I remember the terrible silence from a heart that was supposed to beat forever. The universe does not warn us when the most important light goes out; it simply demands we navigate the sudden dark.

— Excerpt from Anguish of the Heart, First Book of the Revelations from the Lost Soul

The knock rattled through the low rafters of the attic—three heavy, flat strikes that set dust drifting down from the collar beams. For Talathis, the vibration ran straight through his boots.

"The Blind Hammer," Lirynel said softly. Her voice registered as barely a whisper in the damp, ash-scented room.

Talathis remained on his splintered stool. Beneath his feet, every quivering beam spoke too much like the jarring shudder of a hull against an unseen shoal. The familiar language of a dying vessel. 

Beside the floorboard opening, Jayne stood motionless, her back pressed flush against the brick chimney stack. Her right hand rested against the small of her back, her fingers locked around the worn horn hilt of her dagger.

Thump. Thump.

The rhythmic impact echoed from the hall below. Talathis’s fingers nervously twitched against his trousers, index and thumb tracing the quiet, compulsive shorthand conditioned in childhood guilt. Just moments prior, the comfortable facade of his life had been dismantled. His demotion, the humiliating isolation in Dragondown, his father’s distant coldness and stern reprimanding—none of it had been the spite of a lord. It had been a crude, desperate shield forged by his mother’s hand to mask the truth of her past. The old brick storehouse he had dreamed of buying for her, where she would never again scrub spilled ale or dodge the slurred advances of drunken sailors, had crumpled to ash and scattered about the loft by the cold draft.

He rose, his limbs heavy, finding his balance on the structural beams with unpracticed care. Standing next to Talathis, Krysaalis kept her hand silently clamped to his shoulder. The pressure was firm, grounding him against the blurring edges of his vision. Her touch did more than act as a steadying guide; it slowly dragged his focus back from the precipice. 

Across the floorboards, Lirynel moved with sudden, aggressive precision. Her leathers rustled softly as she dropped to one knee beside the trapdoor. Recognizing the signal in the rhythm of the knock, her left hand unlatched the iron slides while her right hovered above her sword hilt. Jayne, poised above the threshold, tightened her grip on her blade, and settled into the brickwork like dressed stone.

With a sharp jerk, Lirynel threw the timber hatch back, admitting a thick draft saturated with sea-grease, stale ale, and the brackish reek of the low tide.

Cedrik hauled his bulk through the opening, his heavy wool cloak catching on the rim before he swung a leg over the joists. The air in the narrow loft compressed under his sudden weight.

"The harbormaster’s man has his silver," Cedrik rumbled, his voice low and heavy as iron, "and the watch is staring into the bottoms of their cups." 

He paused. His sweeping glance caught Krysaalis’s hand still pressed into Talathis’s shoulder. Cedrik’s easy grin faltered, his lips pulling taut against his teeth as his eyes narrowed on the High Therysian scholar. 

Before Cedrik could demand an accounting, Lirynel moved smoothly into his line of sight to break his dangerous focus on the scholar. Lirynel plucked Krysaalis’s hand off Talathis's shoulder, stepping between the Duke and the boy with cold, defensive posture. 

Jayne remained frozen against the chimney stack. She did not look at Cedrik. Her unblinking eyes were fixed on the gap between her son and the rest of the room. Her linen dress, stiffened with dried salt and dust, held the rigid posture of armor.

She broke the silence with a single, dry click of her teeth, creating a sharp, mechanical strike that froze every breath in the loft. 

Her hand snapped up from her belt, her fingers cutting the dim air in sharp, strokes, moving with the blistering speed of a commanding directive. The motion carried none of the soft, sweeping gestures Talathis remembered from his youth. It came at him in a harsh, rhythmic code to brace for impact.

Rooms. Below. Move.

Her knuckles tensed as she pulled the final sign tight. Talathis felt the irrefutable command in the snap of her wrist and the sudden droop in her posture. His fingers stiffened against the seam of his trousers as the cold draft from the floorboards rose around his boots. 

He demanded no explanation. He offered no glance to his father. He just stood, stiffening his back with the rigidness of an iron rail. He met his mother’s fierce, unyielding gaze and answered with a single, sharp tilt of his chin.

"Down," he rasped, the single, subterranean syllable barely clearing his lips before he turned. 

