A Lore Primer for Dockside Memory-Keepers, Harbor Clerks, & Anyone Who Ever Paid “Protection”
Port Azure was never starving. It was bled.
It nominally paid tribute to the distant Shogunate, but in practice the city belonged to privateer guilds—men who wore law like a cloak and used it like a net. The people learned to speak softly, to keep their ledgers hidden, to smile at the wrong flags and survive another week.
And at the center of the rot was one name the port could not say too loud without consequences:
Captain Cronus Peacock.
The first public sign that the Peacock’s grip could break didn’t happen at a fortress.
It happened on a tavern floor.
A privateer agent named Layla Craft came collecting “protection” and left screaming, calling Julius a monster—scrambling out on all fours and trailing humiliation behind him like bilge-water.
That mattered more than most battles, because the port saw something it hadn’t seen in years:
A Shogunate-backed man running without a blade ever touching him.
After Layla fled, the Grinning Siren became the first courtroom.
Yarn Grin (owner, professional coward, survivor) shifted instantly from “please don’t hurt my business” to “yes, Captain, anything, Captain,” because fear recognizes a stronger predator.
And Lance Oreo—the one-eyed baker who carried grief like a second spine—didn’t laugh at the name Love Pirates. He treated it like a bad joke that ends in a funeral for the wrong side. He also said what everyone was thinking:
Cronus had a fortress, a warship, and half the Shogunate’s blind eye protecting him.
The port listened. Because Lance was the kind of man who didn’t talk unless it cost him something.
Tom Littlefoot, Mayor of Port Azure, did not greet Julius as a hero. He greeted him like a man watching a storm drift in—unsure if it would water his crops or tear the roofs off his homes.
What broke Tom wasn’t Julius’s grin.
It was the Yoto pearl.
For a moment, the Mayor felt “quiet” again—years of tension dropping off him like wet chains—and in that artificial peace he finally said the ugly truth out loud:
Cronus wasn’t just taxing the city. He was isolating it, intercepting letters, strangling requests for aid, and hoarding confiscated pearls off-registry to build his own fleet.
Then Tom gave the Love Pirates their real target:
A rumor of a ledger—proof of treason—kept either on Cronus’s person or on his ship, the Gilded Cage.
Port Azure didn’t need vengeance.
It needed evidence.
Most ports know the sound of an approaching war: drums, boots, shouted orders.
Port Azure remembers something stranger:
A boy, a grief-tempered quartermaster, and a pearl-beast padding along like it belonged to the story.
People watched from shutters. Dockhands paused with ropes in their fists. Fishwives stopped haggling mid-sentence. Because the Love Pirates didn’t march like raiders.
They moved like a decision.
The Naval Fortress should’ve been the end of them. It was the kind of place that eats small crews.
But what the port later recorded—through scattered witnesses and panicked sentries—was that the fortress didn’t fall to cannon fire.
It fell to certainty.
An officer named Aliaster stood in authority with a Meito blade (the kind that burns and sings in the air), and he met Julius with the posture of someone prepared to die for order.
And then Julius did something the port still argues about in taverns:
He turned fear into theater.
Smoke moved where smoke shouldn’t. Shadows lied with discipline. The fortress garrison—trained men—started behaving like prey. Witnesses later claimed the air tasted like brine and old ghosts. (Ports always add flavor when they’re terrified.)
However it happened, the outcome is the same in every retelling:
The fortress opened.
Not in victory. In surrender.
Here’s the part Harbor Clerks don’t like writing down, because it makes the world feel too fragile:
Julius didn’t “interrogate” Aliaster like a brute.
He touched a pearl to the back of Aliaster’s neck and used resonance to question the truth directly.
And what spilled out wasn’t just strategy—it was disgust.
Aliaster’s mind held the image of Cronus’s warship, the Gilded Cage, and the knowledge that the captain kept his incriminating ledger rolled in oilcloth under a floorboard in his quarters.
Worse: Aliaster had already tried to do something about it. He’d raided the treasury and found it “almost empty,” because Cronus had pulled the best stock the day before.
So Aliaster did the only honorable thing left to him:
He gave Julius the heavy iron key ring to the treasury and admitted, without saying it cleanly, that he needed pirates to do what soldiers could not.
Port Azure would later call that moment the Soldier’s Flinch:
The second a man trained for obedience chooses truth instead.
When people say “the Love Pirates fought the Gilded Cage,” they imagine cannon duels.
Dockhands remember something else:
The privateer flagship sitting proud like a parasite with painted fins—Peacock colors, Shogunate arrogance—and the water around it feeling wrong.
They also remember whispers about the ship’s “crew”:
Grey-skinned sentinels with milky eyes, pearl shards hammered into flesh—alive, but not living.
That detail spread fast, because it explained why Port Azure had felt haunted for so long:
Cronus wasn’t just stealing coin.
He was building a fleet from people.
This is the scene that made Port Azure’s storytellers start lying bigger than usual—because the truth already sounded like an exaggeration.
Witnesses insist the Gilded Cage ended up stripped, its deck “scrubbed clean” except for one figure:
Captain Cronus Peacock, clutching a war hammer, half-cowering, half-raging.
They say Julius’s smoke rose in a twisting column and turned into spears—a storm that chose targets—and that the privateer captain tried to hide behind the idea of law, calling Julius “vandal” and “criminal” like those words were armor.
They also swear Julius didn’t end it with a gun.
Because the port later agreed on a small, unsettling principle:
Julius Applebottom fights like a pirate—
but punishes like a judge.
Ports don’t heal in a day. But Port Azure changed its posture overnight.
When the Love Pirates returned to the Grinning Siren, Hala painted the Jolly Roger—a bleeding heart skewered by a cutlass—and set the heavy key ring down like punctuation.
Then the ledger went to the Mayor.
Not as a trophy—
as a weapon the port could use to protect itself from the next “legal” monster.
Tom Littlefoot offered gold from the treasury out of reflex—out of gratitude and old fear.
Julius refused it.
The Love Pirates, he said, do not take coin from civilians—only from the wealthy—though they would accept safe harbor, and asked the Mayor to help convince Lance Oreo to join as cook aboard the Exocoetidae.
Tom’s answer became Port Azure’s oath to the bleeding-heart flag:
Any ship flying it would find a berth and a hot meal, so long as the Mayor lived.
And from the kitchen came the sound of a man celebrating the death of a tyrant the only way he knew how:
By threatening to bake a cake that would make gods weep.
Ask Port Azure who saved them and you’ll get answers that sound like folklore.
But the Harbor Clerk version—the one written in ink instead of rum—ends like this:
A privateer monopoly broke the moment a collector fled without steel drawn.
A Mayor spoke the truth because one pearl gave him a moment of peace.
A soldier chose shame over obedience and handed pirates the keys.
A ledger returned meant Cronus couldn’t be replaced quietly.
And a flag called Love left the port with a new superstition:
If you see a bleeding heart on the wind,
either you’re about to be robbed for your cruelty—
or rescued from it.