Thank you SEAKING! Glad to see more readers are becoming interested in my story!
This one was a little late in terms of my pattern of posting chapters, but I believe the length will make up for it. So, without further adue, I present to my readers...
Under Their Noses
The waves rocked along the tanned shore quietly, uncurling the sand grains nestled in the beach, and slowly unwinding them to the seas. The sun delicately rose over the gleaming horizon, in between the far out rocks that scattered themselves across one's vision. The orange, blue, red, and purple pigments swirled around in the sky, creating a breathtaking painting-like view that captured the soul of a being. It was quiet, like that like before it begins to snow, graceful, peaceful - eerie, almost. The island was bare - the tents, gone or left behind, the shops, boarded or burned, and the bay, free from any ships, aside from the
Victory Shark, and a single vessel that slowly made its way out, away from the desolated space of land.
Delmaria walked along the beach of the island, from the hill, down across to the shipwright, letting the little waves ripple against his feet. Off in the distance, he stood and stared at the burnt pile of rubble, still steaming a little from the events of the night before.
After the celebration of their victory over the invaders, the privateers went mad, pillaging, plundering, and burning anything they could get their hands on. A few of the remaining French Officers tried to hold them off from breaking the island in to chaos again, but they were easily overpowered by the masses of freebooters. They grabbed any piece of French symbols they could find, from flags, to paintings, to even jewelry, and tossed them on top of the pile of wood that was once Porc's beacon of "justice." They then created a massive bonfire out of it, before gathering their personal affects and fleeing the island in sprees.
Delmaria easily trotted up to the pile of wood, his royal blue, embellished tunic still floating in the wind (he believed that if he was given it, he would keep it.) It was beholding, standing before the former stronghold of one of the greatest centralized forces in the Caribbean. He walked forward, stepping over the little fence-like burnt area of wood, in to the actual site. The cooled embers and splinters crunched before his feet, as he climbed plank over plank to look further in to the wreckage. He had his sights on one item, solemnly determined that it was still there, despite the destruction. And sure enough, as he pulled over the base of a destroyed crate, it was there.
A little, alabaster box sat tilted over on the floor, smoked lightly by the fires that were doused with the rain earlier that night. It was very small, palm sized, but so beautiful carved and textured, that it had no bumps or blemishes. Delmaria scooped it up, and carefully opening it, revealing gold, shimmering ring. It had a simple, gold band, but was topped at the top with a craftful, amazing gemstone. It was a star sapphire, crafted by the mystical powers of the Earth to a bare a deep violet base, with a white, five-point star reaching out over it. Delmaria slipped the ring on to his finger, and nodded quietly, gripping his hand.
The ring was stolen from him by Porc far back during his rebellion against the Pirate Lord, and since was a prized possession of his, often flaunting it at any prospecting privateer who wanted to join his ranks. Delmaria smiled as he felt it on his hand. He turned, and walked paced back to the Shark, eager to reach his next destination, still fiddling with the ring.
He boarded his ship in an eager swiftness, the rest of the crew lousily making the knots in the ropes as they prepared to launch off in whatever direction. Lawrence tranced down from the second deck to his Captain, who shifted his way to the center of the main deck, around the crew. "Seas are open, captain. Guess all of them got scared out. Winds are good, too."
"Excellent. Preload all the cannons and set course due South-southwest. We might just hit up a few ships along the way."
As the crew ran off in their separate directions, Darkskull took one more look at the ring. Eccentric as it was, it was special to Delmaria. It had belonged to his wife.
1
The sun slowly began to ascend back up across the horizon, the glistening on the water strengthening to create a mystifying entrancement that glazed the eyes of the travelers that lined the large stone dock. A magical blanket of the clear blue sky created a free, limitless atmosphere, until one turned their attention to the sight before them. A thick, large stone dock rose steadily, then faster to the base of a great, massive set of walls leading off in both directions, fading as they cut off around a corner a little less than a kilometer away. The sight was amazing, to think that a man-made structure could be made at such a stature. At the end of the dock was a high, arching stone gate, that led off in to the entrance of the fortified island. Travelers, commoners, and elegantly dressed folk alike bustled up and down the dock, shifting in to and out of the entrance.