After descending the narrow staircase back into the lower hall, the warmth of the taproom wrapped around Talathis like a fireside blanket. Salt-fish and mutton fat, with a sharp bite of overturned ale filled his senses. The day before, the roar of voices would have been a deafening din. Now, he noticed the eyes of men in shadowed corners and the uncharacteristic silence around their tables. Talathis no longer saw a boisterous room of jolly patrons. His new understanding of reality, of the tavern’s facade, and his truth of his mother’s place, the market emerged before him–where payment of debts came weighed in iron and paid in blood.

The moment Lirynel’s boots touched the floorboards at the base of the staircase, she moved through the open room with a fluid, effortless precision. Talathis observed her movements, noticing the quiet intent and subtle shifts he had spent a lifetime reading. The complete absence of hesitation in her stride suggested an intimate familiarity with the tavern, rather than a guest in an unfamiliar environment She moved like someone who knew its secrets and had watched it grow.

In fourteen winters of service aboard the Sea Wolf, he had dropped anchor in Vagnithane and slipped away to the Laughing Gull to see his mother many times. And yet, he had no memory of ever seeing Lirynel here. It never occurred to him she had ever been here before. 

He crossed the room in a dizzying silence and sank onto a rough wooden bench nestled deep within the shadow of a broad corner post. His shoulders fell under the crushing weight of newly unmasked secrets. Talathis looked at how the shadows played upon his rough hands, his fingers compulsively twitching as he grappled with understanding the world before him, one that lay hidden in plain sight until just moments ago.

A soft rustle of woolen cloth broke the heavy quiet. Krysaalis stepped into the dim amber light of the tallow lamp, eclipsing his hands in shadow. Before long, she moved forward gracefully, pulling a wooden stool beside his bench and sat beside him. Her face looked soft. She wore none of the rigid formality she had kept on the ship. Eventually, Talathis realized she was looking at him.

“The brick structure held a truly noble fantasy, Talathis,” she said softly. Her awkward, archaic Therysian spoken so low and warm that it came to him like honey-wine poured from a courtly glass goblet. Thinking of his dream as a fantasy hurt like a reopened cut, but a small smile crept onto his lips nonetheless.

“It was a fool’s dream,” he said in a flat, gravelly voice. He did not immediately look up, keeping his jaw locked and eyes fixed on his own hands clasped over his knees. “It was the nursery rhyme I sang to myself while my father treated me like inconvenient cargo and my mother scrubbed floorboards in the darkness of this place. None of it was real.”

“The brick is composed of stone and mortar, but the animating spirit remained genuine,” Krysaalis countered gently. He felt the sun-filled warmth of her sky-blue eyes searching his face. “I have spent many Arcs sequestered amidst the scrolls of the archives, unearthing the  crafted illusions we weave to shelter the soul from the burden of past eras. We fashioned a sanctuary of gilded myths, even while my kin bled in valleys and suffered in the hollows. I am well-acquainted with the vertigo accompanying the disintegration of one’s own foundation and the vulnerability that follows the shadows reaching back toward the light.”

Talathis slowly met her gaze. His words escaped his throat as a scraping murmur. “My father told you what I am to you. A short wick. A spark that burns hot and bright for a single season before turning to dust. And you remain a frozen, unchanging monument.”

She went still. A faint flush darkened her temples. “I am no monument, Talathis. Monuments do not bleed, nor do they stand at the rail, watching the pilot clear the fog.

“The Captain appraises individuals against wood and iron, tallying their remaining winters against the rust in their bones,” she said, moving the thumb of one hand over the knuckles of another. “His perception is of a short wick because he fears the guttering flame. On the Sea Wolf, when your persistence refused to yield against the current in Lithrys, I did not see a fleeting spark, Talathis. I saw an anchor.”

A small, tired shadow of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Anchors rust, Scholar.”

“Not while it sustains the line,” she replied in a determined, melodic cadence. “Did you not endure the burden of the helm for many days and nights in unbroken vigil? Did you not compel the keel to remain resolute amidst the current in Lithrys, defying the pilot’s frantic pleas to change course? The ambitious goal of becoming a merchant was a tapestry woven of hollow myth, yet the spirit guiding us through the peril was always true.”

Talathis looked at her healing hand, no longer wrapped, but resting gingerly in her lap. “You seized the Aeolian console barehanded, cooked yourself to save Lirynel, and pulled a frozen newborn from her frostbitten mother on a blood-slicked deck. After part of the ship vanished to ash when struck by that depthless black. You’re no delicate scholar from a golden tower, Krysaalis.”

“We endure as fellow castaways who have yielded the fortress of our certainty to the capriciousness of the currents,” she whispered.

