They gave us captains as skilled professionals navigating real historical conflicts. Watch any adaptation of Hornblower and you’ll see the same approach: competent men doing difficult jobs with skill and courage. We love a good competence porn.

I don’t believe I could ever measure up to what they’ve written. So I will simply try something else.

I’m writing what I will arrogantly declare is called elegiac naval gothic—secondary-world maritime horror where officers are intermediaries between their crews and a jealous ocean. Where the uniform isn’t simply a given because they’re naval officers, but is threaded through with an extensive material culture that encodes the philosophies of a people under siege by sentient sea. Where competence doesn’t just work as much as it borders on divine possession.

This isn’t better or worse than grounded historical naval fiction. It’s different aesthetic territory. The same way Warhammer 40,000 didn’t replace Star Trek but claimed adjacent space—Gothic grimdark in the void instead of optimistic exploration—I’m going to attempt to claim the space for Gothic grimdark at sea with what humility I’m able to muster.

Competence Treated as Mundane

I must identify what could stand to be elevated. What do I like about naval fiction and what does it look like to then turn some of the knobs and dials about in a bid for something exciting, strange and new? Something that I would read with stars in my eyeballs.

I love a good hero shot. And grounded naval fiction is swimming with those moments where the captain might take the helm in a storm. Turn the tide of battle with a genius play.

You may get the description of wind velocity. Wave height. The physical strain on the wheel. So we know what the enemy is. Then maybe the set of the captain’s jaw, the tension in his shoulders. The action of seamanship rendered with technical precision so we also understand the cost.

What I never see is transfiguration.

The moment when a man executing skills at the absolute peak of human capability stops looking human and starts looking like something… Else. The crew’s response isn’t just respect for competence—it’s the paralysis of witnessing the numinous.

Naval fiction is afraid to go Gothic. I’m not.

What Gothic brings to bog-standard competence porn is moments where ordinary human exceeds human limits and becomes something else.

And in a setting where the ocean is sentient and hungry—as I love to remind, it’s my boilerplate at this rate—that transformation isn’t merely metaphor but rather a form of survival. Officers don’t just look divine and tremendously neat in moments of crisis. They have to become vessels for something older and stranger, or the sea claims everyone.

And in so doing, you are transfiguring ordinary seaman into Hercules or Poseidon.

Competence as Religious Experience

Let me now attempt to show it.

This is Saltire—a working-class First Lieutenant—recalling his captain during the storm. He’s being asked by a child to describe what happened.

He saw Somerset at the wheel. Not the rakish officer who smiled his way through every wardroom and tavern, but the other Somerset—the one Vance had glimpsed at the summit of that impossible wave. Eyes wide, feral, his shoulders straining against the fine turquoise wool of his coat, the white countershading along his inner sleeves and flanks a blinding flash against the bruised sky—wounds of pearlblood rendered divine.

He looked like a man the sea had claimed.

He looked like a god.

The uniform is doing narrative work. Because that’s what I wanted to do when I was designing the material culture of Arune, their country. The turquoise wool (muirrine—the sacred color). The white countershading (dolphin mimicry). The visual description is intending to demonstrate that, for Saltire, the psychological experience was like witnessing something divine.

“Wounds of pearlblood rendered divine”—this is the iridescence, the light-catching quality designed into the white fabric. It looks like wounds that bleed pearl-light because the uniform is designed to make you look like you’ve survived the abyss and returned luminous. It’s something their people wished to encode in their officers.

This is what grounded historical naval can’t give you.

The moment when skill becomes something else. When a man doing his job crosses the threshold and becomes ferryman of the underworld. When his crew stops seeing their captain and starts seeing an intermediary between them and the divine, terrible ocean.

Saltire isn’t able to articulate this. He’s a practical man. So he reduces it to the simplest possible statement: “The captain did what needed to be done.”

But the reader sees what Saltire saw. The Gothic sublime. The horror and beauty of competence executed at a level that stops being human and starts being that strange other thing.

What Secondary Worlds Allow

In historical fiction, you’re bound by accuracy. Uniforms looked a certain way. Rank insignia followed regulations. You can describe them beautifully, but you can’t redesign them to encode your world’s cosmology.

In secondary-world fiction, you have a superpower of being able to design material culture from scratch to reflect belief systems.