On a straightaway along the great stone dock, before the faster incline yet after the steady one, a pile of boxes layed next to the barely unprotected edge of the walkway. At the side of the pile, that faced towards the island, Delmaria stood, his heavy, black brimmed hat lowered to shield his eyes from anybody who tried to meet them. He watched the crowds go by, staring down at their feet. He didn't look, but observed, watching and waiting, cautious yet patience and quiet. He didn't shift or move, until the clank of Navy boots marching in sequence passed by him. As the group of six soldiers, lined in two rows of three walked by, their bayonets pointed in to the air, Delmaria slowly merged in to the crowd only a meter behind them, continuing quietly as though to blend in with the crowd.
When he passed under the daunting shadow of the gate, stepping out on to the short, fuzzy, firm grass below his boots, he paraded past them, now quickly pacing through the crowds, whom were lighter here than on the dock. He watched off his left, gazing over the outline of houses and shops that lined far off in the distance along the great wall, the center area cleared to allow for an expansive place for training, where the public could gaze as they went about their daily activities. A small group had formed near a formation of a few soldiers, who readied their guns at a few sack dummies, firing and stabbing them in unison as their bearded officer barked at them from the front. The esteemed crowd clapped casually, as in respect to the soldiers.
Another separate fort rose to the left , raising up high in to the sky, as Darkskull walked up a small hill, and under yet another gate, larger than the one at the entrance, as a few disgruntled Navy officers glared over the people that walked back and forth. One of them had suspiciously locked on to Darkskull, be the pirate ignored him, proceeding in to a longer strip of land that headed off to the right, the right wall that extended from the front of the island had now worked its way to move down the right. A little ramp led down from the left, where the massive second fort sat, which bore out from the fortification to allow entrance. A few minor tent shops had been set up, where a few people bargained and negotiated in a loud buzz over things from meat, to clothing, to supposed voodoo relics that were told to "cure all illness and disability." Yet the most impressive sight of all was the godly hill that rose straight out along the left wall, reaching far in to the sky. It was crowned by a great fort, which one might say could allow a single person to gaze across the entire Caribbean.
Darkskull headed down the stretch in the direction of a lavish, semi-forested hill that lead up in to another region of the island. Yet he ignored it, and, after checking that nobody was looking, made a sharp, quick right, up to a heavy pair of wood doors. A little slit was on the front of it, just at eye level. Delmaria checked again, and then knocked in a specific order, two heavy, slow taps, followed by five slight, quick taps, and then ending with three unevenly spaced knocks. The slit opened to a strong pair of eyes, which glared heavily. "Password?"
Delmaria, without hesitation, recited "In nomen of Licentia , Nos coma concussio.", followed by the two of them translation at the same time "In the name of liberty, we stalk the oppression." The slit closed, with the door creaking slightly open, followed by Delmaria instantly stepping in, as the door slammed behind him. The large, heavy set guard turned to him, his brow leaning over his gaze.
"Glad to see you again, Captain Darkskull." He saluted in a nod.
"Ah, good afternoon Herald. Glad to see you still are with us." Delmaria looked forward, in to the quiet room. It was a large storage room, piles of boxes, crates, barrels, sacks, chests, and containers of all sizes tossed around in a semi-orderly fashion. Halfway in to the room, it let down in to a depression, which was not visible from where Delmaria stood, due to a large stack in front of him. Little candles sat along the pillars of the walls, lighting the room. "I'm guessing that everybody is in the underground?"
"Aye." He shrugged, returning back to his post at the door. Delmaria walked down, past the pile of boxes, in to the depression. Walking in to the little area, he headed over to the far right corner, where two huge boxes sat side by side. Darkskull gripped them, and shoved them away from the corner, revealing a small, wood paneled door, which was only up to Delmaria's stomach in height, yet was twice in width. He tugged at a small handle on the side, and uncovered the grim sand and dirt floor that he could see from his point. He got down on to a lying down position, and crawled through the small space as though it were a usual routine. He crawled only a small length, before coming in to a narrow, long cave, that winded downward and to the left steeply and sharply. A few torches that were held to the wall by metal holders illuminated the dank, brown cavern, the ceiling looming overhead.
