“The sea does not forgive weakness. Neither do I.”

-Captain Shank

 

Among the Sharkmen of Havokk, strength is survival, and difference is a curse. Aleksei was marked from birth with mottled brown streaks that his kin whispered were signs of rot in the blood. His parents, fearing dishonor or sickness, abandoned him to the surf before he could even swim on his own. The tide carried him ashore near a bustling mortal port, where the boy’s life became one of mockery, beatings, and suspicion. His jagged teeth and predator’s eyes left him forever branded as a monster.

 

For years, Aleksei knew only cruelty. Each insult hardened him. Each stone cast at his back taught him to endure. Yet when the mob finally turned to execution, it seemed his life would end before it had ever begun. Fate, however, rides on the tides. That day, Captain Seadog, pirate scourge of Havokk’s coasts, descended upon the town, leaving fire and ruin in his wake. In Aleksei, Seadog saw not a freak, but a survivor, and he dragged the orphan from the noose and onto the deck of his ship. Under Seadog’s harsh but fatherly command, Aleksei found belonging for the first time. He studied the pirate code, the sway of the sea, and the brutal wisdom of survival. His bitterness hardened into resolve, and his fear of rejection was drowned beneath the roar of cannon fire and the creak of sails. The sea became his mother, the crew his brothers, and Seadog his true father.

 

Years passed, and Seadog’s ambition led him toward Thresher Reef, the hidden domain of Mako, Pirate King of the Sharkmen. To most mortals, Thresher Reef was a myth. To Sharkmen, it was sacred. A secret bound to their blood, the supposed origination point of their species. Mako believed piracy to be a divine rite of his kind, and he guarded the reef with ferocity and his horde of Sharkmen pirates. Seadog’s crew learned this truth too late; ambushed upon arrival, they were mostly slaughtered or captured. Seadog and Aleksei alone slipped away into the jungle. The two waited hours for the enemy to change shifts, until a desperate night raid freed their surviving mates. Despite their escape, the victory was hollow. Seadog was mortally wounded by Mako. With his dying breath, he passed his blade, Riptide, into Aleksei’s hands, naming him heir in spirit and sea.

 

Aleksei buried his name with his captain. Swearing vengeance against the cruel pirate king, Mako, and his legion of unjust Sharkmen, he now sails as Captain Shank, master of the Scurviest Fin. His body bears the scars of mutinies, sea battles, and duels, his left arm torn away and replaced with a grotesque claw of teeth ripped from those he bested. Though monstrous in form, his legend is greater still: a Sharkman who rises not by bloodline, but by indomitable will. To sail Havokk’s waters is to risk the black sails of the Scurviest Fin, its crew of cutthroat outcasts, and its merciless captain who answers to no king, no god, and no tide but his own.