Chapter Text
Lucius Tenebris grew up on the ports of The Starless Sea, where time was a suggestion and fates were passed around like a bottle of whiskey. His father was an artificer who made his living fixing up the pieces of Godware that people used to dive into The Sea. His mother was a Nephilim, beings between angels and humans, who walk on the ever shifting surface of The Sea, but he’d never met her.
Due to his mother being what she was, dark brown wings sprouted from his back and the side of his head. He was ashamed of these, and other children alienated him for them, so he often wore a thick white lab coat to cover them. He didn’t bother with his fellow children, instead locking himself away in his fathers workshop for days, learning how Godware worked, and it’s connection with The Sea. He spent countless days there, slowly working on something that he claimed would let him walk the sea like his mother, yet he never seemed to get it, the twisting breathing machinery that is Godware continued to fail him.
Until one stormy day, the never-ceasing wails of the stormy Sea banging at the door to the lab, the spires and eyes and wings and steel came together into a tapestry of iron and sinew that he knew would finally set him free. Finally let him call back to The Sea that had always oh-so-sweetly called to him. He stepped out of the old wooden door, the creak of its hinges was nothing to the screams of the storm. He approached the ever-shifting void that lurked in the bottom of his nightmares and tips of his dreams, and he placed one brown-shoed foot onto the mass. He felt the device in his hands wail the sound that dying galaxies make, it writhed and screamed in ways unknowable to any half sane mind.
Yet he placed another foot onto the starless abyss that had taunted him for as long as he could remember. He wasn’t sure if he stood with that shrieking abomination atop that sentient abyss for merely a second or a thousand lifetimes. But, no matter how long he stood, he still fell. As he fell deeper and deeper into The Sea his flesh, wings, and clothes all were a suggestion to it’s unknowable whims. It merged the cost that he’d worn for countless days with the wings that he used it to conceal. His flesh was torn apart and replaced with the sea, the line between he and it blurred for countless millennia before it spat him out on a sandy beach next to a woman holding a cane, and what appeared to be a soldier with a fake mustache holding a parasol for her.
“You look like you’ve seen some things” the woman said calmly. “Would you be interested in seeing more?” She extended a pale hand to him, and he grabbed it and stood up, spitting writhing Sea water out of his lungs. With a sharp nod to the woman and a slower one to the Soldier, he walked off with them to a new part of his life.