually the Watarara from a different country, who are developing ties to Hyrule at the time, but don't yet majorly live there. Then, since they're probably around even in WW's timeline, once the Rito of that Hyrule evolve to the point of being slightly more bird-like they become compatible and breed resulting in the Watarara-like Rito of BotW and fully breaking off mutual compatibility they had with the Zora.

HOWEVER-!

While I don't believe a Rito can fertilize the offspring of a Zora, (here's another vibes bit), I do think somehow that there's a male -> female compatibility between the Zora and the Rito.

(I think it's much the same as Hylian/Zora, but the head-tail gene is simply discarded and the rest functions).

Gerudo II

Unisexual reproduction is when a species doesn't need its own males to reproduce, in which the species has haploid eggs (only one set of chromosomes), so the male's genome is discarded, but the sperm is still necessary to develop the embryo (source).

This would explain how every Gerudo child is 100% Gerudo, even with different species as parents.

Now, due to fantasy and magic, I'm going to say the Zora, Rito, Hylian and Sheikah races all have compatible sperm.

This is slightly backed up by in-game Gerudo travelers, like Laroba, stating that a man from any race could be suitable to be her partner. Even if she's talking about romance rather than sex, maybe being able to mate with every other race backs it up a little. She does include Gorons too, though, so that might be unreliable. I'm just throwing it in here.

One more thing- there is a type of unisexuality in which parts of the male genome "leak" into those of the children. I assume this is more or less why Gerudo have pointed ears in BotW and not OoT.

inspiration

-

The Easiest

Gorons are (most likely) asexual reproducers.

There are no "female" Gorons in the series. Even the ones in Gerudo Town seem to identify as male ("I thought men weren't allowed in this town... Why did they let me in?" Lyndae; "I made it all the way to Gerudo Town! But I'm not sure why they let me in..." Strade).

And, conclusively in my opinion, OoT presents a young Goron- Link, son of Darunia. Being that Darunia and Link (the Hylian) are friends, and Link (the Goron) is even named after the Hylian Link, you'd think we'd get an introduction to or even a mention of some kind of mother, or find a "wife"/"girlfriend" of Darunia somewhere, but there's nothing of the sort (equally, the same can be said about Yunobo, who's directly descended from Daruk- the former having no mention of a mate and the latter having no mention of a mother).

I believe that Gorons are genderless, and the use of "he/him" and the male identity has to do with working with Hylians (source).

I tend to imagine that Goron offspring somehow originate from the rocks on the Gorons' backs, therefore being directly related to them (it makes more sense for Yunobo to have Daruk's special power that way).

-

Bonus: The Deku Group

"The Deku group" is something completely different I could talk about, but basically boils down to Deku trees, Deku scrubs, Skull Kids and the Koroks/Kokiri; they're (mostly) all plant-based spirits of the Lost Woods.

In short, Deku trees are something of a minor god/species cross and kind of radiate magic, Deku scrubs are an offshoot of this magic and can and do breed as a very specific and unique case of being a race of spirits, Skull Kids are just kids who got lost and died in the Lost Woods and turned into spirits, and Korok/Kokiri are a mix of fairy and Deku, being both "the children of the forest/Deku tree" and referred to as "fairies" multiple times, so with that combination it's honestly likely that they're just made out of magic à la UNDERTALE.

-

And that's a wrap! For now!

As a bonus for sticking with me this far, here's another chart.

Not only is he probably just... magically fertile, but I think if Gerudo are compatible with every major race of Hyrule (save for the Gorons of course), Ganondorf himself would be able to... show that compatibility a lot more easily. So, technically, if we're rolling with this assumption, the Gerudo and the rest are mutually compatible.

[iwillberunningfromdemons]

And so I confided my worries about my son to him, and in that telling, regained our familiarity. I found tea herbs for the bubbling water, and toasted some bread that was left over from my last night's repast. He listened well, as he bundled my charts and notes to one end of the table. By the time my words had run out, he was pouring steaming tea from a pot into two cups that I had set out. The ritual of putting out food reminded me of how easily we had always worked together. Yet somehow that hollowed me even more when I thought of how I deceived him. I wished to keep him away from Aslevjal because he believed he would die there; Chade aided me because he did not want the Fool interfering in the Prince's quest. Yet the result was the same. When the day came for us to sail, the Fool would suddenly discover that he was not to be one of the party. And it was my doing.

Thus my thoughts wrapped me, and silence fell as we took our places. He lifted his cup, sipped from it, and then said, "It isn't your fault, Fitz. He has made a decision and no words or acts of yours will change it now." For one brief instant, he seemed to be replying to my thoughts, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck because he knew me so well. Then he added, "Sometimes all a father can do is stand by and witness the disaster, and then pick up the pieces."

I found my tongue and replied, "My worry, Fool, is that I won't be here to witness it, or to pick up the pieces. What if he gets into real trouble, and there's no one to step in on his behalf?"

He held his teacup in both hands and looked at me over it. "Is there no one staying behind that you can ask to watch over him?"

I suppressed an impulsive urge to say, "How about you?" I shook my head. "No one that I know well enough. Kettricken will be here, of course, but it would hardly be appropriate to ask the Queen to play such a role to a guardsman's son. Even if Jinna and I were still on good terms, I no longer trust her judgment." In dismay, I added, "sometimes it's a bit daunting to realize how few people I really trust. Or even know well, as Tom Badgerlock, I mean." I fell silent for a moment, considering that. Tom Badgerlock was a façade, a mask I wore daily, and yet I'd never been truly comfortable being him. I felt awkward deceiving good people such as Wim or Laurel. It made a barrier to any real friendship. "How do you do it?" I asked the Fool suddenly. "You shift who you are from year to year and place to place. Don't you ever feel regret that no one truly knows you as the person you were born?"

He shook his head slowly. "I am not the person I was born. Neither are you. I know no one who is. Truly, Fitz, all we ever know are facets of one another. Perhaps we feel as if we know one another well when we know several facets of that person. Father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband . . . a man can be all of those things, yet no one person knows him in all those roles. I watch you being Hap's father, and yet I do not know you as I knew my father, any more than I knew my father as his brother did. So. When I show myself in a different light, I do not make a pretense. Rather I bare a different aspect to the world than they have seen before. Truly, there is a place in my heart where I am forever the Fool and your playfellow. And within me there is a genuine Lord Golden, fond of good drink and well-prepared food and elegant clothing and witty speech. And so, when I show myself as him, I am deceiving no one, but only sharing a different part of myself.”

"And Amber?" I asked quietly. Then I wondered that I dared venture the question.

He met my gaze levelly. "She is a facet of me. No more than that. And no less."

Fool's Fate, by Robin Hobb (Tawny Man Trilogy #3)

[whatsonmedia]

7 Artists Performing Live This Week

Calling all music fiends. Tune in to find out about some exciting performances coming up this week, including fabulous artists such as Kodie Shane, Dan Croll, Owl City, The Chemical Brothers, Ne-Yo, Eddie Palmieri, and Griff. This variety of talented performers covers a range of genres, from electronic to indie, to pop to jazz. Broaden your musical horizons and explore what this week of music has to offer!

Kodie Shane

A talented singer, rapper and songwriter, Kodie Shane is known for her versatile style that combines R&B with hip-hop and pop. She started gaining attention due to her unique sound and energetic performances, also being a part of the rapper collective “Sailing Team” which included famous rapper Lil Yachty. She quickly established herself as a solo artist with her captivating stage presence, with music that often explores themes of love empowerment and self-discovery which makes her a stand-out female rapper.

Date: Wednesday 20th March 2024

Location: The Promontory, Chicago, IL, US

Time: Doors open 19:00

Ticket: $25 – $175

Ticket Link

Dan Croll

Dan Croll is a British singer-songwriter known for his innovative blend of indie rock, pop, and electronic music. He rose to prominence thanks to his distinctive voice and catchy melodies. His debut album “Sweet Disarray” from 2014 caught lots of attention with the inclusion of hit singles “From Nowhere” and “Compliment Your Soul”. Characterised by their infectious hooks and introspective lyrics, his music often includes themes of love and human connection, broadening creative horizons, thus establishing himself as an influential figure in contemporary indie music.

Date: Thursday 21st March 2024

Location: YES, Manchester, UK

Time: Doors Open 19:00

Ticket: £15.75

Ticket Link

Owl City

Owl City is the musical project of American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Young. His breakout single “Fireflies” in 2009 became an international hit and has made his music renowned for its dreamy synths, catchy melodies and uplifting lyrics. His optimistic vibe and nostalgia-evoking songs have cemented his status as a prominent figure in pop music, with his atmospheric soundscapes and whimsical music style leaving a lasting impact on the pop music industry.

Date: Friday 22nd March 2024

Location: McDonough Arena, Georgetown, DC, US

Time: Doors open 19:00

Ticket: $18

Ticket Link

The Chemical Brothers

An iconic electronic music duo consisting of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons that began in the 1980s, these artists have been at the forefront of the electronic music scene through their innovative soundscape and electrifying live performances. Their debut album “Exit Planet Dust” from 1995 catapulted them into mainstream success, with their music characterised by its distinctive and dynamic sound, The Chemical Brothers have amassed multiple Grammy Awards, chart-topping hits and a dedicated global fanbase.

Date: Saturday 23rd March 2024

Location: Royal Albert Hall, London, UK

Time: Doors open 18:30

Ticket: £75 – £120

TicketLink

Ne-Yo

Born Shaffer Chimere Smith, Ne-Yo emerged as a prominent figure in the music industry of the mid-2000s and has since become known for his smooth vocals and heartfelt lyrics. His versatile music style helped him gain recognition, with his R&B-infused pop-creating songs such as “In My Own Words” and “Sexy Love”. His music often explores relationships and personal growth, combined with his charismatic stage presence and infectious dance tracks, Ne-Yo has remained a significant figure in contemporary pop and R&B music.

Date: Sunday 24th March 2024

Location: Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Time: Doors open 20:00

Ticket:€77 – 104

Ticket Link

Eddie Palmieri

Eddie Palmieri is an incredibly influential American pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader. Known for his contributions to Latin jazz and salsa music, Palmieri grew up in New York with Puerto Rican parents, meaning he was raised immersed in a vibrant musical environment. With a six-decade-spanning career, Palmieri has pushed many boundaries with Latin music, combining elements of jazz, funk, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms into his compositions. This architect of modern salsa music has earned multiple Grammys and a label as a true musical pioneer.

Date: Monday 25th March

Location: Blue Note Jazz Club, NY, US

Time: Doors open 22:00

Ticket: $52

Ticket Link

Griff

British singer-songwriter, born Sarah Faith Griffiths rose to prominence for her distinctive voice and emotionally charged songwriting. She gained recognition after winning the BRITs Rising Star Award in 2021. Her music is characterised by its electronically influenced pop and R&B combined with her poignant lyrics that focus on her personal experiences. Her debut EP “Mirror Talk” showcased her impressive vocal range and songwriting skills, solidifying her reputation as a rising star in the music industry.

Date: Tuesday 26th March 2024

Location: 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Time:Doors Open 19:00

Ticket:€30

Ticket Link

[uesp]

Today is the First of Hearthfire. All children of Nirn are granted a heavenly birthright.This season's birthsign is the Lady, a Charge of the Warrior. Those born this month are known for being kind, tolerant, tough, and willful.

"Today the Lady shall fortify you in your quest for glory." --Emperor Uriel Septim VII

"This one hears the whispers of court—scheming and revelry behind closed doors… Your spirit bespeaks elegance, walker—pillow-soft and dagger-sharp. This one sees… yes, it is the Lady. Her gifts are sweet indeed for those deserving. Patience, caution, foresight. Seek the highest path to earn her protection." --Hanubina-ko

"Who striketh from a distance, all heart afire with sympathy? The Lady, who bends bowing in the firmament, as it's meant thy firm bow shall bend like a lady whose darts speed true. Mark these words, Celestial." --The Guardian of Stars

"The Lady is the sign of indomitable will and unflagging health. When she shines, she smiles on the sick and makes them well and rewards those who persevere in hardship." --Gathiel's Astrology Chart

"The Warrior is a Guardian Constellation, and thus protects his Charges from the Serpent during his Season. His Charges are the Lady, the Steed, and the Lord, Minor Constellations which share his Quadrant of the Heavens. The Serpent threatens Different Charges during Different Seasons, and the Warrior's Very Aspect will Change according to the Times. If, for Example, His Lady is being threatened the Warrior will seem as if he is looking to His Left, Eyes blazing towards that Part of the Sky wherein she resides. Thus, to find the Serpent during the Warrior's Season look to where he looks, for that is where the Coiled Beast is Active." --Excerpt from Ffoulkes' Firmament

The star sung far-flung tales Wreathed in the silver of Yokuda fair, Of a Warrior who, arrayed in hue sails His charges through the serpent's snare

And the Lord of runes, so bored so soon, Leaves the ship for an evening's dare, Perchance to wake, the coiled snake, To take its shirt of scales to wear

And the Lady East, who e'ery beast, Asleep or a'prowl can rouse a scare, Screams as her eye, alight in the sky A worm no goodly sight can bear

And the mailed Steed, ajoins the deed Not to be undone from his worthy share, Rides the night, towards scale bright, Leaving the seasoned Warrior's care

Then the serpent rose, and made stead to close, The targets lay plain and there, But the Warrior's blade the Snake unmade, And the charges wander no more, they swear

--The Warrior's Charge

[ramblerogue]

Tell us more about tiller like what’s her backstory

LOVE her design

SURE THING!! (And thank you!! She's been through a couple iterations but I'm pretty psyched about how her design has solidified!!) This is gonna be a lot so I'll put everything under the read more. Genuinely, thank you to everybody who takes an interest in Tiller!!!

