My name is Arthur Curry.
I am the son of a lighthouse keeper from Maine. That should make me nobody, and it would, were it not for the fact that my mother is the Atlantean Princess who stole his heart. I am the product of two worlds, of modern man and ancient mysticism. I am the son that should not be; a child of land and sea; the result of when worlds collide, born of one World War, forged by the Second, and destined by birthright to be the man that prevented a Third.
My name is King Orin.
I am the sovereign of Atlantis, the blood-descendant and rightful heir to King Atlan. I am High King of the Seven Kingdoms, Master of the Seven Oceans and Ruler of the Seven Seas. In one hand I hold the Trident of Neptune, forged by the weaponsmiths of the ancient Titans, and imbued with the power to command the oceans; and in the other I hold the power of the Waterbearer, an arcane magic that transforms the waves, and tides, and creatures of the sea into my allies. On my shoulders rests the responsibility to defend my people from the dangers of the surface, and in my heart rests the responsibility to defend the surface from the retaliations of my people.
My name is Aquaman.
I am the Dweller in the Depths, the Protector of the Oceans, a champion of Atlantis, of America, and of Justice. I am among the mightiest of Earth's heroes, and yet I am unthanked, and disrespected, a punchline for land-dwellers who underestimate the power of the sea. Yet still I fight, still I protect and defend, for that is my purpose, my mission, and my calling.
Or at least, it was.
My name is of no consequence. I am Aquaman no more, and King Orin in title only. The powers that once made me mighty have now become my curse: for as my power grows, so too does the power of my shadow, my dark opposite, a mystical balancing force that will, if left unchecked, become the unstoppable destruction of the kingdom I am sworn to protect. It is my match, my opposite, my equal in every way. I cannot defeat it: and so I can no longer be what I was. To protect my home, and the people I love, I have become someone else.
I have become something else.
* * *
CAUTION: Teeny-tiny half-spoilers for the first five minutes of Aquaman.
When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories.
She told me about the ancient Kings of Atlantis, my ancestors. She told me about our myths, and our legends, about the fearsome monsters that lurked in the deep, and the worse terrors that lurked in the hearts of men. She told me of the great enemies of Atlantis, not merely the Titans of old, and the Leviathans of the deep: but also the insidious serpent of greed; the infectious demon of fear and hubris; the unstoppable beast of anger and hate; the fever, the rage, the feeling of powerless that turns good men cruel.
My father told me stories as well, of the great kings and heroes from the legends of the surface; but most of all, he told me stories about my mother.
According to my father, there were two stories of the day he and my mother first met: a first time, and a last time. He told me of his days in the Navy, of how he had served aboard the USS San Diego during World War One. While the rest of the world fought in the so-called war to end all wars, America - he said - sat on their collective asses and waited, until at long last the order came down, and the San Diego set sail for Europe.
There was no glorious war at sea, not for the San Diego, at least. Her mission was simple: escort convoys back and forth across the Atlantic, protecting vital supplies from German U-boats. A vital mission, the Admiralty called it. The words my father used to describe it were a whole lot less precise.
America lost ten ships during the war: four military vessels, and six merchant ships; 430 Americans dead at sea. That number was important to my father. There was the USS Jacob Jones, the first American destroyer lost in battle, sunk by submarine U-53. There was the USS Cyclops, a transport carrying a shipment of coal, that disappeared without a trace, with 236 souls onboard. There was the USS Mount Vernon, a captured German liner sunk by U-82 off the coast of France.
And then there was the USS San Diego. According to her Captain, she was sunk by a torpedo strike. An investigation by the Naval Court of Inquiry concluded that the she must have struck a mine. Underwater archaeologists have found and studied the wreck, and even they aren't completely sure what sunk the San Diego, and claimed the lives of six naval servicemen.
My father knows that it was only five. Two men were killed instantly by whatever it was that struck the ship. Two were killed during evacuation as the ship began to fall apart, and another drowned in the crow's nest, unable to escape. My father, meanwhile, was a lowly mechanic, last seen when he was sent to oil the port propeller shaft shortly before the attack. When he wasn't found amongst the survivors, the obvious conclusion was that he hadn't made it; the sixth man to die in the sinking of the San Diego.
I, and my father, know otherwise. We know that it wasn't a mine, or a torpedo, or a German U-boat that sunk the San Diego: we know that it was an Atlantean, a rebel, an extremist insensed that the surface-dwellers would dare wage their World War inside our oceans. We know that he tore through the San Diego like it was made of paper, killed those first two casualties with his bare hands, and would have done the same to the third - my father - were it not for Princess Atlanna of Poseidonis. Against the orders of her father, the King, my mother took it upon herself to intervene, to preserve the ancient tradition of Atlantean neutrality in the affairs of the surface. My mother is the reason that only five men died aboard the San Diego rather than several more: and she is the reason that my father survived.
After the Atlantean rebel was defeated, my mother did what Atlanteans always did, when they rescued a surface-dweller from a shipwreck: she delivered him back to shore, made sure they wouldn't die, and then disappeared back into the ocean to be dismissed as a dream, or a myth, like the sirens and mermaids of old. Unfortunately for my father, Atlanna didn't deliver him to the port on Staten Island where the San Diego had been bound: she left him on a beach in Maine, hundreds of miles from where the San Diego had sunk. My father couldn't possibly be the man he said he was: and so he became someone else. Amnesty Bay has that effect on people, I guess.
That was the first time my parents met. My father spent every day that followed waiting for the second. He obsessed over the ocean, taking a job as the lighthouse keeper as an excuse to spend his days watching the sea. Every morning at dawn and every evening at sunset, he walked back to the place where she had left him, waiting for her. It was an impossible dream, a flight of fancy, the madness of a man who believed his life had been saved by a mermaid. Impossible, that is, until it happened.
That was the second story of how my parents met. My father found my mother on the shore, wounded and not breathing. She was a Princess, he learned, from the Kingdom of Atlantis, whose husband Trevis had mysteriously died. Atlanna suspected that King Orvax, the ruler of a neighbouring kingdom, was responsible: Orvax had long sought a political marriage between his people and Atlantis, one that Atlanna had thwarted with her betrothal to Trevis, and one that Orvax was now forcefully eager to revisit. Atlanna told my father that guards had tried to apprehend her, and that she had fled. 'Why come here?' my father had asked. 'It is not every day that you save someone from the surface,' my mother told him. 'You were a hard man to forget.'
To say that Atlanna became the love of my father's life would be an understatement. My memories of the two of them together are few and fleeting, but in the years after my mother was forced to leave, compelled back to Atlantis after her father's death to ensure that Orvax would not have an uncontested path to the throne, you only had to look into my father's eyes to understand what he had lost, and how heavily it weighed upon his heart.
My father told me many stories, but perhaps the most important was the story of his life. From my father, I learned that the lives of Atlanteans are long, while those on the surface are fleeting. I learned that all love ends in loss, but that you should love in spite of that, because of that: because that which we fear to lose is most precious to us, and nothing should be more precious than those we love.