I’m not writing about the Royal Navy (though I was deeply inspired.) I’m writing about Arune—a maritime nation where the ocean is god, where dolphins are sacred messengers present in the founding of empires, where the depths have myths and those myths have teeth.

I was going to write something entirely real, entirely grounded, but as I wrote I realised my instinct kept pulling me too far into the witchcraft of peak seamanship. And given that I cannot separate soul from salt, I decided to take the leap and just invent the whole damn world specifically to serve my distorted vision of our own.

Beginning with the seemingly mundane, I asked: what would a culture that worships the ocean wear?

And Arune was born for the first time when I began to design the uniforms.

Sacred Biomimicry

Dolphins (relansheer), particularly white dolphins—the Sollurela—are sacred to Arune. They’re messengers between the surface world and the deep, blessed creatures that navigate both realms without being claimed by either. They represent everything Arune aspires to: grace, intelligence, mastery of the ocean without being mastered by it.

So Arunean naval officers wear dolphin countershading.

White inner sleeves. White along the flanks of the coat. The same protective coloration that makes dolphins nearly invisible in open water—light from below, dark from above.

Officers are claiming the status of the sacred animal. They’re marking themselves as blessed, as chosen, as operating under divine protection.

When a captain stands on deck in full dress uniform, the white countershading creates a visual echo of the creature Arune holds most sacred. The uniform is making a theological statement also: this man speaks to the sea, and the sea recognizes him as kin.

Colour Taxonomy

Colour is everything to me. And so it means a great deal to the people in this world also. They have ontology for the colours of water.

So it isn’t simply what they wear, but also what colour it is.

In Arune, the water column—the vertical distance from surface to crushing depth—defines everything about their maritime culture. Which is encoded in colour symbolism.

When an Arunean describes something as muirrine, they’re not just saying it’s blue. They’re saying it has the quality of the most beautiful, shallow seas—sacred, beautiful, carrying the soul of their nation.

This is something secondary-world fiction allows me: systematic color symbolism. The colours become a vocabulary for emotional and spiritual states. For people, moods, things, places. I’m able to invent words for things I feel may not be effectively described by words like doomed, joyful, expansive, predatory beauty.

Rank Insignia: The Philosophy

Now we get to the shoulderboards. The rank insignia that every naval story includes but rarely makes mean anything beyond hierarchy. Not that it ever could, it’s not made for mythology, it’s for making rank legible. Fine.

I wanted rank to tell a story about what you’ve survived to earn it.

Lieutenant (Muiradon) : Churning, swirling waves on their insignia

• Still learning to read the sea

• Surface turbulence, chaos, motion

• You command the waves, but the waves command you back

Captain (Maarendar) : The drauhessa appears

• The drown-horse, the mythological mount of drowned sailors

• Folkloric, cursed, the creature that claims those the sea takes

• You’ve gone deep enough to encounter what lives in the myths

• You’ve survived touching the cursed and returned to tell of it

• At this rank, you don’t choose the drauhessa. It chooses you.

• You’re a sea officer; you’ve been called to the deep. The insignia marks you as touched by the myth.

Commodore (Venmaarendar) : The relansheer (dolphin)

• Administrative officers, shore command

• They’ve chosen safety, chosen the blessed over the cursed

• The dolphin says: I survived the deep, and I’m not going back

• This is the path most officers take—up and away from the water

• By commodore rank, many officers have moved to administrative roles. They’ve survived, and they’re choosing safety

The Dolphin Choice: Living or Skeletal

Any officer who wears the relansheer (commodore or admiral) faces an additional choice in how that dolphin is rendered:

The living relansheer honours the blessing itself. It emphasizes protection, the dolphin as sacred guardian, the forward-looking hope that the blessing will continue. Officers who wear this are choosing to focus on what the dolphin saves.

The skeletal relansheer honours the dead. It acknowledges that the dolphin’s blessing didn’t save everyone. That you’re standing here because others aren’t. Officers who wear this are choosing to remember what the blessing cost.

One looks forward, one looks back.

Admiral (Draumeir) :

• At this rank, you decide: dolphin or drauhessa?

• Most choose the relansheer (dolphin) with pearlescent backing—pearl-light, the only illumination that returns from crush-depth

• They’ve earned administrative safety—they take it

• They’ve been to the abyss and returned luminous, and now they command from shore, from safety, from the blessed side of the myth

But some will keep the drauhessa.

