Friday Lore Post: A Biography of Devon the Parrot

In the summer of the year DN 1202, a baby was born. This was not a particularly noteworthy occurrence, and indeed was not noted by anyone except the baby’s parents, who named their new son Devon. Devon grew up in a particularly rough part of an Imperial port city named Quvar, where survival generally relied on taking things from others. When he was fifteen Devon killed someone  and needed to leave Quvar quickly or risk being arrested and enslaved, so he signed on as a deckhand on a trading vessel called the Orphan’s Wire. 

Devon’s time on the Orphan’s Wire was not particularly interesting. He developed a competency as a sailor and had a relationship with another sailor named Anri for eight months until Anri got Devon drunk one night and convinced him to have a threesome with another sailor Anri had lost a dice game to, which Devon resented in the morning. Devon ended up leaving the Orphan’s Wire after two years, and served on two other ships before finally, around his twentieth birthday, beginning a contract of service on board a Kyainese trading ship called the Ice Glade. 

Devon did well for himself on the Ice Glade. Though he had disagreements with some of the crew, he became good friends with quite a few of them, and became a sort of leader among the other deckhands, and was affectionately named the Parrot by his friends for his willingness to take their complaints to the ship’s officers. He renewed his contract after two years and resolved to stay for another five. Three years into those five, the captain died suddenly, and the unpopular first mate moved into the captaincy. Many of the crew were talking about leaving, and in order to appease them, the new captain named Devon his first mate even though they had never gotten along.

Just over a year later, in the early months of DN 1237, the Ice Glade was caught in a sudden squall that drove it against an uninhabited rocky island with no supplies. In the storm, Devon was thrown overboard and nearly drowned in the raging waters, but was rescued by a merman named Kein. Kein took Devon to an underwater grotto and explained to him that the ghost of his deceased father Syen had woken up and was causing the storm, due not only to his father’s anger, but the fact that in life his father had been possessed by something far older and more dangerous. Many other ships, as well as the underwater civilization of the merpeople, would be in danger if the ghost wasn’t stopped.

Kein took Devon to the island where his crew was stranded, and used his magic to help repair the ship with living coral. When the captain refused to cooperate with the plan, Kein killed him, giving Devon no choice but to lead a full mutiny and become the captain himself. Devon and the Ice Glade set out sailing the waters looking for Syen’s ghost and the bones it was inhabiting in order to destroy them and break the curse. 

Over this period of time, Kein and Devon became lovers, which transpired after an argument where Devon insisted that Kein was just using him and was controlling his life, and Kein admitted that he’d saved Devon because he’d thought Devon was pretty. They were together for six tempestuous months, and were married by Devon’s first officer about two weeks before they finally found the small, isolated rock where Syen’s bones were not resting. 

Kein and Devon went onto the island alone, taking a large warhammer and all of Kein’s magic with them to destroy the bones. When they found the bones, Devon was surprised to find not a skeleton but a crown, some rings, a brace, a necklace and a sceptre. Kein admitted that he had killed his father and carved his bones into this shape some sixteen centuries past in a bid to become immortal, which had partially worked, but that the bones—which were keeping him alive—also had a will of their own thanks to the spirit that had possessed Syen, and were going to destroy too many other lives for it to be worth it. 

Devon refused to destroy the regalia that was keeping his husband alive, and instead resolved to protect it. Kein wouldn’t let him, and the two argued. As they did, Devon held the crown in his hands, and Syen’s magic rose to the fore, possessing him. Suddenly overcome with a great power, Devon slammed Kein away and donned the regalia, his mind warped and controlled by the ghosts of two men who each had a lifetime’s worth of anger and betrayal weighing on their souls. 

Devon returned to his ship alone wearing the regalia, which he never took off again. The Ice Glade became the flagship in the reign of terror that he began that day, assailing other ships and bringing them under his control as he built himself history’s most fearsome seafaring empire. He even eventually constructed himself a castle made out of coral in the middle of the Coral Range, the world’s largest coral reef and underwater mountain range. Over the next five years, Devon became less and less Devon and more and more the Sea King, but he wasn’t the only one. Syen, the creature that had once possessed Syen, and Devon were no longer possessing each other, but rather the three of them merged into a new entity. 

The newly emerging Sea King was not unopposed. Navies sailed against him, and sank. Kein and the other merpeople fought him, to no avail—in large part because the merpeople refused to cooperate with human efforts. Kein himself fought with the Sea King several times, trying in futility to remove the regalia from Devon’s body in the hopes that it would get his husband back. 

Eventually, in the middle of DN 1211’s storm season, the Sea King was prepared to create the greatest storm the world had ever seen, to cement his supremacy over the ocean. Refusing to allow that to happen, Kein used all the power at his disposal, with the help of a clan of human witches in the Bevia Islands, to seize the power of the sea from the Sea King for a brief moment, and broke into the Sea King’s coral palace. Wrestling for control of the sea’s power, Kein and the Sea King’s battle caused earthquakes under the ocean and tsunamis that hammered all the nearby coasts and destroyed several islands in the region, sinking countless ships. 

But in the end Kein won. He stabbed Devon through the heart, using all of his power to hold him in place, and pulled the Regalia away from him as he died. Despite his hope that this would restore Devon, the body that died in his arms was an empty shell. 

Kein attempted to destroy the Regalia, knowing he was destroying all that remained of his father and his husband, but he’d used all his power in the fight with the Sea King, and could not. Instead, as the castle collapsed around him, he lifted the Regalia to the sky and used the last of his strength to blast it far enough away that it would end up on land, where it was relatively harmless, and would hopefully never be reunited. Kein sank to the bottom of the ocean with the castle and was never seen again, at least above the surface. Devon’s soul, along with the other two with which it had amalgamated, was split in pieces and scattered.

And it would remain so, but only for the next eight hundred years, until until the Sea king returned to the sea once again. 

From “Who Is the Sea King?” By John of the Black Witch Clan, Cabbar Island, DN 1991.