Within six hours of Gorgon’s death, thirty black-hulled Sanctuary gunboats deployed across the outer perimeter of the Star-Fall Sea.
They did not fire on the trench.
Instead, they formed a rigid crescent blockade across the three primary shipping corridors.
They dropped barbed iron nets and explosive sea-traps into the shipping lanes. Every civilian freighter carrying fresh spring water or white spirit-grain from the southern ports was seized or turned back at spearpoint.
Behind the gunboats anchored four heavy alchemical barges.
On the flat decks of the barges, sixty robed disciples of the Alchemist Choir struck bronze resonant chimes. Their low, droning chants created a heavy psychic dampening field across the northern waters, suppressing wind-currents and slowing civilian shipping to a crawl.
High on the bridge of the Iron Catacomb, Warden-Elder Moros gripped the railing with his skeletal hands.
“A fleet of five hundred thousand men requires twenty thousand barrels of fresh water every single day,” Moros rasped, his sunken eyes gleaming with cold malice. “And five thousand sacks of grain to maintain their battle-auras.”
