"Steady the wheel!" Elshabeth roared over a wind that sounded like human humming. "The horizon is folding!" The Folding Sea

They didn't find gold. They found a graveyard of ships from every era—galleons of oak, sleek metal steamers, and vessels made of bone. At the center of this wreckage stood a lone figure on a sandbar that glowed with a soft, internal light.

Elshabeth was gone. But they say that on nights when the moon is thin and the fog is heavy, you can see a single amber light flickering far out at sea—the unblinking eye of a captain who found her way home by staying behind.

Elshabeth’s final journey began at the docks of Port Mallow. She was seeking the Gilded Shoal, a mythical stretch of sand said to appear only during a lunar eclipse. While others hunted the Shoal for gold, Elshabeth hunted it for time. Her father, the great navigator Silas Readyrar, had vanished there decades prior, and she believed the Shoal was not a place, but a door.

It was Silas. He hadn't aged a day. He looked up, his eyes matching Elshabeth’s amber gaze, and smiled a weary, heartbreaking smile.