There is a tide in the affairs of serpents which taken at the flood leads on to fortune... Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.
In the warm the warm fug in the apartments above, the voice of your father, reading the great authors of history from remaindered texts. The heavy thump of the printing press in the workshop below.
In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labor; in this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking. No, a merry life and a short one, shall be my motto.
Huddled around carefully guarded furnaces, the rough laughter of rough sailors, well-intentioned for all of that, telling stories of heroes of the sea. The rise and crash of the waves, fast becoming second nature.
Servant. Serpent. Scribe.
I do not offer you obedience or service, safety or certainty. You know well certain ones, at certain times, have the opportunity to rise, to wax in power. Seize it while it lasts, and grasp in weeks what decades of study could not give you. But the bargain is this... danger, and great deeds, and great enemies. You will not be forgotten, a mere printer's son. And I, I will not be rewritten as an appendix of Her greatness...
The dry, hissing voice of the god; the dry, eternal heat of the Near Fire. The endless coils of Apophis, and tangled and laced among them, huddled and writhing, the countless souls of the Yuan-Ti. The humans call it a Hell of Fire, but to a serpent's soul it's warmth and brotherhood and safety. And behind it, the scuffle and thump of the eternal struggle in these titanic caverns. Tiamat does not lie still, with the snake-god binding her limp as rope; they
struggle. For millennia they have struggled, and the sound of it fills your dreams.
You sail on, and you get stronger.
Re: Privateers of Lssthp II [IC]
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