Iter de ex Condemnabitur
/ˈiːtɚ ▪ deɪ ▪ ɛks ▪ kənˈneɪ̯.biːtɜ/
Phrase, From Ancient Siscian
1.Ancient Siscian phrase popular among soldiers and especially sailors, literally translated as Voyage of the Damned.
2.A popular expression in late-Lynlander and early-Novan culture for anyone undertaking a hopeless quest.
3.An ancient proverb of Siscian sailors and their descendants indicating that mortal danger lies ahead; a cursed voyage.
V O Y A G EOF THED A M N E D
The Marcotte, the Triumph, and the Tragedy of the Krieger-Loving Expedition
The Kingdom of the Lynlanders, 1322
It is a period of great wealth and glory in the Kingdom, the Golden Age of the Heroes of Exploration.
Ever since Sir Winfirth Ealdwin Moulton's famed landing on Terra Incognita in April 1315, the titans of Lynlander society had been hard at work pouring immeasurable resources into building bigger and faster ships, eager to set sail on the dangerous waters of the Corian Sea, hoping to find their riches in the hinterlands of the world. Shipyards in Hawksmouth, Port Townes and Veronica's Landing are brimming with coin and laborers, laboring day and night to fulfill the commissions of the nobility, the wealthy, and the landed gentry seeking their piece of the pie.
Overnight, brave and courageous souls win for themselves great glory and fame scouring the Earth for new land to claim for the Kingdom, making their names famous overnight: Alves-Muir, Elizondo, Lunceford, Loewes, Ricci. The public hungers for new adventure and new heroes to worship; their cravings cannot be satiated, and the desire for fame and fortune leads many to volunteer to sail into the unknown, where unknown fates tempt the vigilant and curse the wicked. For every successful voyage into the fathoms of the ocean blue, four voyages end in disaster.
But the greatest prize, the most tempting and the most dangerous remains the first claim, the wondrous claim, the land now christened with the namesake of its discoverer, Moultonsland. Three different expeditions featuring the Kingdom's best and brightest had set out for the vast, untamed wilderness of the new colony; all three had failed to meet their objectives, their crews facing mortal peril on each trip. But even the deadliest, most forsaken of living Hells could not stop the dreamers from looking west to the horizon from the safety of civilization.
The cunning and wise Philosopher-King, Stuart IV needs to mount a successful expedition to Moultonsland before his political rivals attempt to lay siege to the vast claim. Two wealthy-yet-untested noblemen step forward to accept the King's challenge: the Baron Bordelón, Carlton Bradbury Krieger and his partner Sir Autry Hynes Loving, Thane of Olde Norfleet. Though they lack formal experience adventuring, both have the financial wherewithal to fully fund a well-provisioned expedition to the remote Moultonsland colony.
Together, the two noblemen propose an expedition so bold in scope, the King cannot refuse them their charter: sail through the treacherous Straits of Isurium into the vast, inland Corieltauvorum Sea, berthing in the far north along the largely-unexplored Ferraterras coast. There, they will trek overland through the Andreanae Mountains, hoping to clear the passes before winter arrives, opening the way to the icy fjords of the Ora Praestrictus, the "Frozen Coast". If they can rendezvous with their relief ship, the Dragonsfire in the far north, their conquest would be the greatest of all.
Before their journey can begin however, they must first find a seasoned expeditioner to lead their trek into the perilous wildlands of Moulton's claim. Someone that can help them achieve the immortality they so lavishly crave. The man they choose for the job is a veteran explorer, one of only a handful of men to have walked on the shores of Moultonsland and returned to tell the tale. With his experience in the territory, Krieger and Loving believe that their expedition will succeed beyond their wildest dreams if their choice for Captain of the Host pays off.
Though they do not know it yet, their survival would hinge on their fateful choice for a leader,
into whose hands their lives would soon fall, lost in the wilderness of the unknown.
Link to A Historical Factbook on the Krieger-Loving Expedition [WIP]
(Warning, Spoilers Contained Within!)
Ever since Sir Winfirth Ealdwin Moulton's famed landing on Terra Incognita in April 1315, the titans of Lynlander society had been hard at work pouring immeasurable resources into building bigger and faster ships, eager to set sail on the dangerous waters of the Corian Sea, hoping to find their riches in the hinterlands of the world. Shipyards in Hawksmouth, Port Townes and Veronica's Landing are brimming with coin and laborers, laboring day and night to fulfill the commissions of the nobility, the wealthy, and the landed gentry seeking their piece of the pie.
Overnight, brave and courageous souls win for themselves great glory and fame scouring the Earth for new land to claim for the Kingdom, making their names famous overnight: Alves-Muir, Elizondo, Lunceford, Loewes, Ricci. The public hungers for new adventure and new heroes to worship; their cravings cannot be satiated, and the desire for fame and fortune leads many to volunteer to sail into the unknown, where unknown fates tempt the vigilant and curse the wicked. For every successful voyage into the fathoms of the ocean blue, four voyages end in disaster.
But the greatest prize, the most tempting and the most dangerous remains the first claim, the wondrous claim, the land now christened with the namesake of its discoverer, Moultonsland. Three different expeditions featuring the Kingdom's best and brightest had set out for the vast, untamed wilderness of the new colony; all three had failed to meet their objectives, their crews facing mortal peril on each trip. But even the deadliest, most forsaken of living Hells could not stop the dreamers from looking west to the horizon from the safety of civilization.
The cunning and wise Philosopher-King, Stuart IV needs to mount a successful expedition to Moultonsland before his political rivals attempt to lay siege to the vast claim. Two wealthy-yet-untested noblemen step forward to accept the King's challenge: the Baron Bordelón, Carlton Bradbury Krieger and his partner Sir Autry Hynes Loving, Thane of Olde Norfleet. Though they lack formal experience adventuring, both have the financial wherewithal to fully fund a well-provisioned expedition to the remote Moultonsland colony.
