The comfortable chair in question was a wide wicker lounger with a cushioned footstool.
Kaelen Vance had it positioned directly over the brass drainage grating of Azure-Tide Port’s primary tide-node. A broad oiled-silk parasol shielded his face from the ocean glare, while the tidal spring beneath the stones gurgled with dense Earth and Water Qi.
Across the harbor channel, crude laughter drifted over the oily water.
“Hey, mud-dwellers!” a Sanctuary sailor bellowed from the railing of the lead Star-Iron warship. “Did your emperor choke on his soup? Bring out the slave-girls, or we will grease our hull with your fat!”
The black dreadnoughts floated motionless in the deep-water passage. Their jagged iron rams dripped with purple Star-Marrow slime, daring any imperial vessel to approach within five miles.
Barnaby Holt stomped across the jetty, his wooden ladle waving violently in the air. “Listen to those sea-ticks, boy! They have been spitting curses at our watchmen since breakfast. We have five hundred thousand troops and three thousand war cauldrons! Let me lead a fire-barge into their flank!”
Beside him, Elder Sterling wrung his hands with frantic intensity. “Lord Sovereign, the deadline is slipping away! If we launch a coordinated strike with the imperial array, we can pin them against the reef before they fire another torpedo!”