Okay, so strap in for the backstory. Tiller was raised in Nassau during the Golden Age of Piracy. She has two loving fathers named Jimmy and John (and they run a sandwich shop together haha). She had a very regular and happy childhood; she'd go to school, make friends around town, go to the beach and have picnics with her dads, help out around the restaurant, etc. The only odd thing was that for as long as Tiller could remember, she had had a tattoo of a sea serpent going up her arm. Her fathers told her that they found her that way as a baby, and didn't know what it meant. It was a mystery for sure, but hey, Tiller didn't really mind a cool tattoo and she didn't even know where to begin finding answers. So she let it fade to the back of her mind while she had fun living her life!

In her late teens, Tiller started getting antsy about going out and exploring the world. She felt a draw towards the ocean and took a great interest in marine life, ocean currents, and star-charting. She wanted to know what was beyond the island! And besides all that, her dads' business was hitting tough times, and she knew they needed money (though her dads would never ask her for it). Thus- Tiller signed up to be an intern navigator/cabin hand for the Royal British Navy. She was brought aboard a ship called The Nightingale, captained by Lieutenant Warren Elliot. She bid farewell to her dads and sailed off.

Quickly, Tiller learned that life was different with the Navy. Everyone was cold towards her, she worked long hours with no appreciation, and the pay was little (but she still mailed her earnings back to her dads regardless). And above all that, Captain Elliot was cruel. He either insulted her or acted like she didn’t exist, as if she was below even thinking about. About a year into her work, she'd seen him execute someone trying to desert. It was then that Tiller got very scared. She wanted to leave, but she was in the middle of the ocean. Where was she to go? What was she to do? Maybe not being noticed was a good thing. 

A few months later, The Nightingale was set to return to the coast. However, before they could get there, they were attacked by pirates! Tiller wasn’t a fighter and stayed hidden during the chaos. Though the pirates put up a good fighting spirit, the Navy had much more firepower and overcame them soon enough. The mysterious pirates were sent to the brig, and Captain Elliot wrote up an order for them to be hanged upon reaching port. When Tiller emerged from below deck, she saw that the attacking ship bore a flag with a sea serpent emblem on it. It exactly matched her tattoo. 

That night Tiller snuck down to the brig to speak with the prisoners. They were wary of her at first, but after she showed them her tattoo and asked them about it, she learned that they all had sea serpent tattoos! They told her that they got their tattoos by the normal means, and didn’t know what it meant to be born with it but! They knew all about the sea serpent symbol. It turns out that she was talking to the The Sea Dragon crew, named and themed for the oceanic deity; a giant sea serpent that is a common myth among sailors and pirates alike. Tiller saw an opportunity. Both for answers and for escape. She made a deal with The Sea Dragons. She would sneak them the cell key and then make a distraction on the other end of the boat. During the distraction, The Sea Dragons would make a run for the life boats. In exchange, they would take Tiller with them. They agreed and got to work. 

Tiller might’ve learned that night that she had a flair for the dramatic (plus having absolute Zero fun for like 2 navy years might enhance that desire). She needed a distraction and found the gunpowder supply. One lit match later, Tiller was running for the life boats while the rest of the ship exploded with fire and panic. She was almost there when she was blocked off by, of course, Captain Elliot. He learned of her betrayal, of the escaped crew, he was furious. He said she would die along with her “criminal scum” if she wanted to join them. He swiped at her with his rapier and landed a burning slash across her right eye. Tiller didn’t have a weapon, she couldn’t get past him. Anywhere would be better than here. She ran for the nearest railing and jumped overboard.

Tiller was plunged into the dark waves. Despite how vast and cold the sea was, the underwater was a relief. It almost felt like the ocean was holding her. Tiller couldn’t see anything, between the blood in her eye and the black depths. Which way is the surface? Suddenly, a hand grabbed her and pulled her up into the night air. Tiller blinked away the salt water, and it was The Sea Dragons! They had deployed the lifeboats already and were waiting for her. They all fled the scene, leaving The Nightingale a fiery speck on the horizon.

Ever since then, Tiller has happily turned to a life of piracy, and is a proud member of The Sea Dragon crew.

Everyone was thick as thieves in no time. Though some didn’t take to trusting a recent Navy deserter right away, Tiller won them all over eventually. Her eccentric nature was far better suited to a pirates life. She became the navigator for The Sea Dragon ship, The Quicksilver, and she assured them they would never be lost again as long as she was with them! And most importantly, they cared for each other. The Sea Dragon crew were from all walks of life. Everyone ranging from colorful to dangerous to shy to stoic. Tiller felt like she belonged. They became her family.

Tiller kept sending percentages of her treasure back home to her dads. However, she didn’t tell them about her new employment. She was worried they might be disappointed in her somehow, or they’d get in trouble if they knew they were getting stolen gold in the mail. She would write home often, but she kept up the ruse that she was still in the Navy.

- - - - -

AND THAT’S THE TILLER BACKSTORY! These are literally the events that happened BEFORE the dnd campaign started. There’s tons of other Tiller drama happening in-game, which range in relevancy to her backstory. Also I’ve done a few Navy/backstory centric drawings if you wanna check those out!!

Tiller in Navy uniform

“A Navigator’s Past” comic (click the link for the whole thing!) 

Tiller growing up (also click link for the whole thing)

General moody Tiller (AKA i’m a huge sucker for lighting that highlights her scar)

[kagrena]

ruins

There is a ruin on an island north, far north, beyond the depths of winter: an old, crumbling temple that points towards the first forest. It is swallowed by thundering seas and winds unending, a storm without relent, and yet the temple is a place of calm where the stars no longer twinkle. It might be lost, were it not for the tides, who still remember, and whisper that it is named for clouded Ysmir. It’s a name that means nothing to you, except for steel, the beginning of a storm.

In the glittering westward seas, speckled with isles bewitched by the falling sun, where ships have fallen spell-bound beneath the waves, there’s the ruin of a fallen tower that hasn’t quite sunk. Aldmyne, the western witch, mist-made and lightning-touched, before the old song shattered and there were elves, many, she liked to unweave sails into silver thread and lace the skies with the first rains from this place. You loved her name.

You were born into a world, your mother told you, woven from corpses. Crumbling histories, the bloodied remnants of old kings, were to be your cradle. You were certainly not to fear them (you would be the fear of them). From what was rotting, flowers would bloom. The Mythic Dawn had told you more: you would weave a crown of them, by your magic. You’d flourish through the rot, through the breaking of the wheel and the building of one anew while the world devours itself. You’d be queen of the forest, and queen of the fire. 

You’d been thinking on this, wandering pleasant Cyrodiil, green and plenty Cyrodiil, strewn with all things crumbling, and the blood of others buried beneath its fields of wildflowers. This is not your inheritance. How could it be? Your mother is gone, and you have no father – he is no one, and thus, he is everyone, he is aldmer and he is atmoran and he is the old dark from which you will ascend and yet little more than a shadow cast from exactly nothing. Illusions of grandeur.

You are not named for him. Nor are you named from myth, nor a legend. You needed no queens. You’d pull your name from street signs and village notice boards and the bold lettering front of a market stall and lists of common exports from Anvil to the Illiac Bay you snatched from a shipping manifest in the third place you’d stowed away that season, you pull your name from guards’ rosters and the third most prominent wizard in the colovian highlands. You had shed your true calling, your true name – for they were words that exist for others to place you and position you and puppeteer you – after your mother was strung up. You are not Ysmir and Aldmyne. You are not Mother’s child. You are not the daughter of the dark. You are not a bold line on Topal’s star chart or a prized gem of Azura’s twilight collection.

You look now to the priest, whose eyes are searching in the night. Perhaps for  a constellation. You’re far north, now, the frost is beginning to bite and the keen eyes of a blade grandmaster cut at your back during the daylight hours, making sure that you did not stray from those clearly demarcated roads, under the steady watch of the Imperial Legion. You’d noticed the priest had kept his jaw tighter, his words terser, rarely drawn, since you’d seen the priory ablaze. The stars do not twinkle. The embers, however, are warm.

“Ysamyne,” you say to him.

It is not a name, a line predestined, prophesied, drawn up in the stars, storm’s daughter, lightning-born, but instead the remnants of things pulled from memory, pulled from the earth lost beneath the waters, wreckage, broken fables, meaningless, now, made anew. Made by you.

“Ysamyne?” he says. He looks to you, unsure. It’s almost a question.

You roll your eyes. You point at yourself with one very clear finger.

“Ysamyne Montrose.”

Perhaps you'll tell the priest, when you know him better, about Ysmir, about Aldmyne, about your terrible habit of making up nonsense, and also that you had thought it would be faintly amusing, for your second name to be the same as the guard who locked you in a cell in the first place.

For now, he gives you the best smile an exhausted man can offer. Kvatch is still smoke and ruin, even if you can no longer see it.

-----------------

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[deceptigoons-attack]

The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

The British brig Dei Gratia was about 400 miles east of the Azores on December 5, 1872, when crew members spotted a ship adrift in the choppy seas. Capt. David Morehouse was taken aback to discover that the unguided vessel was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York City eight days before him and should have already arrived in Genoa, Italy. He changed course to offer help.

Morehouse sent a boarding party to the ship. Belowdecks, the ship's charts had been tossed about, and the crewmen's belongings were still in their quarters. The ship's only lifeboat was missing, and one of its two pumps had been disassembled. Three and a half feet of water was sloshing in the ship's bottom, though the cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol was largely intact. There was a six-month supply of food and water—but not a soul to consume it.

Thus was born one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history: What happened to the ten people who had sailed aboard the Mary Celeste? Through the decades, a lack of hard facts has only spurred speculation as to what might have taken place. Theories have ranged from mutiny to pirates to sea monsters to killer waterspouts. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1884 short story based on the case posited a capture by a vengeful ex-slave, a 1935 movie featured Bela Lugosi as a homicidal sailor. Now, a new investigation, drawing on modern maritime technology and newly discovered documents, has pieced together the most likely scenario.

Read the rest of the article here.

[guardianofjunmyeon]

Finding Atlantis (part 1)

Pairing: Baekhyun x Reader

Genre: Action/Adventure, Enemies to Lovers, PirateAU

Description: 20 years ago the seas became angry. Unruly and unkind to any sailor, to any ship that dared venture too far out in her waters. Many a man has heard the tales of Atlantis, the lost city, the key the ocean. But fewer men know the tale of it’s missing child. The key to the ocean, the key to Atlantis but a lost little one. The power one would hold should they find this child would be nearly that of Poseidon himself. Thus, the hunt began.

A/N: Hiiii long time no see lmaoo...I started a pirate story and I felt like i should upload it here on tumblr bc i think it’s fun and i have a few chapters written already so ...here you go!

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,  Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18

20 years ago the seas became angry. Unruly and unkind to any sailor, to any ship that dared venture too far out in her waters. Many a man has heard the tales of Atlantis, the lost city, the key the ocean.

The heart of the ocean.

Atlantis was created by the Gods. Created by the God of the ocean, Poseidon, himself. He created a land, a city, in the middle of the ocean among the humans in order to be closer to humanity. He went on to fill his new city with his many half God, half human children; he allowed others who felt the pull of the ocean deep within their souls to populate his city and call it their home. Their Atlantis.

The people of Atlantis were a rich people, culturally, morally, financially. Their advances far beyond our own. They lived in peace, in harmony and kept the sea happy, kept her calm and teaming with life. Poseidon’s children ruled the city with kindness, with understanding and neutrality for hundreds of years. They protected the city and the oceans for many, many years even after Poseidon himself returned to live amongst the other Gods.

One day, a thousand years in the past, the people of Atlantis decided that they wanted more. They were the keepers of the sea, they were the people of Poseidon. They wanted more money, more attention from their creator, more reverence from the humans and animals that they watched over. They wanted to be worshiped. They created waves large enough to drown continents, monsters big enough to destroy ships, and storms scary enough to keep the faint of heart far from the ocean, and even farther from their city.

And so they were bestowed with destruction for their greed.

The city was destroyed with volcanic eruptions, lightning storms, and ultimately a tsunami large enough to bury the city miles below the ocean’s surface.

The city was lost beneath the waves of the ocean to never be found or seen by humanity again, but it’s believed to still exist. It is believed to still thrive, to have adapted, and reverted to its original task of protecting the ocean without greed or desire for repayment. For the seas have been kind again after the disappearance of Atlantis.

Until 20 years ago.

It was said that each of Poseidon’s children were born with a destiny that they were meant to fulfill. A destiny that was crucial to the survival of the seas. To the survival of marine life. To the survival of humans.

Rumors that one of Poseidon’s children had run away to live amongst the humans began to spread across the lands like a wildfire as the ocean began to act restlessly, and monsters were starting to reappear in places they’d long vanished.

For the return of this child, for the rediscovery of Atlantis, you would be rewarded with riches beyond your wildest dreams.

