The sea had been wretched for so long that I had nearly forgotten how silence felt beneath my boots. For weeks, the hull had throbbed with the groans of wood strained beyond endurance, the creak of rigging clawing at the mast, the suck and roar of waves that dragged our vessel like some hunted beast. And yet now—now there was land. I stood at the bow, fingers gripping the salt-crusted railing, staring into the strange coast ahead with a mingling of dread and triumph.

  Divina Terra.

  There it lay, unthinkable and immense, like a carcass sunbathing beneath an unearthly sky. The land did not welcome us. It sulked beneath clouds the color of old bruises, horizon to horizon. The desert reached toward the sea like a beggar with sand-scoured hands, clawing into the foam as if it might pull the tide itself into thirst. I was tired, raw, and sunburnt beneath three layers of wool—yet I stood straighter. I had made it.

  Behind us, the other ships of our convoy had turned back days ago—frightened or broken, I did not know. They disappeared behind the black squalls that chased us like hounds. One burned. One drifted. Only ours endured.

  And I—I carried the gold, the orders, the apologies. I was the knife that would cut the thread between the Old World and this fevered colony. And I meant to do it cleanly.

  If this went well, they'd move me inland. No more storms, no more saltburnt ledgers. A proper desk. A staff. A name entered into the League’s eastward charter. Deliver this, they said, and you’ll never see the sea again. I intended to earn that.

  I wasn’t born to this work. My father sold spices by weight and shouted himself hoarse in the rain. But I learned the codes. I mastered the ledgers. I could cite the tariffs of three capitals by memory before I ever touched a ship’s rail. The League does not reward ancestry—they reward deliverables. And I deliver.

  The men behind me muttered in reverent exhaustion. A few wept. The navigator kissed his holy relic and collapsed into the arms of a steward. I could hear one of the junior scribes vomiting over the side.

  Me? I was elated. My stomach churned, but it churned with purpose.

  Here I would find the port that had been promised: a customs house, fat with coin and complaint. Trading stalls rich with old spices and new tongues. Contracts, obligations, sealed letters from one empire to another. And I, wearing the Free League’s banner upon my coat, would oversee the salvation of this outpost. They would remember my arrival.

  The sea spat us forward one final time, flinging us toward the shallows. The sand came rushing up beneath the waves, and the keel groaned as it scraped the bottom. Sailors scrambled. Anchors dropped with a splash that hissed like steam. And then, for the first time in nearly two months, the ship was still.

  I leaned forward and stared.

  The port was... lacking.

  No, more than lacking—it was eerily empty. What lay ahead was not ruin, but absence. The docks stood clean, intact, and silent—too silent. The great cargo cranes loomed tall and still, their arms drawn inward like praying limbs, their ropes unused and dry. Warehouses lined the piers in orderly rows, begging for goods. There were no carts creaking, no shouted orders, no calls from rigging. Not a single flag moved. The watchtower stood, unlit. It was all there, and yet it breathed no life.

  It was like stepping into a theatre after the show had ended, but before the audience had ever arrived. Everything in place. No one to move it.

  A single figure stood at the shore, waist-deep in silt and shouting up at us with cupped hands. His coat was once green, now somewhere between saltwhite and ruin. He gestured violently, waving us in, and then pointed—urgently—toward the sky.

  I turned my gaze upward. The clouds shifted, roiling with a slow and unnatural pulse. The light beneath them was wrong: not dim, but diffused, like sunlight passed through wine and bone. No sound. Not yet.

  The air felt... inverted. Like pressure pulling inward.

  “Dockmaster!” someone called. “That’s the dockmaster!”

  The crew moved quickly. Gangplanks lowered. Lines thrown. I stepped down onto the boards and nearly slipped—everything was damp with fine, oily grit, like the residue of some burnt-off incense. The dockmaster seized my wrist as I found my footing.

  “You made it,” he said, breathing hard. “Only one?”

  I nodded. “The rest turned. We pressed on. Orders from the League.”

  “Good,” he said, though he didn’t sound pleased. “We need the letters. The contracts. The goods, god, anything—anything.”

  “I have them,” I said. “You’ll find everything in order.”

  He nodded absently, already turning toward the crumbling dockhouse.

  I followed, my boots heavy with sand already. I turned once, glancing back at the ship. It rocked lightly in the shallows, and I could see the captain blessing himself as he stared at the sky.

