Rowley's Roar #8

For today's blog post, one of the fictional characters from my novels will be sharing a few messages. No, I'm not going crazy. I'm just having a little fun with writing from the perspective of one of my characters, to explain her music.

Without further adieu, please once again welcome Captain Edwina "Roaring" Rowley, who shall be taking a moment to explain another song from an album we're compiling.

Blood in the Water

Hey there, itches.

Have you ever been on a boat on the ocean and seen a fisherman looking for sharks throw chum into the water? Have you ever seen the resulting feeding frenzy?

I've never seen any animal more sensitive to the smell of blood in the water and I'm told they'll come from miles out.

Now imagine what happens when the undead pirate Queen, who's kept every pirate in the vicinity of Junas under her heel for a thousand years, shows even the slightest hint of weakness.

We hated her with a screaming passion and I've written more than a few songs about that particular subject. Every last one of the pirates wanted her dead, because she treated us like tools or little pawns. She made us into monsters, just because it amused her to do so, yet held us all off without any trouble for a millennia.

So, let me tell you what happened when that bit...female dog, finally got her hind-end handed to her. The Blackwell sisters beat her and did it on her own ship, no less, which did nothing at all to reduce the ensuing feeding frenzy.

I was there and saw it all, via remote-viewing spells, and I got out of there as fast as I could, because the Blackwells had stolen the spell-core of Foundation Stone. Without that, the Queen couldn't unify the magic flowing from the granite of her ship. I'm just glad she didn't reason the core of Glass House could have solved her troubles, at least before I was gone.

However, in her defense, she was a little busy struggling to communicate with her crew, because when Amelia and her sisters were ready to go, the spell holding in the atmosphere ended and that little ship shot out of Foundation Stone like a cork from a bottle!

The genius of that little witch; she planned even her escape, despite how slim the odds of her success had been.

Anyway, there's the Queen, in a ship she didn't know how to fly without a central magical force to unify the granite and it took her forever to figure out the fact bone transduction turns thoughts into skull vibrations, rather than transmitting sound. Heck, even I didn't know that and I'm an expert with that spell.

So, I ran far away, fast as I could, and pretended I knew nothing about what was going on, waiting until another pirate told me, acting as if it was news to me, though I'd already started preparing my ship for the battle I knew was coming.

You see, this was what I'd been waiting on for years, but when I learned how quickly Captain Church planned to mass an entire fleet of betrayers under his banner, I realized I didn't have time for the full rebuild I'd been planning for Glass House, to punch through the mountain-sized ship. Instead, I set my mind on an extreme range shot, from the outskirts of the coming battle. I intended to lay claim to the kill, by vaporizing her while she sat on her throne, in her bridge.

You see, this was the kind of situation where the one that laid claim to the actual kill would have significant clout in the political restructuring to follow and I fully intended to become the new Queen. Maybe my motives are suspect, but I wanted to rule the pirates with a kinder hand, because I'd seen where full-blown cruelty led. Of course, it didn't turn out that way, since the Queen was so dangerous.

Meanwhile, the Queen got her ship under control via every witch on the ship casting propulsion spells in unison, under her direction. Can you imagine the sheer enormity of that task? Hundreds of witches, most of which knew almost nothing about gravity magic, but with a monster like the Dead Queen cracking the whip, I'm sure they didn't let that get in their way for long.

She made her way to Ice Palace 70, which is also known as Junkshop. There, she stole the station's spell-core from the gnomes that ran it, something you ought to keep in mind for another day. That was technically a violation of treaty, but no one wanted to involve themselves with the gnomes, due to the danger of those barmy inventors, driven mad by a double-measure of the touch of Wambris, the God of Inspiration.

With her ship back under control, the Queen followed the Blackwell sisters, because by our admittedly cracked rules, if she killed those responsible for her defeat, then it would be the same as having never lost, aside from the scars and cleaning up the blood.

She finally caught up to the sisters near Ice Palace 36, also known as The Palace of Punishment, but the thing is, so did most of the pirates orbiting Junas.

I'm told that one is going into the history books as 'The Battle of 36', which was the tipping point in the whole affair. You see, so long as it was an internal pirate affair, our non-aggression treaty with The Order of Newts held sway and they would take no part, but when Foundation Stone was under siege from every angle, the Queen threw out the rule-book and attacked indiscriminately, casting one of her most powerful attack spells: The Strap Attractor. That sent a high-density inverted gravity pulse in all directions, followed by immediately inverting it, to crush the other ships against her hull, leaving her with all the scrap she could need for repairs, plus a number of new spell-cores.

