Hold your shivering, and draw close the blankets. Sit and be still, for here is how the world came to be.

	In the beginning, there was nothing but void, fire, and water. In the vast sea of emptiness, its deep crystal depths was the realm called Nadania. It held nothing, and was nothing. To its north rushed sea, Agaelia. Its rough waves were bright as silver and foamed; heavy and salty it rushed west through Nadania. On the south of Nadania, there was the fire: Pyrosyna.

	Nadania, though vast and shapeless offered no resistance to either fire or water, and both forces met. In a crash the universe was filled with a mighty volcanic roar as sea and fire met. The two forces fought one another in violent conflict. Splashed over and under one another in long suffering spasms and devouring. They battled up other one another. With waves of water and fire racing up and up. Waves rose like pillars into the dark sky, as the illumination of the sparks from Pyrosyna shot towards heaven with the screaming and yowling of fire works. In the mad chaos of their battle, the fire got the upper hand as the brilliance of its embers rose into the sky forming flares of stars whose light was hot and boiled the great seat away until it was steam and cloud that softly spread over the battlefield as it quieted and settled. In the wake of either combat were vast deserts of ashen gray landscape illuminated by the weak fires of the stars overhead.

	In the haze the ground cracked and sputtered as the latent hear brooded and fermented. Over distant horizons the endless fire sea of Pyrosyna sputtered and burned on. While opposite the endless depths of Agaelia churned and lashed against the sea. But the vast emptiness was beaten, and the baking embers over head warmed the world. The clouds released from the confrontation rained upon the sooty earth. The rain drops boiled and steaming from the ashen ground and rose again as mist in the sky. The great lashing dunes of the elemental battle were eroded.

	As the dunes flattened, the shoulders of great giants shifted. Lifting their heads from the blackened earth rose the great Blando Pelliedo Grondas, the White Giants. Two by two they emerged from their dunes as the rains washed over them. Standing naked in their great bleak and gray world they looked out at the the new creation of the world and realized its emptiness. They gathered together, and realizing the bleakness of the world sought to build something out of it. They reached to the ashen ground and brushed aside the mud and the slop and pulled out the clay. In their hands they molded and formed, creating the world around them.

	They created great mountains, built celestial palaces. They set to the sea of the north and the fires of the south and laid out great bridges. They brought fire to their mountains and opened forges. They brought water to the troughs and filled great seas. They reached for the stars and brought down great shimmering gemstones and metals which they spun into the veins and bones of great creatures, packed them tight with clay and forged life. They worked with a silent innocence and love for all that they touched and their works filled the sky as it did the ground. They sat at their benches, their heads in vast clouds and hammered into creation great works. In every move they made they put in their love and their life.

	For eons they worked. Until so much of their love and life was spent that the great giants fell back from their tables and died. Their creations mourned them. Their bodies were buried in the great earth. From their bodies came a last creation as they rotted, green life came into existence and astonishment came to the world. The halls of their palaces were filled with luscious forests. The taming of the seas became home to great forests of kelp. And the premier of their creation, the dragons looked down upon it all.

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	The first boot touched the ashen shore with a muffled thud as the long boat came to a stop. Around the sailors an eerie snow was settling over the landscape. Behind them was held a silent sea. A light wind blowing from over the horizon held a gentle lapping of the waves but nothing more as the longboats unloaded unto the shore. For the better part of three days the detachment at open sea had prowled along the coast of this island in search of an ideal landing spot. They had in the end found it at the furthest tip of a great bay, guarded at the one end by a large island. Exhausted and legs wobbly from months at sea the sailors and marines finally once again felt dry land.

	“Santiago.” hailed a sailor. He turned back to the men getting off the boat and in a dour tone spoke, “Once you get your land legs back take a group of men and scout the surrounding area, establish a picket.”

	The sailor, dressed in a loose fitting shirt and a leather tunic nodded. He leaned on the long pole of a pike as he staggered ahead a short distance and fell down in the cold sand to rest. Moving quickly the commanding sailor helped men and equipment get onto land, pulling the boats further ashore so what little tide there was would not pull them again out to sea. After several minutes passed of walking and stretching many of the marines and sailors were just losing their sea legs and a patrol was sent out. Many of the others moved by habit to move up to the dunes and highland overlooking the beach to find cover from the elements in the immense oaks, mangrove, and fading palms of the shore line.

	Things moved along as more and more boats landed ashore. The commanding sailor fell in with a recovering group of men as they helped them along. From these boats came various ill and famished sailors, pale as a winter's gale and their gums bleeding. Scurvy. Helped by the doctors and surgeons of the ship they were moved up on their stretchers to the high beach where they laid out and a fire lit to keep them warm.

	“If we do not find some fruit soon, I fear for them, don.” said a surgeon in gray formality, “They are well advanced.”

	Scurvy was by no means an unknown ailment, or one hard to treat. Everyone knew this. But it lifted a weight off the old surgeons chest as he brushed his graying bird and turned to look back to the sea. Adrift in steel gray waters still as a mirror's edge sat five immense hulks. Three packed levels of canon deck and perhaps enough stores to sail around the world, though none have thought to try it; many things aboard a ship has a tendency of going sour. But he looked at those boats not as a promise for some great deal or potential but as a nursery for plague and disease which had long haunted them over their trip no matter how much they tried to chase it off with gunpowder and burning incense. Of the original number of the crew, fifteen to forty men each aboard each ship had died many more convalesced by one disease or another, least of them was scurvy. There were plenty more aboard the dank decks feared too sick to move still.

