Azure Sea

"Captain Harlon Vey stood at the rails of the Crescent Star, watching the bustle of Waterdeep’s harbor spread before him like an anthill made of stone and salt.

Passengers filed up the plank — merchants wrapped in silk, traders carrying ledgers fat with promises, sailors dragging crates of salted fish and kegs of ale. Gulls screamed overhead, the tide slapped against the pier, and somewhere on the docks a woman cursed in five languages at once.

Vey had sailed this route Waterdeep to Neverwinter more times than he could count. He knew every reef, every fickle current, every rock that hid beneath the waves like a thief in ambush. And still…

…he never relaxed.

There were places, he knew, where civilization flourished. Where the new lords built roads and libraries and theaters, where clever men invented clever things, where rules made sense and contracts held. That was land.

The sea was something else entirely.

The sea was older. Primal. Out here, men did not matter. Out here, a storm could unmake kings, and a kraken would eat a nobleman as easily as a deckhand. Out here, it was man against the elements, the pirates, the smugglers, the monsters below, and the dragons above.

Especially the dragons.

Vey glanced at the rigging, where a tar-smeared deckhand whispered to another. The rumors had reached even them. Dragons, they said, sighted near the islands off the coast. His crew spat every time someone brought it up, as if that might ward off fate.

Two days later, they passed the narrow straits where the Sea of Swords bled into the Azure Sea. Vey stood at the bow, hands gripping the rail as his sharp eyes scanned the rocks and jagged islands that crowded the horizon.

Such a beautiful name, he thought. The Azure Sea. It sounded like poetry, like something sung by an elven minstrel under starlight.

But he knew better.

The Azure Sea was ugly.

The wars. The pirate princes. The smugglers who slit throats over a keg of rum. You didn’t sail these waters unless you had to. And Vey, thank the gods, didn’t.

They weren’t stopping in Saltmarsh. He sighed in relief at that.

Saltmarsh. Even the name soured his tongue. He still remembered the beating he and his mates took in the Wicker Goat Tavern as a boy — gods, how many years ago had that been? Fresh to the trade, green as seaweed, his first lesson in how quickly a night could turn ugly in a place like that.

The memory made him smile now, a crooked, private thing.

A bell rang overhead — lunchtime.

He adjusted his coat and headed below decks, boots clanging on the iron steps. Being captain had its perks: gone were the days of moldy cod and flat ale. Now he dined on roasted pheasant, good wine, and polite conversation in the officers’ cantina, rubbing elbows with silk-wrapped merchants and soft-handed nobles.

And yet… sometimes, just sometimes, he missed the taste of salt-crusted cod eaten on the peer, a cold tankard in hand, the sound of waves slapping the hull and the wild laughter of sailors who knew the next day might be their last."