Together, the two noblemen propose an expedition so bold in scope, the King cannot refuse them their charter: sail through the treacherous Straits of Isurium into the vast, inland Corieltauvorum Sea, berthing in the far north along the largely-unexplored Ferraterras coast. There, they will trek overland through the Andreanae Mountains, hoping to clear the passes before winter arrives, opening the way to the icy fjords of the Ora Praestrictus, the "Frozen Coast". If they can rendezvous with their relief ship, the Dragonsfire in the far north, their conquest would be the greatest of all.
Before their journey can begin however, they must first find a seasoned expeditioner to lead their trek into the perilous wildlands of Moulton's claim. Someone that can help them achieve the immortality they so lavishly crave. The man they choose for the job is a veteran explorer, one of only a handful of men to have walked on the shores of Moultonsland and returned to tell the tale. With his experience in the territory, Krieger and Loving believe that their expedition will succeed beyond their wildest dreams if their choice for Captain of the Host pays off.
Though they do not know it yet, their survival would hinge on their fateful choice for a leader,
into whose hands their lives would soon fall, lost in the wilderness of the unknown.
Link to A Historical Factbook on the Krieger-Loving Expedition [WIP]
(Warning, Spoilers Contained Within!)
Chapter I: An Unholy Proposition
Friday, June the 12th, 1322 CE
Westswold, Tammany Province
The Kingdom of the Lynlanders
For a man whose reputation was renowned amongst his peers for his exemplary service under Sir Winfirth Moulton during his second expedition, the daring Captain Stearns had a rather-raffish streak about him. It had taken Hubert Grissom most of the afternoon tracking the good Captain on his trek through every malodorous alehouse and tawdry house of ill-repute along the wharf; every step further into the seediness of it all made him all the more thankful his young bride-to-be was several hundred kilometers away out of sight – and screaming distance – back in Towcester. If she knew that he was scampering through unsightly taverns and seedy brothels, Grissom stood a decent chance of having his manhood cashiered against his will. Even now, the thought of a vengeful fiancé lent speed to his efforts, as if the stink of the wharf would somehow permeate him and give the game away upon his return home. The whole wretched city was accursed; to him, letting it slide into the seaside would be doing it and the Kingdom a favor.
Though he had expected to meet Captain Stearns at a hostel up on Hoy Bluff overlooking the malapropos hive known as the Port of Westswold, his day instead had been spent following the tales of the Captain’s exploits at every haunt by the sea. He had rapidly begun losing hope of even laying sight on the man before the helpful matron of a… palace of untoward companionship and kindly interspersed an expletive-laced rant with his presumed whereabouts before concluding with a request for Grissom to take his ceremonial shortsword to Stearns’s nape repeatedly. Surely, no finer recommendation for a vitally important expedition for national honor and prestige could a sailor receive than earning death threats from the proprietor of a lowly whorehouse in a scum-ridden harbor town. Between that and risking drowning by falling drunken off naval rum stores in the middle of the open sea, what other mark of high honor could an esteemed officer of the Lynlander Navy hope to achieve in his long and arduous career?
From what he knew of the man, Stearns’s career as a naval commander had been quite sterling, making his sudden odyssey through the bowels of society all the more perplexing. He had been a career officer from the jump, earning his commission through the patronage of his father, part of the landed gentry in Kylshire. As a young ensign serving aboard the Terrapin under Commodore Beaudoin, he had distinguished himself as a capable sailor and masterful junior officer. He quickly found prominence as a lieutenant aboard Captain Bertrand McClintock's newly-berthed corvette, the Faison Heinz, serving as one of his watch officers. For a short time prior to his promotion to First Officer, Grissom had actually served under Stearns’s watch on the Faison Heinz. His reputation was likened to that of any other competent watch officer: a skilled sailor and sound tactician who had earned the confidence and respect of his compliment, but who was still an officer and thus a world removed from the petty officers and the seamen he was commanding.
Grissom scowled, unable to hide his disgust; his odyssey through the bowels of Hell’s earthly enclave had brought him to a narrow alleyway between two mead halls, the befouled smooth stones and casks smelling of urine and despair. If his interpretation of the madam’s directions were true – and God take him if they were not – he would come upon his final destination, a small hostelry near the wharf’s largest bathhouse serving grog and other impure elixirs that were probably dirtier than the rotgut served aboard Lynlander capital ships. As he carefully tip-toed around soiled refuse in the narrow passageway, the thought occurred to him that he may not have asked for a large-enough bounty for undertaking this quest. His patrons were certainly wealthy enough to afford a higher salary, though at this point Grissom was willing to concede that no salary may be high enough to warrant streaking through piss-soaked avenues, dodging human filth as he went. No gentleman would debase himself to undertaking such a mission willingly–
“Only a fool or a damned fool would come into Westswold wearing a neckcloth and waistcoat,” a coarse, gravelly voice bellowed from up ahead, just as Grissom came through the back end of the alleyway. His search for the speaker did not take very long; he was perched on a rickety wooden chair, its wobbly legs lifted up off the ground with the occupant leaning back, causing the chair to tilt off the sidewalk. His cadence was broken only by a sip from a bronze flagon. “Officers in His Majesty’s Grand Navy could be flogged for bringing disrepute upon their ships and its command, Lieutenant.”
Unable to refrain from sneaking a glance down at his neatly pressed officer’s coat and other assorted paraphernalia betraying his profession and rank, Grissom quickly turned his attention to the erstwhile-Isaac Stearns, captain and explorer-extraordinaire. He matched both the description given of him and his own personal memory of the man to a ‘T’ – barrel chested with wide, broad shoulders and silvery, cropped hair. Steely blue eyes that seemed to pierce the skin with their intensity were the most prominent feature on his face, aside from unshaven scruff that would have gotten him reprimanded were he still on active duty. Coupled with a few more wrinkles, the most glaring difference between the officer he knew and the man now sitting before him was his unkempt appearance; wearing something akin to a flannel tunic that was partially stained with liquor and partially girded with some sort of sash with more stew on it than decorative tassels, Stearns more closely resembled a peasant farmer than an officer of noble birth. His sun-kissed skin and unwashed hair were quite unflattering as well.
