The Telphineas Strait is the one deepwater channel between the eastern and western halves of the Middle Sea. North of it sits the Watar peninsula and, behind the Mossy Mountains, the gnome republic of Bestacia. South of it rise the Iri Mountains of Echea. Everything else that joins the two basins is shoal, reef, or the long way out through open ocean, so a hull carrying cargo from one half of the Middle Sea to the other passes through Telphineas or pays for it in weeks. That single fact is why three states claim the water. It is also why none of them holds it.
Claiming a strait and commanding one are different things, and each of the three claimants is built wrong for the job.
Three half-powers
Watar has the ships. Its merchant council can put hulls on the water faster than anyone in the region, and under the Strugmar house those hulls patrol the strait mouth and collect an anchorage fee from cargo riding at anchor. But Watar holds no fortress on the narrows. Its strait-side city, Madero, sits west of the channel rather than over it, and the capital at Solera is up the northwest coast entirely. The fee is real revenue, enforced by presence and not by position. It lasts exactly as long as the fleet is there to collect it, and the morning the fleet is somewhere else it is worth nothing.
Bestacia has the law. The Goshwen republic would by rights be the strait's landlord, since its coast runs along the northern shore, except that the Mossy Mountains stand between the gnomes and the water and Bestacia has never built the harbors or the navy to reach past them. What it has instead is Pastrova, the law town on the near side of the range, whose jurists carry the anchorage case to the Alliance courts. Bestacia fights the fee with writs because writs are the only weapon it can get to the waterline. Twice the courts have ruled the fee unlawful. Twice Watar has paid the fine and gone on collecting.
Echea has the high ground and no wish to use it. The Iri Mountains drop straight to the south shore directly over the narrows, and a magocracy that graduates elemental war-casters by the class could close the passage in an afternoon if it cared to. It does not care to. The Echi keep only fishing villages on that coast, sell their magitech to whoever pays, and regard the strait quarrel as a squabble among lesser states that were rude enough to veto them out of the Alliance. The one claimant geographically able to command the water is the one with no interest in commanding anything.
So the strait stays contested and uncommanded, which is the worst arrangement for everyone who uses it. A toll a single power could at least make predictable is instead a fee that appears when Watari hulls are present, lapses when they are not, and is litigated without end in a court that cannot enforce its own verdict. The standoff between Watar and Bestacia worsens by the season and never quite breaks, because neither side can finish it. Watar cannot make the fee lawful, and Bestacia cannot make the ships go away. The water belongs to whoever is standing on it that week.
Three flags claim the Telphineas and not one of them flies over it. The dwarves chase you for the fee, the gnomes chase the dwarves for the writ, and the wizards on the south hill never look up. Pay if there are sails in the channel. Sail on if there are not. — common counsel among Middle Sea pilots