The bouncy, ceaselessly grinning and hollering and spitting pirate who, having been raised amid a cacophony of accents himself, veered wildly between all of them and none, who covered his habitual malapropisms and neologisms by purposely creating as many as possible so that he might become larger than life—that legend was suddenly simply a slender Ilytian man, hitting middle age earlier than he ought, his face drawn, eyes haunted by things forever lost.
