The dawn Dorik had promised was not a true dawn in any sense Lewai had known throughout his life. No sun rose, no horizon colored gold or rose the way Oswald's sky did every morning. It was only a slow shift in the shade of grey surrounding them, as though some unseen hand were lifting a heavy curtain with great care, never once revealing what lay fully behind it.
Lewai stood at the bow, hands gripping the wet wooden rail, eyes straining to pierce the fog, which now seemed less dense than the night before, though it had not become transparent by any means. It was more like a thin veil hung between two worlds, allowing vague shadows to be glimpsed without ever revealing their detail.
"There," Dorik said suddenly, his voice low but sharp, gesturing with his whole hand, not a single finger as was his habit, toward a point in the fog directly ahead. "Do you see that?"
Lewai stared with intense focus, and after long moments, began to make out something: faint vertical lines, spaced at a strange, regular interval, rising from the water's surface and vanishing into the fog above. They were not rocks, nor ordinary wooden pilings, but something more like giant teeth driven into the seabed, row after row, extending in a nearly straight line across the water ahead of them.
"What is that?" Gilbert whispered from behind, having regained some of his composure after a long night of dread.
"A boundary," Dorik answered simply, beginning to steer the ship slightly to the right, away from the straight line of the mysterious pilings. "No one knows who planted them, or when. But every true captain knows one thing for certain: whoever tries to cross directly through those pilings, instead of going around them, is never seen again."
"Going around them means extra time I don't have," Lewai said with restrained tension, mentally calculating the remaining hours of his four-day deadline at feverish speed.
"Going around them means you'll stay alive to worry about the time at all," Dorik retorted sharply, not without a strange kind of paternal patience. "Trust me on this, my prince, as you trusted me back at the old harbor."
Lewai surrendered to silence, watching the mysterious pilings pass slowly on their left as the ship followed a wide, cautious curve, as though respecting an invisible boundary someone had drawn long ago, for reasons no one knew with any certainty.
After a full hour of slow sailing along that wide curve, something else began to emerge gradually from the fog: a dark, massive shape, floating motionless on the water's surface hundreds of meters away. Everyone moved toward the rail, eyes fixed with mounting unease.
"A ship," murmured the balding, scarred sailor, his voice carrying clear dread. "A wrecked ship."
The closer they got, the more details became clear: the hull of a large vessel, far bigger than their own nameless ship, tilted at a strange angle as though it had run aground on some invisible rock beneath the surface, its torn sails hanging limply from broken masts, and aboard it — no movement, no sound, no sign of life whatsoever.
"Get closer," Lewai ordered, his thirst for knowledge once again overpowering his natural caution.
Dorik hesitated for a moment, then obeyed reluctantly, steering the ship with great care toward the floating wreckage. The closer they got, the more disturbing details Lewai began to notice: there was no sign of natural decay on the wood, despite the ship appearing old enough to have run aground here many years before. There was no seaweed covering its hull, as one would expect of a vessel stranded for a long time in still waters. It was preserved in a strange way, as though time itself had stopped affecting it from the very moment it ran aground.
"Blood Budget," Gilbert whispered suddenly, having read a name barely visible carved into the ship's side, old-fashioned letters nearly vanished beneath a thin layer of crusted salt. "My lord... this is the name of an old imperial vessel. I remember this name from the naval registry records I reviewed years ago. A ship that vanished more than thirty years ago, in the time of your grandfather, during an official diplomatic mission to... to here, specifically, to the Archipelago."
Lewai felt a chill run down his spine that had nothing to do with the weather. "Vanished? And no one ever tried to find it?"
"They tried," Dorik said in a low voice, his eyes still fixed on the wreckage with great caution, as though he feared approaching it any closer than instinct allowed. "They sent three search ships in the months that followed. None returned. After that, the former Emperor stopped sending more, and the entire mission was declared an official loss in the records, with no real explanation ever given to the public."
"So we're looking at an imperial ship that vanished thirty years ago, preserved as though time never touched it." Lewai murmured, his mind racing to connect this new information with everything he knew about Oswald's old politics. "Dorik, was that diplomatic mission... did it have anything to do with an earlier deal with the Archipelago's brokers? Something similar to what I'm trying to do now?"
Dorik looked at him for a long moment with his single eye, his expression carrying something like cautious appreciation. "You're sharp enough to ask the right question, my prince. I don't know the precise details — I was a child back then. But the tales I heard later say that mission tried to impose its terms rather than negotiate them. They tried to come with the crown's authority, not with a fair deal. Perhaps this wreckage is the first lesson you need to learn before reaching your destination: these waters don't respect the crown. They only respect those who understand that here, they are a guest, not a master."
Lewai swallowed this lesson in heavy silence, his eyes still on the broken ship's hull as it gradually faded behind them while their small vessel continued on its way. He had never thought of himself as a master imposing his terms; but he suddenly realized that merely being the Emperor's son, carrying the crown's name with him wherever he went, might be enough to have him viewed the same way that doomed mission had been viewed thirty years before.
