Chapter 2 – Part 9

Thomas sat cross-legged, his eyes shut, finding his center.

The half-daelkyr was naked save for a loincloth. His clothes lay in a pile atop his armor and weapons and few remaining possessions. To his right was a bowl that held the residue of his last meal, eaten almost 24 hours before. It had been porridge, the same kind that Delegado was feeding Ois.

Thomas was not thinking of Ois. He had purged her from his conscious mind. She was a distraction.

Thomas’ body was lean, but well-muscled. His fingers and feet had calluses, and several of his fingernails and toenails were cracked. His body sported several scars, some old, some new. There were many new bruises as well, including a long, ugly one across his back where the harpy had struck his armor.

Thomas’ eyes were closed. His stormstalk, normally a weaving and bobbing thing, lay limply on one shoulder. Its eye was shut as well, and its small brain was quiet. Thomas had spent his first several hours in the cabin re-establishing his dominance over the symbiont.

Thomas had been nervous about how the stormstalk, after many years of being his mute servant, had suddenly grown from transmitting images and feelings to actually speaking to his mind in complete sentences. The stormstalk had not ‘spoken’ like that since Thomas had first exiled himself to the Icehorns.

Thomas would not let it speak again. He could not.

A trickle of sweat dripped from Thomas’ brow, stinging one of the fresh scratches on his body. Thomas had taken his dagger and shaved all of the hair on his body; head, eyebrows, armpits, nether regions, chest, everything. It was a way to let things go, remove them from himself.

Thomas’ early life had been about finding power in rage, then subtlety, and then finally in manipulating the miniscule ticks of magic that empowered so much of the world. The half-daelkyr was able to instinctively activate and manipulate powerfully contained magicks.

Like now.

At first Thomas had been simply trying to remove his mind from the chaos. He both loved the promise of the Silver Flame and he hated it. He both respected Ois for what she had done, and he hated her for lying to him. He venerated clergy and despised changelings.

And he loved her. As a bugbear even.

That was a true irony. It had been harder to love a goblinoid than a changeling. The goblins had been his father’s enemies, so long ago. The orc druids had been dismissed, ignored even, while the goblinoid armies had been the focus of the conquering daelkyr.

That had been a tactical error, needless to say.

But Ois did not know that, would not know it, would not understand. Neither she nor Delegado had realized how carefully he had held the greataxe away from her. The large weapon was enchanted with a bane magic against goblinoids, left over from an interplanar was millennia ago. Thomas had been so careful with it around Flamebearer.

And it turned out that Flamebearer was not a goblinoid at all, but a changeling. A race born to deviousness and lies.

If the Silver Flame was stability, then how could it be represented by a changeling?

These had been his thoughts. Emotional chaos, piling on top of his second daelkyr mind constantly trying to figure out how to refit flesh, piling on top of his stormstalk becoming more mentally aggressive, left him…needing a shave.

Needing a challenge.

Needing a purpose and a distraction.

Needing to let go of one thing and start another.

It had been easy doing that, out in the world. He accomplished that by simply moving. He’d never really owned more than he could carry, so he would just move on to some other place that caught his fancy.

Not possible to do here, he was on a ship. A ship whose master, a powerfully magical being in his own right, had specifically limited to Thomas and the others in terms of areas of access.

Thomas had then realized, somewhere in the depths of his first night, that the entire ship was one device. Like a wand, a ring, or the staff that Oalian had lent to him, the entire Crimson Ship was a singly-contained magical unit with multiple functions.

And now, after nearly an entire day, he finally had found its trigger.

Thomas’ eyes – all three, including the stormstalk’s – opened suddenly as he felt the control flow through him.

The Crimson Ship was his.

He was no longer dependent on the Captain, or Delegado, or the Silver Flame, or anyone.

A grim smile, with no humor whatsoever, spread across Thomas’ face as he stood.