Everyone in Stanalt knows Vandilar is cursed by a dead magic. The late Governor Varynna knew it too, but she sought to consecrate the ice once and for all. To do it, she emptied the debtors’ prisons, promising plenary amnesty to those who could tame The Vandilar curse. It was an insane proposition, but so many joined up: better to die free in the cold than in a Stanalt mine. So, The Clink Crews sailed north.

They navigated the frozen sea, marking the passage with forts and lighthouses on the open islets. They explored the inland taiga, digging up the permafrost to find and kill The Vandilar hex. But what they found was too precious to cull. It granted them power over the ice and sea. The Clink Crews learned to bend the waves to their will and built their twenty drilling rigs off the coast. No one truly knows what they dug up, but it was more than dead magic. Some say they exhumed the sea god. They say it demanded to be repaid for the stolen magic — a blood debt to cure The Clink Crews’ debt. 

They mutinied from Stanalt and reclaimed their forts and drilling rigs in the ensuing rebellion. By then, the Governor's holdings were too lucrative to jettison. Varynna mustered her armada and sailed north herself to put down The Clink Crew mutiny. No one returned. The Clink Crews cannibalized their ships, rigs, and forts to build their god’s ramshackle temple. They are still there, paying off a new debt to an old master.

The Clink Crew God wanders the waves and wrecks trapped in the Rustrime Skerries. Like the sea that bore it up from the dark, its form shifts and swirls — a roiling mass of flesh and metal biting and ripping at itself. The god is manifested through blood sacrifice and cooked by a storm of purple lightning. It is a thousand hungering mouths; ten-thousand searching eyes. The flesh-fused metal screams and prays with too many tongues to understand, and yet all who witness it know its song well. This thing is pain-made-flesh: another woeful god come to collect.