Letter Found on the Wreck of the Starling¶
Recovered from a sealed oilskin pouch, lashed to the mast of the trade vessel Starling, which ran aground on the Shattered Reef southeast of Port-Siren in 5A 849. The ship’s manifest listed fourteen crew. No survivors were found. The letter was never delivered.
Meren,
I am writing this in the hammock, which means the handwriting will be terrible and you will make that face you make. The one where your mouth goes flat and your eyes go soft and you pretend to be annoyed but you are not annoyed. That face. I am picturing it now.
We are three days out of Port-Siren and the wind is wrong. Captain Haleth says it is nothing but she has been standing at the bow since midnight and she has not eaten. When Captain Haleth does not eat, the wind is not nothing. The younger crew do not notice. I notice because I have been doing this too long and because I promised you I would come home and I intend to keep that promise even if the sea has other ideas.
The cargo is ceramics from Goldmere. Forty crates of the blue-glazed kind that the merchants in Ravance overcharge for. I do not understand why anyone would pay six imperials for a bowl. But they do, and that is why we sail, and that is why I will be home by Bloomond with enough coin to fix the roof and maybe enough left for the earrings you looked at in the Tidewrit Market and pretended not to want.
I saw them. I always see.
The sea has been strange lately. Not rough — strange. The color is wrong some mornings. Too green, like copper left in rain. And two nights ago Davin swore he saw lights under the water. Not fish-light. Steady light, like lanterns, deep down, moving in a line. Haleth told him to stop talking about it. She did not say he was wrong.
I do not want to worry you. That is not why I am writing this. I am writing this because the stars are out and the deck is quiet and I am thinking about the way you smell after you have been in the garden, like soil and that herb you put in everything, the one I can never remember the name of. Lanceleaf. No. Greenmint. Something.
I will ask you when I get home.
I will be home soon.
All my love under all the stars,
Verath
Archivist’s note: The Shattered Reef is not a natural formation. It appeared in 5A 843, six years before the Starling’s loss, in a region that had been open water for centuries. The Imperial Armada has classified the Reef as a navigational hazard. No investigation into its origin has been conducted. The letter has been filed under “Personal Effects, Maritime Losses, 5A 849.” No next of kin was identified.