Delmaria headed down the cave in a nice, swaggering walk, preventing himself from toppling over in the abyss. The path was never straight or predictable, constantly turning around and around. It was only after a few minutes of walking and whistling did Darkskull reach a well-sized stone facing, bearing another large, wooden door. The white stone studded out from the deaf surroundings, peeling away a slight light of civilization. A little ornament hung down at the door, to which Delmaria took and slammed it on the door three times. After a few seconds, it opened - and with the door, opened the livelihood.
The pirate found himself submerged in an underground parlor room, filled with tables of happy revelers singing, drinking, and chatting, maintaining a healthy level of insanity, to the point that nobody got in to a bloody bar fight. A bar sat along the far left wall, where groups of men and women dressed in extravagant gowns and common linen alike clinked glasses and ordered round after round, flirting and mixing with each other. It had the regular dim orange hued-light of any other Caribbean bar, but the type of atmosphere was different - tight-knit yet crazily active and joyful, like the feeling of a large family reunion during the holidays. They were all relatively different in appearance, but they had one common piece that dignified them as a group - a little silk band, like a flag almost, that sat over their heart. It was three vertical bands of color, red, blue, and yellow, with their crew's or family's coat of arms put over the bands to represent individuality, yet unity. The red, represented the color of courage and revolution. The yellow, represented justice. And blue, represented freedom.
As Darkskull stepped in to the party, heads began to turn, to stare at the pirate. Slowly, their voices quieted, Delmaria coming down to a halt as he walked among the tables. As he stopped next to one, looking around to see the many faces, a man leaning back in a chair next to him, patted him lightly and cautiously on the arm, stating "Welcome home, Liberator!"
They all raised their glasses in unison and gave a cheer of support, before returning to their disrupted activity. Although it would humble most, Darkskull continued forward, past the room, and up a set of stairs that started at one end of the back wall, and rose to meet a walkway that continued above the walls surrounding the bar. He went up the stairs, rounded around the corner at the top, and then headed across an overhang, a little path that jutted out over the bar, where the chandelier hung from, to the other side. The other side led directly in to another room, with a few steps that ran from wall to wall leading entirely open in to an office-like area. A desk waited there, with a man leaning against it's front, his arms crossed in a smile as Delmaria approached. He was shorter than Delmaria, wearing an old, grizzled white bear, with a rough tricorne sitting on top his dwindling hair. He was puggy, but still in a normal shape. His old, blue eyes laughed as the pirate approached him, climbing up the steps and standing before him.
"Ah, my old friend, Delmaria, good to see you!" He clamped a heavy hand down on the pirate's shoulder, and shook Delmaria's hand with the other.
"And you as well, Admiral."
The two pirates sat there for at least a few hours, elaborately and dramatically going over anything from politics, to past ventures. Delmaria stood firm on the ground that his raid of Havana with the crest of Captain Gerald Blackly far outmatched the cunning of when the Admiral took down a half of the Spanish Royal Fleet Caribbean Division with only a War Sloop manned by himself an a one-legged pirate named Jeffrey. It got to a point where over a simple debate over the profits of silver trafficking did Delmaria nearly punch one of the Admiral's crew mates squarely in the brunt of the nose. It finally began to simmer as they slinked in to a period of silence, and Delmaria got back to the reason he took time out of his day to come here.
"Edward, perhaps you've seen a recent.. pattern in the current events, correct?" Delmaria asked as he propped his legs up on the desk before him, his back leaning towards the open space that led over back down to the bar.
"I'm not sure I'm catching your drift. Explain, please?" The Admiral questioned as he leaned forward in his chair.
"Well... the assassinations, Edward. Longshire and Regald, yes, they were on our hands - but I never heard any plans to eliminate Victorio, nor Porc. And I'm almost positive Roger isn't interested in joining the Libertists. What I'm saying is... don't you think it's a bit odd that Jolly has decided to take breaking down the tyrants of the Caribbean in to his own hands?"