  The dockhouse loomed ahead like a forgotten altar, its roof tarred with ash and birdshit, the shutters hanging like broken teeth. I passed workers as I entered—if they could be called that. Figures hunched over crates. One dragged a bundle of rope that trailed behind him like entrails. Another sat motionless, arms folded across a barrel, eyes open but seeing nothing.

  Everywhere, I smelled salt, old fish, and something chemical—acrid, almost metallic. The sun hung behind the clouds like a memory. The boards beneath my boots moaned with fatigue. A gull cawed overhead, halfheartedly, before vanishing into the violet gloom.

  The dockmaster pushed the door open and gestured for me to enter. Inside, the air was marginally less foul, though stale. A table had been set up with cracked ledgers and inkpots crusted dry. Maps had curled into themselves from humidity. A war of mold and bureaucracy.

  He sat heavily. I remained standing.

  "You said there would be more," he began, glancing toward the door. "The letter said five ships. Minimum."

  "There were five," I said, removing my gloves one finger at a time. "They turned back."

  "And you didn’t?"

  "It buys time," I said, brushing sand from my coat. "And time, dockmaster, is all this land ever needed. My name is Allemand. I am courier and envoy, vested with the Free League’s mandate to oversee, correct, and reforge strained agreements. That means cargo tallies, export flows, documentation, and, where necessary, discipline. Your partners have grown lax. Your exports, erratic. I’m here to make certain the old channels flow again, and that your station remembers what it means to be held accountable."

  He didn’t answer. He only reached for a chipped mug and poured something dark from a cracked clay bottle. He didn’t offer me any. I was glad he didn't.

  "We’ve had no word for weeks," he said. "No post. No provisions. No horses, even. You think we’re exaggerating. You all think it. Back in the capitals, you imagine we live on dates and legend."

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  "Dates and legend," I said, with the ease of a man who had practiced this argument. "Romance feeds no army. But your debts feed us."

  He laughed once, dry and sharp.

  "The men thought you weren’t coming. Thought the colony had been cut loose. Some hoped for it. Some prayed."

  “I’d like to review the manifests before sunset,” I said, already removing a sheaf of papers from my satchel. “If there’s a functional office.”

  “There’s a table,” he said.

  “Where is your inventory? The outward post? You must still be keeping records.”

  “Must we?” the dockmaster muttered, already irritable. “You think it’s paper keeping this place from falling into the sea?”

  “I think it’s negligence,” I snapped. “What exactly are you doing if not recording departures?”

  “Look, man! We are in the storm’s center! Did you not lose ships on the way? Think what we’ve lost! We’ve no stable roads, half the tradehouses are burned out, and the north fence gets swallowed in fog twice a week. You think us careless Allemand? We’re surviving.”

  “Survival without structure is collapse,” I said, voice rising. “If you’ve let the ledgers rot, you’ve let the colony rot!”

  He jabbed a finger toward me. “And if we perish, what then? You scribble our names in some little black book and stamp it with brass? We’re not your footnotes. We’re the ones holding this place together with rope and blood!”

  We stood there a moment, the table between us like a plank laid for a duel. Then he turned and spat into a bucket.

  “There’s a table,” he repeated. “It’s what we’ve got.”"

  I laid the first packet down with deliberate care, smoothing the corners.

  "I’ve got cargo orders from the League, transcribed rights of passage, sealed writs for each company head operating within fifty leagues of the inland border, and itemized corrections for charter 7-D. I assume you know what that is."

  "We’ve burned all but four charters for fuel," he said.

  I stopped, mid-sentence.

  "Joke," he added, with no smile.

  "The League won’t find it funny."

  "Then let them come explain it to the wind."

  I looked out the open shutter, past the listing cranes and patchwork roofs, out toward the brown-stained edge of the sea.

  "So this is the edge of the world," I murmured.

  He refilled his mug.

  "No," he said. "This is where the world gives up."

  I straightened the papers on the table, resenting the poetry in his voice.

  "Outgoing vessels," I said, almost flippantly. "I trust some made their return crossing?"

  The dockmaster looked at me for a moment, his eyes narrowed as though I’d asked if the sun still rose in the west.

  "None," he said. "Not one in over a month."

  I blinked. "What? None has arrived at your shores? For how long?"

  "Over a month," he repeated. "No messages. No runners. Not even a whaler blown off course."

  I felt a flicker of unease but smothered it with the heel of arrogance. "Has the sea truly been abroil for so long?"

  "Aye," he said. "And it's only gotten worse. Your ship is the first thing with a hull and name that’s come through in thirty-seven days."

  I waved a hand, as if brushing away the superstition. "Then the storm patterns have shifted. There are always fluctuations in this latitude."

