When the Ships Stopped Coming
War empties the harbour and the coffers
For three generations the ships had come to Marenna, and the salt had always found its buyers.
Then, in the spring of that fateful year, rumours of war began to drift along the coast.
No sooner had the first reached the harbour than the merchants grew and slow.
Ships that had once crowded the docks now lingered at sea, their captains afraid to enter.
Fearing the coming conflict, foreign traders cancelled the orders they had promised only weeks before.
The great port, which had never known silence, fell strangely quiet within a single month.
Aldric Voss stood at the harbour wall, watching the empty water where masts had always risen.
No sooner had one buyer withdrawn than another sent word that his coffers were now closed.
Salt, unable to be sold, began to pile in the cellars like a rising white tide.
Sacks upon sacks, stacked to the ceiling, waited for ships that would never arrive.
Maria, seeing her father's face, understood for the first time that something was truly wrong.
"The salt will not last forever," he had warned her, and now his words returned to haunt her.
Left unsold, the precious crystal slowly lost its worth, for wealth means nothing without a buyer.
The clerks, once busy from dawn to dusk, now wandered the counting-house with little to do.
Ships blockaded in distant ports could neither deliver grain nor carry Marenna's salt away.
Growing , the townsfolk began to whisper that the House of Salt might finally be failing.
Aldric, refusing to show fear, kept the great doors open and the candles lit each night.
But behind his calm face, the ledgers told a story that no candlelight could brighten.
No sooner had the family paid one debt than another quietly came at the door.
Maria began to study the accounts herself, searching for a solution her father could not find.
Each figure she examined revealed the same truth: more was leaving than coming in.
The salt, heaped and useless, seemed to the family that had once ruled the coast.
Winter came early that year, and with it a cold that settled deep into the empty warehouses.
Standing among the silent sacks, Maria felt the first true fear she had ever known.
The ships had stopped coming, and with them had stopped the of three long generations.
She did not yet know that the worst news of all still waited to be spoken.