Thalor Vey

Thalor Vey is old in the way harbours are old: weathered, useful, half-legend, and impossible to hurry. He keeps shipwright law, departure rites, tide warnings, and the quiet ledgers of those who sail west and never return. His robe hems smell of salt and tar. Fleetmasters listen when he speaks because his docks decide which exiles become refugees, envoys, soldiers, or ghosts. Thalor rarely commands by decree. He waits for the tide of an argument to turn, then gives counsel with the weight of drowned years behind it. There is beauty in his patience and dread in what it has survived; he has watched too many bright departures become funeral smoke over the western water. His mercy is costly because he remembers every ship he could not recall and every family that mistook a fair tide for safety.