...The city walls rose at the harbor's edge, still new enough to smell like fresh timber. Balduran watched from the waterfront as workers moved materials, and he could already see the shape of what this place would become. Not in his lifetime, perhaps. The sea doesn't reward those who think in generational terms. But he had built his settlement on rock and principle, and rock endured longer than men. The enemy fleet approached from the north, and he didn't send for reinforcements because there were none to send. He walked the walls at dawn and spoke to each guard as though they mattered individually, because they did.

When the fighting came, it came with all the brutal clarity of the ocean itself. Some died. Some held. And in the aftermath, the city remained. That was the only victory that mattered. That you had stood against the dark and not been erased...