Humans had tried to find Atlantis since its disappearance and none had gotten close to uncovering her secret location, so humans began to look for its lost child instead.

The key to the ocean is Atlantis. And the key to Atlantis is its missing child. The power one would hold would be nearly matched to that of Poseidon himself.

Thus, the hunt began.

-Anonymous

~~~

“Are we ready to leave port?”

“Yes Captain. All members are present and accounted for.”

“Good. Our heading is east, let’s make haste. I want to get this bounty and be back before the month’s end.”

“Ay, Captain.”

Leaving port is always as gratifying as it is stress inducing. There’s nothing that can quite match the rush you feel when you see your fellow crewman rushing around your ship, bringing her to life again, after weeks at rest. Raising the sails and cleaning down her surfaces before taking her back out home on the open sea, that rush is what excites you most in this world. The entire vessel buzzes with energy as your men call out to each other across the ship ensuring that she’s prepped and safe to take out on the water.

You always feel your chest swell with pride as they do their jobs with a confidence and energy that you hoped you played a part in inspiring. You’ve recruited each of them personally, and watched them grow under your guidance from nervously getting their sea legs to being some of the fiercest pirates known to man. Your first mate, Junmyeon has been by your side the longest, and is your most loyal second in command. Kim Junmyeon knows the ocean and the workings of the ship with nothing but innate talent. You would consider him just as respected and in charge of the ship as the captain himself.

Your quartermaster, Zhang Yixing has been with your ship for slightly less time than your first mate, but he is just as important. If Junmyeon is your right hand, then Yixing is your left. Yixing understands the workings of the ship and handles moral and makes every voice on the ship heard when issues among the crew arise.

You have a few sailing masters, those who handle navigation and piloting the ship. They are the keepers of the charts. Kim Yeri, your head sailing master is the smartest woman you’ve ever had the pleasure of taking aboard your crew. No one can read a map, chart a course, and follow the stars quite like her. Lee Taemin is your best pilot. He can guide your ship like it’s an extension of his own body, no matter the weather, no matter the conditions. Although Yeri and Taemin handle mostly navigation, they work hard at easing the burdens of your other crewmen as well.

You have 2 head gunners, Kim Minseok and Kang Seulgi. They lead two separate groups of men who are in charge of the ship’s artillery. Minseok and Seulgi are the fiercest fighters on the ship, well trained at aiming the heavy cannons and teaching their men how to work them safely. Minseok takes on the role as master gunner, the one in charge of all 8 men in the artillery.

Your cook, Qian Kun, doubles as the ship doctor. Both he and Yixing have been trained to attend to any kind of injury your crewmen may face.

You have 6 boatswains, or deckhands –those who handle all other activities on the ship. Whether it be anchoring, handling naval provisions, raising and lowering the sails, or just keeping the ship running smoothly. They all report directly to you, Junmyeon, or Yixing. They may be on the lowest rung of the ship, but they are just important to the ship as you are.

The crew of Storm Chaser have built a relationship based on trust and respect. All men are important, all men are heard, and all men are expected to put their life on the line for his fellow crewman. If you are unable to follow this general understanding of how the crew works, then…well, you as captain would make sure that anyone who misbehaves is handled.

You’ve captained the Storm Chaser for seven years now. She’s a decent sided ship, black as night with dark blue sails. She’s not huge, but she’s faster than the winds. She’s your pride and joy. She’s your home, and she’s home to the 20 odd other people who work her with you.

You bought her with your first big bounty, back when you were but a powder monkey on some brute’s ship, dealing with the ammunition and cannons with other dispensable suckers.

He was a shit captain and an even shittier person, but he’d allowed you to work on his ship in the lowest position possible because he saw the drive in you. He gave you a chance, and you’ll forever be grateful for him.

Even if you ended up being the one to poison his food and bring his dead body to the admiral who’d wanted him dead or alive.

He’d underestimated you. That was his mistake. You should always watch your own back and build up relationships with others who you can trust. He was a bully and a hot-heated asshole. No one liked him, he didn’t respect those beneath him, and he was careless just because you seemed young and naive. So now he’s dead and you cashed out on his life.

That's the way of the pirates after all.

The award you were given, for leading that unnamed admiral back to the brothel room where you’d left your dead ex-captain, was a hefty chunk of change. You bought your first ship in cash at the ripe age of 19.

You became a Captain at only 19.

You began to slowly build up a crew of trustworthy men and women who would lay down their life for you and for each other. You promised them safety in return for the building of trust aboard your ship. You’d seen captains who would do nothing but boss around their crew, take half of any reward for themselves, and would turn on any man on their ship at the drop of a dime.

That wasn’t the kind of captain you aspired to be. A good captain works with his men, is on the frontline of every fight, and acts as mediator when the ship is split on crucial decisions. A good captain works with their ship, not against it.

You’ve wanted to be captain of your own ship for as long as you can remember. The ocean has called out to you since you were big enough to have memories.

You grew up on a small port on the easternmost part of Xiao Shitou, a large island known for its dealing with pirates. It was easy to do business on the island and get away with things that other islands would arrest you for. Things other islands would hang you for in the middle of its largest city. You grew up watching ships come into town with people of all kinds of looks, backgrounds, stories. You watched them with wide eyes and an ache in your chest that you could never quite explain.

You just knew that where ever they were going after they left your port, that’s where you belonged.

Your mother owned a bar right in the heart of the seaside town. Storm Breaker. You can remember playing around with the regulars as your mom served them ale and smiles and would listen to their stories. You can also remember hiding in the back room among the bags of flour and crates of unopened beer whenever people your mother didn’t trust would enter her bar. Pirates and hooligans visiting for the first time. People who did nothing but cause problems when they visit.

She was a fighter, your mother. A scary woman that everyone in town respected, and a loving woman who did everything she could to protect you. You looked up to her, you admired her, but still you knew that you couldn’t do what she did. You couldn’t grow up working a bar and seeing the same people and doing the same tasks every day. You didn't belong trapped in a small town so close to the ocean, but never actually on it.

At 8 years old you watched you mother get shot right in the chest in the middle of your living room. One bullet to the heart by some ruffian she’d threatened with her own gun when he was harassing women in her bar days before.

You managed to escape him by throwing the pot of boiling water that was still burning on your stove straight at his face, and then running straight out the door that he’d kicked down. You’d left your mother there and ran away just as she’d always instructed you to.

That was just how life in pirate port cities worked.

You dragged your mother’s body out of the house a week later with the help of a man who frequented your mother’s bar often enough to basically live there. You both gave her to the ocean. He stood at your side, patted your head and told you that you would be okay.

You never saw him again after that.

The next years you lived alone on the streets, stealing food, earning money for little odd jobs around the town when you could. Some people recognized you and would help you out when they could, but they had their own struggles and issues, so you continued to live on your own the best way you could. You got into fights, got chased by people who caught you picking their pockets or filling your cheeks with their food. It wasn’t easy, but life could have been worse.

You kept your eye out for the man who murdered your mother. He made Xiao Shitou his home not long after that night. He ended up taking over your mothers bar, changed the name to Slut Cavern, and ran it into the ground a year later because he didn’t know how to fucking run a business.

When you were 11 you were able to find real work as a blacksmith’s apprentice. A woman with kind eyes and rough hands who taught you self defense and how to make and use the artillery she was selling.

Everyone just called her Victoria.

She’d known your mother, had gone to Storm Breaker a few times. She never had her own children, too busy working and owning her business on her own to bother with the excuses for men who frequented Xiao Shitou, so she took you under her wing as her own.

Her business wasn’t clean. She often sold blades, gun parts, and bullets to the worst kinds of men. To pirates, looters, murders, slave owners, anything of the like.

She did what she could to make money. Your mother did the same with her bar.

Victoria would take you along when she would deliver her swords. You would watch her threaten men who dared try to steal from her, and kill those who would try to take advantage of her. You learned quickly how to surprise people with your brutality and quickness with a blade under her guidance.

By 13 you’d killed your first man. A dirty older man who bought a knife and wasn’t going to pay you since you’d come to collect the money on your own. This wasn’t the first collection you’d gone on without Victoria, but it was the first time it hadn’t gone smoothly. He’d planned on assaulting you on top of robbing you. He’d pulled out his blade and advanced on you, but you were faster; you evaded his first swipe and slit his neck in one go with the thin but sharp sword on your hip.

You took off with his personal sword, the sword you were meant to sell to him, and all the valuables on his person. He lay there dead in an alley and you walked away with a smile on your face.

At 14 you cornered the man who killed your mother. He was stumbling drunk out of the bar your mother once owned and he hadn’t recognized you. You figured he’d forgotten all about the kid that slipped away from him. The kid who fucked up his face. He’d made disgusting advances that evening; uttered despicable words that you knew were meant to get you in his bed. You walked up to him and watched his lip curl up in a smile and he started to unbuckle his pants. You shoved your sword right in his chest, just as his hand reached into his pants to pull out his cock.

You watched the shock fill his expression; he choked out an agonized moan. You twisted the blade and pushed it as far as it could go through his heart. When you pulled it out and felt your hand wet with his warm blood, he slid down to the ground. You crouched down and looked in his eyes, watery with drunkenness and pain.

“I hope you rot in the hottest part of hell,” you’d said evenly. You drove your blade into the middle of his throat and watched the last of his life drain from his eyes, head lolling to the side and body going still. You went back to Victoria’s and she helped you wash away the blood without question.

At 16 you and Victoria parted ways. You wanted to go off and make your own money working aboard ships. Staying on the island wasn't the life for you. You watched the people who spent their whole lives on land. Watched them live the same daily routine over and over until they died. Watched them eat and shit and fuck the same people in the same place over and over again.

And you watched the pirates who would come for short periods of time, never staying put for too long. Living life on the unpredictable sea, following no one’s rules, taking what they wanted out of life and doing something new and exciting every day.

You wanted to be like them. That was where you belonged.

You had the swordsmanship. You didn’t have any ties Xiao Shitou outside of it being the place you were raised. Victoria would live on with or without you around. And you found that you had no fear of death.

You found your first captain, Captain Lee, inside of a bar that people tended to frequent when they were looking for work or for men to complete jobs. He was signing on crewmen that night and you joined a line of big, mean looking guys trying to make yourself fit in as much as you could. He laughed right in your face when you walked up to the table and demanded he let you on his crew.

“And how old are you sweetheart? Isn’t it a bit late at night for you to be at a place as dangerous as this?”

“Don’t worry about how late it is; I know how to handle myself. I want to join your crew. I don’t care what job it is, I just want to be on the sea.” You stood confidently.

He laughed at you again and waved you away with a roll of his eyes. The man behind you pushed you out of the way to take your place at the front. “I wasn’t done you brick-headed fucker!” You yelled. He’d looked over his shoulder, given you a once over and scoffed.

You took the gun out of your holster and shot a single shot directly into the air. The bar quieted. You finally had the attention you wanted.

You looked directly at Captain Lee. “I said, I want to be on your crew and-”

The man in front of you turned around fully with a scowl set on his face and a step in your direction. “Listen here little wench-” You cocked your gun and pointed it at the man who interrupted you.

“If you put your hands on me, I will kill you right here,” you challenged.

You watched the captain stand up with his hands folded across his chest and an amused smile on his face. “You going to let a little girl threaten you sailor?” He teased.

The man went red in the face at the challenge from the captain and the audacity of you to embarrass him in front of all the patrons in the bar. He lunged at you with all force and no coordination. You slipped under his reaching arms, lifted your gun to his head and fired a bullet directly into his skull.

He fell to the ground with a thud that shook the ground, and shocked everyone watching in silence. You lowered the smoking barrel and looked at Captain Lee in exasperation. Have I made my point?

With an impressed nod, he pushed forward the signing papers and the bar erupted back into normal business.

Here you are 10 years later with the ship you bought for killing him in turn. Life is a fickle thing.

Your first mate Junmyeon comes up to your side as you’re manning the helm, getting your ship farther away from the random port you’d all spent the last few weeks at. Weeks getting drunk, having fun, resupplying the ship.

“I’ve put the bounty papers on the table in your quarters. From what I’ve gathered, the guy we’re after has been going around destroying random port cities in the south east. Pillaging, raping, setting fire to homes, and then leaving with anything him and his men can find worth value,” Junmyeon tells you evenly.

You sigh and nod. “Dead or alive?” you ask with a look in his direction.

“Either. 50,000 dollars for him, and another 5 for each member of his crew,” he replies.

“That's a shit ton of money…”

“It’s enough to set us all for at least 3 years,” he agrees. “I can call Taemin to guide the ship while we discuss the logistics in your quarters.”

You nod again, and watch as Junmyeon walks off to search among your men for the purple haired pilot.

The sun begins to set as you all set out for the next weeks at sea. The sky blooms in shades of pink, purple, and blues. You don’t think that you could ever get tired of this sight.

“Captain, I can take over from here,” Taemin chirps from your side. He beams and leans an elbow on your shoulder.

“All yours.” You hand the ship over and scan the deck quickly for any sight of your first mate. His shiny black hair blows in the wind as he leans against the mast. Even doing nothing, he manages to look just as unreal as the day that you met him. You walk up to him with a smile and put your arm around his shoulder.