And when you see an admiral of the fleet wearing the drown-horse instead of the sacred dolphin you can infer something about that man’s soul.

He’s chosen the call, still. Chosen to remain a sea officer even when he could command from land. The drauhessa on his shoulder says the ocean still speaks to me, and I still answer.

It’s fatalism, of a sort. The mythology teaches that the drauhessa appears to claim sailors, to carry them down to the drowning-places. Captains wear it because they’ve been called, touched by that myth, and they know—somewhere deep—that the sea will probably take them eventually.

The Drauhessa

The drauhessa deserves special attention. In Arunean mythology, it’s not just “a sea horse” but is the mount of the drowned, the creature that appears when the sea claims a soul. It’s featured on heraldry alongside the white dolphin because both are sacred, but they represent opposite relationships with the ocean:

• White Dolphin (Sollurela): Blessed, messenger, chosen by the sea, operates in the light

• Drauhessa: Cursed, taker of souls, claimed by the abyss, dwells in the dark

Why do captains and admirals wear the symbol of the cursed alongside the blessed? Because to command at that level, you’ve been both chosen and claimed. The sea has touched you, marked you, and you survived. The drauhessa on your shoulder says you’ve been to deep places where men die—and came back.

And the pearlescent backing on admiral insignia; that iridescence that shifts between soft pink, teal and orange depending on angle? That’s the only light that returns from these dark places. Pearl-light. The organic treasure that forms in darkness under pressure.

They’ve been to the abyss and brought back illumination.

Make Material Culture Systematic

If you’re building secondary worlds and trying to encode actual themes rather than just making a formula fantasy, your material culture should encode your themes systematically.

Don’t just tell your readers “the sea is sacred”. Put the sacred sea on your characters’ bodies and make it mean something.

This is worldbuilding through material culture. It’s what Gothic fiction has always done—every detail is symbolic, every object carries meaning, surface appearance and intimate reality are different things.

I’m bringing that symbolic density to my naval fiction.

The genre has given us technical precision and historical authenticity. Beautiful. Necessary. I love it. But there’s room for something else—room for the sublime, for competence treated as apotheosis, for officers who look like what they actually are in moments of crisis: men communing with something vast and terrible that sometimes, horribly, answers.

Claiming New Territory

Elegiac naval Gothic is what happens when you take the competence and seamanship of historical naval fiction and admit what it actually feels like when executed at that level.

The sea is a jealous lover. Officers are her priests. The uniform is sacred vestment displaying a cosmology of depth, darkness, and divine blessing bought at terrible cost.

And when a captain takes the helm in a storm and brings his ship through the impossible, he’s more than skilled professional. He’s transfigured into a conduit between his men, ship and the deep. He’s possessed. By something strange.

That’s the aesthetic territory I’m claiming.

Grounded historical naval fiction will always have its place—O’Brian and Forester built something beautiful and true. But there’s room beside it for something that admits the ocean is older and stranger than any history.

If you’re curious about the actual maritime horror novel I’m building this aesthetic for, that’s The Reply—currently in development, set in the world of Nhera where the ocean only sometimes pretends to sleep.

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Fair winds,
—D.S.

You do not expect Lt. Gore to make the choices he makes.

He’s an aristocrat which—for as much as the meaning of that word has been twisted or misunderstood by moderns—is something a bit older and I would say load-bearing in his world.

He looks at Captain Somerset—reckless, common-born, possibly cursed—and concludes: This man survived when he should have died. That is data I cannot ignore.

Dossier: Lieutenant Marion Gore

Designation: Second Lieutenant, Arunean Navy; Officer aboard the frigate Siren’s Reply
Known For: Analysis, lineage, competence, efficiency

Appearance & Demeanor

Marion Gore is tall—even for a family known for their height—with the kind of bearing that suggests years, if not generations, of expectation informing it.

His features are the usual acute angles. High cheekbones, a blade of a nose, pale blue eyes that assess. His uniform manages to always be immaculate. Every button catching the light at precisely the right angle. It’s infuriating.

What’s also infuriating is that he doesn’t perform superiourity. He simply is superiour—at least in the variables he considers meaningful. He’s calm under pressure, he’s rather good at what he does.

When he fights, he doesn’t brawl. He doesn’t charge—he advances. His movements are a dancer’s waltz and he’s just too bloody perfect.

