“Thank you for renting the harbor to me.” Should be “Thank you for leasing the harbor to me.”

Days since crazy human incident? Too long.

It’s been over a year so it doesnt really matter but if you remember the scene eith teriarch and ryoka where we see his past encounters we see he promised to leave his cave and help her if she made peace in izrissil. And I think neirs would have been less of a pipe dream if he knew she had zel as if he could see a chance for her vision to come true he would probably do it. And we dont know if she didnt have any backup strategist she just didnt for that battle.

I have a suspicion that if Zeres HADN’T try to strongarm Magnolia out of some of what she was carrying, she’d have brought out the dragonsail as a gift for them instead.

Yes, she bullies her way around. But she’s also not so stupid as to only ever bully. She knows that her biggest strength is being stupidly fucking rich, and isn’t afraid to buy goodwill with that instead of just strong arming everything.

She throws weight around until people stop trying to fight her, then follows up with a whole pile of reasons why it’s better to work with and not against. Said reasons being a fuckton of money and magical artifacts. Its a case of waving around really big sticks AND really big carrots. But if you’re gonna be an ass, no carrot for you. Repeat this process for at least a couple decades and you can see why people tend to let her do do what she wants.

Yeah, she’s undeniably a bitch, but she’s also one of the very few people in power dedicated to peace instead of war and conquest. Yes, she looks at the Antinium as an enemy, but from the point of view that they are an enemy to peace. If the Antinium ever wised up to the idea of working WITH other races to fight their true enemy, she’d probably be first in the queue to back that if she could be convinced it was true. “You came here purely to gather resources to fight a thing that sounds like a threat to the entire world and the war of conquest was an incidental side effect not the point? Yeah that IS the bigger issue, here have this huge pile of stuff. Now get off my continent because I’m still upset about the war part”.

Versus -> verses

a song has verses

While your points are understandable, I offer a few counter points:

Magnolia would have likely had a much larger army, with more and better quality officers, who could have actually managed the logistics properly had Tyrion not tried to be a scheming bastard. Magnolia basically only got the dregs of the available levies because people trusted Tyrion more for war, and either didn’t send any to Magnolia, or sent her fewer, worse soldiers.

Has she had the appropriate army she called for, Zel wouldn’t have had nearly as much of a struggle against Reiss, and quite likely wouldn’t have had to make such a suicidal attempt at taking him down.

So, yes, she was poor at planning the logistics of that army, but it also was entirely her fault the way things ended up. She should definitely have had a backup strategist other than Niers – especially since multiple Strategists could stack their Skills, so it would never be “wasted” to have extras – and Teriarch was a pipe dream. But, she can’t be blamed for doing the best she could with what she had available. Tyrion deserves just as much blame for her army failing as Magnolia herself does.

The Dragonsail wasn’t just a claim of “I’m your friend, let me pass.” It was also a huge threat. The ship she just entered the city on, which hadn’t yet left the harbor, was powerful enough to take out a ship designed to carry and support dragons in battle. Had they continued to try and bend their own laws due to greed, and it came to fighting, that single ship would be a massive threat to the entire city. She is saying the “polite” meaning of the Dragonsail out loud, but the unsaid, real meaning is, “We destroyed one of your most powerful weapons before. We are already inside your famed walls. Are you willing to risk war for your greed?”

The drakes likely would have won such a fight, and Magnolia would probably die. But then it would be outright war with the humans, once again. And Zeres would be wrecked, ripe for the rest of humanity – already pissed off due to the Circle of Thorns – to sail down and finish off.

As the ships smoothly dropped anchor, they moved as one.

why would the ships drop anchor if they had berths waiting for them?