Prologue (Destiny's Confession).
Everything in life has a purpose, a meaning to which a greater power has given. It isn't like anything in life can be helped. Events that happen in a persons life cycle, happen for a reason, they happen because they are meant to happen. Even though it would seem like the choice is your to make, it is not. The choices we make lead us on the path that fate has chosen, it is that simple, in the understanding of the concept. The sun rises and sets, the moon changes the tides and the sea brings forth life and death, all because it is supposed to. Just like when fate smiles on some people bringing them great fortunes and joy or it frowns on other bringing sickness and suffering, poverty and sorrow. Like for me, the sea is in my blood and it can't be helped. My fate was decided the moment I came into this world. My one and only love is the sea.
The more people are against it, against piracy, the more we are driven to it. To follow the ocean breeze, salty and fresh. We are the most free of spirits and yet we are feared and hunted like animals. We are pushed further out to sea, further toward our ways, further to our fate, for there is no where else for us to go. As the waters are charted, as the islands are explored, we become more dangerous as if caged. A beast in a cage is nothing to mess with, for if it is released there is no hope to escape its wrath.
The ocean carries with its waves many secrets. The only ones to understand and hear them are those who are cursed by the call of the waves. Many have heard it, and many have died by it, but there are many more still, out there, that hear its enchanting song and who will follow it until their souls are free to the judgement of whom ever had set them upon the earth. The water was created to bring forth life, it can also take it away but most of all it can steel a persons soul. To be trapped for thousands of years by the sick, cursed waters of the Caribbean sea is my fate.
Does it sound, for a moment, that I should fear my fate? For I do not, I welcome it as my father welcomes it be fore me. The same waters that churn beneath his ship, will beneath mine. I have learned to listen and I have mastered the arts of our way. We are vengeful and sinful, this is why we loose our souls to the chant of the waves, but it is the adventure that called us forward. It is the risk we take, toward an end we know to well. Let the sirens take my body and Davy Jones my soul, for I will spend my lifetime at sea, weather I say I have chosen it or if it was written in the stars.
It is true to say that pirates are not the most well regarded on the rung of the ever rising ladder of social justice and it isn't the noblest of occupations, however, we do see more adventures and distant lands than any of the stuck up royal navy men or the merchant sailors who remain loyal and honest, and yet this isn't really something we have chosen to do. It may seem like it was a choice that we made, just as one might decide to be a blacksmith or a farmer, but really were did the idea come from? Who planted it in our minds? It had to be planted, that is for sure, for who would want what we get and for it to be planted, then it is meant and it is real. It was something planned and executed. It was the spark planted inside you by a higher, greater, force that no one can see or expect. It is like a plaque, a disease that sneaks up and takes over. And thus, like many before me, I felt the sea, I heard the wind and the waves. The moon taunted and called me to its tides and so, when it was time, I looked at my poverty, my lowly position and it was my time to walk my chosen path.
My transformation from peasant to pirate may have seemed like an easy task, leave the world you know for the one you are meant for. Just get out and find a ship and all with be well. Sadly it was not that easy, not in the least little bit. My lack of funding to purchase a vessel wasn't my only worry. Even if I could have afforded a ship my gender was my biggest enemy, for it was dreadful bad luck to have a woman onboard your ship. And so I was a rather pitiful pirate in the beginning no ship, no crew and no one wanted me.
I say no one because, not only was I not wanted for a crew, but I was the bastard child of a pirate that interrupted my mothers great dreams. From the very beginning I was not wanted. My mother was a simple bar maid, she had been since I can remember and since she could. She has aspirations to better herself. Her wages were small and yet she saved everything so that one day she could get out of Tortuga. That was all she wanted, if she could have left she would have found other work, hired herself out in another settlement. She wanted to be free from the grasp of the tavern that held her so tightly in Tortuga all her life. My mothers older brother, William, used to promise to return and take her away from the shores of Tortuga, to experience the rest of the world when he himself left. After some time of roaming, he found his path aboard the great pirate ships. Starting off down low in the crew and working his way up to being a trusted friend of one of the greatest captains who ever lived. At that time there were many great and feared pirates. Grand ships and even more fabulous adventured that called to him and he found himself right in the midst of it all. My uncle had planned to become a working merchant, but he became caught up in the wonder of the pirates life and thus he continued and believed in his fate.
