Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month II: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 2nd Month
---
Arriving at Arkanus
Somewhere at the southernmost tip of western Arkanus, the Imperial Royal Navy Ship Tritus made port.
It was a military vessel, a patrol ship assigned to the vast ocean routes that the Empire maintained for security and trade monitoring along its southwestern approaches. The Tritus had been on a standard sweep of those waters when a lookout on the upper deck spotted something that had no business being where it was.
There were three people aboard on a makeshift vessel. Port side, thirty degrees off the bow.
The Imperial Royal Navy Ship Tritus was not a vessel you mistook for anything else on the open water.
She was a Grand Vessel of War, five hundred feet from bow to stern, fifty feet across at her widest point, and thirty feet from waterline to main deck. Her hull was dark and heavy, built for the kind of ocean that swallowed smaller ships whole. Three mast towers rose above the deck at intervals, rigged with sails that could push her mass across hundreds of kilometers a day when the wind cooperated. When it didn't, the oarsmen below kept her moving.
Her sides were lined with magical artillery ports, closed in calm water and only opened during engagement. Her deck carried catapult mounts fore and aft, and the marines that crewed them were not the kind of people who spent their careers in coastal harbors. The Tritus was an ocean going ship. She had been built for deep water and the things that lived in it and the enemies that tried to use it.
Two thousand one hundred and ten people lived and worked inside her when she ran at full complement. Soldiers, marines, support crews, sailors. A small city moving across the surface of the sea under a single banner — a golden water dragon on an azure field.
That was the ship that found them.
The lookout called it through the speaking tubes and sounded the alert bells before the words had fully left his mouth. The Tritus slowed and came around to starboard, and a crew detail with marines was sent over the side to bring them aboard.
Their names were Zahran Ishmar Noor and two companions, a mother named Sefiran and daughter named Seriffita who had set sail with him from an island named Saharr that was no longer worth staying on. Their makeshift vessel had taken serious damage in a storm during the crossing. With critical components gone and no land in sight for days afterward. They had to survive based on hope, they fished from the wreckage and waited and somehow kept each other alive long enough for the Tritus to find them. None of them looked like people who had been well for some time when the crew pulled them aboard.
The three of them spent a year aboard the patrol ship before it made port. Naval vessels on these routes didn't simply turn home after an unscheduled rescue. The Tritus needed replacement equipment and authorization before it could return back to shore. The trio had time aboard to recover and to tell their story to anyone who asked, which was most of the crew at one point or another. Sailors on long patrols had few entertainments and three strangers from a place no one had heard of in living memory were as good a distraction as any.
The port they arrived at was the Port City of Ruki in the 9th Region of what the Empire formally designated the Eleanor Special Administrative Zone, previously known as the Fresco League of Kingdoms. The League's old resistance structures had been largely dismantled in the years since integration. The population had moved into the broader sphere of imperial life with the particular pragmatism of people who had been close enough to the Empire geographically to understand there was no realistic alternative. Ruki was a functional, busy port city, the kind of place that moved goods and people without sentiment and absorbed unusual arrivals without much fuss.
The migration office processed the three of them through the standard intake. Someone in the local area still spoke a modified form of their native tongue called Alilibat, close enough to their own Alibbat that communication was possible with a migration officer as intermediary. They were given health checks, fed back to something resembling their normal weight, identified and registered in the system, and briefed on the basics of life in this part of Arkanus.
They were also given language instruction. Imperial Arkelian was the modern national tongue established under Emperor Janus rule after the reunification that formed the Elms-Arkanus Empire, it descended from the older ancestral forms — Ancient Arkanian, the former imperial language, and Old Elmish, the ancestral tongue of House Elms. Their broken early grasp of Arkelian was enough to start navigating with. They were then left to explore what Ruki had to offer.
The city was overwhelming in the way that only a place with close to a hundreds of thousands of living, moving, purposeful people could be to someone who had come from somewhere that no longer had any of those things. The streets were paved and maintained. Merchants moved between stalls. Children ran between adults' legs. Vendors called out to passersby. The smells of cooked food and salt air and livestock and fresh timber all layered over each other in the way that busy cities always smell. The faces were different from their own in ways that went beyond skin tone or mannerism, the whole texture of it was different from anything in their memory.
They stood on those streets and felt joy and grief at the same time and couldn't cleanly separate one from the other. Whatever those cities on their island had once been, they must had been something to akin to whatever this city was now, it was proof that something like what they had lost could have existed before. That was both hopeful and crushing to look at simultaneously.
Their story spread the way unusual stories always did in a port city. Word of mouth first. Then it moved outward with the merchants and the naval personnel who rotated through. By the time it reached Aethelgard and the seat of Emperor Janus, it had been retold enough times that some of the details had shifted but the core of it remained intact. Three people from a distant island kingdom the Empire hadn't had contact with in a thousand years or more.
The Emperor remembered the kingdom of Saharr. Vaguely, from his long reign's accumulated history, but he remembered it. He ordered the trio found and brought to the capital. He wanted to hear what had happened to that place directly, not through a third account.
An expeditionary crew was quietly organized to investigate the island before the meeting. They would confirm the claim independently and bring back their own report. The three from the Tritus were escorted to Aethelgard alongside the local translator who had been helping them since Ruki. The Empire moved on these things methodically. Whatever came from that conversation would shape what they chose to do about a kingdom that had apparently ceased to exist without anyone on the continent noticing until three survivors washed up on a navy patrol ship.