“You are most elusive prey, Captain Stearns,” Grissom chided in partial frustration and mild indignation; the fact that he had spent most of the blessed day chasing down what appeared to be a drunkard at best and a vagabond at worst was a most disappointing conclusion to his excursion. “I was informed that you were aware of my arrival this day to Westswold, and that you were to meet with Lieutenant Hubert Grissom at Lady Boothe’s manor for an audience with a most important proposition to discuss? Chasing you through your trail of jocular miscreance around Hell’s half-acre by the wharf was quite the ordeal, sir.”
“Isaac, not Captain,” Stearns corrected him bluntly, taking another swig from his mug before continuing. “I lost that privilege when they politely ushered me ashore to an early retirement, relegating me to interminable days spent wasting my inheritance on baser proclivities in my little empyrean garden here,” he motioned towards the debauched port city around him, letting out a curt laugh before taking the last swig of his grog. He sat the empty mug down on the small end table beside him, his demeanor suddenly stiffening. “I never intended to meet with you at Lady Boothe’s manor, Lieutenant. I would have assumed my absence there this morning would have indicated my disinterest. I must congratulate you on your tracking skills, though, Mr. Grissom; had I known you were part bloodhound, I would have made myself more difficult to find.”
“Hubert, please,” Grissom corrected Stearns, a small morsel of satisfaction to return the Captain’s snark in kind. “Though my close acquaintances tend to call me Hugh, which is acceptable to me under the circumstances.”
“Hmm, a watch officer named ‘Hugh’? The King’s Navy has become more lax in its standards than I thought,” Isaac smirked, folding his arms across his chest. “Of course, I do not mean to disparage you or your esteemed talent as an officer of the Grand Navy, sir.”
Grissom shook his head, trying hard to suppress a slight grin. “You may not remember me sir, but we once served together aboard the Faison Heinz. I was a boatswain assigned to your watch, about a month or so before you assumed the executive officer’s position aboard the Endurance.”
With no subtlety whatsoever, Stearns’s demeanor immediately flipped; he leaned forward in his chair, the pegged legs smacking the stone with an audible thump. A sudden intensity appeared in his pinched features, so much so that Grissom was suddenly quite uncomfortable. “Were you one of those heathen degenerates that shirked his duty on every watch, attempting to humiliate the officers cast above him by fluke of birth, vengeful at having been birthed from the womb of a woman unworthy of being impregnated by a man of reputable esteem, earning such contempt as to nearly drive me to grab you by the stones and cast you into the ocean with a millstone moored through your scrotum?”
Grissom stared blankly at the incensed man. “Um… no sir?”
The old captain held his glare for a pause, then bellowed in deep, rumbling laughter. He slapped his knee, frivolously waving the Lieutenant off. “Ah! Then it is a most jubilant day, indeed! I always enjoy meeting former charges of mine, learning of what became of them. From a warrant officer to a commissioned Lieutenant is no easy task, Mr. Grissom. You have my earnest and most candid respect; if you would permit me to be pretensionless, it is no small feat to earn a commission in the King’s Navy. You actually honor me with your career advancement; it means I must have done my job well enough at some point.”
“I always thought so,” Grissom added, belaboring the point in a plain attempt to ride Stearns’s diffusing of stiffness and tension. “Given your considerable reputation, I always counted it an honor to have served under you. It was a privilege while I served under your watch, and it remains a privilege now. To have been under the watch of Captain Isaac Stearns does quite a bit for your credibility with new commanding officers looking for competency amongst the rank and file. I pray you find that an acceptable condition of having learned under your tutelage, sir.”
Isaac admired Grissom’s earnestness and integrity, slowly letting his posturing subside. He leaned back in his chair more casually this time, inviting him over towards his seat by the hostelry doorway under the makeshift awning. “Well then, Mr. Grissom; to what do I owe the pleasure of an audience with an esteemed envoy of the Grand Navy? What news of the King’s Business do you bring for a retired skipper this fine day?”
“Actually, sir,” Grissom interjected, “I am on detached service from His Majesty’s Grand Navy at present. I am currently in the service of a pair of noblemen who are seeking to employ your services for a most noble undertaking.”
“Serving as a shipmaster on some trawler in the Corian, trying to pad their bottom lines I suppose?” Stearns chortled, waving his flagon through the doorway towards the proprietor as if to request a refill. “Sorry, Mr. Grissom, but I’m no whaler. They will have to find some other seadog to go hunt blubber all day.”
“Of course sir,” Hubert responded. “They would never approach a man of such rapport with anything so menial or unbecoming of your station as an officer and a gentleman.
“Hmm, you have me at a loss then, sir,” Isaac confessed, holding his mug up for the young waitress that emerged from the hostelry with a fresh pitcher. “What, pray tell, do these two noblemen desire of me?”
Grissom’s voice was unwavering. “They want you to lead them to Moultonsland.”
Though he had expected to meet Captain Stearns at a hostel up on Hoy Bluff overlooking the malapropos hive known as the Port of Westswold, his day instead had been spent following the tales of the Captain’s exploits at every haunt by the sea. He had rapidly begun losing hope of even laying sight on the man before the helpful matron of a… palace of untoward companionship and kindly interspersed an expletive-laced rant with his presumed whereabouts before concluding with a request for Grissom to take his ceremonial shortsword to Stearns’s nape repeatedly. Surely, no finer recommendation for a vitally important expedition for national honor and prestige could a sailor receive than earning death threats from the proprietor of a lowly whorehouse in a scum-ridden harbor town. Between that and risking drowning by falling drunken off naval rum stores in the middle of the open sea, what other mark of high honor could an esteemed officer of the Lynlander Navy hope to achieve in his long and arduous career?
From what he knew of the man, Stearns’s career as a naval commander had been quite sterling, making his sudden odyssey through the bowels of society all the more perplexing. He had been a career officer from the jump, earning his commission through the patronage of his father, part of the landed gentry in Kylshire. As a young ensign serving aboard the Terrapin under Commodore Beaudoin, he had distinguished himself as a capable sailor and masterful junior officer. He quickly found prominence as a lieutenant aboard Captain Bertrand McClintock's newly-berthed corvette, the Faison Heinz, serving as one of his watch officers. For a short time prior to his promotion to First Officer, Grissom had actually served under Stearns’s watch on the Faison Heinz. His reputation was likened to that of any other competent watch officer: a skilled sailor and sound tactician who had earned the confidence and respect of his compliment, but who was still an officer and thus a world removed from the petty officers and the seamen he was commanding.