He reached out for her slowly. His fingers rough and battered by hemp rope and frozen rigging brushed lightly across the unscarred skin of her wrist. Krysaalis did not pull away. The rigid perfection of quiet and stillness she maintained on the quarterdeck dissolved, watching the tension leave her shoulders like the tide going out. It felt like watching a clear sunrise after a breaking storm.

"We have a harbor to map tomorrow," Talathis said softly, his gaze steady and clear. "And whatever dark is waiting in Vagnithane... we hold the line together."

Krysaalis gave a single, firm nod, the amber lamplight catching the quiet resolve in her face. "Together, Pilot."

†                                          †                                          †

The quiet hours of the night had settled deep into the lower quarters of The Laughing Gull, drowning the distant thrum of the harbor. The tide kept its own time, so the waterfront never truly slept. The air in the lower chamber smelled of seasoned oak, faint tallow smoke, and old linen, existing in isolation from the damp chill of the harbor. The colorless light of the dying watch crept across the empty common room, turning the damp woodsmoke to stale ash. In the stillness beyond the taproom within a small, wood-paneled room in a portion of the inn reserved for servants, a single yellow flame guttered from upon an oak table, sending soft and warm shadows to dance upon the floorboards.

When Talathis reached the doorway, Lirynel was giving a parting embrace to her old friend. 

“I’ll leave you two be,” Lirynel whispered softly and slipped soundlessly past him into the quiet gloom of the common room. 

His mother crossed her arms, a subtle, cocked smile touching her lips as he appeared in the doorway. Talathis felt a slow, unconscious release of tension in his chest, and returned her grin with a faint smile of his own.

What brings the ship’s Master Pilot to an old maid’s room in hours before dawn? Jayne signed in relaxed, sweeping gestures. The sharp strikes of the earlier shorthand she used in the upper loft had vanished entirely. 

“I want to understand, Mother,” he said quietly, his voice so low it would have gone unheard much beyond the dim candlelight. “I want to know what you’ve been hiding from me.”

Talathis stepped into the room and pulled out the wooden chair. The legs scraped the floorboards loud enough to make him cringe, earning him a tilted head and an admonishing glare from his mother. He sat down, leaning his forearms on the chair’s oaken toprail. 

“What’s the reality of the mother I never knew?” he asked.

Jayne sat across from her son in a heavy grey woolen dress, its color appearing darker in the dim light. Her hands moved from her chest with relaxed wrists, as her fingers traced the slow, sweeping loops of their silent communication–the familiar gentle, sylvan code from his childhood. 

She sighed, her jaw tensing. A brittle clack of her teeth cut through the quiet, followed by a gravelly rasp drawn from deep within her throat. He knew the sound; he had grown up with it. A harsh, physical huff that marked the boundary of her words before her fingers ever moved. 

Then came the familiar, silent chiding from her fingers. 

Use your hands! 

The gesture sent Talathis back to moments in his youth when his mother had warned him against the same carelessness. But, he was a boy no longer, and as a genuine smile touched her eyes, the cold draft became the warm and familiar cadence of his mother’s soft signs. 

Little girl in Bryla, her fingers signed, tracing an open arc that drifted like a gull over water. The shipyards. Your grandfather’s timber.

Talathis watched her hands with native fluency, his broad shoulders slowly unspooling from their defensive set. He had put in at the port on Bryla many times, but he had never known her life had begun there. He did not merely read the gestures; he felt their weight.

You were on the docks? Talathis signed back in the familiar Silent Hand.

Her palms opened, sweeping downward to depict the dark, churning waters of the southern bays. Smuggler. Blockade-runner. The Blackened Seabird. I was never a tavern maid, Tally. I was an informant.

Talathis’s eyes narrowed as corners of his life began to align. The Wolf’s Boatswain. Garrick. Smuggler. Blockade-runner. The Blackened Seabird, he signed back, concluding with a flat-palmed slash. Garrick and the Blackened Seabird. Blackpool. Not Bryla.

A light of immediate recognition bloomed across his mother’s face, and she offered a firm nod.

She paused, her breath catching in a quiet, dry exhalation through her nose. Her right hand rose, hovering inches from the line of her jaw and the scarred hollow of her throat. She did not execute the violent, slicing motion across her neck that she had used earlier. Instead, her fingers moved with a heavy, solemn dignity.

Blackpool, she signed, her fingers slowed to a heavy, deliberate rhythm. Blackburn War. Fled Blackpool to Reimes. Garrick helped.

