An Incident Primer for Port Seabright Memory-Keeping
Waters: Southern Archipelago — Port Seabright shipping lanes
Primary Site: The Lanternwake Corridor (reef-spine deep lane)
Among sailors this theft is remembered as the Lanternwake Job—the first confirmed case of the Silent Bell using its Keel-Birth, stone-born mass as a deliberate lane weapon to strip an escort and take a custody tender clean. It did not become famous because gold was taken. It became famous because a custody box screamed, and something important looked back.
In the hours before the robbery, the Monkey Paw Pirates gained an unwanted kind of credibility. Their captain, Kaio Veyra, proved the Silent Bell could move despite the Stone Giant Pearl’s weight, and in doing so caught the attention of Captain Harm Powder—a Privateer with a reputation for betting on talent instead of wasting it.
Harm Powder did not arrive to arrest them. He arrived to measure them.
When the Silent Bell’s hull and figurehead confirmed Keel-Birth Integration beyond rumor, Harm Powder shifted from mockery to calculation. His parting gift was not kindness. It was a business decision.
He gave one name and one warning:
Iron-Lung Xandar: an escort captain who sinks ships that surrender, hoards bounties, and treats charters like permission to butcher.
A “Gold-Ship” moving off-route near Port Seabright lanes, hauling tax shipment and pearl assets under escort.
Harm Powder’s logic was simple: if Kaio died trying, the sea would erase the problem. If Kaio succeeded, the Shogunate would panic, contracts would surge, and the ocean would become expensive again. Either way, the walls got taller.
The convoy was not one ship. It was a system.
The Gilded Gull — the Gold-Ship itself. A floating fortress of gold-leaf and ironwood, arrogant and sealed, built to survive panic.
The Sable Lung — Xandar’s escort schooner. Low, matte-grey, built like a shark: fast turns, clean lines, disciplined crew.
The Ledger Sloop — the tender. A small reinforced cutter towed on heavy chain, riding lower than it should. No windows, one door, and one object that mattered: the Custody Box.
Kaio did not plan to “take the Gold-Ship.” Three pirates do not take a fortress. He planned to take what fortresses are forced to protect.
The Silent Bell could not chase. It could only arrive—heavy, stubborn, momentum-bound. So Kaio turned the weakness into a rule set:
Get ahead.
Occupy the lane.
Force the escort to commit.
Strip the guard dog.
Take the tender.
Leave.
This was the moment witnesses later describe as Kaio “sounding like a captain instead of a kid.” The plan was not loud bravery. It was geometry.
He assigned roles that matched reality:
Ryla would falsify the ship’s condition by singing the hull wrong—a dying merchant frequency, cracked keel, surrender vibration.
The instant Xandar began breath-work, she would invert the note and make him wobble—not defeat him, not duel him, just break rhythm.
Jurok would board for ten seconds. No duel. No proving. Cut one thing that mattered and return.
One cannon shot only: reduced charge, aimed at steering and rigging, not hull.
They were not hunting with teeth. They were hunting with timing.
At dusk, the Silent Bell drifted sideways across the deep-water lane between two submerged reef spines. It did not bob like a ship. It sat like a sunk cathedral that refused to drown. The deck boards no longer creaked. They thrummed—stone pressure humming through wood.
To approaching eyes it looked crippled and dead in the water.
That illusion mattered, because escorts are trained to respect hazards—but predators are trained to inspect corpses.
When the convoy rounded the bend, they saw the blockage and slowed. Signal flags ran up Xandar’s mast. The Gold-Ship held back, protective posture, keeping the tender close.
Then Ryla sang.
Not a shanty. Not a lure. A low grinding resonance that made the air taste like failure. The Silent Bell’s hull seemed to groan in sympathy. The deception took hold.
The Gold-Ship refused the risk and stalled.
The Sable Lung approached.
Xandar closed range like a man pushing aside trash. He did not run guns. He did not commit to battle posture. He came close enough to bully the “wreck” out of the lane and continue escort duty.
He spoke through his apparatus—voice metallic, amplified, confident. He presented his flank like it was untouchable.
He was wrong for three reasons:
He underestimated the stone-born hull and assumed the Silent Bell was a victim of its own weight.
He did not understand siren-harmonics used as warfare, not seduction.
He assumed pirates would aim for bodies instead of systems.