Grissom scowled, unable to hide his disgust; his odyssey through the bowels of Hell’s earthly enclave had brought him to a narrow alleyway between two mead halls, the befouled smooth stones and casks smelling of urine and despair. If his interpretation of the madam’s directions were true – and God take him if they were not – he would come upon his final destination, a small hostelry near the wharf’s largest bathhouse serving grog and other impure elixirs that were probably dirtier than the rotgut served aboard Lynlander capital ships. As he carefully tip-toed around soiled refuse in the narrow passageway, the thought occurred to him that he may not have asked for a large-enough bounty for undertaking this quest. His patrons were certainly wealthy enough to afford a higher salary, though at this point Grissom was willing to concede that no salary may be high enough to warrant streaking through piss-soaked avenues, dodging human filth as he went. No gentleman would debase himself to undertaking such a mission willingly–
“Only a fool or a damned fool would come into Westswold wearing a neckcloth and waistcoat,” a coarse, gravelly voice bellowed from up ahead, just as Grissom came through the back end of the alleyway. His search for the speaker did not take very long; he was perched on a rickety wooden chair, its wobbly legs lifted up off the ground with the occupant leaning back, causing the chair to tilt off the sidewalk. His cadence was broken only by a sip from a bronze flagon. “Officers in His Majesty’s Grand Navy could be flogged for bringing disrepute upon their ships and its command, Lieutenant.”
Unable to refrain from sneaking a glance down at his neatly pressed officer’s coat and other assorted paraphernalia betraying his profession and rank, Grissom quickly turned his attention to the erstwhile-Isaac Stearns, captain and explorer-extraordinaire. He matched both the description given of him and his own personal memory of the man to a ‘T’ – barrel chested with wide, broad shoulders and silvery, cropped hair. Steely blue eyes that seemed to pierce the skin with their intensity were the most prominent feature on his face, aside from unshaven scruff that would have gotten him reprimanded were he still on active duty. Coupled with a few more wrinkles, the most glaring difference between the officer he knew and the man now sitting before him was his unkempt appearance; wearing something akin to a flannel tunic that was partially stained with liquor and partially girded with some sort of sash with more stew on it than decorative tassels, Stearns more closely resembled a peasant farmer than an officer of noble birth. His sun-kissed skin and unwashed hair were quite unflattering as well.
“You are most elusive prey, Captain Stearns,” Grissom chided in partial frustration and mild indignation; the fact that he had spent most of the blessed day chasing down what appeared to be a drunkard at best and a vagabond at worst was a most disappointing conclusion to his excursion. “I was informed that you were aware of my arrival this day to Westswold, and that you were to meet with Lieutenant Hubert Grissom at Lady Boothe’s manor for an audience with a most important proposition to discuss? Chasing you through your trail of jocular miscreance around Hell’s half-acre by the wharf was quite the ordeal, sir.”
“Isaac, not Captain,” Stearns corrected him bluntly, taking another swig from his mug before continuing. “I lost that privilege when they politely ushered me ashore to an early retirement, relegating me to interminable days spent wasting my inheritance on baser proclivities in my little empyrean garden here,” he motioned towards the debauched port city around him, letting out a curt laugh before taking the last swig of his grog. He sat the empty mug down on the small end table beside him, his demeanor suddenly stiffening. “I never intended to meet with you at Lady Boothe’s manor, Lieutenant. I would have assumed my absence there this morning would have indicated my disinterest. I must congratulate you on your tracking skills, though, Mr. Grissom; had I known you were part bloodhound, I would have made myself more difficult to find.”
“Hubert, please,” Grissom corrected Stearns, a small morsel of satisfaction to return the Captain’s snark in kind. “Though my close acquaintances tend to call me Hugh, which is acceptable to me under the circumstances.”
“Hmm, a watch officer named ‘Hugh’? The King’s Navy has become more lax in its standards than I thought,” Isaac smirked, folding his arms across his chest. “Of course, I do not mean to disparage you or your esteemed talent as an officer of the Grand Navy, sir.”
Grissom shook his head, trying hard to suppress a slight grin. “You may not remember me sir, but we once served together aboard the Faison Heinz. I was a boatswain assigned to your watch, about a month or so before you assumed the executive officer’s position aboard the Endurance.”
With no subtlety whatsoever, Stearns’s demeanor immediately flipped; he leaned forward in his chair, the pegged legs smacking the stone with an audible thump. A sudden intensity appeared in his pinched features, so much so that Grissom was suddenly quite uncomfortable. “Were you one of those heathen degenerates that shirked his duty on every watch, attempting to humiliate the officers cast above him by fluke of birth, vengeful at having been birthed from the womb of a woman unworthy of being impregnated by a man of reputable esteem, earning such contempt as to nearly drive me to grab you by the stones and cast you into the ocean with a millstone moored through your scrotum?”
Grissom stared blankly at the incensed man. “Um… no sir?”
The old captain held his glare for a pause, then bellowed in deep, rumbling laughter. He slapped his knee, frivolously waving the Lieutenant off. “Ah! Then it is a most jubilant day, indeed! I always enjoy meeting former charges of mine, learning of what became of them. From a warrant officer to a commissioned Lieutenant is no easy task, Mr. Grissom. You have my earnest and most candid respect; if you would permit me to be pretensionless, it is no small feat to earn a commission in the King’s Navy. You actually honor me with your career advancement; it means I must have done my job well enough at some point.”
“I always thought so,” Grissom added, belaboring the point in a plain attempt to ride Stearns’s diffusing of stiffness and tension. “Given your considerable reputation, I always counted it an honor to have served under you. It was a privilege while I served under your watch, and it remains a privilege now. To have been under the watch of Captain Isaac Stearns does quite a bit for your credibility with new commanding officers looking for competency amongst the rank and file. I pray you find that an acceptable condition of having learned under your tutelage, sir.”