He laughs and wraps his arm around your waist. “So tell me more about the son of a bitch that we’re gonna go kill.” You guide him to your room with a lift to your voice. The excitement of going on another bounty hunt after days of relaxing make your hands itch to use your blade again.

You both enter your quarters and he takes a seat first at your large table covered in documents. You close the door while he settles in, chin in his hand and fingers tapping against the newest addition to the pile of papers. “You really need to clean this up,” he throws out lightly.

You shrug. “I like having them all, for sentimental value.” You keep the wanted posters of yourself, of your crewmen, of the people you hunt, and anything else that goes to show just how much of a name you’ve earned. How many accomplishments you’ve achieved.

“Hoarder,” he jokes.

You roll your eyes. “Whatever, my junk doesn’t matter. As my first mate it’s your job to keep me in order. You could clean it up if you wanted.” You flick him in the temple. He winces. “I wouldn’t be able to function without you.”

“You or the rest of the crew,” he scoffs. “I’m here to help you keep the ship moving, not to literally put your old paperwork in order.” You sit across from him and lean over the table to scan the papers splayed in front of you both. “Speaking of keeping the ship moving, let’s talk about our latest mission.”

“Of course!” Your skin thrums with excitement. “Has Yeri managed to get a handle on where our elusive man might be headed?”

He puckers his lips in thought and taps a map marked in red circles with his finger. “She looked at his previous hits and has been working to predict his course, but because he seems to be rather…unpredictable she’s reported difficulty pinpointing an exact location.” He looks up from the map. “We have a general idea of his location based on the last place that was reported hit and the direction of major currents that they may be following.”

“A general idea is better than nothing…I trust Yeri’s navigation and mapping skills. I’ll have her update when she finds changes. For now I think we should continue the course we’d set following you and her suggestion.”

“I’ll make sure-”

“CAPTAIN!” Junmyeon’s mouth closes immediately as you both train your eyes on the person who stormed in on your meeting. “Captain,” he says again out of breath.

“What is it Johnny?” you ask, standing up from the table. Your full attention sets on him.

“There’s a stowaway on board.”

“Fuck,” you curse.

“Where are they now?” Junmyeon asks the boatswain.

Johnny jerks his thumb behind him. “We’ve got him in irons and dragged him above deck. He was hiding in the food storage. We only found him when we were taking stock of food supplies.”

“Good job, I’ll be right out. Gather the rest of the crew. I want everyone on deck,” you command.

Johnny rushes out and you and Junmyeon share a look. This doesn't bode well and you both can feel it.

When you emerge from your quarters, you take note of your crew still gathering and the stowaway on his knees in the middle of the growing crowd.

He’s objectively handsome, you note. Dark hair, strands fall messily across this forehead and ears. Strong jaw, a well built face. He looks to be in his mid twenties. He’s wearing a beige blouse with leather pants and boots that tell a story of self care, of money. He looks like someone who spends a lot of time in the sun if the color on his face and hair tell you anything. He’s no dirtier than any of your men.

Not a beggar. Not by the looks of him.

You don’t have the time to deal with him at the moment. Not in the middle of a bounty hunt. You’ll send someone to question him later. “Throw him in the brig,” you call out to no one in particular.

“Wait…” you watch as your quartermaster pushes through your other men. His eyes widen at the man on the ground in front of him. “Jongin?” he asks in disbelief.

The stowaway looks up at the sound of his name and catches the eye of your crewman. “Yixing,” he sighs out in happiness, in relief. He sags a bit in his chains at the familiar face. You look between the two men in confusion.

“You know him?” You ask Yixing simply.

He nods vigorously. “Friends from childhood,” he says. “Almost like a brother.”

“Good. Then you take him to the brig and question him.” Yixing nods at your words and is quick to get the stowaway on his feet. He looks alarmed at the fact that he’s still being taken to the brig, but Yixing understands your position on stowaways hopping aboard your ship. It’s not something to take lightly.

You look around at the rest of your men. “As for everyone else, I want all eyes searching the ship immediately. Stop whatever you were doing and start looking around. From top to bottom, from bow to stern. Look in every fucking crack. I fear we may have more than one stowaway on board. Find them and throw them in the brig. Find me or Junmyeon afterwards to deal with them.” At your words everyone disperses to frantically search the ship.

Yixing drags Jongin below deck by his chains. Junmyeon places and hand on your shoulder with a concerned frown.

“I know,” you say.

This can be no coincidence. No one would dare just hop aboard your ship without any devious ulterior motive. Your ship is known for its ruthlessness and its ability to complete jobs quickly and cleanly. You’ve heard the stories in pubs.

“No one who has ever seen the captain has ever lived to tell the tale,” they say. Your ship is feared. You are feared despite keeping your identity as captain of the Storm Chaser on a need-to-know basis. You’ve built relationships with all of your crewmen, and you all thrive on the fact that the captain’s identity is kept secret. No one will mess with anyone on the crew in fear of them being the deadly Captain.

It works out for you all.

And this fear is what keeps lesser ships from fucking with you. You’ve had…dealings in the past with individuals you’d rather forget existed, but you and your ship are always able to get away with minimal damage. You, along with pirates around the globe, know that this is not a ship you can just fuck with and get away with it.

You take it upon yourself to keep somewhat on course while the rest of the crew are looking for any extra bodies on the ship.

It’s hours later when a deckhand, Taeil, finds you at the wheel. “Captain we found one other stowaway. You won’t believe who it is…” he says with wide eyes.

“Are they in the brig already?” He nods. “Find Junmyeon and Yixing and tell them to man the ship while I go talk to the prisoners.” He runs off and you tell any other crewman on your way to the brig to go back to manning their normal positions.

The lamps in the brig have been lit at the new addition of prisoners. It’s been nearly half a year since you all had to use your brig like this. Most of the bodies you all bring back are dead and thrown in a body box you all keep deep below deck with other nonessential items.

Your ship has two decently sized cells (enough to hold 20 men in dire, cramped situations). In the first cell is the first stowaway, Jongin. He’s huddled in on himself in the far right corner of his prison with his head against his knees. He looks up at the sound of you coming down the stairs. You see the sadness and fear in his eyes before he hides his face once again against his knees. In the second cell you catch sight of hands languidly relaxing outside of the bars.

Hands adorned with various rings. You know those hands, it’s hard to forget them with the various encounters you've had with them.

“Ah…if it isn’t the fearsome Captain of the Storm Chaser,” he drawls amusedly.

The sneer that finds its way onto your face comes instantaneously at the sound of his voice. You step closer and take your second prisoner in. His flashy jewelry, the cloth wrapped around his forehead to soak up sweat, the stupid ass eye patch that he wears, and that grin that brings you nothing but fucking trouble.

“What the hell are you doing on my ship Byun?”

[jeanjauthor]

In mediveal times how long did a noble family have to exist for to be considered noble and not new money? 10 year, 50 years (son/grandson), 100 years (great, or great-great-grandson), or something so big like 200 years?

I'm going to be bluntly honest.

I have no frikkin' idea.

But we can think it through logically, at least a little bit, as well as draw parallels to modern or recent-era situations that are similar.

(This post ended up rather long, so I’m inserting a Keep Reading cut for the rest of y’all...)

We have a lot more writings on the Georgian/Regency eras (1700s onward) regarding the newly rich versus old money...but that's because there were more opportunities to garner new wealth, through the exploitation and colonization of explorers in the Americas, merchants traveling overseas over much longer distances due to better ship design and navigational charts, etc.

We have complaints about sea captains buying noble titles, giving money to their sovereigns who, for whatever reason, needed more income than they garnered from taxes, etc. People who were ennobled for enslaving foreign regions and extracting local resources for European consumption, so on and so forth.

Part of that was because prior to the boom in exploitative exploration & colonization, there was literally only so much land that could be parceled out to heirs or sold to the newly wealthy merchant classes, and land was still seen as the biggest economic stimulus point (the constant need for herds and crops to feed everyone, etc).

Even mining operations and foundries for smelting iron, etc, were still not advanced enough to be productive enough, because science and technology weren't far enough along for these things to provide enough metal to spark the Industrial Revolution until the turn of the 1800s and later.

We can conclude that the means to amass a lot of wealth was, therefore, difficult to acquire prior to colonization and industrialization. This was not to say that it didn't happen! There were always wars against one's neighbors, there was cross-country trade that could make one rich, someone could stumble across a gold mine (literally, a source of precious metals), so on and so forth. The Crusades were initially about Christian religious fervor...and the acquisition of the wealth of their supposed enemies, the Muslims (who weren't enemies to begin with, btw).

People in the Middle East were literally sitting at a crossroads of trade between Europe, Africa, and Asia, so yes, they had access to a lot more cross-continental commerce than anywhere else. And when the invading crusaders brought back some of that wealth--spices, silks, exotic jewels, dyes, decorative objects, and ideas (yes, those can be a source of wealth! Cross-pollination between different groups sharing ideas almost always leads to new innovations!)--it sparked avarice in the hearts of a lot of people who saw a potential opportunity for acquiring more wealth.

Those who came back with that wealth...possibly bribed their sovereigns, bought lands, became the newly rich...except back then there wasn't quite the same class divide barrier to break. Because those who could afford to go to the Holy Land to conquer & rob it of its wealth had to be able to not only walk themselves there, with enough funds to provision themselves along the way, but needed the equipment to be able to successfully capture rich targets. Horses, armor, weapons, so on and so forth.

They'd also have to attach themselves to some noble's entourage if they weren't noble themselves, and that meant they'd have to share their plunder, etc...or be counted a brigand at best. (Let's be blunt, the difference between sanctioned plundering and brigandry is having the approval of a big group of people regarding your actions.) This meant that most of those that made their wealth off of the Crusades often did so as second and third and fifthborn sons, who weren't going to inherit much anyway--or bastard sons, who by law couldn't inherit without their family jumping through legal and liturgical hoops.

The ones who profited the most off of these plunder campaigns were therefore most likely already a part of the ruling class--or at least the mounted warrior class, which was seen as close enough to being the same thing. Compared to the long-distance merchant classes, who rode or sailed long distances to trade items only produced locally (and thus rare elsewhere) for exotic ones they could bring back and trade at home, the bastards and fourth-born sons had an easier time getting to be acknowledged as "acceptable new money."

Most merchants who did get wealthy tended to do so in free cities, or in city-states that were already mostly democratic (albeit the kind confined to wealthy male citizens) in nature, such as Venice and Genoa, where they did not have kings, or did not have a strong kingly or nobility presence (unlike Paris or London, etc, which were the seats of monarchial power).

But there is one more factor to consider: The Black Death.

Prior to the first major sweep of bubonic plague through Europe in the 1340s, the vast majority of European medieval life was pastorally centered, with the vast majority of people being serfs legally obligated to work the farms for the local lords, a few freemen, the clergy (who were slowly focusing on attaining lots of wealth themselves), and the nobles who were supposed to watch over and protect everyone from outside marauders, etc (to various degrees of belief & efficacy; some were genuinely good leaders who wanted to protect and share the wealth, while others were exploitative SOBs, and most were at some stage in between those two extremes).

When a quarter to a third of everyone died, however...that left crops rotting in the fields, people were weakened and devastated, whole reams of knowledge were lost with the deaths of those who were the masters of their crafts, and...well, the wealthy staggered under the weight. IF they survived themselves, of course.

The vast shift in the availability of workers meant the surviving workers started demanding many of the freedoms they had been previously denied--they literally took their possessions and left their serf-bound homes to go work for anyone who was willing to pay them a lot more and give them more legal freedoms. (Modern folks really need to take notes!) And because all ranks and stations were being hit more or less just as hard as any other caste level, that meant those who could have enforced the peasants staying on their lord's demense-lands were unable to bring enough of them into play to herd the wayward serfs back to their quasi-slavery.

After all, if you had 100 warriors, 50 of which were needed to keep a watch out for brigands and guard the castle, you could afford to send out 20-30 of them to spread out, search for, and round up a stray serf who had run away, while keeping the remainder in reserve. (Remember, serfs who ran away to free cities and stayed there successfully for a year-and-a-day were considered free men and could not be dragged back to their farms...but that left 366 days in which they could be caught and dragged back.)

But if you lost 30 of your warrior-class, you'd still need 50 to guard the castle and its lands--possibly more in such restless times!--and you'd only have 20 to spare, period. Which meant in a practical sense that you'd only have 5-10 at most you could send out (needing to keep a reserve at your home base), which meant searches for runaways were far less efficient--either they'd have to search fewer areas with large enough groups to capture and return, or they'd have to split up, find the serf, run for help, and hope the serf was still in that same area when they got back with enough forces to capture the serf without risking injury to themselves or to the peasant in question.

Prior to the Black Death, upward mobility was a rare thing--you practically had to save the life of the king in battle, etc. This was of course easier to do in the 700s than in the 1200s, but still not an easy thing. And even then, you'd have to prove you were "noble enough" to be accepted by the upper classes. We know this upward mobility of the wealthy-but-not-noble was restricted because we do have increasingly stiff sumptuary laws--aka what non-nobles were allowed to wear.

Literally, wearing winter ermine--the white fur of the ermine mustelid with the black-tip tails--was reserved for royalty and very high ranked clergy and sometimes very high ranked nobility depending on timeperiod and culture. Indeed, a lot of furs became increasingly social-rank-dependent, to the point that only squirrel fur was considered "open for everyone." Yes, only squirrels, because even rabbits were considered to "belong" to the local lord, and poaching them for eating, never mind for wearing, became a punishable crime.

