Factions

        To the unknowing eye, Meritide Bay is a port of splendor — modest in size, yet opulent in appetite. With the sea at its back and a wall of timbered palisades encircling its landward edge, the town gives the impression of a mouth held in a careful smile: polite, picturesque, and deeply hungry.

         At the center of this smile rises a weatherworn stone keep, the sole relic of a more martial past. Here resides Lord Gula, sovereign of The Succulent Marigold, a faction whose colors are bright but whose dealings grow dim.

        Gula does not govern so much as indulge. His hall overflows with goods meant for Goldenglough — salted meats, foreign wines, dyed silks, and polished arms from beyond the sea. He claims, always with honeyed words, that delays are common, that storms are cruel, that smugglers prey upon the coast. He says these things between bites, before belching into goblets not his own.

        But beyond the keep’s feast-laden tables and the perfumed courtyard, something darker takes root.

        Beneath the guise of trade, The Succulent Marigold has begun to arm another flower: The Alluring Dandelion, long since declared a rebel house. Crates marked as "spiced grain" and "bronze kettles" are, in truth, filled with steel — shortblades, crossbow bolts, chainmail crafted in secret by smiths from The Lone Delphinium. These goods are ferried in quiet by night, loaded onto wagons bearing the sigil of The Marigold, and slipped across the inland roads under forged manifests.

        Gula, for all his bloated demeanor, is not blind. This trade is not born of ideology, but leverage. Should The Burning Lily press too hard, or Goldenglough demand too much, he may yet claim that his hands fed the enemy — or threaten to do so again.

        But not all eyes in Meritide are dulled by wine and sun.

        Humanitas, the clandestine steward of The Burning Lily, moves now, out of Invidia's sight, through the port town. Posing as a merchant, he has begun tracing the discrepancies in the manifests, the shifting patterns of ships, the names of men who are here one day and gone the next.

        He suspects treason, though he cannot yet name its full shape. In whispers, he speaks with dockworkers. At night, he walks the outer edge of the palisade, where the scent of the sea is tainted by smelted iron.

        Though Temperantia, daughter of Gula, remains unaware of the extent of her father's duplicity, Humanitas knows her well enough to suspect she would not abide it. But he is cautious — for to accuse Gula openly without proof is to risk the fragile union between Marigold and Lily, and to endanger the betrothal of Temperantia and Patientia, which now steadies the balance of the realm.

        Meritide Bay sleeps behind its wooden walls, content in feast and fog. But beneath the surf and silence, weapons move like currents — and Humanitas listens to the tide.