Bleu

--Garr Longship No More-- I. His father was leaving. It should have been easy. This was a rite of passage for all pirates. Garr swallowed the lump in his throat and followed his father into the Badlands, which were a mess of scrub and scree and rusted trash lost in the wilds around Starshade. Further along came the actual forest – high, impenetrable – and beyond that, no one knew. The pirates who flew out that far were crazy and never came back. But Garr wasn’t thinking of the high sea-sky. The city of Starshade glimmered distantly on the horizon, catching the dreamy jewel tones of a fresh dawn. Garr followed his father and aimlessly kicked at a rat, which hissed and ran. His father seemed to be growing larger and larger in this dump, squaring his shoulders, gathering courage for what lay soon ahead.

At last he halted and turned to his son.
His eyes shimmered with love and affection. Garr scowled back.
But the first words out of his father’s mouth weren’t those of ritual. They shocked Garr:
“I’m sorry.”
Garr blinked. “Sorry…” So, you’re not leaving? I’m not ready?
“I’m sorry I wasn’t tough on you. I was gentle. You lost your mother, but you reminded me so much of her. What else could I do, but take pity?”
Garr watched, speechless. This dragon was a far cry from the towering, gruff uber-dragon who drank others under the table.
His father recovered himself and placed a gentle claw on his son’s forehead. He smiled. “You’re ready, aren’t you?”
Garr knew that if he said anything other than yes, that he would never leave his father’s side, never claim his birthright. Never claim the sky.
He swallowed hard again and nodded.
Then Garr’s father spoke the words that harked back to ancient pirate rituals, from just as the first ships set sail for the skies.
“Now I have no son. My greatest gift to you is loosing my name from yours, and letting you go freely into the sky to find your own fortune. Nameless, you can dodge the jaws of fate for a while longer.”
Garr listened, mesmerized. His father’s voice rolled and thundered like a great bell.
“I’ve taught you everything you know, but now you learn another lesson: loss. My loss. It would happen someday; better for it to happen now.”
His bell-tones were fading away on the dawn. Now Garr’s father watched his son expectantly.
Instead of surging forward and flinging his arms around his father like he wanted to, Garr bowed his head.
The words of the blood-loosing were inlaid with a deeper meaning. A deeper love. Now you can be free of the curse, my son…
Then Garr turned away.
It was over and done. He was Garr Longship no longer.
There he stood meditating for many hours, even after his father’s footsteps faded from the Badlands.


II.
Bah. I’ll show him softhearted.
The next day was dawning, and Garr was angry with himself for feeling sad. Pirates shouldn’t have room for feelings, after all. Grunting and chomping on a meat stick from his ration pack, Garr set out on his first quest free from his family name: To find a ship.
The pirates of Starshade were a superstitious lot. They said that you had to cut ties with your family, so fate could never track you down and knock you out of the sky. Luck was a resource that could be used up – each family name had a limited supply.
Moreover, the pirates said that a pirate’s first ship – if handed down from one’s parent – was cursed.
Five times in recent memory, Garr could recall wealthy pirate-lines being smote for their insolence. By the Storm God himself, in fact. By nature’s cruelest lance – lightning.
Even if someone survived the ship wreck, they were seen as cursed and summarily exiled, never to find work or flight again.
Garr reminded himself of these things as he clambered and scrambled toward the Fields of Ingenuity.
That fate had befallen his father… Best not to think of him.
It was uncomfortable, not having a ship. Made him feel naked and exposed. Especially, as he clawed aside curtains of thorns, in the Fields.
Like the Badlands, the Fields of Ingenuity were a dump. A mess of metal, copper wire, sailcloth, and general detritus.
Rival pirate gangs hunched over wreckage, arguing about buoyancy and mizzens and masts. They looked on him with sneers…though Garr thought he detected pity as well. For a son just blood-loosed. For the son of a cursed one.
No, no. Never mind.
Sneering himself, he sauntered through the dump, looking for something he could use. Anything.
His eyes fell on the remains of a small ship, buried beneath a dirty pile of sail.
Without looking too eager, he ambled over, lifted the soggy cloth’s corner, and swore quietly. It was a name he knew well: Wayward Lass.
A racer sloop, it was, passed down from father to son…the ship bearing the scars of his own father’s ill-fated final flight.
And now, here it was. No wonder it was lying here. I suppose you can’t escape destiny.
As Garr brushed his paw over the engraved letters on the hull, he thought he heard the howl of wind, the hollow bellow of thunder…

