Mattystereo

Notes on the Southern Expedition The men of the Shyrjhaeli colleges in the west, the natural philosophers chief among them, do not have much care for the Courtlands, this I have known to be true for as long as I have known of them at all. That said, the intensity of their self-regard still surprised me. One incident, although it was a minor thing all-in-all, made this clear to me before departing. In an old Dwarven home my host had hoisted across one whole wall a tapestry of the western shore blown up as if it were half the world with the rest of the Empire, the Imperial City included, but a faded mass pressed up against the edges, unmarked though the locations of the various schools of the west were displayed prominently. I asked him what I was looking at, I must confess I wasn’t sure at first, and he simply said it was “all of Qarad”. Caradumbe, you recall was what the Dwarves themselves once called this land from here up to the Waking Sea prior to it being gifted by the grace of

It was the final story, the final frontier, that which man had always wished to grasp yet never could. Man had long presumed as his birthright to be the heavens, and yet they denied him, closed off by the stringent laws of reality. Eventually peace was made with this fact. Across the 21st and 22nd centuries mankind stepped tentatively out into the black, grabbing onto the rocks about their immediate neighborhood, experimenting with fusion, trying so hard to claw out so many Gs of constant acceleration as efficiently as possible. Torchships lit up the night, domed cities sprung up on Mars and the Jovian moons, and by the middle of the 22nd century the first laser propelled probes crossed Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. On Earth great advancements had been made in kind. Malaria was at last wiped out, Alzheimer’s and dementia could now be kept forever at bay with a treatment that came in pill and jello form, Mammoths were even brought back to life. Yet even as mankind reveled in what