The creature at the bow moved with speed that should not have been possible, but Gore was faster—not in body, but mind. He sidestepped with balletic precision, his saber tracing a path planned moments prior. The strike wasn’t aimed at thick hide or otherworldly flesh. It found the weak point, the joint where whatever was holding the emaciated body upward was clipped apart.

One thrust.

It fell. Gore wiped his blade.

Psychological Profile

Gore was raised to be a certain kind of officer.

The sort father envisioned: methodical, traditional, obedient. And the “right” families produced the “right” officers through breeding and training of comportment alone. His father, Commodore-General Valoren Gore, is quite certain about all this.

Tall, austere, absolutely convinced that his way—the old way, the proper way—is the only way. You know, the usual noble father trope.

Marion is supposed to become that. A continuation of the family legacy. Another Gore in the long line of Gores who commanded through birthright rather than earning it through blood and salt because now they were expected to earn it in reverse. Blood and salt was the entry fee when Arune was only a dream.

But Gore—our Gore, not father Gore—had another idea.

He looked at Captain Somerset—common, reckless, contemptuous of regulations—and saw something his father couldn’t process: Somerset survived when doctrine said he should die. Somerset held a ship together through the Fathom’s dreamed up storm when every law of seamanship said it was impossible.

That is not mere luck, surely. There are numbers for this. There’s data.

And data, to Gore, is the only god worth worshipping.

The Variable He Can’t Control

Gore burns bridges. Quickly, too. Because for all the times father has said he’s being troublesome, it’s only because he raised him to be decisive. Gore is.

And he chooses to serve under Somerset despite dad really not liking that. And not out of any loyalty, per se.

Somerset survived the psychic storm. That data justified the choice. But Somerset is also becoming something Gore doesn’t fully understand—something touched by forces that don’t operate on logic. And Marion Gore is, above all else, a man who trusts data.

What happens when the data changes? When Somerset’s competence starts looking less like skill and more like communion with something that hunts them. When the sea’s obsession with his captain becomes undeniable?

Gore chose to stay. But he’s an analyst, not a zealot. He follows Somerset because Somerset has proven his worth. The moment that proof becomes compromised—the moment competence tips into madness—Gore may very well recalculate.

For now, he stays.

It’s not about whether Gore respects Somerset. It’s whether respect will be enough when the abyss starts calling.

Well, calling louder. We already established the whole abyss calling thing. It’s a nautical horror.

Fair winds,
—D.S.

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I’ve spent 570 hours on The Reply in the last two months.

That’s not a complaint, by the way. Far from it.

Instead, I confess that I’m building a world I’ve been obsessed with and the hours disappear because this isn’t work. And that means that I can’t ever be sure anyone will give much of a damn about it. Because like the best things that matter to those that make them, they’re personal first. They’re a piece of something. Of you.

And I’ve never been entirely likeable.

My point here is that this is ok. I’ve given myself permission to write it and possibly even write it poorly.

LLM would advise me to write it like a powerpoint presentation, devoid of all the ESL nonsense, romance-language exophony and strange archaicism that might define my English. I’ve decided to write it in English anyway since I do believe—if there will ever be an audience for it—that English is a nice home for a nautical horror.

Perhaps when the manuscript is done, I’ll translate it myself.

Where Began

So, to the point. Nautical horror is something I’ve been rather obsessed with since I read my very first book in English. Wreck of the Whaleship Essex by Owen Chase, first mate of the very voyage he recounts. Which, while not strictly a horror—or even a work of fiction—is definitely horrific.

I was so immersed in the atmosphere, the salt, the suffering. It’s crusted over my dreams since.

In The Reply, the sea—called many things though mostly the Elder Fathom, or the Oraen depending on who’s speaking—is sentient and jealous. It doesn’t just kill sailors rather it claims them. It whispers, makes offers, gets inside your head and stays there.

Captain Somerset survives it not by blocking it out, but by listening. This gives him preternatural intuition at sea and it’s destroying him.

The fog was a living thing, its tendrils clinging with a damp chill that had nothing of the sun’s mercy in it. It tasted of salt and envy.

I grew up with the ocean as a constant presence. My mother’s love for it was tangible—old glass buoys hung like captured stars, sea shanty CDs were our soundtrack.

What I understood later, or perhaps it was true because of this: the ocean is where I feel most spiritual. Where some people find God (or whatever) in mountains or forests, I find myself in the sea. It’s an empty, contemplative space—devoid of sound but roaring with it also. It’s a perfect analog for a human mind, for a soul. Sailing on the sea is sailing your own consciousness. And in some parts of your mind, as the old maps warned, “here be dragons.”

