"War at Sea" by Arealius the Sailor, Scribe of Port Olni.

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"War at Sea"

 Sorana,

You are going to read this and tell me I am being dramatic. I know you. I can already see the small frown you get when you think I am embellishing, the one where your left eyebrow rises just slightly, and you set down whatever you are holding to give the scroll your full skeptical attention. I am not embellishing.

I want to say the sea looked beautiful that morning — copper-green, hammered metal left too long in the salt air, rolling under a sky the color of old parchment — because it did, and because I know you appreciate the detail. But I also want to say it so you understand the mood before I tell you what happened next, because the beauty of it made the danger feel worse, somehow. You know how I am about that. The worst things happen on lovely days.

I had taken passage on a Teletusan round ship. Before you ask: no, I had no better option. She was broad-bellied and high-sided and built for cargo, not comfort, with a single square sail and a hull that groaned at every wave the way old Marius used to groan in the morning. I liked her for precisely the same reasons I liked old Marius — she was stubborn, slow, and reliable, and she smelled of tar and grain-dust and did not pretend otherwise. My bunk was a wooden shelf. The man above me snored. I recorded notes by day and listened to him by night and thought of home, which mostly means I thought of you.

Four days out of Teletus, we sighted them. Long, low silhouettes at first, cutting across the glare. I thought — I genuinely thought, for a moment — that they were merchant vessels running parallel. Then they closed, and the shape of them became clear: Selnaran warships. The lean, hungry kind, not the fat patrol galleys. Their prows were reinforced with bronze, sharp as a spearhead, made for exactly one purpose. The oars moved in perfect unison and there was something about that regularity — so unlike the sea, which is never regular about anything — that settled cold in my chest before my mind had caught up.

The captain said, quietly, "Ram-ships. Hungry ones." I want you to appreciate that this was not reassuring.

A round ship cannot outrun those vessels. This is not a failure of the round ship; it is simply the nature of things, the way an excellent draft animal cannot outrun a hunting tarn. We turn slowly. We speed up only when the wind cooperates, and the wind, as you know, has its own opinions. The Selnarans also carried kinetic engines on their decks — torsion arms, crude things, but capable of throwing a stone large enough to ruin your morning. One of their warships angled for our bow. Another came around our flank. They were going to pin us, and we both knew what came after that.

The captain ordered us windward. The ship groaned. I gripped the rail and watched the ram-ship on our flank close the distance and thought — I am going to tell you exactly what I thought, because you have always said you want the truth and not the polished version — I thought: I have survived Port Kar and the Iron Hall and three years of northern roads and I am going to die on a grain barge because of Selnaran boredom.

Then the engine fired. A stone the size of a man's head took out a section of our starboard bulwark. Wood everywhere. Men shouting. A second shot skipped off the water and hit the hull and the sound of it went through the deck and up through my boots and into my teeth. The ram-ship was very close by then. The bronze prow was catching the morning sun.

And then the Thassa did something.

A swell larger than the surrounding water had no reason to produce — lifted us. Not gently. Sharply, unexpectedly, at exactly the moment the Selnaran committed to her charge. Their prow hit not our mid-hull but the reinforced curve of our bow, at an angle that spared us. The beak scraped along our side. It’s momentum carried her past, her oars snapping against our hull one by one, and the shouting from her deck was the most satisfying sound I have heard in recent memory. The captain turned us hard; the wind filled the sail, and we ran into a bank of fog rolling in off the coast. And that was that.

I say "that was that" but of course it was not. The ship was damaged — gouged along the starboard bow, leaking steadily, badly in need of the carpenter's attention and the pump crew's arms. We spent the rest of the day patching and bailing. I helped. Do not make the face. I know you are making the face. A scribe's hands are not too delicate for tar and rope when the alternative is drowning, and I have always been practical about that distinction.

The captain — his name is Heraclides, and I think you would like him, he has the same tolerance for nonsense that you have very little — held himself together admirably during the work. It was afterward, in the quieter part of the evening, that I saw it catch up with him. He stood at the rail with his hands too tight on the wood, staring at where the fog had been, and for a moment he simply looked tired in the particular way that has nothing to do with sleep. He recovered himself, as captains do. But I saw it.

Later he came and stood beside me and said I had kept my head. I told him I had been afraid. He said he had been too, and that the difference between a captain and a passenger is that captains don't get to show it. Then he told me to write it down — that a ship survives on skill, luck, and the sea's mood, and that day we had all three. I liked him better for saying it plainly. Most men would have made it into a boast.

The crew, predictably, lost their minds. Not violently — sailors are practical people and the work kept them grounded — but the superstitions came out like water through a cracked hull, steady and unstoppable. The swell became a spirit. The fog became a divine shield. The gouge on the bow was cursed with the malice of every ship the beak had previously sunk, and two men refused to sleep in the forward bunks because they claimed to hear drowned ships groaning through the planking. Heraclides rolled his eyes. I recorded it all.

The part that genuinely surprised me: several of the crew decided I was lucky. A scribe, apparently, carries the favor of the Priest-Kings, or my quill "wrote away" the ram-ship's strike, or some variation on that theme. One man asked me to mark his shield with ink for protection. I declined, as I think you would agree was correct. He slept with the shield beside him anyway, and in the morning he thanked me with the specific warm sincerity of a man who believes you saved his life without knowing it. I did not know what to do with that. I still don't.

I want to tell you about that night, though. The night after the deck lamps were low. The crew was asleep, most of them, the deep ragged sleep of spent fear. I sat near the stern with my notes and the lantern and the sound of the pumps still going below, and I did what I always do when I need to make sense of something: I tried to write it.

