“How often in history have friends found themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield, you ask? Definitely more times than I could count, just from the stuff I’ve read.” - Ophemidus Regosiasis, Scholar of History from Knallzog, circa 319 FP.

“So the two of you ended up on opposing sides, huh? How did that work out?” asked Aideen with a raised eyebrow.

“Rather inconclusively, at least at first. Our first meeting was just a small skirmish that ended quickly without any real resolution. Was enough time for me to recognize him amongst the enemy sailors though, and I bet he recognized me as well,” replied the captain with a nostalgic smile on his face. “From then on, we clashed at least dozens more times at sea, under differing circumstances.”

“Both of us arguably rose to the pinnacle of our respective professions. Hadrian managed to rise to command over a boat, and from there accumulated enough merits that he was ennobled by the government,” continued the old captain cheerfully, clearly proud of his old friend’s achievements. “He even got himself hitched with the daughter of some bigshot noble and married into their family as a son-in-law. Probably thought to borrow their status so he could make changes like he wished, that old idealistic fool…”

“It didn’t go as he expected?” Celia asked with some concern in her voice.

“Oh, he tried to affect some changes once he got high enough on the ladder. All that got him were political enemies and scorn, the nobility mostly thinking of him as some stuck-up peasant who overgrew his station, and all that,” said the old captain with a disappointed shake of his head. “In the end, I guess Ol’ Hadrian was just too idealistic a man to think that he could affect change so easily against long-ingrained beliefs and institutions, even if he made admiral and all… Then again, his last loss to me probably didn’t help either.”

“You made a name for yourself amongst the pirates, I assume then?” asked Aideen with a smirk on her face, having guessed where the story was going.

“Oh yeah, milady, a lot of ‘em, in fact. Scourge of the Ten Seas, they called me, Dread Pirate Redbeard, and all that,” said the old captain while he proudly groomed his thick beard with one hand. “Never you mind that the so-called ‘Ten Seas’ are just what the locals called the waters around them. They had all the arrogance to name parts of the ocean after themselves, I tell you, it’s embarrassing to watch. Definitely got it right with the beard, though.”

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“I can relate,” replied Aideen with a chuckle. “They also gave me a moniker based mostly on my outfit and hair color, though I can’t say it wasn’t unfitting.”

“It is how it is, yes, milady,” replied the old captain with a smirk of his own. “Either way, I was living it up on the high seas. Was made captain of the crew I joined fifteen years after the fact, too, then led them to plunder our way through the high seas,” said Arquivaldo proudly. “We kept our predations to those from our own nations, though. We kept peace with the dwarves, as we’d be idiots to pick a fight with them. Not like we could do shit to one of their ships anyway with the sort of guards they had on board!”

“Smart,” commented Celia. She was not as world-wise as Aideen was, but she had seen what passed as ‘guards’ on board of dwarven ships, which amounted to a good platoon of light infantry or two, usually, heavily armed with crossbows and armor specially enchanted to allow them to float in the sea. One platoon of such guards would have easily been the match of most regular pirate crews, and the dwarves regularly had one or two such platoons per ship.

For that reason, dwarven merchant ships were considered to be the most reliable ones amongst all the merchants that sailed the seas between the continents. Combined with their nations’ reputations for exacting brutal vengeance on the rare cases of a pirate successfully robbing one of their ships, most pirates with a brain refused to even touch any merchant ship flying the dwarven nations’ flags.

“The dumb ones grounded themselves on the reefs that were the dwarves, yeah. The rest of us learned to stay the hells away from their ships at all costs,” replied Arquivaldo with a grin. “But yeah, either way, spent a good couple decades pillaging my way through these seas. Made fools of their navy on many occasions too. Ol’ Hadrian was the only one who could ever even come close to catching me back then.”

“Around twenty years ago, the two of us decided to get together one last time and set the whole stakes on a barrel of rum. He wins, he gets to take me back in chains. I win, he lays off me for good. I dunno what gave the poor bastard the idea, as he was never the best with his liquor,” said the old unliving captain with obvious fondness for his old friend. “Bastard still made it into a good workout, though. We must’ve emptied like half the barrel before he dropped.”

“What happened to him afterwards?” asked Celia, now quite enthralled into the story.

“He retired, tried to live quiet and peaceful-like for a while, but he made too many enemies in his time by then. Someone hired a knife to shank him in his own home not two years after he retired,” explained the old captain with a wistful sigh. “I actually came to his funeral, in disguise, of course, and made it a point to raid the properties his enemies had that were near the beaches, but that was the extent of what I could have done at the time. Then before I knew it, my own time was up.”

“The incident you mentioned that happened twelve years ago, didn't it?” asked Aideen with some curiosity.

“Indeed so, milady, indeed so.”