You had to have permission from your social betters to wear luxurious furs and other items....so we can conclude that upward mobility was not much of a thing...up until the devastation of the Black Death upended social order, and the vast majority of people seized back many of their natural rights and forced social status mobility upon those who held all the wealth and the power. (*ahem* Do Take Notes, People. *stares in Covid Pandemic* (Yes, I have no chill on this point, there are TOO MANY PARALLELS to what we're suffering today, socio-economically.))

Anyway! if you're thinking medieval pre-pandemic, there wasn't as much social mobility. Post-pandemic (and there were several waves of the Black Death and other plagues, btw, including a devastaing plague in 1655, not just the most famous one of the late 1340s/early 1350s), there was a lot more elbow room for jostling your way toward the top.

However, the best hope one could have for social mobility was to buy into a noble family. Usually via a marriage contract, wherein the non-noble brought in a great deal of wealth to a potentially impoverished noble family, with their offspring to be considered part of the noble family.

This was often done by someone with an ongoing source of wealth, such as merchant enterprises, or someone who could, say, create exceptional glassware, or whose family line held trade secrets in a lucrative profession, such as the thread-of-gold makers in London, ladies who were taught the secrets from an early age and whose skills were sought far and wide--or the lacemakers of certain regions in France, the Low Countries, southern England... Though to say it was "often" done isn't exactly an indication that it was done often, just that it was more likely a means to acquiring social status than saving the life of a king, etc.

So those are several of the possible ways to become wealthy and high in social status. As for "new rich vs old money"...that's a complex and lesser known subject. Most of the records we have from the medieval era were from legal documents and/or household ledgers, neither of which lend themselves to including personal annotations on things like, "A suckling pig and 2 pounds 16 shillings - Mercantile Atteborough paid this much to be included as an honored guest at the Feast of St. Barnabas in my southern manor keep."

Or maybe, "Goodwife Ashton paid 20 shillings to be able to wear a mantle lined with sable marten fur throughout the winter despite it being above her station, the rude hen" or "My son decided to give a length of silk to the village baker's daughter, even though I told him that she had no right to wear such things until after they were wed and elevated into the family fold..."

We do have a few sources mentioning such things from earlier eras, but writing was such a laborious process, the materials so costly (parchment is literally the inner shaved skin of an animal, often a goat or a sheep, and nowhere near as cheap as paper to produce...but paper breaks down so much faster than parchment over time), that most people tended to not meander about various subjects, but instead saved writing for "truly important" subjects--keeping monetary accounts, tallying things for tax-time, writing about God, and for those few scholars who had the wealth and support system, writing about the natural world, the dawning of science and reason, so on and so forth.

So we don't know how much these things were considered, only that they were considered to at least some small extent.

With all that said, we do know that the longer a family bloodline remains in power, the more determined they are to keep that power, which means concentrating it in the upper classes. (This is dangerous biologically, as inbreeding is...um...yeah. BAD.) In later years, those being allowed to join by marriage would be under heavy expectations to fit in, obey the head of the household/bloodline, and copy the manners and traditions of the class they were joining. But again, not many records of this.

Not all marriages were made for love. We see love as a marital concept among the higher classes only being developed after the rules of Courtly Love had been established for long enough that love as a possibility for high-ranked persons was considered possible. Prior to that, it had been as much or more a business transaction to increase familial power and wealth. But while for the common peasant a marriage was often made based on love and/or compatibility/mutual respect, there were still plenty of families in the in-between ranks who insisted on deliberately matchmaking or at least vetting "prospects" by how much wealth or social power each party or family held.

Again, we don't know how much the consideration of depth of a family's noble or wealthy lineage played into these calculations in the Middle Ages. We do know from the post-colonial era that many noble families back in Europe were scandalized by colonists & other overseas exploiters making loads of money and then not only trying to buy themselves a noble title, but in trying to act like they were the social equals ot the nobility.

"American heiresses" (or anyone from any overseas colony) would come to places like London to enjoy "high civilization." When they did so, their wealth would attract prospective grooms, but their breeding (aka, lack of it) would almost invariably scandalize the prospective groom's social peers and/or family members...until the Industrial Revolution created so many rich "commoners" that the nobles actually lost most of their social status power.

This nobility clout faded especially when America came to economic and cultural prominence on the world stage--a land that prided itself on having zero nobles...but that was not to say America didn't (and doesn't) have a ruling class. We just use different names, and we still have our own Old Money groups, who hoard the reigns of power for themselves and their heirs. Rockefeller is a family name known throughout the nation, as is any politician named Kennedy, for example--and now we have names like Gates and Bezos and Musk...though Gates is technically more old-money than the latter two. (Slightly.)

Unfortunately for the Old Money groups, it is now far too easy for "upstarts" to make billions, diminishing the Old Family names...but make no mistake: Most of these new billionaires still come from money, because they've leveraged their older family ties and associations to wedge themselves into these positions of visible economic power. (Musk bought himself into Tesla; he didn't actually found it. Gates, on the other hand, actually did found MicroSoft and did a lot of the actual programming work in his early days.)

...With all of that said, we only need to look at one more item to determine how long it would take Newly Rich to become Old Money: Time. Depending upon the region and the era...? About 3-4 generations would be my best guess.

Life was short and hard for many people in the Middle Ages, due to the lack of advanced healthcare, with a lot of people dying fairly early on from infections, illnesses, injuries, and the like. While the upper classes would have a lot more access to good food and be less likely to suffer from famines, giving them a better chance at a longer life due to having their nutritional needs met and their bodyfat being a little higher (it's a cushion against ilnesses and injuries, folks; stop being fatphobic!), they would still suffer, and often die much younger than a typical modern-day person might, even one living in modern-day poverty. (Wear your goddamn masks, people!! *ahem*)

When you live in a world where getting to live to be a grandparent or even a great-grandparent is a solid accomplishment, changes will be accepted much more quickly by each successive generation. Mostly because "that's the way it's always been" will have a shorter timeframe needed, due to the lack of grandparents raging on and on about "...that old upstart Timothy bought himself land and the funs to put up a keep on it! He's no more a lord than George the Goose Boy!"

The longer something goes unchallenged in the day-to-day lives of the people experiencing it, the more it seems like it should exist that way. (*STARES HARD AT THE LAST 40 YEARS OF ECONOMIC SUPPRESSIONS.*) And by that metric, given the average shorter lifespans even if you don't count early childhood deaths in mortality statistics across the broad span of medieval times in Europe...it wouldn't take more than 60 or so years for everyone locally to accept that New Money is now Old Money.

...Or that acceptance could happen even faster, if the New Money is clever enough to "share the wealthy" by investing their time, money, and effort in building good relations with their wealthy/high-class "neighbors." This would include publicly deferring to "their betters" and copying the social mannerisms of the upper class without mockery and without overstepping the bounds of what they could reasonably be allowed to do with their newfound status. Truly savy social climbers would be cautious and smart about flaunting their new power, planning for the long term haul rather than reveling too much in the moment.

Note that this statement is building good relations, not spending absurd amounts of money on lavish parties, ostentatious clothing, etc...which brings us to the Old Money side of the equation. Again, this is based in my observations on various peripheral socio-economic factors, and not on direct evidence.

The one thing that would irk the Old Money types pretty much every single time is newcomers being overly flamboyant with their wealth. Especially since the flamboyantly wealthy often end up the stupidly impoverished within a short span of time--to be accepted, the newly rich would have to understand the balance between claiming their wealth and status, and investing it to maintain that power. Wasting it wouldn't be viewed well by those who were raised generation after generation with lessons of how to maintain, expand, and increase their family's wealth and power.

It would be far better for a rising family to absorb and adopt higher-ranking privileges slowly and steadily, rather than greedily grabbing at all of it, all at once. And if they reach out to a neighboring Old Money family "for advice" and show some humility, moderate amounts of flattery (again, not in excess), asking to be treated like a nephew or niece in need of a mentorship, the Old Money family might actually take a proprietary interest in this upcoming family, giving them lessons, helping them get better access to things that were reserved for the upper classes.

Flattery is only good in the long term if there is some genuine sincerety behind it (or the one you are flattering is a narcissist, but they rarely hold onto power for long without serious help from outsiders). Instruction can be obtained with flattery, but also by in being respectfully attentive. And making sure you're not a rival to the Old Money neighbors around you can go a long way toward gaining their acceptance, too. By handling one's rise to power with these things in mind, it could actually allow the Newly Rich to be accepted that much faster, to within a matter of years or decades (with a great deal of luck), if not by one or two generations sooner than usual.

As mentioned above, sometimes Old Money doesn't actually still have the wealth that everyone assumes they have, and they need to accept New Money into their family--aka via an economically advantageous marriage. Sometimes they do have that money, but the sources of reliable wealth and political power are shifting, and the Old Family wishes to diversify its portfolio (so to speak). And sometimes they just want to diversify their power structure. This can include gaining access to up-and-coming industries, being able to have a say in how and where they're used (iron smelting, for example).

Just be aware of the fact that most of the time, if anyone accepted Newly Rich into their Old Money family, it was often an established male accepting a rich but socially-lesser female--aka the "American heiress" syndrome mentioned earlier. While the heiress wives would be...tolerated...if they toed the line, only their children would be considered "much more socially acceptable" because it would be presumed their fathers were raising the children in the Old Money Ways.

(Keep in mind that this is a worldwide trait for patriarchal cultures, not just European in nature. For far too many years, India's caste system allowed women from a lower caste to marry into an upper caste rank, but men were not supposed to marry a woman from a higher caste. This was a method used by the upper casts to deliberately focus familial power higher and higher on the social ladder. And, of course, it allowed high-caste males the social access/right to marry gorgeous low-caste women.)

Most females in a patriarchal society would not get the chance to marry into New Money unless they genuinely had a choice. Most often, they did not, because their families would want to continue concentrating their influence (including matrilineal! revisit this video I posted a while back on just how much influence a matrilineal family line could have on European politics: https://youtu.be/sl4WtajjMks ) into known avenues of power and influence.

...One last caveat: prior to the invasion of the British Isles by the Normans, who treated the local Anglo-Saxons, Celts, etc, as conquered peoples, replacing their nobility with incoming Normans who fight alongside William the Conqueror, many of whom were literally ennobled and given titles and lands etc, practically on the spot just for being a fellow Norman fighter...social mobility into the ranks of the nobility was easier.

If you had the money, the resources, the horses, etc...boom, you were a part of the local power structure. Afterward, there was a stronger incentive to diminish local power & wealth in favor of emphasizing incoming invaders' power and wealth, to be able to subjugate away those who were the original locals. This led to a lot of suppression of social mobility in order to retain power. Not just in the British Isles but elsewhere, as other regions heard of what the Normans were doing, and decided to do it themselves to their own people.

Prior to the 1066 invasion, it was possible for a warrior of commoner birth to go off raiding and looting, bring home a lot of wealth, and be lauded for his (or her!) rise in socio-economic standing. (Whether or not they were Northmen who went a-viking, since plenty of peoples did go raiding for wealth, etc; Scandinavians were just really good at it, far more so than most of the peoples they raided.)

Post-invasion, those in power started to choke down on who could do what, when, how, where, and with whomever else in order to consolidate their socio-economic power. (Seriously, sumptuary laws are mostly a post-1066 thing, along with strict laws of serfdom, up until the Black Death turned everything upside-down.)

So if you're writing a story set prior to the 1000s, there'll be much more opportunity for wealth-based social mobility and its acceptance. But afterwards, much less. But this exists on a continuum/spectrum that varies not only depending on what timeframe the story would exist in, but also where in terms of location, and what kind of social rise-to-power avenue is taken.

After all, someone gaining a lot of money in Genoa or Venice through trade would be heavily lauded by their home society, whereas someone doing the same in, say, Krakow (deep-continent) would be viewed far less companionably by the upper-classes, because trade was not as huge a part of their local culture--trade existed, but it wasn't central to how the locals & their rulers viewed themselves.

Like I said, I don't frikkin know for sure; there isn't enough hands-on documentation in common circulation. But humans have been humaning since before written records began, and we can make some reasonable guesses to help fill in the gaps.

(And if anyone claims you got it wrong, just cry "--IT'S FICTION!! It doesn't HAVE to be that accurate!!")

[howieabel]