Isaac admired Grissom’s earnestness and integrity, slowly letting his posturing subside. He leaned back in his chair more casually this time, inviting him over towards his seat by the hostelry doorway under the makeshift awning. “Well then, Mr. Grissom; to what do I owe the pleasure of an audience with an esteemed envoy of the Grand Navy? What news of the King’s Business do you bring for a retired skipper this fine day?”
“Actually, sir,” Grissom interjected, “I am on detached service from His Majesty’s Grand Navy at present. I am currently in the service of a pair of noblemen who are seeking to employ your services for a most noble undertaking.”
“Serving as a shipmaster on some trawler in the Corian, trying to pad their bottom lines I suppose?” Stearns chortled, waving his flagon through the doorway towards the proprietor as if to request a refill. “Sorry, Mr. Grissom, but I’m no whaler. They will have to find some other seadog to go hunt blubber all day.”
“Of course sir,” Hubert responded. “They would never approach a man of such rapport with anything so menial or unbecoming of your station as an officer and a gentleman.
“Hmm, you have me at a loss then, sir,” Isaac confessed, holding his mug up for the young waitress that emerged from the hostelry with a fresh pitcher. “What, pray tell, do these two noblemen desire of me?”
Grissom’s voice was unwavering. “They want you to lead them to Moultonsland.”
✦
Though it had only been a short while, time was passing like the sand in an hourglass, ebbing slowly enough to allow the entire conversation to play out a dozen times in his head. For a long moment, Isaac had slowly paced back and forth in the alley, trying his damnedest not to bash his skull in against the alley wall – not so much because of the offer made, but because he was, in his relative stupor, considering it. Ever since he had returned from that infernal land, there had been an implicit promise made within himself that he would never put himself in such a position again, that he would never find his way into such mortal danger. It was the loss of his edge that had led to his reassignment and eventual release from His Majesty’s Navy. And now, because his entire adult life had been spent on the water, robbing him of any useful skills other than drinking himself into an early grave, the prospect of returning to the wilds for a kingly ransom and some sort of archaic ritual of redemption was making him reassess his own convictions. It was, in its own special way, maddening.
Moultonsland was far from the only unclaimed territory he had explored while in the service, but it was certainly the most remote. Isaac shuddered involuntarily, remembering the harrowing crossing of the ocean needed just to get there. When he had ventured out with Winfirth on the Coldstream, the violent storms the frigate had encountered were very nearly enough to turn the expedition back on their own. Just landing at Moultonsland was enough of a challenge, let alone surviving with no real support once you made your way inland. The lowlands were safe enough to forage and hunt in, but the mountains were damn-near impossible to cut your way through. At the higher elevations, winter arrived months earlier than down near the coast, making the timing of any trek there critical. If you were strong enough to make it over the range and back down to the inland sea, miles and miles of thick underbrush and dangerous wildlife were waiting to meet you. Moultonsland had no shortage of ways to make a man's significant other a widow before their time.
“No, not again, no thank you,” the old captain muttered to no one in particular, throwing his clenched fist onto the lid of a rum cask in the alley, wincing at the pain. No one had perished on the expedition, but the trip had been so harrowing, even the great Winfirth Moulton himself vowed never to go back. Their supplies had been exhausted long before they reached the relief ship moored off the coast; it was only through dumb luck that a scouting party had found them trying to portage their way through interminable thickets and deep virgin forests. They had been without foodstuffs for almost five days and no potable water in two; had the scouting party not found them, it would have been another week and a half just to get out of the thicket and onto more manageable terrain down to the tidal flats and the relief ship Endeavour. With almost no freshwater sources in their vicinity, there was almost certainly bound to be no one left to return home from the expedition. The team would have surely perished in the wilds, their bones left to be picked clean by scavengers in that morbid Hell.
Isaac’s thoughts drifted to one of their younger porters on the trip, and how he had nearly been mauled to death by a brown bear and shuddered again. His scalp had nearly been torn clean off, and were it not for the skill of the expedition's physician, he would have died there on the mountain slope in the alpine woodlands. Something as simple as a foraging trip was nearly enough to steal the life from an unwitting soul, and now Mr. Grissom and his wealthy benefactors wanted him to return there, a little older and a lot less nimble than he had been during his time as a sailor. Unless he intended to return to Moultonsland to die and end his wretched retirement, there was little purpose in sailing back to those cruel, forboding wilds. After all, what good was the financial bounty of a trip of exploration if you were dead long before you were able to return and reap the spoils? No, he had had his fill of flirting with death, and would easily pass on this trip. There were far more efficient ways for one to spend their time in misery than sailing to the waking perdition that was Moultonsland.
"Like turning yourself into a raging alcoholic here in Westswold," Isaac again muttered to no one in particular. And herein lied his great challenge; trying to justify remaining in Lynland with no prospects and no future, pissing away his inheritance at a blinding rate drinking cheap rum and carousing with fair maidens of questionable moral character. Traveling to Moultonsland at the head of another expedition of "discovery", especially one trying to head further north than even Winfirth had dared trek was nigh-suicidal, but so too was waiting around to die in this piss-soaked corner of existence. And as strong as his survival instinct was, his desire to find some modicum of respectability again after his long confinement to port was gnawing at him. If there was somehow a fate worse than starving to death on a craggy mountain thousands of miles from civilization, it was rotting away in civilization, shedding any remaining respectability from his days at the helm of a mighty warship, becoming nothing more than a dirty beggar who had drained his life away in wretched excesses.
Isaac cursed under his breath, the conflict within him tantamount to a no-win proposition. His mind kept drifting back to his conversation with Lieutenant Grissom, his thoughts hanging on every word as if he were perpetually reliving the moment from minutes past...
"Captain, if anyone could help the team navigate its way through uncharted lands, it would certainly be you! As someone that has already been there–"
"Yes, you're right," Isaac had angrily cut him off, "I have already been there. I have done my tour in Hell, thank you very much!"
