Around 3200 SD, nearly two centuries before the present, five small states on the southern rim of the Middle Sea bound their trade together by charter. Erasnus, Watar, Camaran, Ubrik, and Bestacia had little in common. Halflings, dwarblin, humans, Uline dwarves, and Goshwen gnomes, and each kept its own coin and its own grievances. What they shared was a coast none of them could defend and trade routes none of them could keep open alone.
The decades before the founding were bad ones for anyone shipping goods across the inner sea. Corsairs out of the Griselian city-states worked the western approaches, taking lone hulls and selling their crews back to whichever port would pay. At the Telphineas Strait, the narrow water that joins the eastern and western Middle Sea, passage belonged to whoever fielded the strongest fleet that season, and the tolls climbed with every change of hands. A factor out of Adnar might pay three times over to bring one cargo home and lose it to raiders anyway. Worse, the small states taxed each other's goods as hard as they dared, which only made the outside tolls look reasonable by comparison. No one of them could break the pattern alone.
The pact was assembled by Corwen Hostling, a Belenstrope merchant of Adnar with no title and no fleet, who carried the same proposal between five mutually suspicious courts for the better part of four years. The instrument was drafted by Qepi Sandelyx, a Goshwen jurist of Bestacia, who turned Hostling's bargain into language all five could sign. Its terms were plain. Tariffs between members were capped, and any member's shipping could cross any member's water at the rate that member charged its own. Against the raiders the five pooled escort, so that an attack on one convoy was answered by all of them, until the western approaches were no longer worth a corsair's time.
A hull that flies one flag is a hull worth taking. A hull that flies five is more trouble than the cargo. — a saying among Middle Sea convoy masters
The Alliance takes its name from Aldriktch, the free harbor on the Watari coast where the charter was signed and where its council still sits. For most of two centuries the arrangement did what it was built to do. The corsairs thinned. Tolls at the strait fell to something a small state could pay. The pact's cross-state notaries, who answered to no single nation's god, in time found a patron of their own in Foedros, daemon of the held signature, though that is the cult's story and not the charter's. Myorna was no part of any of this. The Sivakr kingdom was admitted around 3326 SD, fifty years ago and over loud objection, long after the ink had set. The chokepoint the founders banded together to keep open, the Telphineas Strait, is now the seam along which the Alliance is pulling apart.