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CHAPTER ONE ▪▫▪▫▪
IT WAS TRULY A WONDER MORANA WAS STILL ALIVE. What with living her life amongst criminals of the sea, scourge, and overall rather dangerous folk—and yet, Morana found the most dangerous thing about them was their collective aversion to a proper bath.
As the myth of the Crimson Mirage grew, so did her credibility amongst the pirates of the True Sea—the only ones who knew the Crimson Mirage wasn't an armada but a person.
Well, they didn't know the full truth. No one had come close to figuring out it was all a charade on her part, well-placed illusions to make her claim as a sea witch credible. And thus the Sea Witch, the Crimson Mirage became a figure amongst pirates—respected and feared.
Morana hadn't stayed in Bluebeard's ship for long, as soon as he'd announced they would step foot on land, she had abandoned their ship for another pirate ship they'd been in the process of pillaging and plundering and had made the same deal with their captain.
After a few years, she'd become someone that made the scum of the sea, the worse of the worst, shudder in their boots, frightened and yet yearning to have her blessing their crew with her presence, with her magic, with her power to make each crew richer than the other.
Funny thing was, if anyone found out just how big of a liar Morana was, she would be easily overpowered and slashed open to be thrown overboard as shark bait.
Her problems, for the most part, didn't lie there. They were more along the lines of greed and ambition. Some Captains tried to hold her hostage, trying to keep her locked in a cage like a circus monkey. Yet they remained unaware of her illusions and their true essence, and so they were easily reminded why they feared her in the first place.
She was quick to weave light and shadows, creating mirages that made them stumble around, trying to figure out which one was the real her, where the floor really was, and then the crew was all floating in the sea and Morana was standing over them with her illusion of the tentacled sea witch, sneering.
It was all fun and games really. It was rare anyone died.
Usually, they welcomed her with open arms. Morana loved to aid and abet in ransacking merchant vessels, whalers, other pirate ships, and so on. And her favorite Captain to mess with wasn't a pirate at all.
Sturmhond—the poor fool—liked to fancy himself a privateer. So, like others, he suffered from a lack of knowledge and like the flagged ships believed the Crimson Mirage to be a phantom armada of ships that tricked sailors at dawn. And he believed Morana to be a daughter of the sea, a girl jumping from pirate ship to pirate ship—always there to see him get hit in the head.
The first time Morana Zoreslava had been properly introduced to Sturmhond he had kidnapped her.
She had been in the middle of an attack on a merchant vessel, one he happened to pass by. It wasn't dawn. The phantom armada wasn't there, and as she joined the crew of pirates she had been with on the deck of the merchant vessel she was grabbed from behind and dragged onto Sturmhond's ship.
