In the salt-crusted bowels of the Dear Calypso, where the timbers groaned like old bones under the relentless kiss of the sea, Colour perched like a shadow given form. He was a kenku, one of those cursed raven-folk born from some ancient folly of the gods, his plumage a riot of iridescent hues—emerald greens bleeding into sapphire blues, with streaks of crimson that caught the lantern light like spilled blood. Unlike the drab blacks of his kin, Colour's feathers shimmered, a mark perhaps of the wild magic that twisted through his bardic veins. At thirty-odd years, he moved with the fluid grace of a bird in flight, his taloned feet gripping the deck as the ship pitched, his beak sharp and inquisitive, eyes like polished obsidian gleaming with unspoken cunning. He wore a patchwork vest of scavenged silks, adorned with brass rings pilfered from drowned sailors, and a tricorn hat perched jauntily atop his crested head, feathers poking through like defiant sails.

Colour had washed up on the Calypso's deck five years past, a mimic without a voice, fleeing the iron cages of a coastal slaver's den where his songs had been silenced for profit. He wanted the horizon's endless promise—a hoard of gold to buy his silence no more, to craft a life unbound by chains or the mimicry that defined him. But the sea was a jealous lover, and Captain Thorne, that scarred leviathan of a man, held the ship's secrets like a kraken's grip. Colour's melodies, woven from stolen voices of sirens and storms, kept the crew's spirits afloat, but they also masked the captain's darker trades: smuggling shadows that whispered of forbidden pacts with abyssal things. To claim his treasure, Colour schemed in the rigging, his beak clicking softly as he aped the captain's gravelly threats to sow doubt among the mates.

It worked because Colour saw the world through a thief's eye—every voice a key, every note a lockpick. His arc twisted like the Calypso's prow through fog: from silent observer to the ship's sly heartbeat, his songs unraveling loyalties until the mutiny bloomed under a blood moon. Yet conflicts gnawed at him—the crew's growing suspicion of his 'unnatural' colors, branding him omen or spy; the ghosts of mimicked dead haunting his dreams; and the captain's pet warlock, who sniffed out his deceptions with spells that peeled back illusions. In the end, as cannon fire lit the waves and the Dear Calypso listed toward the deep, Colour clutched a chest of glittering coin, his final mimicry a triumphant caw echoing over the chaos. But freedom's price was steep; the sea claimed him too, feathers adrift like forgotten confetti on the tide, his story a bard's ballad unfinished, sung by the wind alone.