in the same era as Edally Academy
The messenger was having a hard time making himself understood.
“There’s a strange ship come into the harbor!”
The Emperor’s secretary was not impressed. “What are the shipwrights up to this year?”
“No, not like that. It’s flying strange colors.” The messenger gestured with both hands.
“Pirates?” The secretary frowned. “They’re not supposed to come this far North. They know what’ll happen if they do.”
“Not pirates.“
“They’d better not be Bitrani…”
The messenger took a breath and began speaking more slowly, in carefully chosen words. “There is a ship of strange manufacture, flying a flag that is neither piratical or Bitrani and certainly not Calenyena. The people, from what we can see, do not look like us or the Bitrani, and their clothing is strange. There are foreigners coming into the harbor.”
The word foreigner was so old as to be archaic. There was no such thing. There was the empire, and that was it. To the North was ice; to the east was wind. To the south was nothingness; to the west was the great fire rift. There was nothing but the empire; since they had conquered the Bitrani, there were no foreigners to speak of.
Until, it appeared, now. The secretary coughed politely.
“I’ll let His Imperial Majesty know that he needs to see you right now.”
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I suspect that a lot of people’s schedules are about to be changed. The Diplomats are about to get a lot to do, and well, the world did just shift on its axis, didn’t it?
Yes, yes it did. Quite a bit, too.
I do have a world where the Atlanteans came back… 🙂
I recall!! They were cranky.
They were supposed to be going to live with the gods, but wound up back where they’d started and that had changed…!
Hopefully there’ll be more of it eventually. 🙂
I think I need to write more and not get distracted by games and things…
Isn’t there another continent they’ve forgotten about, that originally colonized theirs …?
To be fair, that was over 1000 years ago. It’s fallen into myth and legend. In some cases, references have been intentionally wiped.
Yes — sorry, that was me asking you a question, not blaming the current characters for not knowing. Their predecessors who rewrote their history, on the other hand …
Ah, sorry! Yeah, they had reason, but whether it was “good” reason or not…