The ship shivered as my magic filled it.

  Sails snapped in the still-climbing wind as the storm swept ever closer, rigging whipped against the mast, and an enemy flag flapped high above the heads of the sailors below. On my ship, above the heads of my crew.

  The deep-crawler still lurked within the bowels of my ship and a winter storm threatened to dash us across the jagged rocks of the inhospitable coast; suffice it to say, there were higher priorities at this moment…but this was my ship, and I would allow no flag to fly but my own.

  I closed my eyes, and the ship groaned beneath me as it responded to my will. The flag furled upon itself, despite the wind trying to clutch at it and pull it open once more. My will was iron though, and the cloth darkened, the golden crossed keys of the Cerevisian navy bleeding away as the field behind it blushed from white to red. A cutlass began to take shape, curved and cruel, and crossed overtop it a blunderbuss of familiar design formed a moment later.

  Both symbols were stained black against the blood-red background, and a leering skull soon grinned above both.

  The wind took the cloth as it unfurled and a flag that had struck fear into the hearts of noble and soldier, sailor and bureaucrat alike for nigh on a decade was seen flying in the sky once more. The flag of The Cannon-Hand, The Scourge O' The High Seas, The Grey-Haired Bastard That Taunted Nautrescus Himself...the flag of Radagan Greymane, pirate-lord and dread-captain.

  I gloried in the sensation for a few moments longer, enjoying a sight I had been denied for many a year while rotting in the bowels of the Inquisition’s prison complex, but eventually I turned my mind to more pressing tasks.

  First, the vampire.

  I strode to the wheel deck and spared a moment to caress the wheel itself. The grain was uneven, and I felt the ridges and scars marring the wheel’s surface from the predations of uncaring and unkind hands. I soothed it, letting my magic caress and reassure the abused wood before making subtle alterations.

  I spread my awareness throughout the whole of the ship, inch by inch, until every plank was reinforced with my will, each nail and rope precisely where I wanted it. The ship rippled slowly beneath us under my tender ministrations, and after a long search I found, deep in the bilge, in a little crook near where my hammock had hung, the intruder.

  The interloper, the creature of darkness that had hoped to evade my notice and turn more of my crew, suddenly found itself blocked in. Small exists, no larger than a closed fist, found themselves closing, and soon a small box of wood existed within the hull, lined with the same pattern that shot through each plank of the ship from the unusual grain of ceder wood grown on the island of Cerevis.

  I separated that small box from the bilge wall, sliding it up and over one of the ports for cannons – empty since no cannons were present in the belly of the ship that was retrofitted for speed and manoeuvrability more than fire power, but still the opening was there. The shutter bolting it closed unlatched itself and swung open, and the airtight box slipped out, falling to the waves below.

  I turned to watch as we sailed away from the little box, before striding over to the sea chest that had contained my cutlass. I rifled around, drawing out my hand now clutching a blunderbuss with its flared head and brassy sheen. I strode back to the wheel deck and loaded a spare shot before sighting down my arm and firing with nary a moment’s hesitation. The ball shot from the gun, about as large as a fingernail and perfectly spherical, until my magic caressed it as it left the barrel.

  As the shot travelled over the open ocean, two score meters separating myself and the bobbing box atop the sea, the shot expanded. Going from the size of my fingernail to the size of my entire fist, a shot more akin to a cannon ball shattered the wooden housing and the creature within, and I watched with grim satisfaction as the cursed creature died on the surface of the salty sea, cursed by the brine as all its kind were.

  I smiled faintly before issuing my first set of proper orders to my crew, and they leapt to see them through. Sails needed taking in, hatches battening down, and equipment and supplies securing if we were to weather the storm that was coming.

  My magic could do much of the work, but it would not do for the men to lose their ability to sail without me. I would be otherwise indisposed in the midst of battle most likely, and when I looked to the future, I saw plenty of battle to be had.

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  I turned to face the black clouds on the horizon. They were lit through by seems of lightning and a pale moon had begun to rise above the ocean as afternoon gave way to evening and the sun faded from the world.

  Micah – the young boy I had placed in the crow’s nest and designated as my eyes and ears – caught my attention with a telepathic shout. I looked to him and his pointing finger, following the gesture until I saw a dot on the horizon. Over the next several minutes it rapidly grew, until I could finally make out the shape of a Cerevisian galleon, flags flying high on each of its three masts, and cannons lining its sides like a bristling phalanx.

  Now there was a ship worthy of plundering.

