The Shallow Sea

The Shallow Sea is the broad continental-shelf sea off Alshar, Enultramar and the southern coasts, separated from the true oceanic Depths beyond by a submarine drop-off. It is a working sea of ports, freight and fishing fleets, but its greater significance is biological and magical: its floor is home to the Golden Reefs, the coral beds that the Vundel Leviathans tend and on which they (and, ultimately, the stability of the Magosphere itself) subsist.

Governance of the surface waters is ostensibly human, divided among the ports of Solashaven, Falas, and the Coastlord counties; but the true stewards are the Vundel, whose Leviathans move between the Depths and the Shallow Sea to manage the reefs. The Shallow Sea pods have long been malnourished, its reefs damaged and anemic compared to other seas on Callidore, and its Leviathans scrawny — a slow ecological decline that Lilastien fears any further disturbance could tip into outright Vundel retaliation.

The Spellmonger arc gives the Shallow Sea its strategic weight: Minalan's snowstone, by reducing the etheric density of the Magosphere, accelerates coral metabolism and allows the reefs to regrow. This makes snowstone the coin with which humanity can, for the first time in ages, pay the Vundel for continued tenancy on the Dry, and turns the Shallow Sea into the commercial and diplomatic axis of the later books.