On the eastern shores of the Surrounded Sea, between the northern tip of the peninsula that is the Kingdom of Tanzenel and the southern shores of the Syl lands known as Shil’Ta’Vel, there lies a passage through which the waters of that inner sea reach out to seek the greater spaces of the Sungiver Sea and the open waters of the ocean called the Starflow, beyond.
Through this channel, at times little more than a dozen miles across, the eastern tides shift and flow. The only outlet for the churning waters when the twin moons draw together and the tides are at their most powerful, the Straights of Penza take the brunt of this as it crashes forth from the Surrounded Sea. Pausing briefly in a vast bay between those lands, the channel narrows again into the gap known as the Rush.
Named by early sailors, the narrowest part of the channel can boast of currents that no ship can resist with rocky shorelines and jutting outcroppings that promise only death for those fool enough to risk hugging the coast and making the passage at its worst.
For those that live on and around these waters, the stories of the mariners point to something yet worse, as the great gouge that the timeless passage of these currents has carved into the floor of the channel is rumored to run almost impossibly deep. In places, so the stories go on, there is no bottom for a broken ship to settle upon.
And in the flickering of what sunlight tries to find its way into these waters, the shadowed outlines of great leviathans are sometimes claimed to be seen, racing with the surge of the tide as if seeking to outpace the draw from the moons and the crest of the surge as it crashes through the Rush and into the open ocean, beyond.