  Orders were given in an instant, and within a half dozen breaths we were beginning the slow turn to face them as the galleon sliced through the water towards us. It raced away from the horizon, shadowed by a growing storm-front, and I could see that its captain intended to destroy us before we could run for cover within the storm itself.

  Silly – I had no intentions of running from this fight. But it did bring a sad frown to my weathered face to realise there would be no taking the ship in tact. A galleon, equipped with half a hundred navymen at the least, and a dozen cannons across its bloated flanks. Not nimble, not swift and agile in the water like a shark amongst the corrals. This was a whale, and one I would gut and let my crew grow fat on before leaving its hollow carcass in the water behind us.

  I watched it sail towards us, looming larger in our vision with each moment. “Ready yourselves boys!” I called to my crew.

  I mostly stuck to telepathic communication when working the wheel, but every now and then the moment called for something a little more…dramatic. I strolled down the wheel deck, reloading the shot in my blunderbuss with another small iron ball, taking care to get the powder tamped down just right.

  The deck was scoured clean beneath my boots by the unrelenting rain, and the dark clouds above flashed intermittently with the storm’s wrath. Lightning illuminated a dark lump near the gunwale to starboard, and I strode over, dusting off the blooded and rain-soaked tricorn hat that Lucien had once worn. I was immensely glad it had fallen before I’d kicked him down into the deep brine - every good pirate needs a hat, after all.

  I adjusted it on my head, grinning as the watered-down blood dripped from its rim down my cheek, before I turned to my assembled crew. A motley bunch of lads by all rights, but they looked finer than all the courtesans in the capital, to my eyes at least, their toothless grins as captivating as the rouged, full lips of any governor’s daughter.

  “Gather ‘round. You’re about to learn your first real lesson under the command of your new captain!”

  My voice carried easily over the biting wind, and I raised my blunderbuss high, letting them all see the intricate brass covering the stock and the densely engraved script wrapping the flared barrel.

  “This here’s Old Bessie, and over there,” I said, pointing with the gun to where the galleon loomed out of the twilight, “is an imperial galleon, loaded up with booty and plunder for the taking, guarded by no less than three score hardened soldiers and enough cannon-shot to turn us into nothing more than drift-wood.”

  It took up much of the horizon by itself now, and I saw some restlessness settling into the bones of most of the crew. Not nervousness just yet, or gods forbid – panic – but a subtle sign that their faith in me needed some reinforcing before they’d trust me above their own senses and reason.

  Luckily for me, an opportunity was dropping itself oh so politely right into my waiting lap. ‘A man doesn’t choose the knife, but he does choose how to use it’ as my father was fond of saying. That he used said knife to torture folks might say some rough things about the man himself, but I was long since passed judging men for morally dubious choices. I was a figurehead for them myself, after all.

  “Raise your eyes to the horizon, and know this as the day Cerevis remembered why they feared The Cannon-Hand.”

  I let my voice drift away on the breeze as I sighted down the barrel of my over-grown pistol, and smiled to myself as I pulled the trigger. There was a bang, loud in my ears and reverberating around my head for a few moments as the ball left the barrel. The scent of gundpowder tickled my nostrils, and then my focus was gone from the world, narrowing as it was onto the bond between my soul and that metal ball speeding through the air.

  Magic flowed down that link like the tide at dawn, filling the ball, expanding it moment by moment. Each change was minute, but my magic, again much like the tide, was unrelenting. It swelled, growing larger than my fist within moments. It grew to the size of a cannon ball, and then it kept growing.

  By the time that single shot from my blunderbuss had reached the Cerevisian galleon nearly 1000 yards distant, it was larger than a cannon itself, mount and all. The massive iron ball, swollen and travelling at incredible speed, smashed through the centre of the bow. It obliterated anything in its path; wood, metal, men and provisions – everything was scattered like a widow’s sorrow on the coastal wind.

  My shot exited out of the stern, having cored the ship like an apple. Already, water was surging in, and the galleon would be lost beneath the waves in no more than a few minutes, well before the storm arrived. I stepped lightly over to the wheel, holstering Old Bessie against the crook of my back and twirling my tricorn hat at the sinking ship.

  As my gnarled and calloused hands wrapped themselves around the grain of the well-worn wheel, I grinned. Yellow and gold teeth flashed in the lightning that marred the dark skies above, and I looked to my crew, still standing slack-jawed at the destruction on display.

  “What do you say, lads – shall we recruit a few more to our merry band o' misfits?”