When Kaio gave the word, the strike sequence happened faster than a clean breath:
A. Ryla’s Counter-Note
Ryla inverted the air. The sound was felt more than heard—pressure distortion slamming into the Sable Lung’s quarterdeck. Xandar’s breath rhythm broke. Mask glass fractured. His amplified voice choked into feedback. He dropped—command collapsing at the worst possible second.
It wasn’t a victory. It was a stumble. But that was all a stumble needed to become disaster.
B. The One Cannon Shot
The Silent Bell fired a single reduced-charge round. Not at hull. At control. The ball tore through steering hardware and smashed boom structure, turning clean maneuver into chaos. The Sable Lung lost fine handling and began to list into the lane’s ugly water.
C. Jurok’s Ten Seconds
Jurok boarded like a thrown knife, cut tension lines and the main halyard, and forced mainmast failure. The mast cracked, tilted, and fell—bridging the ships for a heartbeat. Jurok used the collapsing timber as a return path and launched back to the Silent Bell.
The Sable Lung became what escorts fear most: alive, armed, and helpless.
With Xandar down and his ship tangled, the convoy’s protection broke open.
The Silent Bell did not “pursue.” It drifted, turned, and pressed its weight into position—stone momentum grinding the sea aside. The Gold-Ship tried to maneuver, but the tow-chain made the tender behave like an anchor. In panic, the convoy’s geometry betrayed itself.
The Silent Bell locked alongside the Ledger Sloop. Grapples bit. Decks kissed hard.
Kaio boarded first and gave terms that mattered:
No sport killing.
Surrender means living.
Fight means pain.
Most of the tender crew yielded immediately—clerks and light sailors who understood they had been abandoned by a fortress that could not afford to stop.
Only one man resisted: the custody clerk, attempting to trigger protocol—keyed seal conditions, threats of blood-boil resonance, talk of counter-seals and Shogunate law.
Kaio’s intimidation pinned him in place like a nail through a hand. Jurok took the heavy brass key clean.
Kaio chose to confirm contents on scene—because tenders do not come twice.
The lock turned. Tumblers fell. A vent hissed. The “blood-boil” threat proved real in concept but conditional in execution: a seal meant to punish tampering under the wrong conditions, not a bluff to scare pirates.
When the lid opened, the deck tasted like ozone and old blood.
Inside were not coins.
1) The Imperial Black Ledger
A thick sea-drake leather book burned with an Imperial seal—names, routes, bribes, false tariffs, and corruption marks that could rot Admiralty careers from the inside. Paper that cuts deeper than steel.
2) The Storm-Eater
A Large (8-slot) Meito Pearl—indigo-to-violet stormlight rolling under the surface as if weather was trapped inside glass. Static crackled in the air around it. Sailors later described it as a pearl that “wants to decide what the sky is allowed to do.”
Then came the moment that turned a robbery into a chase story:
A hidden glass sphere inside the lid shattered.
Not an explosion. A scream—not heard with ears alone, but carried through resonance like a spear thrown into the sea.
Ryla reacted first: pain, nose bleeding black, eyes gone distant. Her words became the line everyone remembers:
Something big looked at them.
A golden eye.
And it knew exactly where they were.
This device is now discussed in port talk as a Witness-Scream—a custody mechanism designed to broadcast the opener’s location/signature across the sea’s resonance network.
By the end of the Lanternwake Job, three truths were circulating at once:
The Monkey Paw Pirates were no longer “kids with luck.” They demonstrated professional interdiction: bait, system-disable, tender seizure, clean exit intent.
Iron-Lung Xandar had been humiliated in full view of sea-lane witnesses, and humiliation is a kind of injury that demands repayment.
The Shogunate did not merely lose a shipment. They lost a ledger that can collapse trust, and a pearl that can change naval weather.
And because the Witness-Scream was triggered, the theft did not end when the box opened.
It began.
Event Name: The Lanternwake Job
Secondary Phrase: “We’re a wall.” / “We’re going to be the cliff.”
Primary Location: Lanternwake Corridor (Port Seabright lanes)
Escort Disabled: The Sable Lung (Iron-Lung Xandar)
Tender Taken: The Ledger Sloop (Custody Box seized)
Assets Recovered: The Storm-Eater (Large Meito Pearl), The Imperial Black Ledger
Alarm Triggered: Witness-Scream Sphere (“golden eye” attention event)