"–As someone that has alraedy been there, you are our first choice to lead this expedition," Grissom had continued, bristling at Stearns and his sudden hostility. "The journey may be a dangerous one, but we are taking every precaution imaginable to make sure that this trip will end in success. We have studied the accounts of the expeditions already made to that wild country and learned of the mistakes that were made. We would never endeavor to make the same errors that nearly befell our predecessors, that much is a given."
“Of course!” Isaac replied incredulously, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “What idiot sets off across the damn world to go and die in the wilds? You never anticipate the mistake that almost gets you killed, otherwise you would never put yourself in the position to begin with!”
“Sir, I beseech you, please,” Grissom answered, his own voice raised. “We need your help! This mission is of vital importance to the Kingdom, and to all of us that have signed on. If our expedition is to have the best chance to succeed where the others have failed, we need the best to guide the rest. And you sir, you are our best hope for glory.”
Isaac spat on the ground, drawing faint disgust from the Lieutenant. “Glory, what a crock! Personal glory means little if you are unable to reap the rewards from it, Mr. Grissom. Your sun-bleached carcass has little use for glory; it has little use for anything, except as a late meal for a bear or a pack of wolves. That is where your quest for glory will end up.”
“Damn you, sir!” Grissom finally broke, the frustration that had been festering under the surface boiling over like a raging tempest. “Where is your honor? Where is the glorious Captain Stearns, the man that turned sailing into the unknown into an exquisite artform? You may share his name, but you are no Captain Stearns, sir. The man I knew would have laughed in the face of death and cursed it for a fool.”
“I am already damned, Mr. Grissom,” Isaac had retorted, holding outstretched arms with palms open to the skies, almost in a form of contrition towards Christ above. “I am God’s abandoned saint, condemned to wallow in the excesses for his pride and vanity. I sought once what you now seek, and it destroyed me. I pray sir that your trip into the heart of darkness will do you better than it did me.”
“And what of your country, Captain?” Hubert once more attempted to appeal to some form of reason trapped within him. “Are you prepared to allow the Kingdom’s claim to fall to the hands of her enemies? Will you truly allow us to sail off for the unknown, knowing what sort of a difference you could make and let the King’s claim fall to more intrepid explorers than yourself?”
“The King and I parted on poor terms years ago,” Isaac lamented, shrugging his shoulders. “I did my duty for King and Country, Mr. Grissom, and the virtue I once sought chewed me up and cast me to the dogs. Go now and find your glory, sir; may fate deal you a better hand than it dealt me.”
Grissom had opened his mouth to speak, but a mixture of frustration and intellectual exhaustion stayed his words. He quietly shook his head in disgust, reaching into his frock coat in order to withdraw a sealed envelope. The wax signet on the paper bore the making of a legal document; Isaac had seen enough of them in his time as a sailor to know what the scroll was before Grissom could even confirm it. “If my words bid no effect, perhaps this will.”
“Your words do little but rob me of my time with cheap grog, sir.”
“Then I shall leave you to it, then,” the Lieutenant had responded curtly, leaving the sealed scroll lying on the end table where he had found Isaac by the hostelry. If you should change your mind, this contract will provide the necessary information. Baron Krieger and Thane Loving will expect you in Towcester by August 31st; you have until then to make your formal introductions. If you fail to do so by that date, they will assume you have turned them down and will make other arrangements. But for our sake and yours, I do hope that you will reconsider.”
“Refrain from holding your breath waiting on me to respond,” Isaac joked sarcastically, nodding with faux-politeness. “You will pass out long before I decide to take you up on this fool’s errand.”
At that, Grissom had given up the fight, resigning himself to personal failure. He politely gestured towards Isaac, returning to the gentlemanly charm of an officer of the watch that became the servants of His Majesty’s Grand Navy. “It was a pleasure seeing you again, sir. May fortune favor your travels, Captain, wherever the winds take you.”
The unfortunate truth of the matter was that Isaac was reconsidering his stance, as foolish an exercise as that was. Being dead on some godforsaken patch of terra incognita was not his idea of glory and prestige, but dying of cirrhosis of the liver in some miserable pit of despair like Westswold was almost as bad. And though his inheritance would hold him over for quite a few days yet, his financial birthright could only carry him so far in life. Provided that his liver or his kidneys refrained from exploding from his consumption of toxic liquor, the end of his days were too far off to rest solely on his father’s estate. He would need to supplement his current nest egg with some new form of income, and unless he intended to indenture himself as a common scalawag, some old sea dog too unfit to run anything but a ship’s tender or some broken-down fishing trawler, he could ill afford to turn down work of this sort of magnitude. Being a plebian beggar in his old age was almost as bad as being eaten by some hitherto-undiscovered creature in the wilds of Moultonsland.
"At least being eaten alive would go quicker than waiting for God to take me out," Isaac joked to himself aloud, managing a chortle. True, death by wild animal was unpleasant, but so were the ills of senility. Though most of the contract Lieutenant Grissom had deposited wasw full of the standard legalese that he could barely understand, the sum of the bounty awaiting him for successfully completing the expedition to Moultonsland and back was sizable enough to ensure his continued prosperity for some time to come. Perhaps a successful rendezvous with history would restore him to his former honor and allow him to erase the stink of his failure to rise beyond his old rank. Truly, the end of his career as a naval officer had come far too soon for his liking, robbing him of the power and prestige that came with admission into the Admiralty of His Majesty's Navy. Though he may have tried to downplay the importance of his career as a flag officer in the haze of inebriation, it was in fact a thorn that pained him greatly in his early retirement from service.
Dying in the hinterlands of existence, falling prey to some native illness or ferocious beast versus dying of poverty in utter disgrace in the proverbial excrement of failure. Two choices of equal worth – that being none – and only two months to decide which seemed the better option. Either way, there was little glory awaiting him unless he could cheat death and disgrace simultaneously, and that meant taking to the sea once more and sailing off for yet another rendezvous with Satan’s playground. Try as he might to find some way around it, the financial solvency of his career as a power-drinker in Westswold made earning an income a relative necessity. And if risking life and limb on some foolish mission to bring two noblemen glory and riches from their aging King was the only way to ensure some sort of retirement plan for him, then maybe the risk was worth the potential reward. Of course, his reservations would continue in his mind until his feet were firmly planted back in Lynland from any sort of trip out to Moultonsland.
