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To be as old as you is a monumental task for anyone not of the highest blood. Even among the seadwelling violet aristocracy, to get as old and as withered as you find yourself is something of a minor miracle. You’re nearing 1500 sweeps old, you’d say, though you’re afraid you may have lost count, may have forgotten the sweep of your birth somewhere in everything that you’ve had to make room to remember. You haven’t spoken to (almost) anyone in quite sometime, though. You’re not sure anyone, with a small, notable exception, actually knows your alive.
The exception to your rule is perched, ear-fins fluttering, eyes wide, in a chair across the table from you. You’re in a room at the very top of one of your underwater castles, in the bit of the final spire that peaks just over the waves. The air smells fresh, smells of salt and open sea, and your old bones feel at home. Moonlight filters in through the veiled windows, an easy magenta that lights the room just enough for you to see by. You make a move on the chess board in front of you with a lazy flick of your hand, send an old, whale-bone pawn gliding a space forward. Your descendant chews on his lip, little shark teeth careful not to break skin, and you watch as he sends a knight a few spaces left, piece from a mismatched set, black stone. He does it without waving his hand, with an ease you’re proud of. He’s going to grow to be more powerful than you, this you’re sure of. He’s already come a long way in the short amount of time you’ve had with him, the unstructured, opportunistic lessons you put him through doing what you intended them to do, and more. You tell him he made a good move, and he chirrups, grins at you with all the pride of a small child, and you let yourself smile.
You play chess for a while, let him win because this isn’t about competition so much as it’s about teaching him finesse with his magic. You leave the board as it is when you’re done, get up from your seat with a bit of difficulty. Cronus bounces off of his, chirps, rounds the table and snatches your walking stick before you get to it yourself. He’s apparently determined to hand it to you, hefts it above his head triumphantly. You smile at him, take it from him and thank him, and head towards the door, towards the stairs slowly. Cronus trails you, buries his small, clawed hands into the old, holey fabric of your robe, and tells you about his week.
“I had t'feed glub-glub yesterday,” he tells you, and you hum an acknowledgement, amused at the way he butchers the name of your Empress’s lusus and irritated that he has to know it at all. You feel his tiny hands tug absently at your robes as he talks. “I was goin’ for this biiiiiiig shark lusus, I think maybe the biggest I ever saw, an’ it came- WOOSH-” he tugs the fabric for emphasis, and you chuckle, “right outta the water, right at me, so I- I got your gun, I got the crosshairs an’ BLAM.”
“That must've been scary,” you reply. You descend the stairs, slowly, and he continues to trail you.
“Oh yeah, it was scary. I did it though!” He sounds proud of himself.
“Mmm,” is all you have to supply. He’s too young to be holding a title, too young to be Orphaner. You remember what it was like, being his age and having to get used to the killing. You still have nightmares.
"An' I saw Meenah the other day too," he tells you, "she was tellin' me, she was sayin' how she's gonna run away. I don't think she wants t'be empress, she says she's gonna go live on the moon."
You think to yourself about how similar that sounds to your own Peixes, though you don't comment. Cronus keeps talking, and you're happy to listen.
Your feet hit water, and he waits until you’re mostly under to splash in after you, running down the last few steps and ducking under the waves just as you do. He’s small, too small, you’re sure, so his feet lift off the ground and he’s hovering in the water before you are, zipping around you as you descend the rest of the spiral. He breathes unsteadily, through the gills on his neck, on the sides of his torso that you catch when his shirt balloons out, gills inflamed in a way that you know is painful. He doesn’t seem bothered by it though, you guess it's something he's used to. He zips ahead of you to open the door before you get there yourself and grins at you, all shark teeth and flappy ear fins.
He follows you as you drift through the halls of your home, chats your ears off because he can, because he wants to, because he’s three sweeps old and has a lot to say to anyone who'll stop and listen to him. He follows you down to one of your studies, settles himself in a comfortable spot near where you decide to rest. It’s easier for you to move around under water, in your old age, though with the introduction of your asthmatic descendant, you’ve taken to spending more time above the waves, though your bones creak and your joints ache more than you’d like them to. Still, you spend much of your time in the depths, though you’re careful to monitor his breathing when he’s with you. In the low light of your study, you catch the phosphorescence on his face, know it’s mirrored, if dully, in your own, and marvel at the fact that you’ve been allowed the opportunity to know him.
You spend much of the night like that. He takes a nap in his spot and you go over some of your books, consider the pages and the information you’ve spent your life collecting. It’s quiet, peaceful as you’d like it to be. The concept of family isn’t something you know, beyond the sense of continuation that comes with descendants, but if it was something you had a word for, this would be how you would describe it.
It’s getting close to morning when you notice he’s awake because he floats over to you, sets himself on your desk and asks for a story.
“You’re old,” he says, matter of factly. “Tell me somethin' that happened a loooong time ago.”
You close your book, put it back in it’s spot on the shelf. “I know a lot a'things that happened a long time ago. What would you like t'know?”
He thinks for a second, chews his lip in thought, before his eyes go wide and his ear fins flutter. “Oh!” he exclaims, “Oh! Tell me about the Privateer again?”
You hum, thread your fingers together, and begin to spin him a tale.
The Privateer was a cerulean blooded troll you knew long before now. You surmise that she would have hatched around the same time that you did, would have grown up in the same unforgiving world you knew as a child, pre-Radiance society and all its bloody glory. Being cerulean, you had she lived out her life on it’s natural course as you have, she would still have been dead for centuries. That said, that was not how she went at all.