	“I already put out the orders for a patrol. If we find any fruit in the area they'll be the first to receive it.”

	The surgeon nodded and his eyes shone with a hint of gratefulness. He wandered off to tend to his patients as the commanding sailor stood to look out at the operations coming to shore.

	Many things were coming to order. It had to, the officers of the fleet had spent the last two days making a plan of operations for when they would find a suitable spot. They had sailed past plenty of coast and wave-breaking cliffs since finding this land. They knew little of what might possibly be here, though more than a few ruins of fortresses seemed to have been perched high above the ocean cliffs. Their walls looked as sturdy and bleak as the gray granite escarpments that met the waves. On this island though they did not see much of the sort from the sea.

	From the great boats was launched one more longboat. The sailor stood erect and crossed his hands behind his back as he saw it make its approach. A great red banner flew from it. A golden canopy covered the hull. He could see the shine of full armor dress as the men aboard shone in the eerie low sunlight. The oars of the boat beat at the waves as it crawled in towards the shore where the men now were working. The sounds of axes struck the breezy air and the first trees were beginning to gall. Clearing was under way and soon would rise the first of the tents. The sailor knew a number of engineers would be at work surveying the area to begin work on initial fortifications; who knew what lived in this land with them now.

	As the dressed boat neared close to shore the sailor stepped back onto the beach and towards the wash to greet it. He came up to the waves just as its bow hit the shore and the first armored boots sunk into the moistened gravel and sand. The wood growled as it pulled across the wave washed pebbles as the men aboard stepped out. The sailor bowed low to the commanding figure who stepped onto land.

	“Don deGrand.” the sailor greeted the tall lithe figure under the wide brim of a flapping hat, struck with a long gray feather, “Welcome to a whole new world.”

	The lithe man, his skin sun kissed and his features sharp and emaciated through hardened stretched skin smiled down at his officer through bright blue eyes. “The pleasure is yours.” he said softly, “You were the first to land.”

	Laughing the two grabbed each other by the forearm and pulled each other close. Sir Gabraldi, or Domi Gabraldi Samprosio SantoSillisia DiCorlone gazed out expectantly at the land they had come to. His eyes were filled with the religious fervor of finding the moon and setting it free again, where ever it might be. This land, he thought to himself as he scanned the shore looked as though in better times it would have been a tropical paradise full of heavenly birds with the potential for much wealth. But under current conditions, the mood was dampened and the possibilities were scant. He may be able to put potatoes and corn into the ground and expect to feed his men with that much. But to again taste coffee and rich Sanerican Oranges were a luxury long dormant even now. Men lived, but they did not thrive. All were forced to be monks. These days were good for Heaven, to receive so many pure souls who did not need to wade the fires of Hell for so long to clear their souls and minds before they stood on the gates of eternal resplendence or blissful reincarnation. But what joy was there in the meantime, except drunkenness or suicide?

	In contrast to the lithe gentleness of Domi Gabraldi was his minor officer, the commanding sailor Fussolino Falango Rumero diCapal. A short stacked figure whose graying features were bruised and scared from a number of fights and scuffles on the grand endeavor he was on. His black beard salted with hints of white and gray and growing wild. His pale gray eyes shaded under the visor of his polished helmet. He wore his musket on his back, a long precise Perto sword at his hip on which rested a heavy gloved hand, while at the other hung a pouch of already wrapped packs of powder and shot.

	The two strolled together up the beach as sailors and marines worked around them. On their expedition they had acquired many different hands. The expedition itself was no longer simply one from and for Sandovarra. While the king still financed the effort, even more so as it produced tribute for his court, manning it was no longer a prerogative of the court itself. Disgraced nobles or overzealous schemers still come to the expedition to seek redemption, but they do not fill the entire ranks. From shore to shore the expedition established many foot holds, or many offices and consulates in foreign lands. Under the red-gold dragon banner of the King of Sandovarra many were offered council or guidance, or hooked fully into the expedition as it seized principalities for trying to excise it. As such, the laboring hands of the expedition were numerous in size and shape. Men and women blue-blooded and not came to be a part of the expedition and they toiled and labored here on the beach to set the next step in its long mission. Children even had been born to it, and these Expediodarra helped pull the labor, doing the simple things.

	Fires were lit to help against the alien biting chill and the two officers surveyed their future encampment. Gabraldi was pleased to see they had found such an ideal bay. The distant small island at its mouth was not far off either and could be seen as a thin strip behind the great masted ships. At a future point, such an island would become an ideal location for fortifications. From that point guns could look out over the steel gray waters and hold off hostile ships. In a more ambitious future, a chain might be pulled up from the sea to seal the water off and break the hull of any hostile vessel seeking to land in their bay. And from the inland they were guarded by the forests and wilderness where any attacking army would have to struggle against first before he could muster an army to hold them at land. The site of a river mouth opening into the sea opening the potential for an inland route for any advanced detachments sent inland. He counted up his possibilities, and thanking the divines that there was nothing yet to contest their presence. A more perfect position he could not think of. 

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Orders? Uhhh... I guess whatever is needed to start things off.
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