MARROWGATE: The Salt-Iron Crown

The story

Once a century, the Marrowgate Narrows drain for six hours when the moon, the sluice-locks and the old machinery align, exposing a causeway of black seabed and the flooded root-level of Marrowgate Keep — a salt-crusted fortress built to hold one prize, the Salt-Iron Crown, a regalia of hammered iron and pearl that legitimizes rule of the coastal cantons. Ilva Renn, a tide-warden stripped of her rank after a lock failure drowned a village, knows the drain schedule better than the priests who guard it. She recruits Tobrek, a mute salvage-diver with hands scarred by anchor chain; Nissa Kade, a young lock-picker who reads corroded mechanisms by touch; and Halvard Cray, the Keep's own disgraced armorer, who wants the Crown to buy his name back. They cross the exposed seabed on foot among stranded ships and whale bones, cut through a barnacle-choked sluice gate, and descend into the drained lower keep where the Crown sits inside a cage of counterweighted iron that will crush the vault if the water returns unevenly. Nissa opens the cage; Halvard betrays them, sealing the inner door and running for the causeway with the Crown. But Ilva has spent the night doing what only a tide-warden could — resetting the sluices so the sea returns early and from the wrong side. The flood catches Halvard mid-causeway; Tobrek drags him and the Crown out of the current, losing his own air line doing it. In the final act the crew surfaces on the cliff stair as the Narrows fill behind them, the blind sentinels chanting on the flooded battlements below. Ilva does not sell the Crown. She walks it to the ruined village that drowned under her watch and sets it on a post at the waterline, where the cantons will have to come and argue in the open — and the vault behind her closes for another hundred years.

Cast

• Ilva Renn To steal the Crown and force the cantons to answer for the village she is blamed for drowning
• Tobrek To repay a debt to Ilva and get back out of the water alive
• Nissa Kade To prove her hands can open the one lock no one has ever opened
• Halvard Cray To take the Crown for himself and buy back the name the Keep stripped from him
• The Warden Abbot To keep the Crown in the dark where it belongs, and to drown anyone who lifts it