“The humans called him savior. The Dravuri called him butcher. In the end, the sea called him home.”
— Elder Vosh-Katag, Holten’Kanaq Shaman of the Drowned Isles
To speak of the Middle Sea is to speak of war, for its waters have never known peace. And yet, among the countless corpses it has claimed, there was one name the tides still whisper: Tirant, the White Gale.
Born in the shadowed docks of the Mercantile Republics, he came of age in war, earning his name fighting slavers, corsairs, and fading empires. He was a soldier of the sea, hardened by battle and driven by ambition. But victories and medals were not enough for he saw the threat beyond the frozen wastes, a danger no treaty could stop.
When the Alaz Empire, besieged and broken, called for aid, none came. Old grudges ran deeper than mercy. Kings and merchant lords watched and waited, eager for the empire’s fall. None but Tirant. Spurned by the Republics, abandoned by monarchs, he turned to the nameless and the damned, forging from their ruin a fleet that bore no nation’s sigil – only his own banner, pale as the grave. The Iron Pact, they called it.
At the Siege of Nur-nagr, he shattered the invaders’ fleets, his ships cutting through the enemy like a butcher’s knife through spent flesh. The city was saved, the Alaz restored.
They named him High Admiral, savior, hero but he was no fool. Tirant did not linger in the halls of the grateful. There was rot in the currents and the war had yet to be won. For seven years, he bled across the edges of Southern Wastes, waging a brutal campaign without end, carving a path through history with shot and blade.
And at last, in the cold embrace of the abyss, beneath skies that had long forgotten the sun, Tirant sank. No throne awaited him. No golden age followed. No happy reunion—only the mourning of those who watched the waves swallow his name.
Yet legends are not so easily forgotten. And when the wind howls over black waters and the dead stir beneath, the sailors of the Middle Sea still whisper his name: Tirant, the White Gale, the Last Lord of the Middle Sea.
This entry was made by Artnoob100.