"But at least having an option, as Godawful as that option was presents me with a choice beyond figuring out which bottle of piss water to drink each day."
Tired of his internal musings, Isaac slowly sat back down by his table outside the hostelry, looking up at the wispy clouds above, streaking through the deepening blue of the afternoon by the sea. It held no answers for him, only caring enough to stare back at him as he gazed upward, trying to find any way he could around taking the job. After a long time cursing himself for having found himself having run afoul of the universe in some past life, he began to re-read the contract provided to him by Lieutenant Grissom. If he intended to take the two noblemen up on their offer to lead the expedition, he had only a short time to dally in Westswold before embarking on the long journey to Towcester. Suddenly feeling twenty years older than he actually was, the Captain began retracing the mistakes in life that had brought him to this point, considering taking up the offer to act a fool and take another stab at cheating death. Before long, he would be reduced to scrounging around for a carriage to the capital, wondering how in the Hell his soul could be bought for so cheap a price.
Moultonsland was far from the only unclaimed territory he had explored while in the service, but it was certainly the most remote. Isaac shuddered involuntarily, remembering the harrowing crossing of the ocean needed just to get there. When he had ventured out with Winfirth on the Coldstream, the violent storms the frigate had encountered were very nearly enough to turn the expedition back on their own. Just landing at Moultonsland was enough of a challenge, let alone surviving with no real support once you made your way inland. The lowlands were safe enough to forage and hunt in, but the mountains were damn-near impossible to cut your way through. At the higher elevations, winter arrived months earlier than down near the coast, making the timing of any trek there critical. If you were strong enough to make it over the range and back down to the inland sea, miles and miles of thick underbrush and dangerous wildlife were waiting to meet you. Moultonsland had no shortage of ways to make a man's significant other a widow before their time.
“No, not again, no thank you,” the old captain muttered to no one in particular, throwing his clenched fist onto the lid of a rum cask in the alley, wincing at the pain. No one had perished on the expedition, but the trip had been so harrowing, even the great Winfirth Moulton himself vowed never to go back. Their supplies had been exhausted long before they reached the relief ship moored off the coast; it was only through dumb luck that a scouting party had found them trying to portage their way through interminable thickets and deep virgin forests. They had been without foodstuffs for almost five days and no potable water in two; had the scouting party not found them, it would have been another week and a half just to get out of the thicket and onto more manageable terrain down to the tidal flats and the relief ship Endeavour. With almost no freshwater sources in their vicinity, there was almost certainly bound to be no one left to return home from the expedition. The team would have surely perished in the wilds, their bones left to be picked clean by scavengers in that morbid Hell.
Isaac’s thoughts drifted to one of their younger porters on the trip, and how he had nearly been mauled to death by a brown bear and shuddered again. His scalp had nearly been torn clean off, and were it not for the skill of the expedition's physician, he would have died there on the mountain slope in the alpine woodlands. Something as simple as a foraging trip was nearly enough to steal the life from an unwitting soul, and now Mr. Grissom and his wealthy benefactors wanted him to return there, a little older and a lot less nimble than he had been during his time as a sailor. Unless he intended to return to Moultonsland to die and end his wretched retirement, there was little purpose in sailing back to those cruel, forboding wilds. After all, what good was the financial bounty of a trip of exploration if you were dead long before you were able to return and reap the spoils? No, he had had his fill of flirting with death, and would easily pass on this trip. There were far more efficient ways for one to spend their time in misery than sailing to the waking perdition that was Moultonsland.
"Like turning yourself into a raging alcoholic here in Westswold," Isaac again muttered to no one in particular. And herein lied his great challenge; trying to justify remaining in Lynland with no prospects and no future, pissing away his inheritance at a blinding rate drinking cheap rum and carousing with fair maidens of questionable moral character. Traveling to Moultonsland at the head of another expedition of "discovery", especially one trying to head further north than even Winfirth had dared trek was nigh-suicidal, but so too was waiting around to die in this piss-soaked corner of existence. And as strong as his survival instinct was, his desire to find some modicum of respectability again after his long confinement to port was gnawing at him. If there was somehow a fate worse than starving to death on a craggy mountain thousands of miles from civilization, it was rotting away in civilization, shedding any remaining respectability from his days at the helm of a mighty warship, becoming nothing more than a dirty beggar who had drained his life away in wretched excesses.
Isaac cursed under his breath, the conflict within him tantamount to a no-win proposition. His mind kept drifting back to his conversation with Lieutenant Grissom, his thoughts hanging on every word as if he were perpetually reliving the moment from minutes past...
"Captain, if anyone could help the team navigate its way through uncharted lands, it would certainly be you! As someone that has already been there–"
"Yes, you're right," Isaac had angrily cut him off, "I have already been there. I have done my tour in Hell, thank you very much!"
"–As someone that has alraedy been there, you are our first choice to lead this expedition," Grissom had continued, bristling at Stearns and his sudden hostility. "The journey may be a dangerous one, but we are taking every precaution imaginable to make sure that this trip will end in success. We have studied the accounts of the expeditions already made to that wild country and learned of the mistakes that were made. We would never endeavor to make the same errors that nearly befell our predecessors, that much is a given."
“Of course!” Isaac replied incredulously, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “What idiot sets off across the damn world to go and die in the wilds? You never anticipate the mistake that almost gets you killed, otherwise you would never put yourself in the position to begin with!”
“Sir, I beseech you, please,” Grissom answered, his own voice raised. “We need your help! This mission is of vital importance to the Kingdom, and to all of us that have signed on. If our expedition is to have the best chance to succeed where the others have failed, we need the best to guide the rest. And you sir, you are our best hope for glory.”
Isaac spat on the ground, drawing faint disgust from the Lieutenant. “Glory, what a crock! Personal glory means little if you are unable to reap the rewards from it, Mr. Grissom. Your sun-bleached carcass has little use for glory; it has little use for anything, except as a late meal for a bear or a pack of wolves. That is where your quest for glory will end up.”
