"Graves" Greybeard

"Oh, quarter! Oh, quarter! Those pirates did cry." —Old Sea Shanty They call it the Free Trade, but Captain "Graves" Greybeard navigates by his own star. While other pirates chase sails, Graves hunts what's already sunk. Warships split in half. Treasure fleets with their secrets taken below. Chances are if it's lying dead on the seabed, Graves has already picked it clean. A gold molar from an admiral. A ring from a mate, still hanging 'round the bone. He once dragged up the skull of a poor devil, just to drink grog from it. "Keeps the rum honest," he'd say, grinnin' through a beard that smelled like low tide and chum. Graves was a real bone-rattler, too. Not the playful sort, but the mean kind. Kind who plays with two decks and lets you cut the wrong one. He's won boots off a man's feet, britches off his hips, and he'd shoot ye clean through if he thought ye figured his tell. But it weren't all for coin and kill-devil—It were for them coordinates. An old wreck. The king's share. A royal flagship swallowed whole in a fog bank that never moved. They said her hold carried something older than the crown itself. Graves had never met a man who saw it and lived to tell, 'til he sailed south to Airy Port and crossed paths with a certain Admiral by the name of Claw. Real barnacle that fellow was, something odd about him, too. So, Graves started workin' his trade. Got him drunk, marked the cards with lampblack, slid an ace from his sleeve and palmed a second when no one watched. By dawn, old Graves had set sail for the oldest cemetery in the sea. He found the wreck easy enough, but the fog there didn't drift—it breathed. Graves dove straight for the captain's quarters, knife between his teeth. Down there in the dark lay no gold nor jewels… just a small iron key nailed through the floorboards. Graves scoured that ship from bow to stern 'til he found the chest, but as the key clicked, it weren't he who had the last laugh: A captain's tricorn, a whistle, and a flintlock were all that lay inside. So, he put them on. Suddenly, the fog thinned him, turning his flesh to vapor and his blood to brine, until he were less man than memory cloaked in mist. Now Graybeard walks through fog like it's home, commanding his army of the drowned, haunting and plundering Tya same as he once plundered sunken graves. A gambler to the end. Only now, the sea keeps the winnings.