The Lore

The Long Gold

There was a sea here once. Not a story-sea. A true one, wide as the sky and old as the bones of the world, and every creature that swam it now sleeps in the stone beneath your boots.

Then one age, without warning and without mercy, the sea left. It did not dry. It did not die. It left, the way a fleet slips anchor in the night, and no one living knows where it went or why. It took the whales and the ships and the drowned cities with it, and it left behind its floor: a thousand miles of rolling gold grass under the biggest sky in creation.

The marooned call that country the Long Gold. Landsmen call it prairie. They’re wrong. Watch it in the wind sometime. It still moves in waves.

The Ghost Tide

The sea left, but its tide would not go.

The wind that never stops blowing across the Long Gold is called the Ghost Tide: the old sea’s pull, still running its courses over an empty floor, still rolling waves through the grass because it has forgotten there is no water left to carry. Sailors of the Company can read it the way their grandmothers read the true tides. When the Ghost Tide rises hard out of the west, something is coming. It always is.

They say if you stand alone in the Long Gold at dusk and hold still, you can hear the Ghost Tide remembering: gulls, rigging, a bell from a harbor that no longer exists.

Shy Anne’s Landing

Where the last wave died, a city rose in a single night. The landsmen call it the Magic City of the Plains and tell each other it was built by rail and iron. The marooned know better.

They named it for Shy Anne, the woman in the oldest song of the stranded: the one who walked to the edge of the retreating water, refused to follow it, and turned her back on the sea that abandoned her. Every soul the sea left behind eventually finds their way to her landing. That is simply how it works. You wake up one morning in some far corner of the world with salt in your blood and no place that fits you, and your feet start walking, and they do not stop until you reach the Long Gold.

Through the city runs the Crowwater, a thin dark creek that is the last living vein of the dead sea. It is not much to look at. Neither is a pulse.

Swordhaven

Every blade the sea abandoned finds its way to Swordhaven.

Somewhere off the old shore stands a hall with no road to it. Marooned fighters do not find Swordhaven by looking. They find it the night they need it: fire already lit, a place already set, steel already waiting on the wall with their name somehow on it. It is the mustering hall of the stranded, the place where castaway soldiers, corsairs, duelists, and oath-broken knights train together because nobody else in this dry world understands what they were.

The fight company of the Last Tide takes its name from that hall. When Swordhaven takes the field, it is the old sea’s steel, still sharp, still remembering.

The Marooned Lord: Aaron Shadowhawk

No one knows where Aaron Shadowhawk came from. That is not a gap in the record. That is the record.

What is known is this. He came across a true sea, a cold one, from a country of hawks and old oaths, and whatever he was there, he does not carry the title anymore. He arrived with the last storm anyone can remember rolling off the Long Gold, walking out of the grass at dawn with a sword on his back, salt in his beard a thousand miles from any coast, and a hawk riding the Ghost Tide above him. The hawk saw everything he left behind. The hawk does not speak.

The stories fill the silence, the way stories do:

Some say he was a lord who burned his own hall rather than let it be taken, and the smoke followed him across the water.

Some say he broke an oath so old the sea itself was witness to it, and the sea left this country rather than look at him. The old sailors spit when they hear that one. The sea left long before he came, they say. Probably.

Some say he was a king’s swordhand who buried the king, and the crown, and the men who came for both.

Some say he drowned once, properly drowned, and the sea threw him back and has been retreating from him ever since.

Ask him which is true and he will buy you a drink, which is not an answer, and tell you the only part that matters: he walked the Long Gold until his boots gave out, and where they gave out he drove his sword into the earth, and where the sword stood, the marooned began to gather. First one. Then a crew. Then a banner.

He gave them the only law worth signing and the only truth they all shared: The sea left. We didn’t.

The Company

The Last Tide Free Company is the banner of the marooned. Pirates, corsairs, sellswords, freebooters, wreck-witches, chart-thieves, and rogues of every water the world ever held, all of them stranded, all of them summoned by feet that would not stop walking, all of them home now on the floor of a dead ocean.

They sail the Long Gold under the Ghost Tide. They carry tide coins, the spiral shells of the old sea pulled from the stone, as proof of what this country used to be and token of what they are. They keep the songs, the steel, and the manners of the drowned age alive in a dry one.

And on the day the sea comes back, and the old ones swear it will, the Last Tide intends to be standing on the shore, blades clean, colors flying, entirely unsurprised.

Your Story

Every member of the Company was left behind by the sea in their own way. That story is yours to write, and it is the only piece of kit no one can issue you.

Three questions build a marooned character:

1. What water did the sea take from you? A ship, a port, a war, a person, a name.
2. How long did you walk before your feet brought you to Shy Anne’s Landing?
3. What do you refuse to tell anyone about it?

Answer the first two out loud. Guard the third with your life. That is the way of the Last Tide: every crewmate a story, every story a locked chest, and not one of us fool enough to ask for the key.