III.
I will speak only of it this one time, his storm-lashed father rumbled back in the family’s home. His body was scarred by wind and scoured by freezing rain. He glared balefully at his family. We were overtaken. Slavers, they were. We recognized their broad black flags and the sign of the diamond on their sail. They latched onto the Lass – an ill-fated vessel to begin with – with their whips.
Lightning struck then, once, and arched and danced along the whip-lines like living fire.
Then something whipped the storm into a wild vortex. We tumbled end over end. I watched dragons fall into the storm clouds and past them.
I myself almost died. Our Captain was lost, and of the other woman with me…
At that, Garr’s mother shooed him to sleep, to bed. Even then he was terrified. He thought he felt the bed rocking beneath him.


IV.
In the present, Garr No-Name thought it was a fine predicament indeed. Just like life, right?
On one hand, no one in their right mind would pass up any first ship.
On the other hand, wasn’t a lightning-blasted ship cursed? And did this count as handing down a ship? If it wasn’t his father’s ship to begin with?
No, no. That doesn’t make any sense.
Reverently, Garr traced the lightning’s rippling afterburn. The lightning had left a wild, snarled tangle of threads burned into the hull.
Besides. They said that lightning never struck the same place twice.
A cold prickle shuddered down Garr’s back — one might even call it fate.
As the sun began to set, he set to work cleaning up the ship, mind made up.
Time for the next trial: waiting for a new crew to present itself.

--Tattered One-- I. Her father couldn’t remember the words. “And so I — er — what was it again?” “The jaws of fate, papa,” she said impatiently, prancing. “Something something no family name.” “Now I can’t abide that.” Her father rubbed his chin. “You’re my girl.” “But you gotta! Or I’m gonna get struck by lightning!” “Oh, screw it. I love you, lassie. Go make your way in the world, and tell the lightning to come talk to me if it has a problem.” Her father hugged her, then shook his finger before her nose. “No racing.” “Didn’t you just say I was free?” Her father sighed. “Guess you’ll learn the hard way. Noggin’s harder than diamonds.” He watched her scramble towards the Fields of Ingenuity, warm pride glowing in his heart.