"Well, as much as I like the fact we're getting somewhere in finally opening up the seas again, I can honestly say that I have expected something. What, with this base being directly under the capital of Beckett's iron fist, I can assure you we hear plenty of rumors. Anything from gold resivors to voodoo relics is the supposed reasoning behind Roger's reasoning. I've even heard rumors Roger is trying to work out something with the heavens, but I highly doubt somebody with his... stature, has faith in above."
"There must be something, though. Surely you have an idea."
A sudden roar of screams rang out at the bar, followed by the simultaneous blasting of muskets in the direction of the doors. Orders and shouts, heavy, male shouts, rocked and boomed as the sounds of not only tables flipping over and glass shattering, but retaliation, as cutlasses and daggers flew through the air, out of sight. On the second level, where they were, pirates ran back and forth along the walkways, until one of them ran in to the open room up to his leader. "Admiral... the Navy, they found us!"
Edward had an immediate streak of disbelief run down his face. He quickly rummaged through the pairs on his desk, and threw an envelope in to Delmaria's lap. "Head to building 122 up in the town, and stay low. Everything else will be explained in that letter. Take the door across the walkway, it'll lead you through a passage to a back dock on the island. Good luck."
Delmaria shoved out from the desk and flurried himself across the decorated rug, down the little stairs, and pushed his way through the scatters of pirates out on to the walkway. Darkskull looked down to the bar as he crossed over, watching the groups of red uniforms pile over the pirates, stabbing and swinging their bayonets with precise precision in to their bodies. The large wooden doors were flung open in to the room, a group of Officers making their way in to inspect the floor. A heavy, blank uniform stuck out behind them, but Darkskull darted out to the door across the walkway before he took notice.
Delmaria quickly grabbed the door, went through, and slammed in shut, murmuring the screams from the room behind him. He was again in another tunnel, only much larger in width and in height, with a less dense aura of light to guide his way. He began to walk slowly, until another shot rang out in the room backwards. He came back in to realization, and began to run down the flat, wandering passage. His feet thudded against the hard rock ground, the elevation of the ground staying platued and consistent.
Darkskull finally came to the exit of the cave, rounding a corner to meet a huge carving in the back of the island, the wind spraying water in his face as he stepped out of the passage, and on to the wooden dock. He looked down to his left, where the dock continued hugging the island until a jutting out from the island cut it off. Above, the sun peaked over the edge of one of the higher forts, now at full blaze. He walked along the small dock, the heavy wood not noticing his weight. The waves were quiet, despite the winds beginning to pick up a bit.
When he reached half way down the dock, the heavy pounding of feet made him turn to face a group of gruff Navy Officers, escorting the man in black from before. His body was roughly draped in black, a heavy leather coat covering layers of eccentric white and gold patterned vests. A thick pair of gloves shielded his hands as he slowly ran his fingers up and down a knife of some sort, a black, embedded tricorne covering the area of his face above his brow. His face was middle-aged, the rough edges of his face showing stern order and horrors untold. He stepped away from behind his enforcers, to face Delmaria.
“Mr. Balnette, I’m going to ask you politely at first to come in to our custody. Should you fail to make the correct decision, you will be brought back by myself, alive, or dead.” The man instructed as he stepped forward tauntingly.
“Oh Mr. Mercer, haven't you learned anything in my time in the Caribbean?" Darkskull said as he turned about, returning to his little stroll down the dock.
"As you wish. Ready your aim, ma-!"
It took Delmaria only a few seconds to garnish his dagger and spin around, sidewinding it across the deck. It barely passed by Mercer, but dashed the leg of one of the soldiers, causing him to fall down on to his knee and trigger his bayonet, that shot a fellow soldier in his foot. By the time Mercer turned away from the confusion to look for the pirate, he was gone, diving off the dock in to the waters below. The assassin ran to the edge of the dock, to watch Darkskull swim off around the corner of the massive cliff.
He frowned, disgruntled, as he turned back to his soldiers. He walked past them, back in to the cave, stuffing his throwing knife back in to his pocket. He walked over to the wall, where a torch sat, and picked it up off it's place. He walked back over to the dock, and tossed it, setting off a fire at the patch of the dock before the wounded soldiers. As the fire spread and the screams rang out, Mercer returned back in to the depths of the underground.
