sea farers,

a child of tortuga, it is the only home you have ever known. no foreign shore has ever beckoned, no distant family waiting beyond the horizon. your life is one of salt-soaked timber, crowded taverns and restless men. your parents lived modestly, your mother earned what coin she could mending clothes or washing linens, your father found work wherever ships required a pair of hands. you were not born to greatness and none expected you to rise to it. just another dockside girl, clever enough to know when to speak and wiser still to know when not to.

you were a child the first time you saw a man lose his tongue for the wagging of it. this was one of your earliest lessons.

a mere wisp of a girl, no kindly relatives appeared to offer shelter after a blaze set by pirates claimed your family home. it had been little more than a hovel, in truth, but yours. old seamus found you alone and cold, took you in, fed and clothed you. whether it was an act of pity mattered little, you slept beneath his roof and ate behind his bar, repaying his generosity in one of the few ways tortuga values. with labor. you swept floors before the age of ten, carried casks before you ever dreamed of keeping ledgers. and little escaped your notice. men saw no threat in the figure of a mousy girl, after all. and a scrawny thing you were, your father used to say. fine boned, like a bird.

watch the men, this was old seamus' lesson for you, and another you learned early on. men were no better than dogs, slavering things, they’d bark and they’d bite.

years passed, and dead man’s bluff became as much your home as his. beneath his tutelage you shed your childhood griefs, the little orphan sweeping floors became a comely lady in fine clothes. tortuga had crowned stranger queens than a women of a gambling house. and crowned you were.

by the time age confined seamus to his quarters upstairs, you had become his caregiver where once he was yours. you proved a kind one, for he alone had won your guarded, tender heart. meanwhile, the books remained balanced beneath your hand, disputes settled themselves with a few carefully chosen words. ever the faithful student, you had long since learned every corner of the establishment, a master of every task. in time you brought in your own strays, offering a family for which loyalty was your only price. when seamus died, the deed passed quietly into your possession.

stories followed, the always do. some claimed you had charmed the old fool into surrendering his livelihood, others still insisted on blackmail or threats. none of the rumors are true, of course. he plucked you from the ashes, raised you as his successor. but you let them believe each and every one.

now there is scarcely a soul upon the island who does not know the lady of liquor and ledgers. your welcome is warm, your ire cold. beneath your roof every captain is greeted alike, every quarrel given the same opportunity to end peacefully. they call your establishment neutral ground, and so it remains. in truth you have little affection for pirates, yet neither do you care for the gilded charter. if the former are rabid dogs, the latter are only hounds in fine collars.

your father was no pirate, you no poor man's whelp. born in caracas to a prosperous merchant family, you knew nothing of hardship. your father's fortune had been built upon honest commerce and you, the eldest and only son of three, were his heir. you received a gentleman's education in reading, writing and arithmetic. you learned etiquette and swordsmanship, lived a charmed life.

yet even the small fortune your father amassed proved a fallible thing when the scourge of pirates, the thieves and criminals he so hated, had taken a liking to his ships. a merchant is naught without his wares and word to back him, and it didn't take long for old friends to turn debt collectors, for old associates to whisper among one another. your father struggled to remain afloat, clung to his tattered reputation as a dying man does his final gasping breaths.

once the good and faithful son, now you pity him. a man so tied to virtue that he could not see his own vices. prideful, he was. greed and glutton both.

eighteen and able bodied, you sought to restore what had been stolen from your family. you departed with your father's blessing aboard a spanish privateer and sailed for four years, lawfully, under the crown's commission. in the eyes of spain it was a noble deed, in the eyes of your father it was a hero's work. when each prize claimed trickled back to your purse, you sent a share home — only ever a small sum, enough to pay down a debt, to keep the household running while your father rebuilt.

when peacetime led to your commission being revoked, that honest work vanished overnight. long since disillusioned by your time spent among sailors, you found it an easy thing to trade one crew for another. those months in service to the black flag may have branded you a criminal, but your work was much the same.

and you enjoyed it, didn't you? ever indulgent, ever faithless. there had always been a devil at your heels, and what a relief it was to finally cease your running. you, who would never be that merchant's boy again, who had abandoned that life long before your father cast you out.

when you returned, there was no question that your father despised you for it. you swaggered into his house swathed in fine clothes and gold jewelry, and your mother and sisters had the goodwill to look past it. he alone refused your embrace, your stained coin, your lavish gifts. but that night over dinner his true rage spilled forth, he declared his only son died at sea, that the man at his table was no more than a stranger. he had already alerted the authorities, he warned. so you fled before they arrived, never returning home again.

later, on his deathbed, he would maintain that warning you had been his greatest mistake. there are many since who would be inclined to agree.

she was born in the year 1726, into a family made comfortable by the trade of medicinal goods. merchants and interpreters passed through her father's orbit carrying printed books and foreign words, their lessons intended for her brothers. she learned by listening outside doors or stealing pages left unattended, stitching fragments together until they became whole. she grew to recognize the characters marked upon crates and medicine jars, to name each root, leaf, and powdered remedy that passed through her father’s storehouse. married young to a man chosen for the usefulness of his family, she was widowed and returned to her father’s care before she had properly learned what it was to be a wife.

she was twenty two when she left home again. this time in her brother's clothes, traveling with a trading party under his name. upon reaching the intended port she abandoned her father's associates, survived on her brother's stolen allowance until she bribed passage on a merchant vessel. whether the captain believed her to be the runaway clerk she claimed mattered little - after the exchange of silver and a quiet boarding, he found his stowaway indeed kept a neat hand, could name the herbs and count without error. liar or no she was useful, and so use was made. through him, the world opened before her. as did so many of its cruelties.

you have forgotten that woman. what use is remembering? you who were born of her death, who share no family nor name as a reminder. your making was an act of salvation you have never reconciled with, an exchange of one form of dependence for another. those first decades as a vampyr were characterized by a deep self-loathing. hunger was resisted until it became agony, guidance rejected wherever it was offered. you withdrew, you withered. feeding became an act of mourning, for the frightened reminded you too easily of yourself: once a fragile being, reduced in another’s hands. some of them, you spared. most, you wished you had. and this life your maker had deemed an act of love. you didn't understand arjun then, not as you do now. in the end, misery became tedious. your grief was traded for restlessness, and restlessness gave way to appetite. you began to travel, first as an escape, then as a novelty. the centuries found you beneath many roofs and many names, disappearing from each place without warning only to return lifetimes later, made anew. before you realized there was none, you sought meaning. you studied wherever instruction could be purchased and, when colleges opened their doors, pursued art, language, philosophy, early sciences. you spent years singing in smoke filled clubs, hunted the men who followed you home for sport. but as all the others, each new place or pastime wore thin, eventually exposing that same brutal emptiness. try as you might to thrash against it, it always pushed you back to safe harbors. you no longer regret what you are, only that the choice was never yours. that distinction governs all that remains between maker and made. three hundred years later, and arjun alone stands as your oldest grievance and most enduring devotion, both your architect and unmaking. now, you revel in what you once despised. the years have made you greedy for whatever sensation you can find, made you playful with your affections and careless with consequence. your boredom has a tendency to leave broken things in its wake, and your attention is fickle, at times cruel. after so long in your own skin, even tenderness becomes just another means of holding something still.