II.
There was a lot of talk going on in the fields.
For one thing, Starshade Police were cracking down on ship-racing. With the new tour-boat business in full bloom, rogue racing ships were seen as a danger, a threat.
Naturally, pirates — who hate the law for the most part — saw this as a challenge. Soon winning pots were tripled and crews were wagering the greatest boon of all: ships themselves.
As the eager young Mirror scampered through the Fields, she heard the word race whispered over and over again. And that was her dream.
She didn’t know why. She just wanted to go fast.
For another thing, two dragons were patching up a cursed ship. This news whispered on the wind alongside the word race. And Tattered, already manic with excitement, was inflamed even more. She scurried from ship to ship inspiring cries of “hey, watch it!” and “outta the way, dumb lass!” looking for the cursed ship.
Finally she spotted it. Clans were gathered indirectly around a small, storm-torn boat, never looking directly at it. Sometimes they would shove one another and dare them to hop on that craft, laddie, we’ll never see you again.
Tattered shoved through the little crowd and gasped. She fell in love at once. The bold orange lightning-lines, the freshly-patched sails. A Tundra and a Nocturne staunchly ignored all the whispering and continued their various tasks.
Tattered couldn’t stand it. “What’s with all the whispering?!” she called.
The crowd melted away with grumbles and curses. The handsome Tundra looked up and cocked his head.
“The Fields are no place for younglings. Especially not young girls,” he said dismissively.
Ponzu snorted. “Hmmm-k. Whatever you say, Captain.”
“How many does your crew have?” Tattered interjected. “You need at least three to command a schloop of this size. One person to check the wing-sails, one to take the fore-sail, and one to take the wheel.”
Garr paused. “Is that right?”
“I got blood-loosed this morning, sort of.” Tattered nodded so hard she almost fell over. “But I know plenty. Been on the Starman, Wayland Faire, Mark III—“
“She’s your age,” Ponzu chuckled. “Blood-loosed youngin’s.”
Garr’s cheeks flushed. “We have two. And we’re fine with two.”
Tattered blinked. “You can’t fly it with two —“
“Well, we are.”
“In the race?” Tattered snapped. “Nonsense. I’m coming aboard.”
Garr moved to block her. “I’m the damn captain of this damn ship —“
“Coming. Aboard.” Tattered squared her shoulders and marched up the plank, onto the deck. She grabbed a sheet from the pile of sandpaper by her feet and began to sand it down. “Splinters all over the place…you all are crazy.”
“No, you’re crazy,” Garr snapped.
“Oh, aye, good one, Cap,” Ponzu whispered. “Lacerate her with that wit.”
Garr ignored her. “This ship is cursed.”
“And you’re going to fly it with two dragons. That doesn’t sound cursed, that sounds stupid.” The Mirror sanded harder in excitement. “Besides, if this works out, we only need to fly it once.”
“We?!”
“We. Oui.” Tattered’s tail lashed out like a whip. “Top five ships in the race tomorrow get a new ship. No joke, either.”
When the Tundra didn’t say anything, Tattered peeped over the edge of the ship. He was rubbing his face with his paw.
“I’m a pirate. Not a racer.”
“Well,” Tattered said brightly. “Why not both?”
III.
Garr didn’t like it. He said that repeatedly, even as he set to harder work. After all, if the ship had to be ready tomorrow, they had to hurry.
Ponzu was the bolt-checker. She moved from plank to plank, checking over and over again that nothing was loose.
Tattered’s specialty, apparently, was rigging. Garr believed the worst until she adeptly tied two mother’s knots and unfurled a ragged spider’s web hanging from the main mast.
His was hard labor. He rushed back and forth from the Badlands to the Fields, lugging massive stakes of wood and carving them with his sharp claws. Ponzu carved little notches in the deck for him to fit the mast in. Since the Lass was so small, the work was soon completed.
All they had to do now was wait. They sat around a small campfire. Garr glowered at Tattered, who was slowly blinking herself to sleep.
Ponzu yawned and stretched. “Consider it this way, cap. If we race tomorrow and we die in the attempt, we don’t have to worry about anything.”
“That’s pretty dark.” Tattered yawned like a dog, tongue furling and unfurling.
Garr scowled at the dirt. “I wouldn’t mind getting away from here forever. There’s nothing left here for me.”
“Hmmm. I’m supposed to have dinner with my parents every two weeks.” Tattered scratched her ear.
“That’s not blood-loosed, lassie.”
“Whatever. My family’s got such poor luck, we used it up long ago.” She smiled brightly, and Ponzu snorted.
Garr buried his face in his hands and groaned.
IV.
Still, he couldn’t suppress excitement when he woke the next day at dawn.
All around the Fields, ships were rising into the air slowly, gracefully, like herons lifting off a lake. The crews scurried around the bottoms of them, shouting and laughing, knotting ropes and cutting anchors. Some grew so excited that they fluttered from place to place.
Garr watched this scene fondly, though deep down he wished his father could be here to witness it.
Or maybe not. He had a feeling that if his father knew he was flying the Wayward Lass, he would never hear the end of it.
He was startled by the Lass lifting into the air — Tattered was heaving the ballast out, and the buoyant rocks were rising to the ceiling of their hold like soda bubbles.
Ponzu let out a whoop, but Garr couldn’t clear the foreboding from his chest. Other ships bobbed in the wind. The Lass simply hovered there, like it had some unknown purpose. Some…reason. A mind of its own.
Shaking off these thoughts, Garr offered a paw to Ponzu. Together they flapped upward and landed on the deck.
It was decided. He would have the wheel, Tattered the wing-sails, Ponzu the main-sail.
Sorriest crew I’ve ever seen. Sorriest ship, too.
With a few minor hiccups, they sailed gently forward, breeze blowing through their fur and scales. With the wind, Garr’s apprehension disappeared. Almost.
As they tried to join the other ships at the starting line, things began to go wrong.
The sails were pointed the wrong direction, parallel to the breeze. Blinking in confusion, he looked askance at Ponzu. But the Nocturne was focused on her job, and to disturb a main-sail-woman was folly.
Still, Garr could feel it: pressure and wind were building from the other side of the ship, shoving against where he wanted to go. He looked at Tattered, but the little air-brain was doing her job correctly.
Then what —?
Before he could answer that, a fierce cold wind blew. Without warning, one of the ropes binding the sail snapped. It lashed out and struck Tattered on the nose. She squeaked and reached up to clutch it, then let go of the rope holding the other wing-sail.
The ship listed to the right.
Garr frantically looked to Ponzu, but she was lost. The crack of the whip had brought back memories of the slavers, the thunderstorm, the fear and danger —
A howling gale rose and shoved the ship westward. Blinking tears of cold from his eyes, Garr saw the tops of the impenetrable forest. They were sailing out past it, riding a sacred wind — out of control of the ship.

