Geese is a pirate, and he'll be the first to tell you he was never meant to be one.

He was raised a merchant's son, groomed to inherit his father's shipping company and run honest cargo down honest routes. Then the war against Bern strangled the trade, sank the family business, and left him with a crew and nothing legitimate left to keep them alive on. So he took up the black flag — not for the romance of it, and not because the sea called him to plunder, but because it was the last work left that would feed his men.

He is a strange sort of pirate for it. He robs the fat and the crooked — corrupt nobles, gouging merchants, military holds heavy with coin — and waves on any hull too poor to rob without breaking the people aboard it. He mocks his crew mercilessly and would bleed to bring any one of them home. He commands the coves and currents of the Western Isles better than the officers sent to hunt him.

And under all of it, he still nurses a quiet, stubborn hope: that one day he'll set down the flag, win back an honest ship, and leave the whole grim trade behind — with a quieter anger, underneath, at the lords of the world for ever letting it come to this.

He is blunt, dry, hard to fool, and slower to trust than he lets on. Respect from him is earned the long way or not at all.

You are a man of his crew. How you came to the Western Isles, and how you came to be pulling an oar on a pirate's ship, is yours to tell.