The Slippery
Corkscrew

SeaBreathe — a city that smells of salt, ambition, and three-day-old fish. A sprawling trade port at the edge of the Shimmering Gulf, where merchant convoys arrive laden with coin and depart somewhat lighter. Half a dozen languages are spoken at the docks on any given morning, and at least two of them are lies.

The city is governed — in the loosest possible sense — by King Altherion III, a man of extraordinary self-certainty and equally extraordinary incompetence. His edicts are inscrutable, his tax code written in a dialect no living scholar can decipher, and his most recent innovation — requiring all trade vessels to affix a wax seal bearing his likeness to their cargo — has produced a dramatic shortage of wax and a surplus of outrage. The nobles who orbit him are no better: a feckless court of hereditary titles and dwindling inheritances, content to feast while the docks rot and the workers organize.

Something is rotten in SeaBreathe. The guilds are restless. The Watch has been bought twice over. Ships arrive at midnight bearing no manifest. Somewhere beneath the cobblestones, the city groans under the weight of secrets it can no longer keep. You have come to the right place — or perhaps the very wrong one. Either way, you have found your way to The Slippery Corkscrew, and here you shall rest, resupply, and answer when the call goes out.