One thing which even the most seasoned and discerning masters of the art of choice do not and cannot choose, is the society to be born into - and so we are all in travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries - or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not really realistic is to claim sanctuary in a safe harbour; one could bet that what seems to be a tranquil haven today will be soon modernized, and a theme park, amusement promenade or crowded marina will replace the sedate boat sheds. The third option not thus being available, which of the two other options will be chosen or become the lot of the sailor depends in no small measure on the ship's quality and the navigation skills of the sailors. Not all ships are seaworthy, however. And so the larger the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. A pleasurable adventure for the well-equipped yacht may prove a dangerous trap for a tattered dinghy. In the last account, the difference between the two is that between life and death.

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

[lukeskywaker4ever]

Christopher Columbus: Master Double Agent and Portugal’s 007

Henry IV of Spain – known as "The Impotent" for his weakness, both on the throne and (allegedly) in the marriage chamber – died in 1474. A long and inconclusive war of succession ensued, pitting supporters of Henry's 13-year-old heir, Juana de Trastámara, against a faction led by Princess Isabel of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. Portugal, Spain's much smaller antagonist for centuries already, sided with the loyalists.

(Wedding portrait of King Ferdinand II of Aragón and Queen Isabella of Castile.)  

The civil war ended in 1480, with the Treaty of Alcáçovas/Toledo, whereby Portugal withdrew support for Juana; in exchange, Isabel and Fernando promised not to encroach on South Atlantic trade routes that Portugal had long been exploring and wished to monopolize.

Treaty Not Worth Much

Spain immediately began to violate the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Portugal's gold trade with Ghana was a powerful enticement, but the Spanish were also lured by the priceless knowledge that Portugal had painstakingly gathered about the currents, territories, winds and heavenly bodies relative to the Atlantic regions. The Portuguese were far advanced in the sciences of geography and navigation pertaining to the Atlantic Ocean, both south and west of Portugal itself.

Meanwhile, João II ascended to the throne of Portugal in 1481, reversing the policies of his father, another weak, late-Medieval ruler who'd surrendered excessive estates and privileges to the nobility. Large swaths of the noble class rebelled, but João II was an astute diplomat, with powerful alliances among the military and religious orders across Europe, along with an extensive network of spies. He sprang a trap on his adversaries, capturing and executing the ring leader.

                                                (João II of Portugal)

Conspiracy!

Queen Isabel supported the traitors in Portugal, having obtained their promise to annul the Treaty of Alcáçovas. When the conspiracy was exposed, numerous traitors among the Portuguese nobility fled to Spain, where they found asylum, along with a base from which to continue their hostilities against João II. Prominent among the defectors were two nephews of the highly-born wife of Christopher Columbus – who would himself sacrifice the next twenty years of his life to join this exodus, faking desertion to his sovereign's most bitter foe. The internecine strife was so keen that after another occasion when his agents had tipped him off, which resulted in João II personally executing the Duke of Viseu, he threatened to charge his own wife with treason for weeping over her brother.

(Christopher Columbus was arrested at Santo Domingo in 1500 by Francisco de Bobadilla and returned to Spain, along with his two brothers, in chains)

The Mother of All Secrets

It's now been amply proven that evidence of hostility between Columbus and João II was fabricated. Columbus was, in fact, a member of João II's inner circle, in addition to being one of the most seasoned of all Portuguese mariners. After his false defection to Spain, Columbus attended three secret meetings with João II, the second of these, in 1488, being prompted by the mother of all maritime secrets: Dias having rounded the Cape of Good Hope, thereby establishing the shortest route to India by sea.

Now, the Holy Grail of all commercial bonanzas was a sea route to the riches of India – sought because Christendom was at war with Islam, and Muslim armies blocked the much shorter land routes across the Middle East. What the most knowledgeable Portuguese pilots knew was top secret, state of the art, a scientific prize for international espionage.

(The Portuguese discovered numerous territories and routes during the 15th and 16th centuries. Cantino planisphere, made by an anonymous cartographer in 1502.)

The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to launch expeditions in search of the Equator, which they reached around 1470, discovering while they were at it, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. By 1485, expert Portuguese technicians had invented charts and tables – based on the height of the sun at the Equator – which allowed navigators to determine their location in the daytime. While King João II was keeping Columbus up to date with all of the cutting-edge developments in maritime science, he was at the same time spreading so much disinformation elsewhere—among friends and foes alike— that we are still unraveling it.

(This secret letter, written by King João II was found in Columbus’ archives. Here is the exterior, addressed in the hand of King João II to, “Xpovam Collon, our special friend in Seville.”)

João II’s agents spent years pursuing the most important traitors across Spain, France and England. With that in view, the following comparison is revealing. Both Columbus and his nephew Don Lopo de Albuquerque (Count of Penamacor) fled Portugal at the same time, took refuge at Isabel's court under false identities, and fostered invasions of the Portuguese Atlantic monopoly from foreign shores. Lopo was tenaciously pursued, finally cornered in Seville and assassinated; in contrast, Columbus disposed of Portuguese secrets, exchanged letters covertly with King João II throughout his eight-year residence in Spain, stopped in Portugal on three of his four voyages, and lied to the Spanish Monarchs about these secret contacts.

A Secret Identity

Christopher Columbus is the garbled pseudonym of a very wellborn, learned, seafaring Portuguese nobleman. The antidote to all subsequent confusion about this man's true identity and character is simply to recognize that the news of his "discovery," which broke like a thunderbolt across the rest of Europe, was in fact nothing more than the release of information that the Portuguese had been hoarding for decades, laced with a linguistic insinuation that Spain had just pioneered the shortest route to India.

Everything Falls into Place

This new perspective on Columbus – as a Portuguese double agent – results in a major paradigm shift. All of the lies perpetrated by Columbus, his family, and the royal chroniclers suddenly begin to make sense as elements in a single, grand design, whose architect was King João II.

It is remarkable that the wave of treasons occurring in Portugal during the mid-1480s – engaging both Queen Isabel and Columbus so deeply – has never been linked by Portuguese historians to the biography of Columbus. Yet, no serious historian today accepts that Columbus was the first European to reach the Americas. There is no excuse any longer for maintaining that he was, or for sustaining the obsolete, pseudo-historical pretense that Columbus invented the idea of sailing west or that he ever really believed he'd landed in India.

(The secret Memorial Portugués, advising Queen Isabel that Portugal engineered the Treaty of Tordesillas specifically to safeguard the best territories for herself. Note how King João II is called  (A) “an evil devil,” malvado diablo , and (B) how the “Indies,” Indias”, that Columbus visited are described as NOT the real India)

Having skirted the western lands from Canada to Argentina, the Portuguese understood there were no established commercial ports, no ready-made commercial goods, and was thus no trade potential there to compare with that of India. Columbus – and his many other co-conspirators in Spain, easily identified in retrospect – guarded these secrets faithfully, secrets they had to be privy to if they would guide the Spanish Monarchs to the counterfeit of India. The trade for gold and other goods along the west coast of Africa was immensely profitable, but still more jealously guarded was knowledge that the sea route to India lay also in this direction. The Portuguese were intent on keeping Spanish ships out of these waters. With both war and treaties having failed, João II and Columbus launched an audacious ruse to obtain their objective through less obvious means.

How History is Shaped

Colossal planning, nerve, and effort went into this accomplishment – seven years of convincing knowledgeable skeptics that the voyage was possible, outfitting a fleet and loading it with merchandise for trade (including cinnamon that would later be presented as evidence of contact with India). On a secret mission to Germany, Martim Behaim, another Templar knight member of the Portuguese Order of Christ, built a false globe based on Toscanelli's theory that East Asia lay just across the Atlantic. This globe still exists; it is the oldest one in the world. Genuine Portuguese traitors warned the Spanish Monarchs that they were being deceived.

(Martin Behaim’s globe intentionally placed the Azores islands, where Behaim lived and was married, on top of the Americas. This made Asia appear much closer to Europe than it really is, thus supporting the project that Columbus was advocating for: Map of  Atlantic Ocean)

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), observed fairly well by both sides, achieved João II's strategic objective: to engage the Spanish in the west while keeping them out of those regions that Portugal wished to dominate. Its effect on the linguistic, racial and cultural substance of an immense portion of the globe has scarcely been rivaled by any other treaty between two nations.  No single factor did more to realize this outcome than the erudite seamanship, cunning, ruthless persistence, loyalty and sangfroid of the man whom we still remember today as "Christopher Columbus," a real-life 007, on May 20th, 1506.

(Cover from the master spy and sailor's Book of Privileges , which clearly shows that the owner's pseudonym was "Colon." An international transmission of the stunning "discovery," in March of 1493, distorted the name in such a fashion as to leave us with "Columbus" in English today. Technically speaking, "Colón" as the Spanish still call him, is correct, and it will someday most likely replace "Columbus" in common usage)  

Another particularly factor that King João II knew of existence of land on the west was that when the first Treaty of Tordesilhas came, the line that separate Spain and Portugal territory was just near the Cape Verde territory (already belonging to Portugal). King João II refuse that line and asked for more 370 nautical miles west from that line. The Spanish Monarchs, not knowing anything about the globe, accepted, thinking that it was just more water. When the new Treaty came, the line that King João II asked put Brasil over Portuguese domain. How King João II knew exactly the number of miles to put Brasil in Portugal territory? Because he already knew there was land on the west. The “discovery” of Brasil was NOT an accident. 

[dentalrecordsmusic]

Album Review: The Dreadnoughts - “Into the North”

Words by Cae Rosch

This week, Stan Rogers, defining Canadian folk singer and popularizer of sea shanties, would have turned 70 years old. Also this week, an album by Canadian folk punks the Dreadnoughts consisting entirely of sea shanties miraculously rose to no. 14 on the Billboard World Chart.

When the Dreadnoughts submitted Into the North to the CBC, they heard via their label that Canada’s public broadcasting corporation had zero interest in playing it. Despite its deep roots in Canadian music culture, from its traditional rowing songs to its two-part tribute to Stan Rogers himself, it wasn’t welcome in today’s Canadian media.

In 2019’s pop and hip hop dominated market, the CBC’s dominion over Canadian radio stations has phased out folk music programming. They don’t care about a capella. They especially do not give a shit about “maritime” music. No one’s going to listen to it, the CBC says. Not even coming from a Canadian band, even though the CBC usually creams its pants over CanCon (that’s Canadian Content, for you southern friends). That stuff’s too old. It’s irrelevant. Apparently.

With no radio play, it should be pretty challenging for an album to shoot up the charts so fast. Maybe the Dreadnoughts channeled the ghost of Stan Rogers to make an unholy deal for folk music fame. Maybe it’s just that people already love the Dreadnoughts enough to trust them.

Or maybe the Dreadnoughts are tapping into something here — something people don’t realize they need or want anymore. Something real and physical, something Stan Rogers knew and the Dreadnoughts revive, an unnameable something that sea shanties give us in a way contemporary music never can.

Dental Records has already written about the first single off the album — “Joli Rouge,” a love song to the aggressively powerful ciders brewed by Fred Simard at Cidre Joli Rouge in Chicoutimi, Quebec. The Dreadnoughts love that cider, and Fred Simard loves the Dreadnoughts so much that he’s named one of those ciders after them. And so here’s a song for him. The rough, catchy melody and solid, pounding rhythm in “Joli Rouge”  are classic Dreadnoughts: gritty “cider punk” you could just as easily use as a work song on your sailing ship as you could mosh to it.

That dual-purpose sound is the soul of the Dreadnoughts. It’s also the soul of the sea shanty — rough vocals just as at home in a punk rock band or while heaving away on a working ship, an insistent rhythm that drives your whole body into motion. That’s why this works as an album of nothing but sea shanties, original and traditional, and also why it’s so damn compelling that not even a CBC dismissal can stop it.

Into the North starts off with stark, firm vocals shouted into silence. “Rosibella” is a call to jump into the rest of the album like a call to get your ass in gear and work. “Come, let’s join Rosibella / Come, let’s join Rosibella / Come, let’s join, come let’s join / The saucy Rosibella” is a cheerful intro, even in a single hard-edged voice, and it’s immediately joined by a group shout of “Heave away!” that throws you right into the “maritime” sound. As the call and response continues, joined by snappy drums and accordion and smattered with an intermittent, enthusiastic “hup!” from the gang vocal crew, you find yourself hauling forward into the beat. The shanty does its job.

The album continues with the steady 1-2 rhythm “Rosibella” sets, through rousing stomps and heavy marches, traditional and original, English and French. Every song maintains the pace. “Pique la Baleine,” a Francophone whaling song, is a rollicking highlight with a dancing rhythm and bright group vocals, but slow and steady classics like “Fire Marengo” and “Roll Northumbria” are just as compelling, driven forward by the heartbeat of the kick drum.

The whole album is a bodily experience. It animates your limbs to haul the ropes of a ship you’re probably not on, with a crew around you not physically present but echoing the presence of everyone else who has ever sung these songs.

Into the North’s recording process demonstrates that spatially, temporally disjointed union. The gang vocals in this album aren’t just a bunch of the Dreadnoughts’ friends shouting along in a single studio, as on your typical punk rock album. They’re a few singers drawn out of the Dreadnoughts’ online call for sea shanty submissions, recorded separately in studios across the world, from Canada to Poland. But because these songs are so rhythmically rooted in the pounding of the human heart, voices that far away still draw easily into one single crew.

Sea shanties developed as work songs because they’re embodied music — they match up with the rhythm that drives the human body in order to keep you steady and united with your team of co-laborers. The Dreadnoughts have been slamming through that kind of embodied music for their entire career. As “Dear Old Stan,” the first of two tracks in tribute to Stan Rogers, explains, that’s kind of the point of the band.

