The dusk deepened into violet twilight over the communal drying shed worktable.
Kezra Venn lit a small brass oil lamp, setting it in the center of the ash planks beside Davren’s rolled linen chart. The warm, yellow flame flickered in the evening draft. It cast a steady, golden circle of light across the weathered grain of the timber.
Peter Vane, the coastal salt-merchant, untied the tarred marline twine from his parchment roll with blunt, salt water-calloused fingers.
“I bought this chart three months ago from an old harbor-master in the salt port of Oakhaven,” Vane said. His deep voice carried the rhythmic lilt of coastal water. “He found it in the bottom of a cedar sea-chest that had belonged to the country customs registry before the coastal storms of fifty years ago.”
He unrolled the parchment across the table, weighting the corners with Kezra’s brass sounding rod and an empty clay glaze mug.
The parchment was old—at least a century old—sized with boiled fish glue that gave off a faint, pungent odor of dried kelp and salt water. Drawn across its surface in faded brown sepia ink was a detailed water-mapping and topographic survey of a wild, storm-battered headland along the western sea cliffs, eighty miles southwest of Kilnstep.
