"Promise are debt and debt build empire for every dawn comes after a night that wants you dead"
—No face
"E go hard before E go soft- even stone bleed if you wait long enough "
—No face
The engine coughed, then caught, growling like a chained animal finally freed.
Metal rattled beneath me as I shifted my weight, perched on the topless car's frame. My boots rested on the leather seat, knees wide, the posture of someone who owned the whole damn world.
I stared at the blue glaze as sunlight thinned and bled into crimson red. The world finally breathed out, and the rush of wind filled my face , it was as if a giant exhaling out to my face.
My fingers slipped into my pocket and found it — not the contract token I expected, but the photograph.
Two of them.
The first: handsome, perfect, the lie.
The second: a moment caught out of context — real, raw, vulnerable.
The engine roared.
He came running — didn't even bother with the door — vaulting straight in, landing hard on the metal beside me. Barked orders like the world still bent to his will.
I didn't move.
Instead, I plucked the first photograph between two fingers and — with the flick of a gambler — sent it spinning onto the hot engine block.
It landed perfectly.
Hiss.
The sound sliced through the hum of the car. The image blistered, curling, the chemicals giving off that sharp, acrid funeral-smell of burning film.
I leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands steepled under my chin. Not prayer — judgment. My whole body was a coiled verdict.
The smoke rose.
I inhaled it. Deep. Deliberate.
The world hit me in flashes — his real smile, the boy he used to be, the man he pretended to be. It burned on the way down, but it filled me, too.
When I turned my head, I was smiling.
I blew the smoke in his face, slow, lazy. Watching him flinch. Watching his eyes widen — not in anger this time, but in something raw, almost human.
"Just drive, old man."
It wasn't a request.
It was the toll.
My gaze drifted to the mirror. The reflection caught the burning photo first, then my shirt — where the faint ghost of the image seemed to glow, showing him exactly what I'd stolen. For a second, the man in the mirror wasn't him anymore. He was mine.
I smiled. Slow. Crooked. A perfect echo of his own younger grin — twisted back at him.
"Checkmate."
He finally snapped.
"What did you just say to me?"
I leaned back, one hand dangling outside the car.
When I spoke out I was cut by his action, his boot slammed the brake pedal.
Metal screamed. Tires bit the earth.
The engine roared like those about to race
The car jerked to a stop so hard the moment shattered like glass.
"Sorry," he said, smirking. "Can't hear you over the sound of you losing."
---
Cain had gone home to fetch his load. They said his crew would leave on the fourth night, when the sea was calmest. Whispers in the taverns spoke of an island—government waters, forbidden. A floating island, some said, scar left from wars of kraken and dragon.
It wasn't my problem. Yet I still helped him carry the crates he trusted to no deckhand. That's when I saw him: an old man crouched low, one eye white as bone, the other still sharp and dark. His beard hung in a grey thicket, framing a jaw like shattered rock. He picked through beans, fingers slow and cracked.
"Don't go," he croaked.
I turned. "And how would you know?"
The old man closed his eye, as if looking backward. "The sea is alive. It gives, but it always takes. It sends gifts ashore—but with them, strange men who should never walk the earth."
I laughed, sharp. "And what are we then? Puppets of waves? You've lost an eye and gained a superstition."
He grinned, teeth jagged. "Not superstition. Payment. The sea took my eye and gave me vision. I know hunger. I was born in Beggar's Kiss. You eat, boy, and are never satisfied. You will want until you're swallowed whole."
Cain said "leave him be,the old man was lost in a sea with to much salt. He only walked on, into the hut where his mother waited.
---
The Dark Hut
She lay in shadows, his mother—red hair fallen like blood over a pale, dying face. Her eyes were dark pools, lips cracked, chest heaving shallow. When Cain entered, she stirred, whispering like she felt the tide cross her threshold.
"You are a myth in the flesh," she rasped. "A story walking. You truly are what you say you are."
Cain knelt beside her, jaw tight. "I'll be offshore for a while."
Her voice broke. "Oh Cain… why go back to the sea? It will not forgive you. It will take what it is owed. You swore—you swore you would never return."
He lowered his gaze. "Then tell me. Tell me of my origin."
---
The Mother's Song
Her chest shuddered. Then, half-chant, half-breath, she gave him the words:
"Born in the storm,
raised by the wave,
crowned by the tide,
destined for the deep.
Blessed with salt,
with fire,
with the breath of the abyss.
To walk where no shore binds,
to reign where dark waters sleep.
A myth in the flesh,
a truth without proof,
a crown of foam,
a debt that does not forgive."
Her song trailed into silence. And then her eyes glazed—not with death, but memory.
She was young again, apron damp from the kitchen, fire still burning behind her. "Cain!" she called. No answer. Louder, frantic: "Cain!" Still nothing.
Fear struck her. She burst into the street, hair flying. She ran, shoving past neighbors, stumbled downhill, scraped her palms raw. "Cain!" Her voice cracked. At the shore she fell to her knees, crawling through sand.
Above, Griffin—the old man, younger then, sunburnt in his beach clothes—appeared with a plate wanting to buy food. Maria rushed to him, wild-eyed. "Griffin, have you seen the boys?"
