They say a pirate crew called the Palm Pirates clawed their way all the way into the Mid-Sea Labyrinth — Axis II, further than any half-trained cutthroats had any right to be.
Their captain was famous enough for his hands—open-palm strikes that could crack masts and dent helm wheels—that people remembered him.
Nobody remembered the crew.
Nobody remembered the ship.
And when the Mid-Sea swallowed them, nobody tried to.
The story goes that three Cursed Giant Pearls—each one bad enough to bend a tide on its own—collided in the black water under Axis II.
The result was not a wave. Not really.
Sailors call it a resonance tsunami:
A sound that hit like a mountain.
A pressure-wall that turned hulls to splinters and men to red foam.
The Palm Pirates were there when it happened.
Their volcano-heart Meito Pearl melted in its socket.
Their timbers screamed.
Their captain never made it to a ballad.
The Palm Pirates became one more nameless wreck grinding along the Maze’s stone teeth.
That should have been the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Ask ten taverns who Julius Applebottom was before the wreck and you’ll get eleven answers.
Some say he was born in a barrel of salted fish.
Some say his mother was a storm and his father was bad luck.
Some say he’s a lie privateers tell each other when the watch gets too quiet.
The only thing the tales agree on is this:
From the moment he could walk, Julius walked onto ships.
He was no older than four, they say, when he slipped aboard his first merchant sloop just to see how the ropes and wheels made the world move.
By five, he’d hopped seven ships and been kicked off twelve, because:
he tried to take the helm “just to see if I could do it better,”
out-argued quartermasters twice his age,
and corrected old sea dogs on their own knots until they wanted to throw him and the rope overboard.
No one knows his parents.
Plenty of crews claim the honor of having thrown him off a gangplank.
He was six when he stowed away on the Palm Pirates’ ship.
The story every dock keeps is this:
In the middle of a gun duel with privateers on the open sea, the Palm’s volcano-type Meito Pearl started to spiral out of control. The gunners were down. The engine was about to flash-boil the keel.
A child in a stolen coat sprinted into the engine room.
No training. No license. No right.
Julius slapped his bare hands on the containment rings, screamed at the pearl like it was a misbehaving dog, and somehow steadied it—long enough to keep the heart from bursting and the ship from vanishing in a red mist.
Then he ran to the guns, climbing onto a stool to reach the elevation crank, and manned a battery by himself while the real gunners bled on the planks.
Afterward, the captain didn’t know what else to do with him.
They called him cabin boy.
Julius called himself crew.
Months later, the Palm Pirates sailed too deep.
Axis II does not forgive mistakes, and the three Cursed Giants chose that stretch of sea to meet and scream.
When the resonance tsunami hit, it tore most of the crew apart in an instant.
Those that lived were hurled into underwater caverns lit by dead pearls, their bodies caught in slow-turning eddies of pressure and memory.
Julius should have died with the rest of them.
Instead, the wave folded around him.
Witnesses—what few there are—call it a resonance pocket:
A bubble of raw, screaming pearl-energy and shattered sound, where time and flesh don’t agree on the rules.
They say it pinned him like an insect in amber.
Every inch of his skin was carved and re-carved by invisible blades of resonance until no unmarked patch remained.
His pale white flesh turned to a map of scar-lines, swirling and crossing like tide charts written in burn marks.
His hair fell out, grew back wrong.
Every breath tasted like stone dust and melted iron.
And as he lay in that prison of broken sound, certain he was dying, Julius did something no sane sailor would admit to:
He laughed.
He laughed out of terror, out of defiance, out of the impossible joke that he, of all the Palm Pirates, had lived long enough to understand he was doomed.
He laughed so hard and so long in the dark that the expression stuck—the muscles of his face twisted by scar and strain into a permanent, crooked grin.
By the time the resonance pocket finally bled out into the rest of the sea, a year had gone by.
The boy who stepped out of it looked like a ghost they’d forgotten to finish.
When they tell the tale in taverns, they lower their voices here.
They say Julius floated up out of a Mid-Sea rift on a shattered plank of Palm timber, half-conscious, riding a slow-rising bubble of spent resonance and bone dust.
He was eight years old.
His skin was bleached corpse-white, cross-hatched with so many resonance scars he looked more burned than born.
His eyes were pure black, all pupil, no white—like someone had knocked the light out of them and replaced it with bottomless ink.
And when he coughed seawater out of his lungs and saw the sun again, that twisted grin was still stamped across his face, like a mask he could never remove.
The worst part, some say, isn’t how he looks.
It’s what happens when he feels.
When anger spikes, or joy flares, or the old terror presses too close, the scars along his arms and neck light faintly, and a black, smoke-like vapor seeps from his skin, coiling in the air around him:
not heat,
not cold,
something like shadow made into breath.
Dogs won’t go near it.
Pearlwrights get headaches seeing it.
Pearl beasts stare at him like he’s a riddle only they’re allowed to solve.
Most sane men would call that the end of a tragedy.
The Estes Sea is not kind enough for that.
In some ports, they say Julius Applebottom is cursed and will drown any ship fool enough to take him on.
In others, they whisper he’s the sea’s own child, marked by three Cursed Giants and spared for some future storm.
Privateers swap stories that he can walk through resonance scars like doors now, step from one battlefield’s echo to another’s.
Pearl hunters claim they’ve seen a small, scarred boy standing on the spine of a dead leviathan at dusk, laughing to himself as black vapor curls off his shoulders, counting how many teeth it had.
No two tales agree on what he can do.
Every tale agrees on this:
He will ask to see your ship’s heart.
He will smile that awful, joyful, scar-pulled smile.
He will talk to your engine the way other people talk to friends.
And if you mock him, or shove him back onto the dock, or tell him children don’t belong at sea…
…he’ll laugh.
Not because it’s funny.
Because somewhere deep in his bones, in the scars that should have killed him, in the year he spent trapped inside the scream of three dying gods, Julius Applebottom learned a secret:
The sea already tried to erase him.
It failed.
So when the lanterns burn low in Port Seabright or along the Sunlit Fringe, and the talk turns to monsters and kings, some old deckhand will always lean in and say:
“You can keep your Pirate Kings and Lion Men.
Me—I’m saving a line in my logbook
for the day that laughing little corpse-boy picks a flag of his own.”
Most listeners roll their eyes.
A few, the ones who’ve sailed too close to Axis II, just drink in silence.
Because they know the truth behind all the best tavern songs:
The ones you laugh at hardest are the ones that hurt the world most when they finally come true.