“Damn you, sir!” Grissom finally broke, the frustration that had been festering under the surface boiling over like a raging tempest. “Where is your honor? Where is the glorious Captain Stearns, the man that turned sailing into the unknown into an exquisite artform? You may share his name, but you are no Captain Stearns, sir. The man I knew would have laughed in the face of death and cursed it for a fool.”
“I am already damned, Mr. Grissom,” Isaac had retorted, holding outstretched arms with palms open to the skies, almost in a form of contrition towards Christ above. “I am God’s abandoned saint, condemned to wallow in the excesses for his pride and vanity. I sought once what you now seek, and it destroyed me. I pray sir that your trip into the heart of darkness will do you better than it did me.”
“And what of your country, Captain?” Hubert once more attempted to appeal to some form of reason trapped within him. “Are you prepared to allow the Kingdom’s claim to fall to the hands of her enemies? Will you truly allow us to sail off for the unknown, knowing what sort of a difference you could make and let the King’s claim fall to more intrepid explorers than yourself?”
“The King and I parted on poor terms years ago,” Isaac lamented, shrugging his shoulders. “I did my duty for King and Country, Mr. Grissom, and the virtue I once sought chewed me up and cast me to the dogs. Go now and find your glory, sir; may fate deal you a better hand than it dealt me.”
Grissom had opened his mouth to speak, but a mixture of frustration and intellectual exhaustion stayed his words. He quietly shook his head in disgust, reaching into his frock coat in order to withdraw a sealed envelope. The wax signet on the paper bore the making of a legal document; Isaac had seen enough of them in his time as a sailor to know what the scroll was before Grissom could even confirm it. “If my words bid no effect, perhaps this will.”
“Your words do little but rob me of my time with cheap grog, sir.”
“Then I shall leave you to it, then,” the Lieutenant had responded curtly, leaving the sealed scroll lying on the end table where he had found Isaac by the hostelry. If you should change your mind, this contract will provide the necessary information. Baron Krieger and Thane Loving will expect you in Towcester by August 31st; you have until then to make your formal introductions. If you fail to do so by that date, they will assume you have turned them down and will make other arrangements. But for our sake and yours, I do hope that you will reconsider.”
“Refrain from holding your breath waiting on me to respond,” Isaac joked sarcastically, nodding with faux-politeness. “You will pass out long before I decide to take you up on this fool’s errand.”
At that, Grissom had given up the fight, resigning himself to personal failure. He politely gestured towards Isaac, returning to the gentlemanly charm of an officer of the watch that became the servants of His Majesty’s Grand Navy. “It was a pleasure seeing you again, sir. May fortune favor your travels, Captain, wherever the winds take you.”
The unfortunate truth of the matter was that Isaac was reconsidering his stance, as foolish an exercise as that was. Being dead on some godforsaken patch of terra incognita was not his idea of glory and prestige, but dying of cirrhosis of the liver in some miserable pit of despair like Westswold was almost as bad. And though his inheritance would hold him over for quite a few days yet, his financial birthright could only carry him so far in life. Provided that his liver or his kidneys refrained from exploding from his consumption of toxic liquor, the end of his days were too far off to rest solely on his father’s estate. He would need to supplement his current nest egg with some new form of income, and unless he intended to indenture himself as a common scalawag, some old sea dog too unfit to run anything but a ship’s tender or some broken-down fishing trawler, he could ill afford to turn down work of this sort of magnitude. Being a plebian beggar in his old age was almost as bad as being eaten by some hitherto-undiscovered creature in the wilds of Moultonsland.
"At least being eaten alive would go quicker than waiting for God to take me out," Isaac joked to himself aloud, managing a chortle. True, death by wild animal was unpleasant, but so were the ills of senility. Though most of the contract Lieutenant Grissom had deposited wasw full of the standard legalese that he could barely understand, the sum of the bounty awaiting him for successfully completing the expedition to Moultonsland and back was sizable enough to ensure his continued prosperity for some time to come. Perhaps a successful rendezvous with history would restore him to his former honor and allow him to erase the stink of his failure to rise beyond his old rank. Truly, the end of his career as a naval officer had come far too soon for his liking, robbing him of the power and prestige that came with admission into the Admiralty of His Majesty's Navy. Though he may have tried to downplay the importance of his career as a flag officer in the haze of inebriation, it was in fact a thorn that pained him greatly in his early retirement from service.
Dying in the hinterlands of existence, falling prey to some native illness or ferocious beast versus dying of poverty in utter disgrace in the proverbial excrement of failure. Two choices of equal worth – that being none – and only two months to decide which seemed the better option. Either way, there was little glory awaiting him unless he could cheat death and disgrace simultaneously, and that meant taking to the sea once more and sailing off for yet another rendezvous with Satan’s playground. Try as he might to find some way around it, the financial solvency of his career as a power-drinker in Westswold made earning an income a relative necessity. And if risking life and limb on some foolish mission to bring two noblemen glory and riches from their aging King was the only way to ensure some sort of retirement plan for him, then maybe the risk was worth the potential reward. Of course, his reservations would continue in his mind until his feet were firmly planted back in Lynland from any sort of trip out to Moultonsland.
"But at least having an option, as Godawful as that option was presents me with a choice beyond figuring out which bottle of piss water to drink each day."
Tired of his internal musings, Isaac slowly sat back down by his table outside the hostelry, looking up at the wispy clouds above, streaking through the deepening blue of the afternoon by the sea. It held no answers for him, only caring enough to stare back at him as he gazed upward, trying to find any way he could around taking the job. After a long time cursing himself for having found himself having run afoul of the universe in some past life, he began to re-read the contract provided to him by Lieutenant Grissom. If he intended to take the two noblemen up on their offer to lead the expedition, he had only a short time to dally in Westswold before embarking on the long journey to Towcester. Suddenly feeling twenty years older than he actually was, the Captain began retracing the mistakes in life that had brought him to this point, considering taking up the offer to act a fool and take another stab at cheating death. Before long, he would be reduced to scrounging around for a carriage to the capital, wondering how in the Hell his soul could be bought for so cheap a price.