Did you know Lirynel or my father then? Talathis asked.

She shook her head. Reimes. Blackened Seabird took Cedrik and Lirynel into the Bay of Tears. Before the Corsair War.

Before the war? Talathis signed with furrowing brows. That was nearly a decade before I was born!

Jayne nodded again. Her fingers traced broad arcs, making her response contemplative and reflective. I spent years in Shintlara and the Black Lands with Liryn.

Is that where you learned…this? Talathis signed, gesturing to their silent hands moving between them.

Jayne gave a single, somber nod.

If you were moving hidden cargo with my father and Lirynel across Shintlara, Talathis signed, how did you end up in Sjavarberg? And Liryn at the Lockstone, instead of becoming Rondish?

Her response came as a soft smile punctuated by a gravelly wheeze in her chest as she rested her hands flat upon her knees. She met her son’s look with an unblinking intensity. He saw the flicker of the amber flame reflecting in her eyes. They carried no plea for pity, only the reality of someone who understood the difficult pain of impossible choices.

A long moment passed in silence before she brought her hands up to continue.

I went to Sjavarberg to hide, her hands continued. To protect you from black snakes.

Snakes? What snakes? Who? Talathis leaned closer as the draft from the hallway cooled the sweat on his temples.

She returned to the dark, rapid cuts of her ciphered shorthand. Her knuckles scraped against her worn palms with a speed that blurred the space between her hands.

Blackburn, Jayne signed, adding a guarded, predatory arc low against her chest. Serpent god.

Serpent god, Blackburn, black snakes came together with a single conclusion. The Black Adders?

Talathis feared his mother’s answer.

Without pausing to acknowledge his question, she continued in forceful snaps and rigid tension in her forearms. Talathis read the movements natively without parsing them individually, reading the flow of her hands like the currents in Lithrys harbor. Her fingers traced the curved line for tongue and severed it with a slicing strike across her collar and a deep, dry huff in her throat. She told a tale that went beyond casual cruelty; she had paid dearly to hold a secret she could no longer verbalize.

A hollow flush of warmth flooded his chest. He shifted as if to respond, but she reached out and grabbed his wrist, arresting his attempt. Jayne gave a sharp huff and locked her tidal-green eyes with his. She let go, her fingers immediately shaping a tight questioning twist before dropping lower, striking the wood of the table with the flat of her palms to mark what came next.

Duke of Dragondown. Siren of Blackpool. You are both.

Siren of Blackburn. The legendary silver-tongued rebel whose bawdy songs filled taverns across the Eleysian Sea. 

"She speaks true, son."

The low rumble of gravel came from behind him. It was his father’s voice without any of the booming reverberation that typically accompanied his theatrical command of the quarterdeck.

Talathis turned to see his father. There stood the heroic Duke of Dragondown he had always known. And his mother had always been Jayne, the silent tavern maid, broken and skittish. From that vantage, he only knew her through a lens of profound and protective pity. But his mother had clearly suggested the siren, whose song lured men to their deaths in tavern tales across the Five Seas. While he did not suddenly believe his mother to be a mythical siren, he could not forget the soothing childhood sounds of her pleasant humming.

But Siren of Blackburn? An ageless, romanticized ghost from a war fought before he was born, before she gave up the song that named her. Slowly, his hands curled into fists in his lap, as if to push against the leaden weight of his own crushing heritage. He was never an independent pilot carving out a place in the world. He was nothing more than another refugee from a blood-stained war for succession over a land foreign to him. And yet, his mother had surrendered her song so that he could have a chance at a voice of his own.

Cedrik stepped into the room with the dry crack of a stiff joint as he crossed the threshold. The flickering shadows made the Duke look old, but nowhere in the darkened lines of his shadowed face did Talathis see any armor of authority. Rare even on his own ship, he entered without Howler, his cutlass. It was as though the permanent, caustic smirk of his had dissolved into an unbearably deep weariness.

Cedrik moved past his son and stopped beside Jayne’s chair where he rested his heavy, calloused hand lightly upon her shoulder. Jayne did not flinch and instead leaned lightly into the touch, her fingers reaching across her chest in a wordless return of affection, as though they sealed some ancient covenant.

“She was Faelyan Massan,” Cedrik said, his voice dropping to the low, grinding scrape of an anchor dragging over seabed. His father looked down at his mother with a tenderness Talathis knew was rare for the old wolf. “The Siren of Blackburn was the sharpest set of eyes and ears the loyalists ever had in the Eleysian Sea. What she gave up saved the whole of the western Black Lands. She bore you in a cold attic in Sjavarberg while I was bleeding with King Wyann’s Corsairs.”