The trouble was that what I kept writing was your name. Not poetically. Not in the way scribes write about their companions in the letters we are taught to compose in the third year of apprenticeship, all measured sentiment and proper form. Just your name, at the top of the page, the way I always begin these. And then I sat there with that and the lamp-oil burning down and thought about the thing I had been too busy being afraid to think about clearly during the encounter itself, which was that the fear was never really about dying. 

It was about not coming back to you. I know you know this. You have always known things about me I take some time to arrive at myself, and you have the good grace not to say so until I get there. But I want to say it plainly because the Thassa came close enough to keeping me today that I think plainness is appropriate.

I thought about you the way a man thinks of north when he is lost — not dramatically, not with anguish, just as the fixed point that tells him which direction matters. Your voice. Your quill is moving. The way you set down whatever you are holding when I say something you want to argue with. The black tea went cold because we forgot it. Those things. I made a quiet vow to myself, the kind you cannot bargain with. To come back. Not to waste what that wave gave me. Not to let this turn me cautious in the wrong ways. Then I finished my notes, put out the lamp, and went to sleep.

I arrived in Brundisium the following afternoon. Heraclides shook my hand on the dock, which is a gesture he makes sparingly. He said nothing. It was sufficient.

The wine here is acceptable. The beds are not. I am leaving for the coastal road in the morning and I expect to rejoin the Vosk road within the passage, weather cooperating. I am coming home to Port Olni. You are going to read all of this, I think, and put it down, and say something precise and deflating about my tendency toward reflection at inopportune moments, and then you are going to pour the wine and ask me the follow-up questions I have inevitably left out.

I look forward to it more than I can usefully say.

Until then,

Arealius

P.S. — The man in the bunk above mine did not snore the night after the encounter. I choose to believe he was humbled into silence. You would say it was exhaustion. We can argue about it when I am home.

Editor's Notes:

The Brundisian Notes of Arealius, Scribe of the Olni River

Written by lamplight after the War Council on the Selnar–Teletus conflict

I set these words down while the voices of the warriors are still warm in my ears, before sleep dulls the edges of what I witnessed in the longhouse above the harbor. The men of Brundisium, Turmus, and the river towns spoke with the ease of those who know the sea and the sword, and though their tongues often clashed like iron on iron, a shape emerged from their arguments—a shape of war, of ships, of ambition.

What I gathered is this: Selnar moves with the unity of a clenched fist, its fleet drilled and hardened, its command tight as a bowstring. Their doctrine is one of swift strokes and decisive moments, a style born of confidence and long practice. Their ships, long and narrow, seem almost alive in the way the warriors described them—lean predators with bronze beaks, built for sudden turns and violent ramming. They spoke of them as if they were creatures of the sea rather than works of carpenters and oarsmen. It is a navy shaped for disciplined maneuver and shock.

Teletus, by contrast, is a city of merchants, not warriors, and its strength lies not in the prow but in the purse. Its ships are round‑bellied, high‑sided, built to carry goods rather than glory. Yet necessity is a stern teacher. The men said the Teletusans would turn their merchant hulls into floating fortresses—deck castles rising like towers, archers lining the rails, engines for stones and fire lashed to the beams. A roundship is slow, yes, but it is stubborn, and its height gives it a vantage no ram‑ship can match. It is a vessel made for endurance and defense, not pursuit.

The Tamber Gulf itself is the true arbiter of this war. Its narrow throat, its shifting winds, its treacherous shoals—all these favor the oared hull over the sailed one. The warriors agreed that Selnar would strike first, not to conquer but to pressure, to choke the trade routes that feed Teletus. Quick raids, seized cargoes, the kind of harassment that forces a merchant city to either arm itself or perish. One man from Turmus said, “They will squeeze the island until it squeals,” and though the phrasing was crude, the meaning was clear enough.

Teletus will answer by hardening its fleet. The merchants will hire mainland marines, reinforce their bulwarks, and sail in tight formations. They will not seek battle; they will seek survival. And survival, as one Brundisian observed, is a powerful strategy when backed by coin.

All agreed that the first great clash would come near the eastern shoals of Teletus, where the waters are narrow and the winds unreliable. Selnar will try to break the Teletusan circle, shearing oars and ramming isolated hulls. Teletus will try to hold its formation, raining arrows and stones from above. If the circle holds, the fight will be long and bloody. If it breaks, the sea will swallow Teletus’ hopes in a single afternoon.

Should Teletus survive that first storm, the war will stretch into a long contest of attrition—blockades, convoy escorts, night raids, and the slow grinding pressure of interrupted trade. Selnar has the better ships and the tighter command. Teletus has deeper coffers and the ability to rebuild faster than it can be destroyed. One warrior said, “Selnar wins battles; Teletus wins time,” and I believe that may be the truest thing spoken all night.

As for Brundisium, the men here see both danger and opportunity. If Selnar dominates the Gulf, the river cities may feel the weight of its ambition. If Teletus falls, the displaced merchants will flood northward, bringing coin, trouble, and new entanglements. The Brundisians listened more than they spoke, but their silence was not ignorance—it was calculation.

Now, as I sit alone with my lamp guttering low, I find myself thinking that this war is not truly between Selnar and Teletus at all. It is between two ways of living: the disciplined certainty of a naval power and the stubborn resilience of a merchant people. One seeks a single, crushing victory. The other seeks simply not to be crushed.

And history, that old companion of mine, whispers that the side which refuses to lose often outlasts the side that expects to win.

I will sleep now, though I suspect the sea itself will follow me into my dreams.