  "Fluctuations don’t swallow fleets, merchant. They don’t drive birds inland or blacken the tide."

  "And yet we’re here. The League entrusted us, and we endured."

  "That you did," he said, his voice flat. "Though I doubt your charts will explain how."

  "Charts are for sailors. I bring direction."

  The dockmaster chuckled bitterly and took another long pull from his mug. "And what direction is that, then? From brass balconies and velvet benches? Do they know what the sky looks like out here? Have they seen a sea without horizon?"

  I lifted my chin. "They know enough to govern."

  He looked at me—long and flat. "You’ve been on land for less than an hour, and already you sound like a man who’s lost count of what he doesn’t know."

  I bristled but said nothing. The dockhouse creaked around us. Outside, I could hear gulls again, or something pretending to be gulls.

  "Tell me," I asked, softer now, "what exactly are we walking into?"

  He exhaled through his nose, slow. "Something that doesn’t want company."

  I frowned.

  "The land’s gone quiet. The roads bend wrong. The desert sings at night."

  "You’re exaggerating."

  "I hope so. God, I hope so."

  I looked down at the sealed orders, the tidy ink of the Old World, the embossed stamp of the League. They looked absurd in this place.

  "And yet," I said, with an effort at cheer, "you’ve got me now."

  He didn’t smile. "Aye. We’ve got you."

  He poured the last of his drink and stood.

  "Best hope that’s enough."

  The dockmaster's coat flared as he stepped into the sunlight again, shoulders hunched as though expecting the sky to misbehave. I followed him out, adjusting my collar against the warm saltwind. Already, the sailors had begun their grim little pageant: planks lowered, chains unhitched, hatches thrown wide as they began to unburden the ship. The port, at last, was moving.

  Or rather—being moved.

  Because what met us at the dock was not a team of workers, but a thing.

  The dockmaster waved toward it with a lazy hand, already bored by the inevitable questions.

  "That’s our muscle. Best not to stare."

  I stared.

  It was enormous. Not merely large, but grotesquely scaled—like someone had started sculpting a man out of bread dough and kept going until it looked just slightly offensive to geometry. It was shirtless, glistening, and covered in a fine silt as if it had been born from the harbor mud itself. Its legs bowed like overcooked timber, yet it bore the weight of entire crates on one shoulder without so much as a grunt. Arms like siege beams. Skin like river clay.

  And the face.

  Or rather—not where the face should have been. There was only a pale expanse of featureless muscle where a head should be fastened, and nestled in its chest, embedded like some cruel jest, were the features of a man. Eyes, mouth, nose—all compacted into a flattened oval of expressionless meat. The eyes looked outward, unfocused, like a pair of boiled eggs slowly rolling downhill.

  It was chewing something.

  There was no visible food.

  As I watched, it bent—groaning with the sound of wet wood—and lifted a crate that had taken four men to drag aboard in Port Malden. It hoisted it with one arm, pivoted on its heel like a ballet dancer half-drowning in molasses, and began to shuffle it toward the warehouse.

  "That is—"

  "A Blemmye," the dockmaster said. "We've got three. Used to have four. One wandered into the sea. One's in the chapel."

  "Why the chapel?"

  "Keeps laying down in front of the altar. No one can make it stop."

  I rubbed my forehead. "Is it... aware?"

  "Mostly no. Occasionally yes. It answers to whistles. And once it sang an entire hymn backwards."

  I watched the Blemmye stumble slightly, correct itself, then gently pat the top of the crate it had carried like a nurse soothing a child.

  "And you just—let these things handle cargo?"

  "Who else? You want to do it?" He took a swig from a canteen. "They don’t tire. Don’t talk. Don’t complain."

  "And how do you trust these halfwits to be safe? To the cargo, let alone us?"

  The dockmaster snorted. "Safe? Nothing out here is safe. But they haven't crushed a man in weeks, if that's your measure. Besides, most of the crew keeps their distance. Instinct, I suppose."

  As if on cue, the Blemmye dropped the crate with an enormous thump, straightened its back with the slow grace of a collapsing wall, and began chewing again.

  I turned away.

  They had warned me of strange skies and stranger lands. They had not heeded me about walking mockeries of men. The League wanted numbers, routes, results. Not stories.

  The reward shall be great for this. It better be.

  I had stepped into a new world. And the world, it seemed, had no intention of accommodating my sensibilities.

  The dockmaster had already started back toward the warehouse.

  "Come along, merchant. Still plenty of madness left to catalog."