The sea. There's only one in the Barony, so no one thinks to distinguish. They call it that because of the colours at the end of the day when the sun is sinking and dying and staining the horizon red and golden.
The sea is a source of plentiful food and swift travel along the coast. All of the Barony's trade with the Empire happens by ship, and ships are also by far the fastest way to travel quickly north or south. Near the coast the sea is mostly calm and warm. The wind blows across its surface and chops it into dull, transparent sheets and waves. In the south it turns wild and icy. North it gets warmer and warmer until eventually, they say, it is so thick with salt and minerals and algae and strange semi-liquid creatures that a person can walk across its surface.
The Baronial Capital hosts a civilian fleet of fishing and trading vessels, and there are many minor settlements and kingdoms with their own ports and harbours along the coast. The sea is the major spine of trade in the region, and because of this is indispensable to its stability.
It is also considered magical - not in any straight forward or diagnosable way; but the sea is like a dream. When the sun bounces from its surface in the summer and the brightness of it fills your eyes first and then the rest of you and you feel yourself dissolving. When the night comes down and you can hear the movements of water beneath you, and watch the passage of the moon and the stars across its surface. Like when you are in a dream, you can lose time, see the faces of people both like and unlike the ones that you know, or be brought into moments of extreme and unwelcome lucidity. The sea is tricky; it can change people.
Sailors are almost like dreamers. They are storied and romanticised, and also not fully trusted. The know the workings of a ship and this is thought to keep them properly grounded. They know how the sea can get into you. They aren't like artists or prophets; they tend not to care so much for language. They work with their hands, with the feeling of the air and the water, with the sky and its patterning. If a Baronial novel has a sailor in it, they will be both very wise and very stupid, and they will probably come out on top in the end. They will also have people falling in love with them, often to the despair of the more central characters. It's quite a specific archetype.
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There are also islands in the sea, far enough from the coast that you can't see them at the horizon, even on a clear day. Everyone knows that sailing away from the coast is borderline suicidal. The dreaming gets more intense. You go into dispersion. The sun gets bigger the further west you are, and it is hungry, the red light at the end of the day. It swallows things whole.
The first of the islands, and the only one that has been properly settled, is the Lantern Berth, so-named for its two operational lighthouses, and many ruined ones. The Old Capital settled and developed the island extensively, but the majority of the forts and townships that they built have fallen to ruin over the centuries. The twin remaining towers are kept lit by the native dwellers of the island, who trade citrus fruit, coffee, fish, and relics that they dig from the ruins with sailors from the mainland. They are known as whalers, and as hunters of sea dragons and monster-fish. If sailors are like dreamers, then the islanders are like the ones who live in the dream. Slow, patient, smiling, methodical, cruel, happy, laughing, silent. Hands working nets and ropes, and the smells of salt and oil.
Beyond the Lantern Berth there are said to be a thousand more islands, each further in towards the hungry sun and the dreaming waves. They are sometimes called the islands of fire, and sometimes called the islands of the dead (since it is amongst them that the day goes to die). There are stories of what may inhabit them, of what strange deeds are done there - some say that the islands are heaven, and that they lie outside of time - some say that they really are the dreamlands, and that this is how you get to those kingdoms as a body instead of a dreaming mind - some say that they are stranger still than this, a limit to the earth beyond which all things are like air and fire, like acid and metal, like the endless chemical burning of the stars.
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| William Etty |
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