Slower than most of the record, but just as full of shanty heartbeat, “Dear Old Stan”  elaborates the Dreadnoughts’ origin story, and in doing so demonstrates the musical attitude that makes this album work so very well. Stan Rogers, for you non-Canadians, is basically the Woody Guthrie of the Great White North. Yesterday (that’s November 29, 2019) would have been his 70th birthday, and we feel his memory hard on Into the North. Rogers performed a great deal of songs that the Dreadnoughts now play on this album, and a few of their previous hits were popularized by Rogers as well. The most important of those songs — the catalyst for the Dreadnoughts’ creation — is the whaling classic “Old Maui.”

“Dear Old Stan” informs us that a band at an Irish pub in a yuppie Vancouver neighborhood had rewritten “Old Maui” — a Stan Rogers favorite whaling song — rewritten from the perspective of the whale instead of the whalers as a protest of the whaling industry. And that reorientation destroyed everything that mattered about the song. The Dreadnoughts were thus born with a mission of musical vengeance: fix that shitty version of “Old Maui.” Bring out what’s so deeply important in that old, “irrelevant” folk music. Make it human, root it in the body, not in an intellectual consideration of why whaling is bad. Channel that hardworking sea shanty rhythm straight into punk rock.

The following track, a cover of Stan Rogers’ defining classic “Northwest Passage,” reinforces this point. There’s an easy path to reject the song outright based on its description of the land in what is now Canada as “savage” and its nostalgic depiction of early exploration. But just like the whaling songs the Dreadnoughts refuse to invert, we hear “Northwest Passage” not in the isolation of its lyrics but in the way its slow beat and melancholy tune wind through our bodies, the way it physically connects us to the materiality of land, and the long journey of exploring, and, of course, Stan Rogers and every other person who has sung it.

Into the North isn’t charting because it’s marketable. It’s charting because its heart beats with an earnest love of an easily dismissed genre. Fucking right it’s “maritime” music, because maritime music is real and raw and viscerally human, undistorted by pop production or electronic flair.

This album is charting because the Dreadnoughts’ sea shanties draw everyone who sings them into a full-body, timeless rhythm. And people need music in their bodies. That’s where catharsis lives.

Find Into the North on the Dreadnoughts’ website, their Bandcamp, or your streaming service of choice.

The Dreadnoughts will play a release show for the album on December 14 at the Astoria in Vancouver.

Cae Rosch is a salty character who lives four blocks over from that fateful Irish pub. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

Follow DRM on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Subscribe to the DRM YouTube channel.

[seascaled]

                               ❝  You may be royal, but without proof of your identity, you are powerless  .  ❞

          𝐭𝐡𝐞  𝐬𝐞𝐚  𝐡𝐚𝐬  𝐧𝐨  𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭  𝐟𝐨𝐫  𝐭𝐡𝐞  𝐠𝐨𝐝𝐬  𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡  𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐞  𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐲  𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬  .   here upon the ocean there are kings  ＆＆   queens born of nothing but the salt in their lungs  ＆＆   the wind captured in their sails  .  their  proof  lies only in the power they  command  ;  in their stories  ＆＆   in their names  ,  which may empower onward even as their very souls inevitably find themselves here  ,  upon the  flying dutchman  .         william thinks better than to correct her in her misguided efforts of  .  .  .   intimidation  .  DEMANDS  ,  of some manner which have ventured into  tirade  regarding such royal claims or ilk  ,  before he could even briefly consider to intervene  .  it is perfectly common for those newly-dead to  lose grasp  of the situation they now inspirit  .  denial  ＆＆   desperation can pull as  violently  as any current  .  it is significantly more  RARE  for one to find themselves upon the vessel towards the afterlife  ,  unbeknownst  ,  while still  alive  .            far from the realm of  impossibility  however  .  the ship’s own captain saw to similar circumstances many decades ago  ,  thus despite the  u n c e r t a i n t y  to her methods of arriving  ＆＆   some disarray credited by her  own  response to her predicament  ,  at the very least her presence is not of any inherent true  concern  to the nature of his work  .         as such he remains settled into his chair within the captain’s quarters  ,  allowing for frustrations to be  vented  as desired  .  it would have spared them both quite some time should he have been allowed to finish  ,  but his time upon the dutchman has left him little if not exhausted across  EVERY  facet of life  ,  including the rather rare opportunity to speak with the living  .  finally spotting opportunity for input without need to vocally  overpower  her distress however  ,  will places both hands flat on the table between them    ＆＆   rises to  claim  his place to speak without interruption this time  .

                     ︑  as i said  :  the flying dutchman does not make port but once every ten years           as i then didn’t finish  :  if you’re unable to make it back however way you managed to arrive on deck  ,  we will chart course close enough to the nearest shore in order for you to  swim  your way to land  .  i’m afraid there is little more i can offer  .  ︑

                                                    @somniaxperdita​           ☠  final fantasy xii prompts

[tomasorban]

THE ZODIAC: SAGITTARIUS THE ARCHER

Date of Rulership: 21st November-21st December; Polarity: Positive, male; Quality: Mutable; Ruling planet: Jupiter; Element: Fire; Body part: Thighs and hips; Colour: Dark blue, purple; Gemstone: Topaz; Metal: Tin.

In my mind Sagittarius is proof of the Aristotelian teleology concerning God as the instigator, primal mover and consummator of a hierarchy of purposes; as the last and the most evolved of the fire signs, the mutable energies of this zodiacal sign draw attention to the natural philosophy that the essence of all things that have been created are forever striving towards a higher and more perfect form. Sagittarius will religiously profess that everything is predetermined and that formed matter contains within itself bits of genetic corpuscles encoding the final purpose and mode of expression. How do we know this? Well, does the seed not sprout and become a tree? Does the human personality not grow, expand, and increase the field of its perceptive, intellectual, and spiritual vision by dissolution and death of the ego during the course of one’s lifetime? Does the egg not hatch to become a chick after a period of incubation in the nest? Does the bland-looking caterpillar not undergo a physical transformation during its lifecycle that sees it pass through individual and distinct phases of growth until it becomes a supernal butterfly? Does carbon, a gloomy and lacklustre element, not fuse to become a sparkling diamond inside the womb of Mother Earth? What more proof of God’s benevolent intent to perfect the forms and products of Mother Nature could one want than the existence of subatomic particles in various stages of interaction and evolution? What proof could be more convincing than the vestiges of that cosmic beginning known as the Big Bang (or perhaps the Big Crash, an alteration of the primal substance spurred by the collision of two universes as put forth by the “unified theory” of superstrings)?

Wherever Sagittarius is in our chart, we become seized, possessed and driven by the big picture. This archetypal power has a knack for stepping outside the microscope of the human senses, getting its hands on a state of the art Skywatcher 16” Synscan GOTO Dobsonian telescope and scouring the heavens for journeys of intergalactic discovery that will simulate sensual delights and tease the intellect. There is nothing more satisfying in life than a physical pilgrimage that tempts the mind to grow bold and question, if not reject outright, its learned biases and attitudes concerning established societies at large. Thus, it would be safe to say that Sagittarius isn’t content being the passive observer of interstellar and deep space mysteries that it will never get to examine under the auspices of scientific investigation. No, that will never do! Seeing might be believing but it will never be enough, not when it comes to understanding the true nature of reality. Sagittarius would rather be one of the lucky astronauts that gets to experience weightlessness and associated gravitational anomalies, walking on the moon, and a throng of other unusual and exhilarating things that most people could only envision in their wildest fantasies. That way it can kill two birds with one stone; it can collect bits of vital information concerning the universe to be used in its philosophical musings at a later stage and concurrently enjoy the finer things that life has to offer. The trajectory of outer space provides the Sagittarian with an adrenalin rush akin to the ride an intravenous drug user experiences after a good hit, one that he or she doesn’t want to lose any time soon by coming back to Planet Earth.

Even after the Sagittarian shuttle uses up all its fuel and is forced to re-enter the atmosphere of Earth, it brings its wide-angled perspectives and some of the heavenly Aether with it. Having already scanned the surface of our planet for the existence of Others whilst it was in orbit, Sagittarius is keenly bent on travelling to these places to interact with the various cultures abounding there. It wants to try out new and exotic foods and customs, meet, interact, and even share a beer or two with members of the indigenous population, explore religious and theosophical beliefs different to its own, learn different languages, and juxtapose moral and socio-political standards quite alien to its own mode of being with those of its own culture. Unlike some of the other zodiacal signs, Sagittarius will never scoff at the opportunity to connect with minority groups or support causes it deems are of utmost important in the human plight. A Sagittarian is likely to be a sponsor for a homeless child in Africa, to donate to cancer charity, to campaign for animal rights and equality in the workforce, and to vouch for the cessation of activities that have contributed to global warming like deforestation and urban carbon emissions.

This sign has a strong sense of identity and is not frightened, intimidated, or overwhelmed by people who are different physically, psychologically, culturally, or in their spiritual groundings. From an academic standpoint they are fascinated by how social perceptions are moulded, group and nonverbal behaviour, conformity and its polar opposite eccentricity, chauvinism, and hostility. How does one’s formative environment and culture actually mould the outer personality, the mirror which one uses to confront the world? Sagittarius wants to know how the abovementioned phenomena affect social cohesion as a whole and will go to any lengths for the sake of understanding the psychology behind it. Above all it wants to see change unencumbered by authoritative limitations that will spur society towards the classical ideal of utopian perfectionism (i.e. Atlantis or Shangri-La), a belief that it can be whimsically optimistic and fanatical about at times. Because much of its time is spent exploring the underlying psychosocial principles from which cultural groups and attitudes form, the Sagittarian can be disconcertingly accurate about any prophecies it makes or visions it has relating to societal change.  

A condition of tempered mutability pervades the last of the fire signs. Aside from drawing attention to the Sagittarian aptitude for adaptation, this quality reveals a heartfelt desire to be in constant motion. Sagittarians will prefer to ride a bike, walk, or jog to work rather than drive a car in or arrive via public transport. Activities and pastimes that get the heart rate up are also high on the festivity list of Sagittarius; instead of sitting in an air-conditioned unit and watching serials and full-length Hollywood movies, the Sagittarian psyche prefers to bide time amidst other inhabitants of the Great Outdoors where it can sail a yacht, swim, walk, and hike to the nearest waterfalls for a refreshing dip in the mountain waters. Risk-taking and a certain level of recklessness also appeals to this sign, and it isn’t uncommon for them to seek contentment in white-water rafting, skydiving, shooting, hunting, deep diving, hand gliding, and mountain climbing.

Despite the magnanimous and carefree sentiments indigenous to the depth of its being, the Sagittarian sign does have its shortcomings. First and foremost fire is an expanding and rising element that can lose track of its own relentless activity and protean elasticity. Hence, all fire signs lack a degree of objective grounding that keeps sensory perception tightly bound to an understanding of reality that is detached and unencumbered by prejudice or emotion. Similarly, the Sagittarian man or woman encompasses a proclivity to stubbornly hold onto any established creeds with zealous resolve and even attempt to impose them on others, a deed that can be easily mistaken for the narrow-mindedness and intolerance it yearns to decimate. Unlike the earthy Libra, Sagittarius finds it hard to detach from its intuitive streaks and ascend to a bird’s eye position above its own body from where it can tune into tho the cosmic powers of percipience and good judgement. This can result in unruly situations where the Sagittarian might become indecisive in pursuing a requisite course of action, slumber into a protracted state of repose, or renounce its obligations. When it inevitably comes to a situation of flight or fight, Sagittarius will take the easier option in an attempt to jettison the discomfort that comes when one is embroiled in commitment.

If the Sagittarian generative power could speak, it would utter, “God is a reality my friends, did you know that? Encountering God is as simple as taking a glass of water or as taking a breath of fresh air. How do I know? Um, well… I know because the creative force and imagination that moves everything in the universe towards a state of completion was born within me! That is how I know and you better believe me! That doesn’t mean I’m not empirical in my rigorous investigations of the paraphysical realms and the ethereal energies that infuse the cosmos. Limitations and problems associated with the scientific method are ample and will reveal themselves in time. Nonetheless, I do conduct my experiments within its concrete framework for the sake of contemporary credibility and acceptance. In my philosophical speculations, I’ve learnt that karma is not a theory but a reality. If you, my friend, wish to attract plenitude and fecundity in all areas of your life you must put out the right energy to the universe and the universe will answer. The answer might not be instant, but I assure you that it will come and it will be as revelatory as the day you woke to realise that it was your parents and not Father Christmas laying presents beneath the perennial Christmas tree. Isn’t that proof enough of the existence of divine providence and a fate for both the individual soul and the cosmos?

Feel good about yourself I say, and give, give, give! Give of yourself to everything and anyone, for we are all conscious extensions of the same divine spark and part of the same Truth. We all deserve love, happiness, and contentment, and anyone who dares to state otherwise is an ignorant and insular fool. Your generous acts will return to you when you least expect it and usually in a way that will sweep you off your feet. I’m not one for an orthodox way of doing things, although I do hold religious and pastoral practices of all cultures in high regard. What would day-to-day life be without festivities that honour the great cosmic cycles and bring us together? Boring and monotonous, no doubt. Know that faith is a powerful thing, an overwhelming force to be reckoned with; it can move mountains, render itself into a panacea that heals all ailments, creates serendipity and freedom, and enact feats that manpower and muscles could only dream of.”    

