Black Brine

Salt Crown sits like a blade’s edge above the harbor—gleaming, honed, and always a breath from cutting deep. It’s where the captains count their spoils, merchants count their losses, and the smart ones keep their mouths shut. The district thrums with quiet menace, where every handshake hides a deal, and every smile might cost you. The Lending House bleeds gold for those brave or foolish enough to ask, its rooftop garden a petri dish of decadence and whispered threats. Rita’s forge lights the street like a second sun, hammering steel into stories with every swing. The Chase Gun Condos loom above, a stacked powder box of hard-bitten sailors, dock queens, and quick-fisted gunners, where disputes are settled on the roof—or off it. In Salt Crown, money talks, steel listens, and no one forgets a debt.

Skinner’s sits low and squat between taller, prettier buildings—more lair than shop, with windows fogged by years of tannin and smoke. The scent hits first: blood, brine, and beast-fat boiled down to survival. Inside, every coat hangs like a husk, every boot polished like a casket. Skinner watches from the back, needle dancing in his gnarled fingers, eyes like burned coals beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Down the street, the Gentle Rest leans like it’s had one too many. Three stories of weather-warped wood and rusted rails, its painted sign flaking like dried skin. By day it’s sleepy, by night it’s silent—and that’s worse. Folk enter with coin and leave with whispers. The Noose, and his Cutter Gang, run it now, and the inn wears that truth like a bruise. Salt Crown watches all this with indifference, as if daring anyone to care. Most don’t. They’ve got debts to settle and secrets to buy. Or sell.