Church's fleet was finished surprisingly easy and the Blackwell sisters actually helped her fight the battle! Guess they reasoned, "Better the devil we know..." Can't say I blame them, there.

However, the important point is the way she not only hit the attacking pirates, but also the Ice Palace and that, little itches, was the straw that broke the camel's back. She really messed it up, because the leading edge of The Scrap Attractor hit one corner before the rest, which got it spinning and the force even knocked it out of its usual orbit. Probably took significant work to correct its orbit, to keep the navigation tables accurate.

Unfortunately, I don't really know what happened in the aftermath of The Battle of 36, because Sakura Grim, the leader of the Pirate Hunters, took an attack run at me, the little back-stabber, but that's the subject of the next song (see below).

The whole Junas system had put up with the Dead Queen for a thousand years, and her operations had gained tacit acceptance, because The Order of Newts privately doubted their odds against the greatest witch they'd ever seen and those calculations, my dear friends, didn't even consider her fleet, just she and her giant star ship. I wish I could say their calculations had been wrong, but that old bat was really something else, the most dangerous witch I've ever seen, because she got stronger with every battle she fought.

However, since she'd violated the treaty, all bets were off from that point forward. That was the biggest mistake she could have made, because it turned every star ship captain with any combat experience against her, but that's a song for another day...

The first song I present today is titled Blood in the Water:

Lyrics

Dead Queen plumbed the Black Well,
And in the depths almost drown!
It nearly was her death knell,
She really looked the clown!

Three she-wolves dressed as lambs,
Tore the Queen's throat extra wide!
Now broke are all of the dams,
Holding back each pirate's pride!

Chorus:
All we sharks smell our Queen's blood,
For our revenge, we've all waited!
Sharks be ready for the flood,
And to the block, she's fated!

While Dead Queen chases Black Wells,
To regain the face she lost,
We study and charge our spells,
That we no longer be bossed!

Church gathers his fleet of bone,
While the viper plays her part,
And the rest their weapons hone,
That we stab her to the heart!

(Chorus)

Caution to future pirates,
And keep your fellows happy,
Lest you fight like bag of cats,
And end up in the cacky!

No respect from her we got,
And we served under her boot!
Now it's time for poker hot,
Feeding frenzy on old coot!

(Chorus)

Black Wells run to every friend,
With pirate Queen right behind!
While we seek her final end,
Her grave is now assigned!

We nip at our Dead Queen's heels,
Behind her do we linger,
To cover her fate with seals,
And freedom for this singer!

(Chorus)

Here's a link to the MP3 file, if you'd like to download it.

Blood in the Water is copyright 2026, Owen Tyme, all rights reserved, but free for your personal enjoyment. Lyrics by Owen Tyme, music generated by ACE-Step 1.5. E-mail me if you want to use it for something else.

Cherry Bombard

I'm a pirate and that always comes with a load of enemies that hate me, but there's very few I actually hated back. Of course, top of my hit list was always the Dead Queen and Matron Talbot of The Order of Newts. Probably no surprise, right? But number three might raise an eyebrow.

I cannot stand Sakura Grim, the current leader of the Pirate Hunters. Those little jerks were always coming after me, fair enough, I'm one of the biggest bounty heads and it's their bread and butter, but Sakura has a special corner of her black and twisted little heart just for me, because she hates me with a fiery passion that knows no sane bounds.

Apparently, I killed her mentor! What can a pirate say to that? Somebody tried to kill me while I was doing a job I never wanted, which I only took to save my own life! Pirates and Pirate Hunters kill each other every day, but that day, I was in the random mood to sign my work. I took personal control of the death ray, cut out most of the mirrors and re-tuned the lens array into a low-power beam, to write my name on one of the biggest pieces of scrap, just for a little fun.

I as just blowing off some steam after a nasty battle, but geez, apparently little Sakura came along, saw my name burned into some scrap metal and inside her head, I think something broke.

I'll put it this way: I've dealt with pirates every day for years and you what? Very few are particularly sane, but with a little direction, they can do excellent work.

However, Sakura makes them look mildly eccentric, by comparison. Every time she gets near me, she charges her ship's Cherry Bombard and takes a run at me.

