City of Sinister Angles

The Pirate Prince

In the lowest part of a tall black office spire, only just barely high up enough to escape the creeping miasma of the city below, the priestess Valencia Draco maintained a modest throne room. Here she was receiving a small number of guild representatives, underdressed functionaries raised directly out of the mud by dumb luck or nepotism.

A single raised throne dominated the room, in which Valencia sat looking slightly bored. It was made of lacquered wood and carved with instinct horrors. The small raised platform on which the throne stood was sculpted to look like a pile of skulls. The priestess herself wore layers of long, thin, robes colored with whites and light pastels and propped up by a petticoat. She had a smattering of jewellery, mostly worn in her elaborately braided hair, and some expensive and elfin-looking make-up.

Valencia was a lesser priestess, responsible for just one annual augury. Once a year she would read the entrails of a black dove and divine the will of the Great Patriarch with regards to the purchase of ceremonial wine for the feast days that year. Bribes from the various guilds involved in wine making allowed her to just barely keep up a lifestyle appropriate to her station.

One of the two nearly-naked slave eunuchs flanking either side of the throne announced the next petitioner.

"The Priestess will now briefly acknowledge the presence of Master Goldvine of the Mead Brew's Guild."

A tall, portly man dressed in a second hand petitioner's suit stepped forward to approach the throne.

"A-although I am aware that mead is not the traditional libation served on feasting days," began Master Goldvine "I think I can make a very strong case that-"

Goldvine actually kept talking, but nobody heard what he said. The doors to the throne room swung open and the attention of everyone in the room shifted immediately to the man who walked through: Oskar Totenkopf.

Totenkopf was dressed in the manner of a merchant prince, wearing a black double-breasted jacket with four pure white buttons made of the ivory of a dead shark god. Underneath he wore a violet blouse and a knotted blood-red scarf. On his head was a peaked cap and on his feet were functional but suitably ornate black boots.

He was followed by six rough looking men carrying three large wooden chests between them. The men didn't look like slaves, mostly because they weren't. They were pirates.

Oskar Totenkopf himself was the most notorious and successful pirate to ever plunder the Thulian Sea. His deprivations against Thulian shipping made him one of the city-state's greatest foes. It wasn't until a week ago, when he sailed into port with ten golden-sailed treasure ships, that Thulian high society came to a collective decision that they were willing to ignore that last point.

Of course, this didn't change anything about his status as a pirate. It wasn't technically considered murder under Thulian law to kill him, and there had been more than one attempt on his life since he arrived. As per the rules of their order, after he killed the third assassin they sent after him, the Flower Arrangers Guild* declared Totenkopf off limits and would take no further contracts out on him for a year and a day.

*The Flower Arrangers Guild is not an Assassins Guild, and their agents of death will brutally assassinate anyone who attempts to repeat the vile slander that they are.

This was why he liked to travel with an entourage of heavily armed members of his fanatically loyal pirate crew, rather than slaves.

The pirates pushed past the crowd of guild functionaries and placed the three chests before Valencia's throne.

"My deep piety has moved me to make a small gift to the Great Patriarch," said Totenkopf "I hope you can accept it on his behalf."

The pirates opened the chests. Two were filled with gold coins; actual gold, not paper scrip representing gold in a vault somewhere. The other was filled with precious stones. Together it represented as much wealth as Valencia could have hoped to wring out of her post in the course of a lifetime.