2
After taking a few days aboard the
Shark to relax and allow for things to calm back on Kingshead, he instructed his crew on the plans. They would spread out across the island, and head to the safe house at building 122 at different intervals of time, so that not to draw attention. Delmaria would go first in the early morning, to ensure it would be a safe venture.
He walked up the dock, past the marching fields, and up the long, gardened hill, trees coming off at the sides in a spaced and consistent pattern, leaning over the stone walls at their side. At the top of the hill was yet another large, stone gate, roughly the same size as that of the entrance. A few Navy soldiers stood there, watching the people walk in and out of the town. Luckily, Delmaria was cloaked over so that his appearance was hardly recognizable. He bypassed the guards in to the town, a quite small expanse, reaching to the left about half the length of the marching grounds. Houses and buildings run along the walls of the town, sitting cloaked under pillars or overhangs. Delmaria finally found building 122 nestled in between a gunsmith and a storage facility. After checking to make sure nobody was looking, he pushed through the small door and shut it quickly.
The building was completely vacant - no furniture, no forms of life, nothing. It consisted of a regular foyer with a vertical staircase leading up around a bend to the second floor, where two adjacent bedrooms sat. A little corridor sat to the left of the foyer in a little depression, and then down a long, narrow halfway, at the side of and then under the staircase, sat another, empty room. Delmaria triple checked the building, making sure the rooms were empty, the floor boards secure, the windows nailed shut. Finally, he went in to the left room from the foyer, sat down right in the middle, and tugged his massive coat off. He got himself settled, and pulled out the letter that Edward had given him.
All throughout the day, as crewmate by crewmate made their way in, Darkskull focused on the piles upon piles of documents that poured out of the envelope. From detailed trade routes, underground maps beneath Port Royal, Delmaria shifted through all of them, studying them.
He finally came to a report written by one of the captain's of the Libertists, to the Admiral, concerning the siuation in Kingshead:
Admiral,
Libertist ships have successfully managed to cut of grain supplies coming in from the South and West, which we've ferried back to the safehouse in Perdida. Navy soldiers are being deployed back to Port Royal in order to compensate for the lack of food. We've reported upwards of at least 250 soldiers returning to Charles, and 100 to Dundee.
Spies planted in Beckett's Quarry have uncovered the rumored plans by the Company, which depicts a new tunnel that will be excavated to go under the Corzana Tattoo Parlor, stretching out under the bay. Fortunately, it's path will not come within reach of our rumrunning path from the Skull's Thunder to the docks.
Reconstruction of Fort Charles is steadily gaining momentum with the influx of Navy soldiers. Progress is expected to slow, however, once Christmas arrives. Libertist Lt. Johnathan Perels, Captain Ronald Times, Officer Luke Rials, and Captain Delmaria Darkskull and their crews are to be rewarded for their ability in aiding in a swift a destructive cleansing of Fort Charles.
Lord Ambrose Royals (Delpadros Darkskull, son of Libertist Captain Delmaria Darkskull) has begun the militarization of Port Royal. Reinforcements of Navy soldiers have begun regularly patrolling the town and port, with inspection of all cargoes and ships entering and leaving the port increasingly significantly. Taxation on all land claims, imports, and exports have increased by 3.58% in the past two weeks. Children in schools have had their courses shifted to include lessons on "The Evils of Piracy" by Herald Lessington and the Mandate of Laws and Actions for the Reprimandation of Acts of Piracy and Treason. Execution rates of all pirates, suspected pirates, and relatives of pirates have also increased. Until further notice, all Libertist members should remain away from and around Port Royal.
On a further note, Lord Ambrose Royals has recently planned an unannounced trip to Kingshead, in which he will meet with head Naval and East India Trading Company Officials. He will arrive in the port roughly three days after you receive this letter. An assassination order has already been filed against him, and will be conveniently carried out by Libertist Captain Delmaria Darkskull.
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Ok, so this wasn't extremely exciting, but it was filled with more story than action. At least this will set the foreground for things to come
Can't wait to here comments and reviews, mates! Thanks for reading!