Building an empire which the sun never set-Chapter 76: The Month After First Contact

The sick men brought aboard the ships did not recover. One by one, they died. Captain Cook, following Pendralis Navy tradition, ordered sea burials for the dead. A funeral ceremony was held aboard the fleet's flagship.

The bodies were shrouded in white canvas, stitched shut with lead weights at the feet. The deck crew stood in solemn ranks, heads bowed. A chaplain muttered final rites over the bodies. Then, as drums rolled and the sea breeze fluttered the flags, three volleys of rifle fire cracked across the water—a final salute. One by one, the weighted shrouds were slid from the plank and vanished beneath the waves. Silence followed. The ocean claimed its dead.

A subdued mood settled over the fleet, but mourning did not last long. In this world—unlike modern societies—death was a constant companion. Disease, hunger, and war had claimed loved ones since childhood. Loss was painful, but familiarity bred endurance. The fleet pressed on.

As the ships sailed further south, the coast changed slowly, subtly. The choking jungle gave way to open woodland and tall grasses that swayed under highland winds. The air was drier now, cooler—no longer heavy with rot but crisp and sharp, with hints of salt and earth. On brief landing parties, the sailors began to note new sights: tall beasts with twisting horns standing alert in the grass, lean predators with golden hides slinking through the brush, and herds of grazing animals that bolted at the sound of a snapped twig.

On the sea, schools of large, smooth-skinned creatures followed the ships. Birds with vast wingspans wheeled above, calling in deep voices, their shadows skimming the water like drifting clouds. At dawn, the surface sometimes broke with the backs of enormous, slow-moving shapes—sea beasts that exhaled towers of mist and vanished again into the deep.

The coastline bent gently, then sharply. Cliff faces began to rise—black rock sheering into the surf. The temperature dropped steadily. Nights became longer and colder. The stars shifted in familiar but altered patterns.

On the deck of the flagship, navigators made calculations with sextants, recording the sun's noon height and comparing the stars by night. Using a precision marine chronometer from Pendralis, they compared the local noon—when the sun was at its highest point in the sky—to the exact time back in the capital. This difference allowed them to calculate their longitudinal position with remarkable accuracy. Every hour of time difference equated to fifteen degrees of longitude. For latitude, they measured the sun's angle above the horizon at local noon each day, taking into account the gradual changes in its height over time—an effect they understood to be part of the sun's yearly motion across the sky. Over several days, they noticed that the sun no longer moved further north or south in the sky, suggesting they had reached the solar turning point—indicative of the southernmost navigable latitude of the continent. With both latitude and longitude confirmed, and no visible landmass extending further south along the coast or out to sea, the crew concluded that they had reached the farthest known edge of Velmora. With no land visible to the south and celestial measurements aligned, they marked the site on their charts as the southernmost point of Velmora.

The fleet soon discovered a natural harbor carved into the jagged coastline—a narrow bay nestled between two rocky promontories, where the sea broke into gentle swells and washed up over black-pebbled shores. Towering cliffs loomed above, their weathered faces streaked with ochre and deep iron hues, while mist rolled down from the uplands in slow, curling tendrils. As the longboats approached the beach, the men could hear the cry of distant seabirds wheeling overhead, their shadows sweeping over the deck like passing spirits.

The landing party stepped ashore onto slick stones and coarse sand. The air was bracing—cold and laced with salt, carrying with it the faint scent of crushed leaves and iron-rich soil. Inland, the terrain rose in uneven terraces, draped in a hardy carpet of silver-green brush and dotted with squat, wind-twisted trees that clung to the earth like stubborn sentinels. Higher still, pale cliffs cut sharp lines against the sky, and beyond them, distant mountains rose with snow-speckled crowns.

There was life here, but it was elusive and cautious. The men glimpsed long-legged grazers moving like ghosts through the low shrubs, their slender bodies almost indistinguishable from the grass. At twilight, golden-eyed predators watched from the rocks, melting away before anyone could raise a gun. Along the shoreline, slick-backed marine beasts lay draped across sun-warmed stones, their deep bellows echoing against the cliffs before they slipped silently back into the sea.

Follow curr𝒆nt nov𝒆ls on fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com.

Streams of clear, cold water trickled down from the uplands, pooling briefly in mossy basins before running out to meet the tide. These natural springs were quickly found and tested—clean and sweet, untouched by the corruption that had plagued the rivers of the jungle north.

The crew worked quickly and efficiently. Tents were raised above the tide line, fires lit with driftwood and resinous brush. Scientific instruments were unpacked and placed under canvas awnings. The sextants came out again, and with careful measurements of the noonday sun and known celestial positions, the officers confirmed their conclusion: this was the southernmost edge of Velmoran. The compass, once stable, now wavered subtly at rest—one last confirmation of their position near the planet's magnetic boundary.

This place was barren by comparison to the lush lands behind them, but there was a strange, austere beauty to it. The wind was strong and clear. The stars blazed at night in unfamiliar configurations. And for the first time in weeks, no one coughed blood in the night or sweated through fevered dreams.

Here, far from the death-ridden north, the Southern Expedition would make its final camp and begin to mark the very edge of the Velmoran continent—scarred, weary, but unbroken.