Aliya was born into a rich family, with a fleet of fishing vessels to their name. She was born at sea, where she would spend the vast majority of her lifetime. From a young age she worked with her mother’s personal crew—all women—and quickly picked up the finer points of command. She never quite got the hang of sailing, but could always trust her crew knew what to do based on what she told them. Trade and exploration were her joys for much of her life, and her parents whole-heartedly supported her with her endeavors; though they would never let her set sail without one of them aboard her ship.

Being out on sea gave Aliya plenty of time to pick up strange hobbies and think. At first she took more common hobbies, like fishing, or whittling, but over time she grew to crave more and more complex, esoteric pursuits. For a short while, she was interested in the tarot, and to a lesser extent, the occult, but this phase came and went, though she keeps her birth cards on hand: the Devil, and the Lovers. One of her attendants had a small flute, which Aliya learned to play with some degree of skill. On and on she went, until she settled most recently on combat skills: particularly fond of boarding actions and deck combat.

While she was learning how to handle an axe while jumping from one moving ship to another, her mother fell ill and perished to an unknown disease. Her father, gutted at the loss, brought all his ships to port for a month to mourn her. This would be the first time that Aliya was on solid land for an extended period of time. Soon, the grief over the loss of her mother was augmented by a certain sickness—a feeling that land was too solid; too foreign for her. She came to associate the stillness of the land with the stillness of death, and was relieved to finally go out to sea again. Her father—still grieving—chose to stay on land, and for the first time Aliya set out in sole command of a small fleet of three clippers.

Her choice of vessels complimented her desire for boarding actions—rather than cannon warfare. Her ships were equipped with reinforced bows and installed the strongest rams that she could find, along with three harpaxes on both sides of the ship. Knowing that her female crews would be at a disadvantage in a melee, she begrudgingly hired a company of mercenaries to accompany her in another clipper of her specification. The mercenary company headed their fleet, and would specialize entirely in combat; both with cannon and in melee.

Aliya’s days of exploring were short, however. Only two months into her exploration, the mercenaries in their company disappeared during a storm. At the time, they had been docked by a large island, and Aliya assumed that the mercenaries would be somewhere nearby. A few days later, their fleet was ambushed by a two pirate frigates, led by the missing mercenaries.

The resulting fight was brutal, but through superior speed and tactics, along with smaller displacements, Aliya ran the two pirate ships aground and set them afire. The mercenary clipper, however, caught up to her while her other ships were busy burning the pirate vessels. Their men were excellent marksmen, and landed their harpaxes from extreme range. Aliya’s crew couldn’t cut the harpoons before the mercenaries were on them. Her crew numbered sixty, while the mercenaries fifty. Their difference in combat skill was immediately apparent, however, and Aliya and a large group of her crew were driven up the aftcastle in short order.

With nowhere to go and her two other ships too far out to render aid, Aliya and her crew used anything they could as weapons. They went from swords and axes to resorting to using mops to push the mercenaries back, and eventually ended up kicking stray barrels down the stairways at them. Her crew kept Aliya far away from the front against her orders, and were cut down. By the time Aliya was able to fight, her crew was down to ten able to fight against twenty men.

It was at this time that Aliya realized that her training amounted to very little without experience to back it up. Her form with a boarding axe and cutlass was excellent, but she was easily brushed aside by more muscular, battle-hardened foes. She called the surrender of her crew with the mercenary captain’s voulge to her throat a short while after she was cornered, and the mercenary crew was quick to bind and gag her crew. The captain extended a “cordial” offer to Aliya: an empty promise that his men, “will hold out raping, abusing, and killing her crew for as long as they can,” in exchange for Aliya’s servitude whenever the captain pleased.

