The Shroud Isles sit at the eastern edge of the Northern Isles, the last scatter of rock before the Ocean of Azeros opens into deep water and then nothing. A bank of fog stands over them and does not move. The rest of the archipelago gets its hard clear days, the cold sunlight that throws blue shadows off the ice; the Shroud Isles get none of them. The mist is there at dawn, there at dusk, and there in the dead of a windless night, which is the first thing that tells a sailor it is not weather. It is held in place. The one holding it is Gelnor, and the islands are named for the work he does.
A ship that enters the shroud loses the rest of its convoy inside a cable's length. The channels between the islands run crooked, rock sits where a chart promises open water, and sound carries wrong, so a crew rowing toward what they take for surf is often rowing toward stone. The only reliable pilots through are the islands' own crabs.
Low water on the outermost isle. A hermit crab the width of a rowboat hauls its borrowed shell over black rock slick with grey-green weed, mouthparts working the algae in slow scrapes. The fog stands like a wall a stone's throw out. The only sounds are the scrape, the drip off the shell, and the soft give of weed beneath it. No gulls. Nothing flies here.
Giant hermit crabs work the shorelines, beasts the size of a coracle that drag their shells up the wet rock at low tide to graze the algae. They cross the shroud without a wrong turn, and a desperate captain who follows one out to open water lives more often than one who trusts a compass. Gelnor keeps no harbor and posts no warning. He turns away anyone who reaches him with a home still waiting somewhere else. What he is atoning for, and why the fog is both the crime and the penance, belongs to his own account.