The eastern shore of Phirexes, where the Whispering Mangroves give way to open water and the mists finally thin enough to see the horizon. The name is not metaphorical—the waters here teem with saltwater crocodiles of monstrous size, some fog-touched into something worse than mere predators, all of them hungry.
The Crocodile Coast is technically unclaimed territory. Queen Phendexelas considers it part of her domain but has never bothered to enforce control over waters that kill anyone who enters them. The jungle nations to the north avoid it. Even the pirates of the Sea of Seven Snakes give this coastline a wide berth. It is a no-man's-land of fog and scales and bones.
The Waters
The sea along the Crocodile Coast is shallow for miles out—a maze of sandbars, submerged rocks, and channels that shift with the tides. Navigation is treacherous even without the wildlife. Ships that run aground here are found months later as scattered timbers, their crews reduced to picked-clean skeletons tangled in the mangrove roots.
The crocodiles that give the coast its name range from merely enormous (fifteen feet, large enough to take a man whole) to fog-touched nightmares that defy natural law. Some have grown so large they're mistaken for sandbars until they move. Others have developed the ability to breathe fog, creating localized mist banks that blind their prey. A few are said to be intelligent—or at least cunning enough to coordinate attacks and remember the faces of those who've escaped them.
Shipwrecks and Salvage
The Crocodile Coast is a graveyard of ships. Vessels blown off course, smugglers who miscalculated the tides, would-be escapees from Phirexes who didn't know the waters—all of them end up here eventually. The wrecks pile up in the shallows, slowly sinking into the mud, their cargoes rotting or rusting or sometimes perfectly preserved by the salt and fog.
Salvage operations are theoretically possible. The wrecks contain trade goods, weapons, occasionally treasures from distant lands. But any salvage attempt must contend with the crocodiles, the shifting channels, and the fog that rolls in without warning. Those who've successfully salvaged from the Crocodile Coast speak of it in the same tone soldiers use for survived battles.
The Smuggler's Routes
Despite the danger—or because of it—the Crocodile Coast is the only reliable way to move goods in and out of Phirexes without the queen's knowledge. A network of smugglers, mostly operating from Vystrilik and the Greenwater Isles, have mapped passages through the waters that are merely suicidal rather than certain death.
These smugglers supply the Dengar refugees hiding in Old One's Wood with medicine, food, and news of the outside world. They also extract the occasional escapee who's made it through the Whispering Mangroves—usually sick with fog-binding withdrawal, always traumatized, but alive. The smugglers charge exorbitant fees, but they're the only game in town.
The routes change constantly. What was safe passage last month might be a crocodile breeding ground this month. The smugglers maintain their knowledge through a combination of magical scrying, bribed spirits, and sheer bloody-minded experience. They lose ships regularly. They keep coming back because the profits are worth it, and because some of them have personal reasons to hate Queen Phendexelas.
The Bone Beaches
Along certain stretches of the coast, the tides wash up the remains of the crocodiles' meals—bones picked clean and bleached white by sun and salt. These bone beaches are eerie landscapes of skulls and ribcages, the remains of animals, monsters, and people alike jumbled together in drifts that can reach waist-height.
The Dengar consider the bone beaches sacred in a grim sort of way. Before the queen came, they would make pilgrimages here to honor those taken by the sea. Now, the beaches are where refugees sometimes hold funerals for those who didn't survive the escape attempt—burning effigies when they have no bodies to bury.
Some say the bones whisper at night, adding their voices to the Whispering Mangroves' chorus. Others say that's just the wind through empty skulls. The distinction may not matter.