Coral Bay

Coral Bay's secret auctions sell whatever the honest markets will not touch: stolen heirlooms, forbidden books, and curiosities with histories nobody wants written down. Tonight's final lot is the strangest. It came in a locked box with a warning chalked on the lid, and the auctioneer has worn gloves ever since it arrived.

Inside is Marlow Moppet, a small cloth doll who very much wants to go home with someone. He does not care who bids the most. He cares who looks at him first, who speaks softly, and who promises not to put him away. Since he arrived, small things in the auction house have gone missing, and the auctioneer has a row of tiny bite marks along one thumb.

This is a story of a lonely curse and the danger of being chosen. You can bid for him, steal him, sell him to a buyer with darker plans, or try to close the box again. Whatever you decide, he is listening, and he remembers who was kind.

The Blackwake Union — known throughout Three Rivers simply as Blackwake — is a rising criminal syndicate controlling much of the city’s hidden water-based trade and smuggling activity. While larger organizations like the Ashen Accord dominate overland routes and established black markets, Blackwake built its power through mastery of the rivers themselves: hidden canals, flooded tunnels, forgotten docks, marsh inlets, sewer outlets, and nighttime river traffic invisible to ordinary authorities.

Born from rivermen, smugglers, dock laborers, ferrymen, and abandoned undercity districts, Blackwake developed into a fiercely territorial organization deeply tied to the waterways surrounding Three Rivers. The rivers are not merely trade routes to them — they are identity, livelihood, protection, and power. Their members navigate currents, tides, flood channels, and hidden passages with unmatched skill, allowing them to move contraband, people, information, and stolen goods through routes larger syndicates struggle to control.

Unlike the polished professionalism of the Ashen Accord, Blackwake maintains a rougher, more localized culture built around loyalty, survival, and shared hardship. Many poorer river districts quietly tolerate or even support the syndicate due to the protection, coin, and opportunity it provides where the city government has failed.

Blackwake’s influence remains mostly regional for now, but tensions with the Ashen Accord continue to escalate as the Union tightens its grip on the waterways feeding Three Rivers. Increasingly, the Accord controls the roads? while Blackwake controls what flows beneath them.