---
The First Thaw
Back in the forest, winter was giving way for spring.
The snow that had blanketed Maya Village's rooftops and paths for the past three to four months was thinning at the edges. The forest around them had never gone fully quiet the way open-country winters could silence a landscape, the trees held too much of the forest's own weather inside them for that. But the particular stillness of the deep cold was lifting. Water was moving again where it had been still. The morning air still had a bite to it but it was a different kind of bite, less settled than it had been in the months prior.
The village shifted with it, from its more idle state back to its vigorous rhythm of warmth and village buzz.
The sound of hammering returned to Zone 4 within days of the visible thaw beginning. The construction crews that had wound down for the coldest stretch were back on site, and the rhythm they had built in the months before winter hit meant they didn't need much of a warm-up period. The experienced builders knew the work. The plans were set. The materials were staged. The additional targets for the year were reasonable given what had been accomplished in the previous run — twenty-five more apartment-style complexes and twenty more longhouses were planned to be completed before the next winter.
The housing expansion wasn't the urgent priority it had been in the year prior. The emergency pace of the refugee period had put enough built capacity in place to absorb the projected growth comfortably. This year the attention could distribute more evenly across the infrastructure that had been paused while housing took all available hands.
Zone 1 had its own activity going. The mountain expansion project that the dwarves had been running continued producing excavated stone from the shafts regardless of surface weather. Some of that material was being redirected for surface construction projects. The carts moved through Zone 1 streets with their loads and the dwarven teams that accompanied them moved with the particular unhurried efficiency of people who had been doing the same job for a very long time and had stopped needing to think about the mechanics of it.
The morning training runs were back on the earlier schedule. August had the group starting before sunrise to stay out of the way of the construction traffic that picked back up with the warmer weather. The village had always taken physical fitness seriously. The returning warmth brought people back to the morning sessions with the energy that the end of a long winter tended to produce in people who had been staying indoors. The visible difference between someone who had been training with the village for six months and someone who had arrived from the Outland Waycamp three weeks ago was not subtle. It showed in the way people moved, how they held their weight, how they recovered from exertion. The village's general population health was something that new arrivals tended to notice within their first few weeks living inside it.
---
The River Settlement Question
The elder council's chamber had a new item on its table that would not resolve quickly.
The discussion concerned a possible water-placed settlement along the great central-western river. The river ran along a route that had historical significance for the region and practical significance for trade. The route that most of the recent refugees had used to reach the village followed the imperial highway that ran parallel to it. August and Andy had used that same road on their first trip outside the village and had stopped at a clearing near the water to rest.
The stretch of land in question sat in a buffer zone that neither Ogind to the north nor Arwen to the south had ever formally claimed. Both kingdoms had borders that arguably met at the middle ground when viewed on a map, but neither claimed the strip between them since there wasn't much land to work with. It made a good choke point to deter each other and both had used it effectively during their war a couple of years ago, but neither had ever tried to formally govern it.
The strip itself was five to ten kilometers wide and roughly three thousand seven hundred kilometers long, running alongside the river route. A strip that thin and that long was geographically awkward to administer. Militarily it was useful only as a buffer. Practically it was just the no-man's land beside the river road that happened to have the imperial highway running through its coastal river stretch. The western edge of the Lonely Forest of Lonelywood ran alongside it for one thousand seven hundred kilometers, and its southern neighbor the Forsaken Ashen Glade Forest extended that border a further two thousand kilometers. The ten-thousand-kilometer figure sometimes referenced was not a literal measurement but a figure of speech that captured why no kingdom had ever seriously tried to claim or administer the full length of it.
That long strip of land was available for anyone to take. That wasn't the hard part. The hard part was the geographical layout of the land itself.
The continent's geography in that region was the result of an ancient split between land masses that had once been connected to the western subcontinent. What were now cliff faces and high plateaus had been continuous ground at some point before the separation. The great river that traders and travelers used had characteristics of something broader than a river in places, more like a strait or a channel, with the body of water coming from the north and southern oceans filling up the spaces created by the land's separation. The result was what we now see, an uneven terrain. High cliffs that drops to water with no gradual slope between them in most places along the route. Accessing the river directly for construction purposes was not straightforward from most angles.
There were exceptions of course. August remembered one from the first trip out, a section where erosion over time had produced a gentler grade down to the waterline, where the ground was accessible and the water was calm. Whether that spot could support a port and the infrastructure surrounding one was a question that required more than memory to answer.
Building lock dam systems to handle elevation differences was technically possible. The Empire had done it in certain regions at enormous expense, millions of imperial orichalcum coins spent to open the river access through raised continental sections. That kind of expenditure was not on the table for a village planning a settlement from its own resources. The realistic option was finding land where the elevation worked naturally, where ships could reach the shore without artificial lift mechanisms, and where the ground was stable enough to build on and defend over the long term.
The strategic value was clear enough to make the difficulty worth investigating. A river settlement with port access would connect Maya Village directly to the trade network that ran along the great central-western river and even to the broader part of the continent. It would reduce dependence on the single stretch of land highway and give the village a second approach to the outside world through water rather than road. It would position them along a route that the Empire, the Xavior Bloc remnant of Arwen, Ogind, and Kirka Village all used. That kind of positioning had compounding value over time.
The council discussed it through the remainder of winter and agreed on the next step. To conduct a survey first and everything else will follow after.