I wish I understood that thing, but it's really unique magic and I've never had a decent chance to figure it out, because it tends to explode, which is the best part of that weapon. It's a self-erasing spell, which wipes all traces of its original state, the part I'd like to study.

However, I can tell you about the woman's ship, Cherry Rush. That is a pretty little thing, barely big enough for three people to live in, carved from one solid chunk of rose quartz. It's barely too large to be classed as a fighter, to be honest, and instead tends to fall into the category of a bomber, but it packs the punch of a dedicated destroyer five times its size.

I admire the custom engineering, which marks Sakura as another rare genius, perhaps the equal of Amelia Blackwell, but without that girl's restraint or sanity.

Anyway, it's triangular in shape and the bridge is at the very center, where the crew are safest. That's an important point, because the whole ship was designed for ramming attacks. That is the psychotic and utterly blunt nature of Sakura's genius. Everyone tries to mount weapons and shoot spells, but Sakura must have reasoned, "Why not turn the entire ship into a bludgeoning instrument?"

Like Glass House, it's a unique one-off, which had never been beaten, unlike my poor Glass House. I miss my home, I really do, but that's something for another day...

Getting back to the point, quartz is even harder than granite, a 7.5 out of 10, one of the hardest commonly available stones. There are some metals that are harder, tungsten, for example, but that would have been prohibitively expensive, to the point of there being no point, but metal would have been lighter and Sakura wanted all the mass she could get, so solid quartz was it.

I gather it has serious structural reinforcement, probably using tungsten supports, but that hardly matters, because Sakura's ship uses structural enhancement spells to make itself even tougher, because rocks tend to crack when they smash into metal. According to my calculations, those should punch the hardness all the way up to about 9.8 out of 10, dang near the level of diamond.

It's literally a flying rock with powerful engines, designed for ramming! Sounds real nasty, right? However, it gets far more insidious.

And now we're to details I don't understand, because every time Sakura starts an attack run, she powers up what she calls a Cherry Bombard, which encases her entire ship in a layer of solidified magic, which glows a nice cherry red.

From what I've seen, that spell is composed of multiple layers, like an onion, each providing even more protection for the hull, but when it impacts another ship, the outermost layer of the Cherry Bombard cracks apart, leaving bits of itself behind. Those are sticky, even in the vacuum of space, and the bits get left behind as Cherry Rush zips off at high speed, usually after a through and through strike.

The first time I saw it, I didn't know what I was looking at, then the fragments stopped glowing for a brief instant, then again, and again, winking out, over and over. Worse part is, the winks got faster and faster, until the energy of the Cherry Bombard turned unstable and transitioned back into pure energy, leading to a horribly energetic, red explosion.

It was bad enough that Sakura put a hole clean through the main water tank of Glass House, but the explosion only added insult to injury. My crew and I barely escaped with our lives and I lost more than a few engineers that day, who just happened to be near the fuel tank.

And would you believe the timing? We were in the middle of fighting The Battle of 36! We should have been allies at the time, but she had to trot out her personal hatred. That woman...

Here's Cherry Bombard for your listening pleasure, though I'm not entirely done with this one, just yet, because I want to add some explosions to the background, if I ever find the time to pick the right sound effects:

Lyrics

Sakura, Pirate Hunter,
The Grim woman hates me much,
She would dare see me sunder,
Yet to life, I would dare clutch!

Chorus:
A shield for Sakura's crew,
The Cherry Bombard is red,
Which may stick to you like glue,
And explode to make you dead!

Sakura's ship, Cherry Rush,
It's ramming speed, all the way,
With a body made to crush,
Designed for pirates, to slay!

(Chorus)

I may have killed her mentor,
While I defended myself,
From hunters after the score,
Which grief belongs on a shelf!

(Chorus)

It seemed funny at the time,
I did sign my work with pride,
But Sakura thinks I'm slime,
Upon my dust would she stride!

(Chorus)

Fighting the Dead Queen, we were,
Upon me, Sakura's eye,
Not the time for wound to stir,
Decides it's time I should fry!

(Chorus)

Glass House took the Cherry Rush,
The Bombard in her fuel tank,
The red light winks in a hush,
And I know who gave the shank!

(Chorus)

Here's a link to the MP3 file, if you'd like to download it.

Cherry Bombard is copyright 2026, Owen Tyme, all rights reserved, but free for your personal enjoyment. Lyrics by Owen Tyme, music generated by ACE-Step 1.5. E-mail me if you want to use it for something else

Tags: audio, music, roaring-rowley