The exact nature of his birth is unknown. His father, a sailor and dockworker from Murann named Jack, simply returned from a voyage to the docks with the half-orc babe cradled under one arm eighteen odd years ago.
Growing up among the crowded wharves and salt-stained alleys of the coast, he never knew comfort in the way noblefolk described it. His earliest memories were of gulls screaming overhead, ropes creaking against masts, and the stink of tar, fish, sweat, and seawater clinging to every surface. Ships came and went with the tides, bringing coin, violence, rumours, and desperate men in equal measure. It was a hard place to grow up, harder still for a half-orc child.
Most folk along the docks expected him to become trouble before he was old enough to understand why they stared. Sailors laughed too loudly around him. Merchants kept hands near clubs or knives. Other children tested him constantly, daring him to lose his temper so they could say they had been right all along. By the time he was ten, he already understood that people watched half-orcs for signs of violence the way sailors watched dark clouds before a storm.
Had he been raised by another man, perhaps he would have become exactly what they feared.
But his father had once sailed under black flags himself, or close enough to them. A privateer by law, a pirate by reputation depending on who told the tale, the old sailor had seen enough blood and fury for several lifetimes. Whatever sins he carried from those years, he buried them beneath dock work, hard labour, and the teachings of the Order of the Calming Wave devoted to Valkur, the Captain of the Waves.
But this boy was not raised in a monastery.
There were no marble courtyards or silent mountain shrines. His lessons happened after dark on rain-slick piers and empty cargo decks beneath lanternlight. His father, wise in the Order’s ways, taught him balance by making him walk mooring ropes above black harbor water. He taught breathing exercises during storms when thunder drowned out fear. Sparring lessons came between warehouse shifts and unloading cargo vessels. Meditation was sitting quietly beside the surf before dawn while the harbour still slept.
The old sailor taught him that calm was not softness.
“Any fool can rage,” his father would say. “Storm’s already angry enough. Don’t add yerself to it.”
The Order’s teachings became woven into labour and survival. He learned that panic killed crews faster than waves. That anger made men sloppy. That strength existed to steady others, not frighten them. When fights broke out on the docks, his father never praised brutality, only control. A clean ending to violence was acceptable. Cruelty was not.
Still, the boy’s life was not peaceful.
He grew quickly, broad-shouldered and tusked before most other lads had become men. Work gangs used him for muscle long before adulthood. He learned how to take a punch young. Learned how to hide anger behind silence. Learned that sometimes people insulted him simply because they wanted an excuse to fear him.
Some nights he failed his father’s teachings. There were broken noses, split lips, tavern brawls, and moments where rage came frighteningly easy. But each failure was followed by another lesson, another quiet conversation beside dark waters, another reminder that discipline was not perfection, it was choosing, every day, not to become ruled by the storm inside oneself.
For years, that life endured: dock work by day, training by night, the tides marking time more faithfully than any clock.
Then his father died.
Not gloriously. Not in battle. Just another hard-worked sailor whose body finally surrendered after years of storms, labour, old wounds, and salt air. The loss hollowed the harbour around him. Every familiar place became a reminder: the empty bunk, the silent morning pier, the absence of that gravelly voice correcting his footing or telling him to breathe steady.
Without his father, the docks no longer felt like home so much as an anchor dragging at his feet.
And so, still barely more than a youth, he began drifting outwards from the docks toward other places in Murann and the rough coastal settlements and landscapes beyond. To the Row.
Finding place where smugglers drank beside mercenaries, where gangs controlled sections of the harbour, where old pirate routes still whispered through taverns thick with smoke and sea salt.
Part of him sought coin. Part sought belonging. Part sought answers about the man his father had once been before age and regret tempered him into something calmer.
Among dock gangs and waterfront crews, he still found work easily enough. Strong backs are always needed. So are steady hands during trouble. Though surrounded by criminals and hard men, the teachings of the Calming Wave remained too deeply rooted within him.
He is young still, and uncertain in ways he hides carefully. The storm within him has not vanished. Perhaps it never will. But every dawn beside the sea, every measured breath before violence, every moment he chooses restraint over fury honours the lessons his father carved into him beside the waves.
And somewhere deep inside, beneath grief and salt and anger, he still carries the same belief he was raised upon:
A strong man is not the one who shouts loudest in the storm. It is the one who keeps his footing when everyone else is swept away.
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