Somerset’s relationship with the Fathom is that spiritual conversation turned predatory. It’s the sea I want to love—need to love—responding with obsession instead of peace. A horror that sits in the violation of something sacred. The darkness that corrupts love into possession, the way existential dread creeps in when you’re in deep contemplation and suddenly the currents turn sour.

You don’t know when it will happen. Just like you don’t know when something sacred can be violated, something important taken away or mutilated.

The sea has moods.

One of the most important creative decisions I made was giving the Fathom temperament. Some days it’s indifferent—you’re an insect crossing its surface. Some days it’s curious, almost playful, testing you with strange calms or unexpected swells. And some days it’s hungry.

The worst days are when it’s in love with you.

When the Fathom decides it wants a particular ship, a particular captain, and begins the work of claiming them. It offers intuition. Power. The ability to read the water like no one else can. And in return, it demands everything. Your peace. Your crew’s lives. Eventually, your soul.

I want to be the sea. Be in it, around it, be loved by it and love it in return. That yearning is why the Elder Fathom exists. It exists because I needed to explore what happens when that love becomes corruption. When the thing you’re most drawn to, the thing that feels most sacred, turns predatory.

Because that’s how obsession works, isn’t it? What felt like grace becomes possession before too long and you wake up one day drowning not having realised you went under long ago.

The Fathom’s moods are my moods. The sea’s jealousy is every time I’ve sacrificed something real for something I needed to create. The way it claims people is the way my work has claimed me. Utterly and often without room for anything else.

The Cultural Cost

Building a haunted sea means building the societies that survive it.

The Orosian faith teaches that the sea is a test—suffer correctly and you might be worthy. The Arunean Navy developed rigid doctrines specifically to keep sailors from listening too closely to the water. In practise, this is for safety. In essence, it’s become paternal discouragement from using your intuition. It’s certainly not meant maliciously, but sometimes terribly tedious decisions are made by people who really just want to keep you safe.

Somerset is dangerous to the Admiralty not because he’s breaking rules, but because he’s proving their entire survival strategy might be inefficient. Wrong. He listens to the thing they’ve spent centuries teaching people to ignore. And it works. That’s what they can’t accept.

And inversely, they may just be right. Because men like Somerset don’t often live the longest lives. Sure, he’s magnificent now but wait. How long can this be tolerated on a gamble before we risk another priceless vessel going down and hundreds of working sailors with it?

After my military service, I needed stories about characters navigating impossible systems with grace and precision. Hornblower. Aubrey. Men who operated in worlds of rigid hierarchy and constant mortal danger, where competence was the only virtue that mattered.

The frigate under sail is the most beautiful piece of engineering humanity ever made. It’s a cathedral of timber and canvas—gifts from land—powered by wind. But it’s also a prison. You’re trapped with the same men for months, sailing over an abyss that sees you, under officers who might be incompetent enough to kill you all. Or so competent that the sea wants them and kills you all to get them.

That tension—which is beautiful and horrible—is everything I needed to process about power, survival, and what it costs to be good at something that might destroy you.

The Cost for Me

I’ve made a crucial decision, repeatedly, at several points in my life where I chose creation over everything else.

I sacrificed stability for art. My every waking moment is always utterly consumed by it. 570 hours in two months isn’t an anomaly for me.

I wouldn’t even say I’m lonely.

The Fathom claims people by offering them what they most want—power, understanding, connection—and then demanding everything in return. It’s not a metaphor. It’s what I’m living. Art claimed me the same way. And I went willingly, eyes open, knowing the cost.

When you’re building the horror that sits in the violation of your most sacred space, when you’re finally telling the story only you could tell whether anyone else cares or not—it’s not really a price. It’s tuesday.

Fair winds,
—D.S.

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For the Arunaic Navy, the repository for this sacred knowledge isn’t resigned to a collection of scrolls. It’s a masterpiece of practical artistry: the Rhumb Atlas.

I’m rather fond of material culture and in a world particularly defined by the sea—and really not just any sea, but one that thinks about how best to swallow you—“yes, they have maps” didn’t feel like rather enough at all.

How do they store them? How do they access them in a storm? How are they built? What happens when the sea changes?

