Kenneth "Scar-Face" Damien

Kenneth Damien learned early that the sea only respects weight and tension—the pull of rope, the strain of bone, the moment something finally gives. Mercy had no place on a deck slick with blood and pitch.
  He was born in the chain-holds beneath a slaver’s dock, where orcs were bred to haul and die. Ships were his prison and his teacher. He learned rigging by touch in the dark, fingers blistered raw, listening to the creak of timbers and the hiss of rope like warning whispers. By the time he could see daylight, he knew how to break a mast faster than most men could raise one.
  The scar came during a running battle in a storm that swallowed prayers whole.
  A corsair hunter rammed their vessel, lines snapping like whips. Kenneth climbed to save the mainsail while steel rang below. A cut cable—meant to drop the yard—caught him across the face. He did not scream. He fell, face torn open, teeth shattered, blood vanishing into rain and black water. The ship burned. The crew fled. Kenneth sank.
  The sea didn’t kill him.
  The Underdark did—slowly.
  Currents dragged him into a cavern maw beneath the coast, where the water turned cold and light died. He washed onto stone slick with fungus and bones. His wounds festered. His scar split and healed wrong. He survived by eating blind fish and tearing meat from cave vermin with broken teeth.
  That was where the Darkwake Corsairs found him.
  They sailed a black-hulled ship stitched from wrecks and spider-silk rigging, crewed by outcasts—duergar deserters, drow exiles, surface pirates who’d fallen too far to crawl back up. They should have killed him.
  Instead, they watched him climb their rigging.
  Kenneth moved through lines and chains like he’d been born to the dark, reading tension by vibration, feeling airflow where there was no wind. He could rig sails for stone currents and silence a ship by choking its lines. When attacked by chasm-raiders, he dropped a mast that crushed three enemies and pinned a fourth long enough to interrogate.
  They kept him.
  In the Underdark, Kenneth learned a harsher truth: ships don’t float—they cling. Every voyage was a knife-edge between gravity and oblivion. He became the one who decided which line held and which was cut when escape demanded sacrifice.
  He never asked whose life was on the other end.
  Now Kenneth “Scar-Face” Damien sails the dark seas beneath the world, scar pale and twisted, eyes reflecting witchlight and bioluminescent spray. He sleeps with a blade in his hand and rope scars tightening his wrists.
  Above, the sea tried to claim him and failed.
  Below, the dark learned better.