Tortuga has always been a hot spot for the pirates and the misfortunate. It is a city without rules, that looked the other way and let people live the way they like. A Pirates Port it is called and rightfully so. It was a misfit town. Quite often my uncle would return to Tortuga with the crews he was sailing with. He always came back to check on my mother but always with an excuse not to taking her away from Tortuga. Not only would she bring bad luck to the crew, being a woman, but the travel and the hostilities between pirates and the navy was growing stronger and reaching a devastating high. Pirates were now hunted like animals and hung as examples. The ships, if they were not sunk, they were ransacked for survivors and those survivors were make examples of. There was no guarantee that my mother would get safely off the ship at any other port but Tortuga.
William would have done nothing to hurt his younger sister, at least not intentionally. It was on one of his visits in Tortuga that he introduced my mother to my father. The great captain, that my uncle was now sailing under, was very famous in the pirating circles. The legends of his narrow escapes, grand battles and fabulous treasure hunts spread far and wide. His Ship bore legends of its own and the risks her captain took to save her from a watery grave. These stories had captivated my mother and that was one of the biggest mistakes. The stories lit in her the imagination and adventure to experience piracy, but fate had different plans for her. Not only was she young and naive but she was taken in by him and his whole being. He was a mystery in his own right, in his eyes and all of his person. My own mother, who had lived all her life in Tortuga, wanting to leave, had fallen subject to the magic and mystery that is the moon and the sea. My father did return to Tortuga, to her and it was on one of these occasions that I was conceived but after he never returned. He left my mother and moved on abandoning us and ruining all of my mothers dreams.
When I was born I was hidden away, my mother was afraid of losing the only job she had ever had and now she believed it would be the only job she would ever be lucky enough to keep. By day she spent her time with me trying her hardest to keep me and giving me at the least what I needed to survive. By night she was away at the tavern with hopes that someday Captain Jack Sparrow would return. She had heard more legends of the great Sparrow but when my uncle would come back to Tortuga, Jack was never there and nothing was ever mention of him. The pirates of the Black Pearl were the most feared and the new stories of that crew terrified even those in Tortuga. My uncle was forced to sneak around, being associated with that crew, by night trying not to be seen. It was as though he fled from the moon and her ever prying eyes. He was the only other living person that I knew or came into contact with and he would spend hidden minutes with me on his visits in the bay. He seemed afraid for me, for it seemed had I been found, that the pirates would waste no time in extinguishing my life light, for legend had it that the pirates of the pearl felt nothing for human life and spent many hours and waking nights ransacking homes and families all through Tortuga and other settlements.
On one of my uncles last visits he remained very quiet, busying himself with a letter and a small metal medallion. By the light hours of the morning he was sneaking away from our small home. That was the last time anyone in Tortuga saw him. Word came threw Tortuga of the curse of the Black Pearl and what had happened to my uncle. Any remaining hopes that my mother carried with her were dashed out of her when word of her brothers death reached us and surprisingly enough with the bad news came news of Jack Sparrow that he was still alive. My mothers sorrow for her brother turned to hate for Sparrow very quickly. I lived most of my life feeling hate for the man but it grew knowing the feeling of hatred resided in my mother now as well.
As I grew my fate became apparent, it became no longer only about me but the feeling of revenge grew. My fate was to make Sparrow pay for the pain he had caused me and my mother, but it would not be easy.
The first steps on my path were very rocky to say the least. It was very hard to gain access to the ships. I had no knowledge about the workings of the ships, how to defend myself or what was custom among the pirates. All I had ever heard were the stories my uncle would tell of the adventures, the sword fights and the treasure. I learned quickly that it was bad luck to have a woman on board a ship and that it was useless to try and sneak on to a pirate vessel.
Finally I became acquainted with another, probably one of the only, female pirates to sail the Caribbean waters. Luck was with me on the day I had met her. She had just finished with another crew and was looking once again to find her own ship to sail. Piracy had been nearly completely wiped out by the time of the Black Pearl and news of its downfall came as a needed relief to the people of Tortuga. She took me under her wing and taught me everything that I would need to know to be out at sea. She taught me how to defend myself and slowly I rose threw the ranks of her crew to stand at her side.
She spoke greatly of the Black Pearl and the reclaiming of the ship by Captain Jack Sparrow. It was only then that I had told her my story and who my father was. As a reminder of my roots Anamaria initiated me into piracy with a naming tattoo. Much like my fathers the Sparrow flying into the water was permanently etched onto my upper arm. But, unlike my fathers, my guide is the moon which would appear behind my name sake.
The stories of the Black Pearl gave me the last proof I needed from a person that had experienced it first hand that my father was alive. I learned a lot about piracy and myself while I was aboard Anamaria's ship and was soon well enough off to gain my own ship and to start off on my destine path. This is where my real story begins.