--Ponzu of the Plague-Winds-- I. “And stay out!” the grog-master yelled. He flung the stein at her head. She ducked it. The big cup fell, shattering on the ground. “Damned sorceress.” The Snapper grumbled to himself and retreated inside the tavern. Ponzu got to her feet and dusted herself off, then spat in the dirt. Gathering up the remnants of her pride, she whirled and stumbled toward the Fields of Ingenuity. Drunk? Who’s drunk? Before she left, though, she craned her head over her shoulder and squinted. The wind picked up the shutters and slapped them smartly against the tavern. The little tavern shook. Satisfied, she shambled off.

II.
The office of pirate attracts all sorts of strange ones. The diseased, the dying, the mentally ill — many took to the sky to live out their last dreams, to find their fortune, to become one with the heavens.
Ponzu wasn’t sure she met any of those criteria, however.
There was something strange about her, but no one was sure what.
Least of all herself.
After all, her main problem sounded silly:
Sometimes, when she felt a certain way, the wind blew.
Many dragons may never have noticed it. Up in the sky, however, it soon became obvious.
If the captain of a ship got her upset, the sky-winds became a tempest. And if she got too drunk, the winds got drunk too, and it was impossible to raise a sail.
She was soon banned from the ships as a sorceress and demon. Banned from all ships except one, one desperate one, who needed any crew they could get their hands on…
But after that ship failed, she spent months belly-crawling through the seedier portions of outer-Starshade, drinking and awaking in gutters.
That wasn’t going to work anymore. She had decided.
Grumbling, lurching onward to the Fields of Ingenuity, she looked skyward. Crisp white stars winked back. Beckoning to her.
She had never participated in the ritual of parent-letting.
Raised in an orphanage, she broke out of the building as a hatchling, and snuck onto the nearest sky-ship.
For the sky had always spoken to her in her dreams, whispering downward, and she knew she belonged on a ship, but now —

