Overview
The Aldriktch Trade Alliance is an agreement between Erasnus, Watar, Myorna, Camaran, Bestacia, and Ubrik that dictates open trade routes between the countries. It sets limits on maximum tariffs for ports and foreign trade, and gives member nations more favorable trading rights. Those tariff caps and the bonds that move under them are reckoned in the Aldriktch standard, the iron-denominated coinage the Adron houses mint and the cross-state notaries seal under Foedros.
Currently, the entire alliance is under threat, as tensions between Myorna and its neighbors continue to rise. Allowing Myorna into the trade alliance was only barely permitted (spearheaded by phenomenal diplomats among Myorna, Ubrik, and Bestacia), and now it's causing trouble.
It is also threatened by the massive silvertongue outbreak in Ubrik, which has driven half the country into a cannibalistic frenzy, terrorizing the nearby countryside. Erasnus is desperately trying to hold the alliance together (it is most profitable for them of all the countries), but it is difficult to hold on.
Camaran has become more isolationist recently as well, which spells trouble, and the Watari and Bestacian relations are getting worse as tension over control of the Telphineas Strait escalates.
History
The Alliance was founded around 3200 SD, when five small Middle Sea states signed a charter at the free harbor of Aldriktch on the Watari coast. Erasnus, Watar, Camaran, Ubrik, and Bestacia had no army worth the name among them, and each was being bled by Griselian corsairs and by the toll wars at the Telphineas Strait. None could keep its routes open alone. The charter capped tariffs among the members and bound them to escort each other's shipping, so that the corsairs faced a sea too well-watched to raid. For most of two centuries it worked. The full account is in the founding event.
The first crack in the charter was not Myorna. It was Watar, and it opened quietly, decades before the Sivakr question ever came to the table. Around 3306 SD a Watari trading house, the Strugmar, levied a "harbor maintenance fee" on cargo putting in along its coast, a capped-tariff dodge in everything but the name. The Alliance courts struck it down twice. Both times Watar paid the fine and went on collecting, and in doing so it taught every member a lesson the founders had never meant to teach: the charter's penalties were a price, not a wall, and a state rich enough could simply pay to ignore the pact's own rulings. The anchorage fee Watar's fleet now levies at the Telphineas Strait is that same move in its third iteration, this time enforced by hulls rather than excused by clerks. Myorna's admission gave the precedent a sharper edge. It did not invent the precedent.
Myorna was no founding member. The Sivakr kingdom was admitted around 3326 SD, fifty years after it emerged from underground, and only barely. Neighbors wanted access to the silver of the Grey Mountains, and diplomats from Bestacia, Ubrik, and Myorna itself argued that binding the Sivakr into the pact would head off a war rather than start one. That admission is the wound the Alliance is straining against now. Echea, the gnome magocracy at the tip of the Watari peninsula, applied later and was vetoed by Camaran, whose distrust of Deoric magic had by then hardened into law.
The newest strain runs straight through the Alliance's own court. A grain bond guaranteed under a Myornic factor's Sivakr-attested signature has failed, and Erasnus merchants want it voided on the argument that a signature a Sivakr can reach into and alter cannot bind anyone. The court that must rule on it sits at Aldriktch, on Watari soil, and Watar is in no hurry to convene the hearing. A slow venue keeps the question open, and an open question is leverage. The full dispute belongs to Erasnus and Myorna; what it costs the Alliance is plainer. The body built to decide whether a contract holds is now hostage to the member with the most to gain from never deciding.