There was no room for negotiation, but for once that was not what angered Aliya the most. In a brief window of opportunity, she knocke the voulge out of the captain’s hands. When he tried to clumsily pick it up, the shorter handle disconnected from the shaft, and Aliya’s skill and speed finally pulled through for her. She seized the blade and drove the spike through the man’s stomach, before swinging it around and catching him on the neck. In her rage, she kept chopping until the man’s head was cut clean off, and then crushed it underfoot. The other mercenaries were too busy hauling Aliya’s crew onto their vessel, and the prize crew was below-deck checking for any hidden survivors. Aliya only had to fight two men to start.

She turned the captain’s head over his throat to cover it in blood, and then ran to the two men on her deck. She threw the bloody head at the one on the left and landed a perfect hit as he turned to face her. The other mercenary was too slow to react, and she drove the spike of the voulge into his stomach, and similarly swung the weapon around to disembowel him. His partner didn’t even see Aliya before she charged him with the spiked end of the shaft and tossed him overboard. She repeated similar actions—freeing her crew as she went—until she could hang the dead bodies of the entire mercenary crew from the sides of her ship and the mainsail.

Despite the sudden victory, her ship was far too damaged to continue sailing for long, and she grudgingly returned to port. Her father was outraged at the mercenary guild, and several men were tried and executed in the following weeks; many more were found strung up and gutted around the port areas. Aliya took to training her crew as hard as she could, and soon she felt as if she mastered the trophy she had taken from the mercenary captain. She had another one made to her specifications, and burned the old one. She swore to her crew that they’d only ever rely on themselves from then on. She hired the finest, and then the women sailors not quite the best at what they did. She organized training for her crew; going so far as to hire master crews and famed female warriors to teach them. Her crew devoured the training she administered, and she built up a truly remarkable crew. She returned to her father triumphantly, and requested a small loan from his fleet to call her own.

Her father was delighted when he tested her crew, and gave her a much newer set of ships:four clippers and the fastest frigate available. The timing of this could not be any better. With both speed and sizeable defenses, her fleet was considered one of the best at ferrying precious cargo and sensitive information in a time of growing unrest. Whispers of a great war were brewing, and all races spoke in frantic whispers and hidden gestures in an attempt to stay ahead of the oncoming storm. Aliya went from being simply wealthy to nearly controlling a small city’s worth of coin in secrets.

On her journeys, during a short stay in a port city with links to the Anfangrim mountainhomes, Aliya encountered what she thought was a stark-raving mad clocksmith. He would not stop going on about his invention; his “masterpiece.” He called it a clock that told the user more than just the time: it told them the time left on their life. Aliya was perplexed, but couldn’t get any reasonable explanation from the man. She dismissed him until she noticed a single figure just barely out of place in the shadows; weapon drawn. From their steely look, she could only guess that they had heard the madman, and knew exactly what he was talking about.

Before they could attack, Aliya hauled the man away; back to her ship. She had him confined to a small room, and she waited at attention for something to happen. At dawn the following day, a squat pair of humans requested boarding, and left Aliya with a box addressed to the clocksmith. She could not shake a feeling of dread that came from the imp-like men.

The clocksmith, on the other hand, seemed saner the moment he saw the box. He eagerly opened it and tinkered with its contents, and Aliya watched in surprise when she recognized the silhouette of a pistol. She could not recognize was the strange lock it had. The dwarf would not explain it in detail, fearing “leery ears” were listening to them. When he inquired about what Aliya and her ship did, he was delighted to hear that they were well known—perhaps counterintuitively—for their ability to take clandestine cargo from one place to another. He said that he would make as many of the weapons as his tired hands could manage, and he would entrust them to as many people as he could believe would keep them safe. There was something looming on the horizon, and—while one invention might not change the course of history—there was a chance that it could. He begged Aliya to take one with her, and told her that when the time came that it would be needed, she would need to find the most adept engineer she could to bring the weapon together.

“By no means will this save the world,” the clocksmith said, “But it may save you, or whomever you bring it to; and that certainty is what keeps me working tirelessly.”

With little reason to refuse, Aliya took the box that had been delivered to her ship and locked it safely in her quarters. The clocksmith disappeared in that short time, and Aliya did not press the issue any further. She smelled an adventure, and would have her take of it.