Form Follows Survival

The Arunean Admiralty Atlas—the primary, official version—is a massive portfolio bound in water-resistant Hammersheer-hide and reinforced with polished brass. Its construction is the purview of Theastone’s legendary Chartwrighters Guilds, with designs ranging from the starkly functional to the grandly bespoke. Each atlas secures the permanent, master charts of the known world—a library of hard-won, generational knowledge.

So if these big honking things are so valuable, the problem is that you can’t simply throw a priceless, unwieldy tome onto a shelf on a ship that’s constantly rolling, pitching, and threatening to go down. So the Aruneans solved it with engineering.

On frigates like the Siren’s Reply, the Atlas is kept on a Navigator’s Arcing Rack. It’s a sophisticated, counter-weighted brass arm that rises from a hidden channel within the chart table itself, allowing the entire Atlas to be swung into place for use.

Think of it as a mechanical limb that knows exactly how to move with the ship, not against it. Form follows survival.

There’s an internal mechanism in these atlases. The vellum charts aren’t simply bound—they’re held taut by a series of spring-loaded brass bars.

A simple press of a release catch allows one to remove or insert a single Rhumb Chart in seconds, transforming a vast library into a functional, single-page workspace. This elegant piece allows for both secure storage and immediate, practical use in the heart of a storm.

Because when you’re trying to navigate through a gale and avoid being seen by the hungry dark with waves breaking over, you don’t have time to foofle about through a goddamn book.

The Factor’s Folio: When Truth Has an Expiration Date

I just love this whole mechanic here. It’s one of the core horrors and challenges of the people in this world.

That is, the Admiralty Atlas—for all its authority—cannot tell the whole story. Those coastlines and lanes are mostly set in stone and quite literally so.

The most dangerous voyages aren’t charted with its permanent ink. They’re charted with the ephemeral lines of a Factor’s Folio.

These are slimmer, more utilitarian leather portfolios that contain the high-value, high-risk intelligence commissioned by a Lord Factor for a specific voyage. A voyage with tight expiry dates because… There is a catch. Due to the shifting, sentient nature of the Oraen (sea), the accuracy of these charts is guaranteed for only a short period—typically a three-month sanction.

When a Factor’s chart “goes cold,” it becomes a liability. By the harsh laws of the Trading Companies, it must be committed to flame in ritual, ensuring a rival never captures its secrets or a valuable ship doesn’t drive straight into the teeth.

This constant cycle of creation and destruction is expensive. Which is why these folios are worth far more than their weight in hard mint.

Your map isn’t just outdated after three months. It’s wrong.

I obsess

I really could have simple said “they have nautical charts” and moved on. Most fantasy writers do. But that’s not worldbuilding. Or, it might be, but it could be so much more.

When you dig into the material culture of your world—these are the objects people make, use, and depend on—They’re not always mere props. You’re revealing philosophy or showing what people value, what they fear, and how they adapt to survive in a hostile world.

The Rhumb Atlas therefore is a statement that could reveal such things about Arune:

• They value permanence (the Admiralty charts, bound in hide and brass, meant to last generations)

• They respect impermanence (the Factor’s Folios, burned when they lose their truth)

• They understand that knowledge is survival (the spring-loaded mechanism that prioritizes speed)

That’s the kind of worldbuilding I’m after. Not just “what does it look like,” but “what does it mean?”

For them, it means adapt or drown.

Fair winds,
—D.S.

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Captain Henry Somerset is a problem.

He’s a commoner, which in just about any fantasy story means he has some sort of a bone to pick and I won’t pretend to be above writing that trope.

What I am above is leaving it at that. His character arc explores what nobility means in a world that has not yet forgotten—as we have—how nobility is earned. No, he does not become a duke at the end of the story. He’s not even afforded a spare joy.

What he does is embody his world’s mythology.

A man who drives the boat out of an eldritch storm while the sea he really should not be listening to is trying to drive him mad is someone the Admiralty hates to legitimise but loathes to dismiss. They need officers like that.

Dossier: Captain Henry Somerset

Designation: Post-Captain, Arunean Navy; Commanding Officer, frigate Siren's Reply Known Alias: The Witch-Captain of the Reply

Appearance & Demeanour: Somerset is not particularly impressive in stature. He’s rather average. But he’s strong enough, elegant enough. Certainly predatory enough in a way that might belie a common birth. His features are “intelligent”, however, with thick brows and a salt-sprayed mane of copper hair. There are a few scars here and there, the most obvious on his forehead.

