As Calimshan's third-largest port, Manshaka Port had originally been left in an awkward position. Its location lay too deep within the Sea of Radiance, so it had failed to reap the benefits of the Age of Great Navigation.
Until a slave revolt twenty years ago. Unable to immediately suppress the flames sweeping through the entire city, Syl-Pasha fled the royal city overnight with his confidant, crossed the Karin River, and moved in to take over this underdeveloped city-state before word reached it. Then he sat back and watched the whole of Calim descend into unprecedented turmoil.
In the years that followed, this exiled king had not refrained from raising armies to quell the chaos and retake Calim City. Yet almost every campaign ended with his servant troops wiped out and his main force fleeing back to Manshaka in rout. Among Calimshan's nobles, it had practically become an open joke.
And an incompetent, absurd king was likewise exactly what the Pasha nobles wanted. Coupled with the threat of Iryklathagra, the ancient blue dragon that levied taxes once every century, the king was simply left where he was.
Yet strangely enough, despite all the defeats Syl-Pasha had suffered over the years, rebellions and coups within Manshaka had become as commonplace as daily meals. Every one of them, however, was swiftly suppressed. Instead, a host of implicated local nobles suffered rotten luck, while Syl-Pasha's rule over the harbor city-state of Manshaka only grew firmer.
This left Calimshan's other Pashas deeply envious of the muddleheaded king. They believed that the only reason he had not fallen from power was that he possessed an incomparably loyal court Mage of peerless beauty, one who could resolve and suppress every crisis, allowing him to continue living the carefree, extravagant life of a king.
That day, in the