"Dorik," he said finally, in a calm but firm voice, "when we arrive, if we arrive, I won't speak as a prince. I'll speak as a man carrying goods he wants to trade. Nothing more, nothing less."
Dorik nodded silently, as though this decision alone had granted Lewai a measure of additional trust in his single, wary eye.
Two more hours of cautious sailing passed, the fog thickening and thinning intermittently in unpredictable patterns, until Lewai noticed something new: a faint, regular sound, like a repeated knocking, reaching them from an indeterminate direction, as though it came from beneath the water's surface itself.
"What is that sound?" he asked, trying not to sound more anxious than necessary.
Dorik listened with intense focus for a few seconds before his single eye widened slightly. "That... that's good. Or at least, not necessarily bad. It's the rhythm of passage."
"The rhythm of passage?"
"Listen carefully, my prince, because this might be the most important lesson you learn today." Dorik lowered his voice further, as though afraid of being heard even by the fog itself. "These waters don't allow passage to those who are seen clearly. It's not about hiding physically — there's no place to hide amid this open fog. It's about something deeper: the rhythm at which your ship moves, the sound it makes, the pattern it follows. Whoever moves with a steady, predictable rhythm becomes visible, noticeable, a potential target for whatever watches these waters. But whoever learns to break their rhythm, to move unpredictably, random enough to be hard to track, yet calculated enough to remain safe... that is the one who passes truly unseen."
Dorik began steering the ship in a strange pattern: sudden acceleration followed by deceleration, small turns that seemed illogical on the surface, very brief pauses that were barely noticeable before motion resumed once more. Lewai noticed, with his mind trained to spot patterns, that these movements were not entirely random as they first appeared, but followed a complex internal logic, something like a code understood only by those who had learned it through direct experience.
"Did you learn this rhythm yourself?" Lewai asked, his admiration momentarily overcoming his anxiety.
"I learned it the hard way," Dorik replied without turning his gaze from the water ahead. "By losing men I couldn't save on my first voyage, because I didn't yet know that steady movement draws unwanted attention. Now, all of you, be silent, and trust me. We'll need exactly twenty minutes of this pattern before we pass through this area safely."
Everyone fell silent, watching the fog sway around them as the ship followed its strange, broken rhythm, the faint regular sound from beneath the water continuing, like some slow cosmic pulse measuring the passage of every ship that dared cross these waters.
In the middle of those twenty tense minutes, Lewai felt something pass directly beneath the ship — a massive shape, far larger than any fish or whale he knew, moving with enormous slowness beneath them without touching the ship's hull, like a shadow examining them from below without fully revealing itself.
He gripped the ship's rail tightly, his hands trembling despite his attempt to maintain an outward calm. No one said a word, not even Dorik, who kept absolute silence, eyes fixed forward with a concentration Lewai had never seen in him before, as though any word, any additional sound, might break the delicate balance their broken rhythm maintained.
Those twenty minutes passed as though they were a full hour, until everyone finally felt, without needing verbal confirmation, that the hidden pressure surrounding them had begun to ease gradually. The steady sound beneath the water stopped, the massive shadow they had felt beneath the ship faded away, and the fog returned to its normal, less threatening state.
"We crossed," Dorik said finally, his voice carrying a deep exhaustion he no longer bothered to hide. "We've passed the zone of the unseen crossing. What remains of the journey won't be easy, but it'll be less dangerous than what we just crossed."
Gilbert let out a long breath that shook his entire body, and even the three sailors, usually silent, exchanged quick glances carrying unmistakable relief.
But Leway, despite his relief, couldn't shake one persistent thought: that the entity he'd felt moving beneath the ship moments before, whatever it was, wasn't trying to attack them. It was merely observing them, assessing them, and making a decision about them that it hadn't revealed. And that, in a way, was far more unsettling than any direct attack he could have imagined.
As noon approached, and although the very concept of time began to lose its accuracy amidst that endless fog, something new began to appear on the horizon: multiple shadows, fixed this time, not passing, rising from the water's surface in irregular shapes, much larger than any ship, and much more organized than any natural rock formation.
"Islands," the bald sailor whispered, having regained some of his professional enthusiasm amidst all this accumulated fear.
Leway looked at the distant figures with renewed focus, feeling that the most dangerous part of his journey was just over, while the hardest part - the negotiation and bargaining part at which he really excelled - was about to begin.
"How far are these islands from us?" he asked, his voice carrying renewed determination.
"A few more hours, if the winds remain as calm as they are now." Doric looked at him with his single eye, and in that look was something akin to the cautious respect a seasoned sailor has for one who has proven his worthiness to have reached this point. "Prepare yourself well, my prince. All you have seen so far is merely the path to the door. What awaits you beyond that door may be a very different lesson—a lesson you will learn not from my laws, but from your own wisdom alone."
Lewai looked towards the distant islands as they gradually came into view amid the fading fog, and felt the weight of the remaining deadline pressing down on his chest once more, mixed this time with something new: a cautious anticipation of what this world might hold for him—a world that no member of his family had set foot in for thirty years, except as a warning message preserved in the form of a shipwreck that would never rust.