When you were young, before Radi’s temporary reform of the Orphaner system, you knew the Privateer by her grub name, knew her as Vriska Serket before you knew her as anything else. You note that she also racked up other titles later in life, more personalized ones of her own construction the more her legend became known, but in your old age you have trouble recalling those. Only her early title and her personal name stick out to you anymore. In those early years, you were too busy to pursue her, too busy to stop for but a moment lest Gl’obgolyb decide to end life in your universe, or at the very least, on your planet. With the death of the previous empress, though and the ascension of your then-moirail, things began to change.
Her Imperial Radiance, frequently referred to as Radi, or simply as her grub name Feferi by you, instituted a reform of the Orphaner system at you behest. It left the strain of having to kill lusii, and consequently, young trolls, out of the hand of a single violet, notably out of the hands of a child, and expanded the duties to several lesser nobles, another sect of which would be responsible for collecting and relocating the orphaned trolls. You’re not sure how successful the system was, considering she would go back on her promise as soon as your descendant came around and she was sure you were out of the picture, but it worked well enough for you, since it was now out of your hands, and freed up time for you to do as you wished. Of course you were part of Radi’s court, and of course you were supposed to have some function to fulfill therein, but she wasn’t quick to reprimand you for anything, and even if she were, you made more than an effort to make yourself difficult to contact unless you wanted something.
At nine sweeps, with nothing to do and a world at the tips of your claws, you commissioned a ship, a grand, ornate galleon you’d eventually brand Aquarian, and then later re brand as Cetus. You knew how to sail, of course, you’d been sailing since you could walk, and your blood status meant that it wasn’t terribly difficult for you to find a crew, though their loyalty would prove difficult to keep, though you don’t suppose that’s the story you’re trying to tell. The Aquarian served you well, was your vessel on a number of chaotic pirating expeditions, magical quests to the ends of Beforus and beyond. It was also the scene for many of your meetings with the Privateer, moored to her ship Charybdis. You knew her from childhood, from chance encounters and competition in the mainstays of youth, but this was an entirely new arena.
You’d come to find out in the time that you spent gallivanting the seas with her, that she was, technically, in the employ of the state, had letters of marque to prove it, though she could do what she wished as long as she didn’t cause any problems for the Empress. You spent many a sweep terrorizing the seas with her, pillaging coastal villages, sinking the ships of any captain you didn’t agree with, living out some grandiose childhood fantasy you had both shared. It seemed the universe wanted you to have something to do with each other, and you did. Your matespritship was tumultuous, vacillating wildly and complicated by her telepathy and you’re affinity for natural magic.
The real story of the Privateer, though, is the story of her treasure. You recall a particularly hot perigee, some hundreds of sweeps ago. She had gone against the state, for one reason or another that escapes you now, likely something to do with the pursuit of wealth. Her breach of contract had been severe enough to have warranted imprisonment at the very least, though a public execution was more likely.
(Cronus gasps when you mention the peril your former quadrant mate was in, eyes big like he hasn’t requested this story from you a few dozen times. You continue your tale.)
On her trail was a troll known to history only as the Judiciary, a Teal with a fantastically large dragon lusus, who functioned as her guide and companion in her judicial pursuits. She was something of a formidable character- a terrifyingly good detective with the full support of the state. She took down many of the planet’s most notorious criminals in her time, but once, in the early days of her career, she had been determined to take down the Privateer.
Knowing she was running out of time, Vriska began to construct a map, a convoluted, nearly nonsensical sort of thing she’d made in a code of her own design. It was made to be unsolvable, made to be so mind-numbingly impossible, that the location of her treasure, of her sweeps of notes, her riches and the magical items she’d collected on her expeditions with you, would be known only to someone with the vision eight fold, only to her direct descendant. You tell him that you have that map, hidden in one of the libraries in one of your above-water castles, behind several blood-based enchantments. You’ve tried, and tried, and tried to read it, tried to decipher her code, to get at her treasure posthumously, but you’ve never been able to read it.
(He asks you where the map is, and you tell him that he’ll have to figure that out for himself, that he’s currently the only one besides yourself who would have access to it, and he seems to delight in the challenge. He asks you then what happened to the Privateer, though you know he already knows the end of your story.)
Once her map was constructed and her treasure squirreled away, she marooned the Charybdis on some lonesome island in the middle of the sea and slaughtered the crew so they wouldn’t reveal the location of her hoard, and to throw the Judiciary off her scent. You picked her up, spent some time with her hidden in your ship before she insisted to be dropped off somewhere, left to her own devices. She evaded capture for a long time, hid herself away in cities and ships for as long as she could, but she couldn’t outrun the end forever. The Judiciary caught up with her eventually, and, knowing of her mind control, conducted the trial in a specially built chamber to keep her from escaping. This, still, wasn’t enough. In one of the most confusing instances in Troll history, the Privateer managed to escape, blinding the Judiciary in the process, and disappeared into the wilds. To the best of your knowledge, that was where she died, grievously wounded from the encounter. At the very least, she was never heard from again, and her body was never found.
Still, her treasure sits buried somewhere in the East, and to the best of your knowledge, her ship still sits on the island she beached it on, rotting slowly, though you haven’t been there in a while. You would like to get your hands on her treasure though, notably the octet.
He asks you for another story, but you tell him no, another time, perhaps. He’s put out, of course, but he doesn’t complain. He spends another hour or two in your study with you before he deems it time to leave, chirps a farewell, and says he’s going back to his hive. He’ll be back soon, he tells you, maybe next week. You give him a wave, and he zips out of the room.
You spend the rest of the evening thinking about the past.
You wonder, vaguely, what really happened to Vriska.