Delirian

I want to warn whoever is reading this that I started writing this story over two years ago and that my style has changed as well as the parts I wrote back then have switched from past tense to present tense more times than I can count.  Please bear through the first parts, and if you have any questions or ideas to improve anything, please leave a comment, and don't forget to vote if you like it, thank you! :)

Prologue 

I am a Delirian. My whole life was a lie. My father, my friends, everything I was taught. It was all a lie.

I received my first hint of this on my eighth birthday. My father had had the chef cook a meal to remember that day by. And he was right about that. But I never did get to taste the food. 

They came at noon. It was dark because of the approaching storm. For as long as I could remember, there had been a storm every year on my birthday. My father said that I was born quiet as a leaf blowing in the wind despite the tossing of the ship and the crackling of the thunder overhead. Storms had never frightened me, I always climbed the mast to the top, right before the crow’s nest during storms, to hang in the weed ropes, bouncing back and forth in the wind and tossing of the waves.

And that is exactly where I was. Hidden behind the pole in this nook I had found years before that hid me completely from all angles of the ship below, except for the one. 

Seth, the lookout, who was also the youngest in the ship apart from me, had gone down to help with the preparations since I was just as good sitting up there.

Now, I had never thought of us as pirates, we didn't pillage or rob other ships. But we did not belong to any one port, so you can see how we wouldn't have much gold or riches, just what we needed to stay happy and healthy. There were no other girls on the ship, not even my 'mother', and I never asked questions. I mean, I knew I wasn't a guy, but I sure felt like one. I kept my hair short and I wore the same cloths the others did. I was just as fierce as any one of them. 

The sound of the wind was music to my ears, I was completely oblivious. I usually have amazing hearing, but I was too focused on the approaching storm that I didn't hear it until I heard a deadly sound. It was Seth. I stretched my head around the mast and saw the gruesome sight. A dark man stood over him, sword dripping with dark crimson blood, Seth's blood. I covered my mouth not to let the gasp I knew was coming out. And it wasn't only him. All around there were these...these pirates.

As I said before, we were not pirates, we were peaceful. We did not have weapons of any kind. The men I had grown up with were slaughtered before my very eyes, every last one of them. 

I sat there, huddled against the mast of the ship, drenched from the rain, frozen with fear. I thought of going down there and dying alongside them. I mean, what was there to live for now?

And then I saw him, in that moment of weakness. He stood there, dripping wet, his sandy hair dark from the rain. His silvery sword was red with blood, but his expression was somber, unlike the others, who seemed to take pleasure in killing my family. He was at the one angle where I was visible, and when he looked up at me I swear my heart stopped. I know he saw me, this boy who wasn't much older than myself, younger than Seth, but so very easy around blood, which Seth had always been queasy around. Our eyes locked together, but then he looked away, and walked off the edge of the ship, and...I really don't know, he just...vanished...

And just as quickly as they came, they were gone, leaving me in the middle of a blood bath.

The ship sailed itself for the next few days until a crew ship found it, with me shivering and alone. Not a single tear had escaped me for the shock I was in. I had lain my father’s crew one beside the other, and cleaned them up as much as possible.

But when the ship came and took me with them, they simply lit the ship a flame and let it burn to the bottom of the sea.

I was brought to live as a servant in a noble’s home, ignored by most of the other maids until my hair grew out and I started to look more feminine.

But my heart was still at sea, swaying in the shroud, right below the crow’s nest, and I vowed to get my vengeance one day. I had no idea what vengeance meant back then.