Discovery
Discovery Part II
Part III

Captain Titrian and his first mate spent a few moments staring at the ship coming out of the harbor.

It was flying a flag, that much they could tell, and although it was no flag they recognized, Titrian at least had not expected it to be. Over a thousand years had passed; nobody still flew the same flags or bowed to the same kings.

It was also flying pennants in every color known to mankind; it was painted in horizontal stripes of red, blue, and green; its sails were red, blue, green, white, pink, teal, and black. It hurt Titrian’s eyes to look at, but he looked anyway. Because under all that brilliant color was a sleek, pointed ship unlike anything he’d seen before, and he could count, painted to match the stripes on the ship, at least ten cannon.

This gaudy thing was a warship, and it was coming out to meet them.

That itself was cause for alarm.

Standing at the helm of the ship, however, dressed in as many colors as the ship if not more, was a man who looked to be a hundred years old if he was a day, his beard and hair both white and both braided into many tiny strands. In the spy-glass, Titrian noted a crown. He also noted that the man – king, what have you – had dark brown skin and a face far more like the Ideztozhyuh than like Titrian’s own people.

“‘What happened to the lost colony?'” he muttered. It was the question everyone had been asking when this mission left. “Clearly, they were lost.”

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