“And why Sjavarberg?” Talathis rasped, discovering his own voice had become thick and uneven as he sat motionless, holding clenched fists on his knees. “It’s dangerously close to Kourvan and under the ominous shadow of the Lockstone. Why there?”

“My idea,” Cedrik admitted. His jaw tightened as he looked his bastard son squarely in the eye. “And my greatest cowardice. I was terrified, Son. The Night of Fallen Crowns. Wyann’s parents, the Queen Ryssa and her consort, Mandril Drake, along with my own father were butchered and paraded through the streets as traitors guilty of colluding with the Darkness. In truth, they were victims. Their assailants were veiled by the same Shadow they fought against that night. They hunted blood. Your mother, with Lirynel and others, fought back from the shadows, making enemies of many. And when I learned of you…”

Cedrik swallowed hard, betraying a rare, visible crack in his calcified exterior. “You were part of her. And you were of my blood, inheritor of Dragondown and whatever secret the Queen was protecting that night. I couldn’t keep you near the court. I had to make nice with Lady Angye to keep Calette bound to Wyann’s cause. If I acknowledged you, you’d have had an ironshade dagger in your back before your first winter.

“So, I built bulkheads around both of you,” the Duke continued in an intimate register, stepping closer to his son. “I put you in Sjavarberg with Lirynel watching your back. When the Stornir sacked the port, the secret hiding places Lirynel taught saved you both, she’d said. But I knew it was too dangerous for you, then. Too dangerous to have you that close to your mother. Once here in Vagnithane, I dragged you onto the Sea Wolf where I could take responsibility for you myself…and I treated you like a bilge rat. Every time I barked at you, every time I corrected you until your eyes and fingers bled, every time I left you in Dragondown’s harbor docks to ride inland to the manor…every time, I was just trying to forge a weapon hardened enough to survive the same dark that nearly swallowed your mother and I. I needed you to be strong, steady, fearless. A master of the sea. But I needed the world to think you were nothing more than a captain’s forgotten bastard.”

“Boan’s Crows share intelligence with the Adders. Boan never knew your mother, “Jayne,” as the Siren of Blackpool. And I’ve stayed close to him since the end of the war, since before he ever had Crows. It was the best way I could see to hide you both and assuage his suspicions. As far as he knows, Jayne’s from Sjavarberg, and you’re just the bastard of a salt-wife.”

Talathis stared at his father as the truth settled into the room. The memory of Averos—the humiliating demotion, the shame of being stripped of First Mate, the belief his father viewed him as little more than a drunken failure—reeled in his mind, suddenly reframing every action his father ever took through the calculations of a paranoid parent and reluctant noble.

“Averos,” Talathis whispered. “The demotion.”

Cedrik huffed out a short, harsh breath that carried a sound of profound self-loathing and crossed his arms. “There are so many veiled eyes in that harbor. You slipped up with a girl, and they needed to think they found something critical. I stripped your rank and gave them chum. I made you cargo. I made you hate me…so you’d stay alive.” 

The room went completely still.

Jayne slid her rough palm over Talathis’s knuckles. With a single, gentle flick of her left hand she offered him a soft gesture of comfort from their quiet years in Sjavarberg. 

Forgive the shield, Tally. I know it cost a lot, but it protected you more than you know.

Cedrik added gently, “We were always headed to Lithrys, but they never knew that. They watch Lirynel, but no one knows who Lady Krysaalis is or whether she came from Averos or Bralmord or wherever the Lynx loped from before that.” 

He could feel the warmth in the rims of his eyes as he looked from his mother’s concerned expression to his father’s humbled countenance. The raw stump of Cedrik’s missing index finger twitched against the chair—a piece of his father taken by the same brutal war that scarred both of his parents.

The comforting illusions he had carried since boyhood burned away in the dim candlelight between a mute spy who could never sing again and a scarred duke who broke his own heart to keep their son alive. He felt the weight start to ease into a light vertigo.

He was not a failure. He had never been an unwanted mistake. They had bled and sacrificed to protect his innocence. And life.

Talathis slowly began to relax. He closed his fingers around his mother’s palm and looked into Cedrik’s deep blue eyes that appeared black in the flickering light.

“The wind has shifted, Father,” Talathis said softly, his voice now as firm and resolute as the Sea Wolf’s iron-heart keel. “The weather is changing. Where does that take our hunt?”