His most defining characteristic is the charm—and it’s almost certainly a lie. He’s quick to smile, easy to laugh and this is generally enough to inspire the minimum requisite loyalty to avoid despairing mutiny. The performance? Flawless until he’s alone or with you.

The fog was a living thing. It had a weight—resistance, even—with a damp chill that had nothing of the sun’s mercy in it. It tasted of salt and envy.

Somerset heard the voice again.

(…)

“Possessive this morning,” Somerset said, his voice bright as it carried over the quarterdeck.

(…)

“Oh, aye,” Saltire agreed, turning his big brows away toward the water again. After a pause, his assessment. “A grasping mood, Captain,” he rumbled. “The whispers, I suspect, will be finding purchase in these quiet hours.”

Somerset’s mouth tightened though just barely. Saltire saw it. Said, “The men are on edge,” as his head inclined slightly. He then took a sip of his tea with the hurry of a man who just made a decision needing acting upon.

“Mmh,” he grunted, wanting to speak before he could swallow. “Then we’ll give them something louder to hear.” He turned his back from the sea and fixed Saltire with a lopsided look. “Lieutenant Saltire. Beat to quarters, a live fire drill.”

So, Somerset’s "witchcraft" is not a gift.

He survives not by blocking out the song he’s not meant to hear, but by listening to it. It’s intuition, torment or possibly madness.

The very thing is what makes him a threat to the Admiralty’s status quo. It’s not (wholly) a matter of common birth but the results are a touch too good. And through methods too unorthodox, too heretical. And you mustn’t challenge the traditions that have kept this island nation afloat in defiance of a malicious ocean for generations. It works. Do not break this.

This is his central conflict. He is a man whose greatest “gift” is almost certainly a curse, whose successes make him a threat to the very system he serves, and whose charismatic performance is the only thing holding back a tide of grief that threatens to drown him and his entire crew.

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Fair winds,
—D.S.

Daud van Richter doesn’t trust anyone.

He’s a deniable asset for the Summit & Spire Mercantile. Technically noble, definitely bastard. Never fails (except for that one time or another.) Approaches people and missions as tactical problems with their exploitable variables. Trust, in this calculation, is a fatal flaw that gets competent people killed.

Then he meets Somerset—No, it’s not a romance, get out of here.

Dossier: Daud van Richter

Designation: Clandestine Agent, Summit & Spire Mercantile
Known Alias: The Laageter

Appearance & Demeanor: He’s—in a word—still. His features are paradoxical. High cheekbones, aquiline nose. This is the noble father’s lineage, contrasted not-so-neatly by pale, almost sallow olive skin of Mother’s heritage. Dark hair is ruthlessly managed, silver at the temples a formal age marker and a particular hauntedness in his look.

Dress is dark. Practical. Exquisitely tailoured in a way that chose function over flourish. There is no frivolity here. No performed charm. Just an economy of movement and a gaze of unnerving scrutiny that is—sure as the tides—searching for a failure to exploit.

When he speaks with his damaged voice, it’s with a carefully measured weight. As with most of him, the voice is also simply another tool.

"I do not waste my time with the poetry of journalists, Captain," he said, voice little more than rasp. "I prefer the hard, simple prose of a ship's manifest. For example, a Befruoren merchant cog, the Stadholder, which was logged as carrying a rather... significant cargo of raw Aithurlode. A cargo that is now, according to your own official report, lost to the deep."

A pause. One that was beginning to feel like a trap before the steel shut. Then, he offered the first, the only, concession of the night.

"My name is Daud," he said, "and the cargo you have so tragically 'lost'... is mine. I am here to collect it."

Daud was always a tool. Useful, expensive perhaps, but not loved.

His response? Become the best tool in the box. Competence as identity. Trust became the enemy—the anchor that drowns fools, as he’d say.

His pride is not in his name or his blood, but in his competence. To be outmaneuvered or underestimated is the deepest possible insult.

His greatest vulnerability? He recognizes Somerset as an equal.

Not the charm—Daud sees through performance with X-ray vision. But he sees another outcast who had to forge his own authority against impossible odds. Another man the system uses but never truly accepts. That recognition terrifies him because it’s a variable his cynical calculus can’t account for: the possibility that someone might be worth trusting.

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Fair winds,
—D.S.