III.
No one was going to hire her.
None of the little tribes clustered around their ships would look her in her good eye.
She was too recognizable — a rippling dark body accented by heaven-blue wings. Not to mention the eye-patch, which was rarer among pirates than some thought.
If she glared at them, they mumbled and rumbled until she headed off.
Dusk was falling.
An unaccompanied female in the Fields of Ingenuity — yes, even a crazy pirate who inspired fear and dread — was inviting trouble.
As she scowled up at the moon, wind began to tug at her clothes. Tied-down sails flapped in the breeze, and clans called to one another about the coming storm.
That set her on edge, teeth grinding. Fear flooded her. The wind grew, and screamed like a wildcat in her ears.
Why? Why am I like this? Why can’t I just live on a ship like a normal dragon?
Then she heard someone shout, “Peace! I’ll parley with you if you leave off the wind!”
The air grew thick at once, becalmed.
A young, rugged Tundra stood before her, palms facing out. His face was full of tenderness, but he quickly rearranged it into a sneer.
“Now. What’s with all that racket, lady?”
Ponzu sniffed. “No one ‘ull hire me because I’m cursed. Not that that’s any of your business.”
A flicker of recognition passed over Garr’s face. The other woman with me…
He spat. “That so?”
“The long and short of it.”
“Miss…I think you might have a job. If you’re willing.”
“Always willing.”
“That so?” He spat again.
“Long and short of it.”
“Look,” he said, exasperated. “I’ve been blood-loosed just yesterday and I can’t wait to get into the sky again. I have my ship over there —“
She stumbled and almost fell. “Sorry about that. Grog was stronger than the keeper let on.”
“Alright.” Garr hesitated, then took her arm and led her to his ship.

IV.
The Wayward Lass was looking better already.
Garr had mended the sails and patched the hull. Instead of buffing out the lightning marks in the wood, he’d painted them orange with mud and dragon spit. He was letting the lightning know you’ve got me once. Not again, please.
And still, Ponzu recognized it at once. She almost fell to her knees. Then she cursed loudly.
Finally, she turned and looked at Garr. He was lost in shadows. Night had fallen again by now.
“I flew this ship.”
“So I reckoned.” Garr scratched his ear, trying to appear calm. But nervousness was beating in his breast, along with his heartbeat. “What…happened, exactly?”
He could’ve been talking to stone. Ponzu was lost in thought, reliving it. The coal-black cathedral-sized clouds roiling around them. The specter of the slave ship. And her anger, whipping the winds into a frothy frenzy…
She swallowed hard. A light breeze brushed her scales. “They got Bleu. Good old captain Bleu. Best dragon I ever flew with.”
“I know. They almost got my father.” He found himself taking her paws. “But no one else will come near this ship, and — and I think it’s my destiny to fly it. Will you join me?”
Before he could curse himself for his forwardness, Ponzu shrugged.
“Aye. Depends, though. Do I get paid in ale?”

~~Bleu~~ His soft gruff voice may not seem intimidating, but get him mad, and you’re going to have to deal with some serious firepower. Bleu claims that he is a pirate not because he can, but because he wants to be. Seriously, it might be odd to others to consider it, but it is a lifestyle for him and his little band that travels together. While they journeyed and adventured, they came across a Guardian who bore the emblem of the Flamecaller. Bleu quickly befriended the Guardian, Honoo, and soon became a close comrade of his. --bio by ShadowChaser--

Epilogue

It’s about time, he thought, struggling through the desert. Honoo gasped and panted by his side, but he was doing better. The flamecaller’s mark on Honoo’s flank sparkled in the sun.
Yes, my family ship. Always mine, no matter what those slavers did to me…
The thought trembled and quivered in his mind.
They told me I could call the family ship back to me at any time. And now that we’ve escaped together…
He collapsed on the desert sand, narrow sides heaving.
He was only down a moment when Honoo tugged him. “Look! Look!”
A shadow spread across the desert. Bleu’s face cracked into a grin.
Our luck may run out and change as a family, but the Lass will never desert you.
The ship was touching down among the sands. Three faces peered down at their new captain.
He recognized one of them. “Ponzu?”
“The long and short of it,” she crowed, and bowed. “You knew I’d never forget.”
The Tundra was more solemn. He looked recognizable, almost, too...
He leapt out of the ship onto the sand and lifted Bleu into his arms.
"Welcome aboard, Captain."

--bio by Caelyn--

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