Sagittarius the Archer is connected with two beautiful symbols, both subordinate to the overarching activity of hunting which the constellation has personified from the earliest of times. The first, an image of a centaur drawing his bow, symbolizes duality of being and the noticeable intercourse between the physical and paraphysical realms. It appeared in the second millennium BCE during a phase of Mesopotamian history known as the Old Babylonian Period. When trade routes between the Orient and the Mediterranean world were finally forged, the image of a celestial deity wielding a bow and arrow travelled all the way to Greece proper whose city-states then weaved it into their image of the virgin goddess Artemis. For the Greeks, centaurs were composite creatures whose physiognomy comprised the head and torso of a human joined to the hindquarters of a horse. They were, for the most part, of a savage disposition and enjoyed cavorting about with humans and initiating pandemonium. Chiron was one of the few centaurs of superlative character; sired by the wily Cronus, he spent much of his time healing the sickly and raising orphaned children on Mount Pelion. Despite their relegation to a carnal sphere of impulses, the Greeks seem to have taken favourably to the mythical centaur because they crop up frequently in innumerable classical episodes. Perhaps the most famous of these is The Battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, a battle deemed so numinous, violent, and memorable in the Hellenic mind that it was transcribed onto the metopes of the southern wall of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. In the said encounter a horde of centaurs were invited to a nuptial festivity in Thessaly honouring the union of their half-brother Pirithous to Hippodamia, daughter of Atrax. During the course of the event the centaurs became quite inebriated and attempted to abduct and rape other guests that included women and boys. One of them by the name of Eurytion went so far as to attempt to ravish the bride herself. A fierce altercation ensured, whereby Pirithous and the Lapiths fought against and swiftly subdued the centaurs with the aid of his best friend Theseus.

The second of the symbols, a shorthand for the zodiacal sign utilized by astrologers in the creation of astrological charts, consists of an upturned arrow. Being an implement of war, the arrow connotes dexterity, litheness, and mercurial wit but it is also the potent instrument of Divine Love (Eros or Cupid) that pierces the wellspring of the heart and sets free the torrential will for union and interconnectedness in one’s life. The latter decrees that the arrow is also a symbol of spiritual transcendence. In the Sagittarian sygil, the diagonal determining the direction of the arrow is crossed by a horizontal line to establish the figure of a cross. Proceeding from a metaphysical angle, the cross can be interpreted as the first irruption of the primeval origin, singularity or chaos that created matter, the four elements, the four cardinal directions, the substances, the objects, the beings, and the physical plane in general. The tip of the arrow, on the other hand, is the desire to transcend the limits of the physical body and the five senses and travel to other worlds and other dimensions. Hence the entire arrow could denote the condition of a spiritual inner quest whose final cause is contingent on circumstances generated by the formative environment and by time itself.  

In the northern hemisphere the constellation of Sagittarius appears in the sky at a time when the moisture of autumn has surrendered its place to the aridity of winter. The transitory nature of this period of the year when Mother Nature has withdrawn to the cavernous depths of the earth to ruminate makes it especially suitable for nomadic ventures like hunting and travel. Sagittarians are innately wired for exploration and evolution, and so a talent for expressive and action-orientated activities such as the just mentioned comes naturally to them as what hunting does to an apex predator. In this, the last of the fiery signs governed by an expansive planet and heeded by a protean aptitude for adaptation and change, elemental fire has become tame, measured and tempered. This is the flame that forms the sun discs that crown the heads of the Egyptian gods and the golden halos over the Christian saints, as well as the hermetic fires that burn beneath the alchemical alembic to bring the Philosopher’s Stone to fruition. Infused by the forces of this energy, Sagittarians exhibit idealistic and spiritual qualities much desired by the corpus of the human populace but seldom wrought. They partake in far-reaching philosophical questions and are drawn to travel, an activity that spurs them towards the universal notion of freedom in all its colours, shapes, sizes, and guises. The Archer is a godsend, wishing to orientate the world to optimism, quash moral and religious fanaticism, and exercise compassion and understanding in its day-to-day dealings with all projections of life, human or otherwise.

[starswornoaths]

FFwrites2018 Prompt #1: Submerged

Of all the things Uthengentle had planned for, slavery had not been one of them.

When he had stepped off of the airship to Limsa Lominsa, a trembling, terrified teenager only recently separated from his only remaining family the only thing he had thought to do was to seek out the Marauder’s Guild—it was what Serella had saved her every coin to get him here for, surely it would be a waste not to fulfill his dream like she had wanted him to?

The Marauder’s Guild, while pleased that he didn’t lack for enthusiasm, gently informed him that a boy of thirteen summers was hardly old enough to join. Come back in a year or two, lad, and we’ll get you started right and proper, the Guildmaster had promised him.

While wandering the causeways and parapets that made up Limsa Lominsa, lost and unsure of what to do with himself now, he stumbled on what he had thought was a golden opportunity: a ship had only just recently come ashore, and he overheard a deckhand commenting that there was too much work for too few deckhands.

Uthengentle had leapt at the chance to offer himself in exchange for modest pay – I just want enough money for food and clothes, he remembered desperately saying.

At the time, he thought the deckhands that looked him over were seeing if he would be a good fit for their ship—it made sense to him, at least. Now he knew better: they were sizing him up for sale.

You a Mhigan? One of them had asked him. He hadn’t known how to answer that—did that even apply, he wondered. Knowing what had become of his homeland, even someone young as he could understand how little worth that carried. Still, if where he was born was so apparent, honestly would serve him best, he decided as he confirmed his heritage. Hear you Mhigans are a hearty folk, the deckhand mused, eyeing Uthengentle as though he were a cow up for auction.

Desperate for a purpose— for his beloved sister’s gift to mean something, Uthengentle had talked up his strength, how he was strong as an ox and fast as a fox and that had been enough for them to present him to the Captain. Uthengentle had been thrilled, seeing a high and mighty leader of his own ship, dressed in fine armor and wearing the biggest, nicest hat Uthengentle had ever seen.

He had found it odd, at the time, when the Captain had said nothing to him as he circled like a shark in chummed water, took him by the chin and appraised his teeth, felt his muscles— like a prized sow, indeed.

You’ll do, the Captain had decided. You’ll do nicely, boy.

The deception of him being a simple deckhand had been maintained for the first week or so out at sea— he and maybe ten or so other boys ranging in age, race, and build had all been recruited to serve the ship in any capacity it had needed. The work had been hard, but fulfilling; pulling rope, hauling stock, and scrubbing the decks and weapons had been his first— and thus far only taste of the pirate’s life.

Then the beatings started.

When they were out in open waters and there wasn’t a speck of land on the horizon all pretenses suddenly and sharply stopped. The boys were roused from their sleep and hauled to the lowest deck of the ship, beaten until the youngest among them hadn’t the strength to cry. When they had all fallen silent, too weak and hurt to to aught but wriggle in pain, the Captain informed them that the ship was making for a black market trading hub— and they were to be their currency. 

Suddenly the examinations, the lack of questions, the lack of discussed pay, all of it added up— but too late. For there he sat, his legs chained to the hull of the ship, his face stained with tears, thousands of malms from anywhere. One of ten or so little boys that were made to grow up too fast, whose tears could well have threatened to capsize the boat.

Despite being one of the boys in the middle of their age range, Uthengentle was one of the sturdier kids, and was quick to shield the smaller boys from the blows, moot as his efforts might have been. In turn, he was simply beaten harder and for longer first, so he was left a bruised mess on the floor too weak to move while the crew moved on to the other boys.

After the third time, Uthengentle laid awake, his body aching under labor and abuse, and swallowed a hard pill: that if he were to survive— if any of them were to survive, he would need a plan.

He spoke to the boys older than him first, in hushed whispers as they kept their heads low and scrubbed at the deck floors with naught more than ratty cloth. Though reluctant, the older ones were willing— for what else did they have left to try? Getting the little ones involved took little more than asking them if they wanted a chance to go home.

Uthengentle might not have been the smallest of the boys, but he was the most fearless, and thus when he volunteered to steal charts and maps from the Captain’s quarters one night to plan their rescue, there was almost no complaint. While he was hardly a strapping and stalwart rogue like in the tales his beloved Da had read to them, he needn’t be; the crew always got belligerently drunk, every night without fail, and procuring the map with the ship’s charted course proved little harder than simply waiting for them to empty another grog barrel.

Two moons and waiting for the right moment, their night of reckoning came.

On the ship’s charted course, they were set to come near one of the primary routes of the Maelstrom— a risky endeavor, but the Captain was apparently counting on their unmarked sails and the cover of knight to slip by undetected.

So the boys set to fixing that— they ignited the sails.

By the time the crew had roused from the light of the sails being engulfed in flames and the sound of the deck lanterns being dashed against the wood, it was already too late for most of them; the boys had poured every flammable resource the ship was carrying on the deck, and the once proud and imposing galleon was little more than a sailing conflagration.

Uthengentle and the eldest boy— a Roegadyn of some seventeen summers— had helped the others jump ship one by one with something to buoy them; a plank of wet wood, an empty barrel, anything that would help them stay aloft until help hopefully arrived they had hoarded before the night had begun.

The Roegadyn boy had nearly leapt first when Uthengentle was grabbed. The smell of burning flesh completely overpowered Uthengentle’s senses, and he fought back the urge to pass out, even as he turned to face his assailant.

The Captain had him by the ankle, his entire body engulfed in flames. From what Uthengentle could see of his face, it had already begun to char in the fire. Looking upon the burning monster before him, Uthengentle could only feel sorry that the Captain’s hat had turned to ashes.

Mhigan bastard, you’ve ruined us all! The Captain shrieked. But ye’ll sink to the bottom of the sea with me!

Before Uthengentle could even think to scream, he was falling.

The Captain had rolled off deck and used his near literally dead weight to drag Uthengentle overboard. His ankle seared in agony where the Captain had touched him but the moment he fell into the dark waters, everything just felt cold.

He wriggled and kicked, even as he felt his lungs burn like the ship above them with the need for air but still the Captain held on. Submerged in the inky wine-dark waters Uthengentle felt his strength wane, bolstered by adrenaline as he had been carrying out their plan it was now exhausted in the aftermath. When he finally wrestled himself free from the Captain’s grasp— only after the burned man’s own strength had left him, along with his life— Uthengentle felt light headed, and couldn’t quite tell which way was up anymore. His head felt heavy, and all he wanted to do was sleep...

I’m sorry, Ellie, he thought sadly. His eyes stung, and a part of him wondered if he could tell if he had started crying, underneath the waves as he was. I guess I won’t be writing home after all. He wondered if she had gotten a letter to him already, waiting in Limsa Lominsa for him, never to be received. He wondered how many more she would send, thinking the fault hers. He hoped she didn’t blame herself for him dying: leaving had been his dream. He’d dove right in, submerged himself in everything that it was to be an adventurer, without knowing how to even swim among them, without knowing what dangers he had to look for in those murky waters.

And this is what he had to show for it. Nothing.

Just as he began to sink, just as he began to slip away, he felt another hand grab his arm.

It jolted him out of his thoughts, feeling another reach for him. He looked up at the source, surprised to see the Roegadyn boy half submerged and holding onto him firmly. Just as he thought his lungs were going to give out, the other boy hauled him up, up, up to break the surface.

Air never tasted so sweet as when he gasped and coughed and clung to his savior. 

“Can’t have ye dyin’ just when yer plan worked, ya madman!” The Roegadyn boy cheered, hauling Uthengentle onto a solid plank of wood. “We made it, ye hear me? We all made it! Look!” 

It took a bit of frantic blinking— and more than one swipe at his eyes with the back of his hand— but at last his vision came into focus, and he nearly lost it again when his eyes filled with tears as the sight: red coats and rescue boats.

“‘Hoy!” A voice from the dark called. There were lanterns— there were so many boats and so many people, so many Maelstrom soldiers circling, already pulling some of the younger boys out of the water. “Don’t ye worry now— we’ve got you!”

Uthengentle and the Roegadyn boy, shivering and barely able to grip the rope tossed to them, managed to get hauled into one of the boats, where they were promptly swaddled in blankets to stave off the chill.

“Yer alright now, lads,” that same voice, a low feminine tenor spoke to them. Uthengentle felt a cup being pressed into his hands. “Sip this brandy slow now— it’ll get ye warm in to time at all.”

A new kind of fire, warm and comforting like the fireplace in the home he no longer had, settled in his chest as the woman ordered the ships to make for their Galleon— to make for Limsa Lominsa.

The moons it took to get back to where his hell started showed him precisely why his Da had loved the sea— why he had been a pirate in his prime; tasting freedom on the wind as they sailed merrily reminded him of why he’d wanted to leave Gridania in the first place. It invigorated him, reminded him of why he wanted to live. He let life and liberty fill his lungs until it was all he knew once more, and swore to himself that he would never know anything else ever again.

It both surprised and didn’t surprise him to see that the Marauder’s Guildmaster awaited their ship at the docks; evidently, slave trading was the one thing Limsa Lominsa actively refused to abide by, and the ship he had joined had been on watch for it for some time before they had set sail. Lucky him.

Boys, I don’t rightly presume to know if any of ye ‘ave a ‘ome to go back tae. The Guildmaster’s voice boomed out. But ye’ve all more than earned a place at the Guild; I don’t care what age ye be— he looked deliberately at Uthengentle. Ye’ve all been made men far afore ye should ‘ave been. I can’t fix that— but I can help ye become better men, if ye like.

Every single one of them agreed.

Feeling his own axe in his hands for the first time felt much the same as breaking the surface of those dark waters not so many moons ago. And submerged in the darkness no longer, Uthengentle breathed a sigh of relief: he had made it.

His sister didn’t understand for some time after why, upon seeing the red of her Maelstrom officer coat, he had wept with pride, but that was alright; she only need know that he was proud of her.