Audemus Dawnspark

Wax

There’s a certain power held within names, and even if he’s always been the pragmatic sort, it doesn’t mean he’s immune to superstition.

Vividly, he can recall the folktales learned by rote in his childhood and that Melisande, in particular, never grew tired of hearing. Sometimes, by browning books with scratchy ink illustrations, secret beneath a blanket and via guttering candlelight; more often, orated with fanciful embellishments, minor changes of cast, but always revolving around the same mythical credos.

One’s true name was a portent of sway. A Very Wise thing to guard and protect and a Very Foolish thing to be used lightly.

He’s shocked from reverie by his own.

“Mathias.”

Snappy, as though it’s been repeated several times and the speaker has grown tired of the endless repetition that comes from a lack of attention. Granted, with who he’s speaking to (or being spoken at by?), several could very well be singular. Patience is not a trait shared among them.

He is always such. Always Mathias. Never a sobriquet, never a shortening, and never a term of endearment that wasn’t filthy in its intention. Certainly never Meadowshine or his adopted Curbelo; the list of his acceptable names is a short one, although he will grant that the vocabulary around his just-the-one is quite expansive indeed.

“Audemus.”

He doesn’t receive an acknowledgement. He doesn’t expect one.

The name feels a bit rusty in his mouth with disuse. A full first name has always felt a bit formal and he’s not the one so effortlessly upper crust that it just fits. He prefers the clipped plosive of Dawnspark — just like fuck — but using it just paints a clearer picture of their unbalanced scales.

In his heart of hearts, he knows the name is an assumed one. It doesn’t feel quite fair. He could ask, probably, and he even imagines he would be told the truth, but those sorts of things are always more impactful when freely given.

It’s not even what he had really wanted to say.

Standing there near the mid-ship break in the wooden rails, so ostentatiously dressed even in the middle of the night and so precariously close to the edge, ‘What are you doing?’ might have made more sense. Or, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’, but even if he might not know Audemus’s real name, he knows that petulant spite is far too alluring of a motivator; he’d rather avoid watching a swan dive off the deck and into the night inky waters just because.

Casting his torch bearing hand in a wide arc over the side of the ship, it illuminates the oil-black water that’s roiling dark against the hull. There’s just the slightest flicker of orange reflected back at him, jagged oscillations broken up by the crests. It glitters like sunken treasure. He draws the flame back, and curls a palm over the weather-worn balustrade.

Standing there, arms tightly folded across a tailored tunic and with bespoke boots planted firmly into the planks of the deck like roots, his sullenly taciturn companion doesn’t even look in danger of tipping overboard. Curiously sturdy sea legs — sturdier than some of the men he’s seen go silver on his crew — and he finds that he doesn’t like the itching formication in his stomach when he thinks about where else these skills might have been acquired.

In lieu of these predictable impasses, he instead says, “I thought you’d be inside.”

That’s certainly the most logical place to be. There’s a fine salt spray being kicked up from the dark surf that’s rendered the deck treacherously wet and the wind is oppressive and blustery, lashing through the rigging. Nothing in the bespangled darkness indicates rough seas, pale fluorescence of the slivered moon unobscured by cloud cover and nestled in twinkling star-spray, but he doesn’t need his eyes to know what the change in sailing foretells.

“There’s a storm coming.”

He wonders, briefly, if he’s thought aloud. The fine hairs on the back of his neck prickle, a premonitory sensation heralding… What, exactly? It’s ridiculous to try and append logic to someone who embodies the essence of quicksilver, even in conversation. He should stop trying before he finds himself stricken with mercurialism. Even this sounds less like a meteorological observation and more like an omen of caprice.

He leans against the rail and in doing so, inches closer with the flame. Lambent eyes like phosphorescent seafoam hone in with a flicker of rapt, predatory attention at the movement, and he’s suddenly reminded of an image of sinuous sharp-toothed beasts circling shipwrecks.

Against such a Stygian backdrop and in the saw-toothed shadows of his flame, anything would take on an otherworldly quality.

It’s merely an issue of location that has allowed the sea to tame riotous dark curls into something soaked, kelp coils dangling from the knife-sharp ears light as a porpoise’s underbelly.

A coincidence that the garments he thought were black are actually darkly viridescent, glimmering green-purple-gold like fish scales when the torchlight catches in the wrinkles.

Just a silly propensity towards vanity that means dressing to the nines in the balmy equatorial heat, even in the middle of the night. His high collar — tiered lace and silk in contrasting light and dark — flaring like a line of gills in response to the surf creaking the hull, is purely a statement of foppishness.

He’s imagining things of course. He’s seen that marble column of a neck in the light of day and plenty of other ways: mapped it with his mouth and strangled the air from it with his hands and has made it bleed very real blood, nothing chimerical about it, absolutely not.

A generously measured tot at noon had been followed with private indulgences from his flask throughout the day, and the two of them had shared boilermakers over a dinner of salt pork and hard cheese. He can’t remember what Audemus was wearing just a few hours ago. It doesn’t matter. He’ll lay off the rum tomorrow.

He may not have been prone to whimsy or nautical mythos, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t heard all the tales. Stories of siren song and men gone missing, ships dashed to spume just for existing. They’re exchanged among sailors more than gold through the hands of whores and innkeeps in portside taverns, and valued just as much.

“Yes,” He agreed, carefully neutral. “You just going to sit out here and wait for it to come? Sounds pretty boring.”

His torch makes a fine projectile, ocean-hewn strength of his body launching it far from the ship. A lucent comet of earthly design, bisecting the gloom with its weak blaze. The motion of something serpentine — an illusion, a whitecap — caught in its wake before it snuffed out beneath a wave.

When he slips his now unburdened hand into a slender curve of a spine to guide Audemus away, rucking up the hem of an inordinately expensive shirt, it’s only because he’s tactile by nature. His fingers are warm and dry against chilly, brine-damp skin.

Definitely skin.