"No, Maria." His face paled. He turned toward the market. At a stall, a vendor frowned, hand stiffening over coins as she caught sight of the tattoo burned into his wrist—a Salvador mark, pirates wanted for blood and fire. The woman drew back, muttering. Griffin cursed, dragged his sleeve down. He paid fast, asked questions, threw coins in alleys, hurried through the crowd.
Griffin turned, uneasy. He spotted Hevel first, leaning against the post of a stall, curly black hair tucked under her beanie, tanned arms folded, the fresh ink of a tattoo still red across her hand. A needle glinted at her side.
"Hevel!" he barked. "Where's Cain?"
She smirked faintly, though her eyes were restless. "Said he was sick of waiting. Talked about the Bloodsail crew. I gave him a mark so they'd take him serious. He wanted to look the part." She lifted her hand, showing the sting of ink. "Now he's got one to match."
Hevel shrugged, but the bravado cracked. "Went down to the docks. Said he was going to prove himself."
Griffin's blood ran cold. "And where is he now?"
Griffin sprinted to the shore. He found only Maria, half-broken in the sand, clawing toward the water. Her hair was tangled with salt, her voice hoarse as she begged:
"Take not my sons, my one and only sons! Please—don't take them from me!"
She bowed her head to the waves. She stayed bowed until dawn.
And when the aurora bled across the sky, a small boat drifted in on the tide. Only one boy lay within it. Cain, fainted, pale as death, lips blue with salt. And a tattoo of a compass at the back of his neck
The sea had spared him. Nothing more.
---
Return to the Hut
Her eyes, old again, opened faintly on Cain's face. A hollow smile touched her lips.
"The truth dies with me," she whispered.
Cain's voice trembled. "But I am the truth."
Her hand brushed his cheek, weak as a shadow. "No… you are Cain. And the sea will not be gentle."
"No—tell me. Tell me everything. Tell me who I am."
Maria exhales, her eyes closing, slipping toward silence.
Her breath left her.
And the hut was silent.
"…And where's Hevel?"
The serpent tore through the mountains like a continent uncoiling, each valley swallowed in the rolling thunder of its scales. Its belly burned in molten gradients — yellow, orange, deep arterial red — and every twist of its body sent avalanches tumbling from the peaks.
On the crown of its head sat the king. Not standing, not crouched — seated in the posture of a predator who has nothing to prove. His right leg was crossed over his left, elbow perched on the knee, long black nails cradling his cheek. His other hand pressed lightly into the serpent's brow, each finger a command etched into living stone. He was motionless, but the world moved around him.
His skin was the muted blue-grey of storm clouds before lightning, shot through with iridescent freckles that caught the bleeding light in shifting greens and violets. Dimples cut deep into his cheeks like scars of beauty, impossible to reconcile with the black-crimson glimmer of his eyes like a black star sapphire. From his temples down his throat, cracks of red light tore open like veins igniting — molten fissures pulsing in time with the serpent's colossal heartbeat.
His brow furrowed, and the dimples vanished into a hard frown. The eyes that had glimmered with black starfire flared open — now molten crimson bleeding into gold, pupils narrowing to slits that burned with predatory hunger.
The mantle that clung to his shoulder had lost its hold in the storm. It hung half-worn, draped across one side of his body like a war-torn relic — less a garment, more a shadow of old conquest. It was not the full sweep of a general's coat, nor the strict symmetry of a kimono — but something in between: a torn length of heavy fabric knotted carelessly at one collarbone, the rest sliding down his arm, leaving his chest and shoulder bare.
And what was revealed was no less terrifying. His torso, sculpted like stone cut by water, shone in the dimming crimson light. The muted blue-grey of his skin was paler here, closer to bone-white, as though the flesh itself dimmed so the veins of fire could be seen more clearly. Across his chest and ribs, cracks of red light pulsed beneath the surface, glowing through the skin like rivers of lava pressing against ice. The contrast was sharp — pale flesh as canvas, red fissures as script.
He sat in the blood's shadow.
The bloated eagle corpse above him bled steadily, wings of ruined flesh stretched wide like a grotesque umbrella. The dripping arcs of blood fell in thin, steady lines, staining the serpent's crown and splattering his bare shoulder. Each droplet ran down his chest, weaving with the glowing veins, creating a map of liquid and fire across his body.
And then the sun turned.
The sky, once pale, bled into crimson as though an ocean of wine had been spilled across the heavens. With it came a wind not born of breath or storm, but of the sun itself — a world-sized exhalation. The gale screamed over the mountains, flattening forests, scouring stone into dust. The serpent blurred in its own storm, but still the king sat unmoved.
His hair, black and wet, whipped in violent arcs, yet the strands never fully tore free — the air itself bent around him, hesitant to touch. Behind him, his broken katana jutted from the serpent's scales like a shard of midnight lightning, fragments of the blade hovering in the air as though reluctant to fall. The wind dragged those fragments into a line, scattering them into a vertical banner of jagged steel. They shone red in the sun's fury, fluttering like the sigil of a war god.
The serpent screamed, mountains splitting under its coils, but the king only leaned into his hand, dimples deepening as if he were smiling. The aura bled off him in visible waves, crimson distortion rippling the air, a crown of heat and violence.
From the valleys below, men looked up and saw not a rider, not a king — but a throne of blood and storm carried on the back of a serpent that split the world in two.
He was the only thing alive at the top of the world.