Snippet #2768278

Ellarian Empyrean Coast...
On the hilltops above the shoreline...

Prince Hrollaug and his band of 10 riders had setup camp on a hill ridge above the seaboard, taking a break from their long travels. The parahelion Sun Dogs lasted all through the night, two suns illuminating the sky even at night so that Atargatis and Sagittae kept the sky bright blue even when the Norsemen slept inside their animal skinned tents. The next morning, Prince Hrollaug woke up to see the Dog Star directly north in the sky, as Sirius was hovering above the Kadota Peaks like a beacon in the distance. One of the crescent moons of Gaia could be observed in the bright morning sky as well, giving the dome of Gaia a truly magical and surreal beauty like nothing the vikings had ever seen before in their homeland. The sky was blue, the weather was warm and fair, and scattered white clouds provided only partial waves of shade over the flowering green hills. The land itself was covered in rich soil, clay banks, freshwater rain ponds, scattered woodlands with plenty of rocks and trees that would prove useful to the Norse settlers as they explored the beaches. To the north, they could see mountains on the horizon where they came from, with a large cascading waterfall and its ever present rainbows. To the south, they took in the view of the bluegreen Empyrean High Seas with its dangerous white waves, rich in sea salt. Beyond the gulf to the west was a chain of islands stretching down the coast. Jarl Hethel had taken the Nuörmbatúr longship down the coast and into the Empyrean High Seas, heading towards a tiny distant island on the Empyrean Sea Beach, while Prince Rollo and his small gang decided to pitch five tents on the mainland where they could see billows of smoke rising from Port Fate in the near distance.

Port Fate was the Kingdom of Benavierre's main port, and import/export center. Deciding to check it out, the Iskjerne Vikings took their woolly horses down to the coastal waters to have a look. They were passed along the way by merchants and travellers of all sorts who paid them no mind as they made their way to the famous Albatross Bar and Inn. Prince Hrollaug and his riders were flying the Raven Banner, something that most of the local inhabitants had never witnessed before. A few of the fishermen from the seaport would stop and give the vikings ackward and distrustful glares, but the Norsemen just rode their horses slowly and casually up to the docks and dismounted them before entering the bar. Prince Hrollaug and his gang would have a few beers, deciding to gossip with some of the locals in the bar in order to gather information about the land, its kingdom, its people and their king. The vikings were larger and stockier, perhaps at times even taller or more muscular than the local Ellarians, but nevertheless Prince Rollo and his band would maintain their respect, being mindful of their surroundings while enjoying a few beers. It wasn't as tastey as the Norsemen's mead, but it would suffice for now.

After gathering all the information they could, the vikings would leave Port Fate and head back to their encampment further up the bank on the top of the grassy hill ridge. "This would be a good place to start a meadery," Ale the Beekeeper commented. Prince Hrollaug nodded quietly. "There is a woodland up ahead," the prince said. "We should get to work," he added. The gang agreed, and so they unloaded all their tools and started chopping down some trees. The ten of them spent hours chopping, cutting, shaping and wittling the unsanded wood by hand using a variety of different metal saws, axes, scrapers, hammers, wedges, bevels, primitive scales and measuring strings. Even their winterbred horses would help with their labor as the Norsemen used the smaller stocky horses to pull the load. By the end of the day, the small circle of two-man tents on the hill had turned into a fenced-in circular round settlement of considerable size. They hadn't yet built any longhouses, but they had managed to build a rather basic sawmill, a wood workshop, an outhouse, a wooden gate, a few sheds, a lookout tower, a ring moat with a man-made narrow trench leading down the hill into the sea, a horse fence, a small well, a forge, a few hive boxes and a large wooden palisade to protect their animal skinned dome-roof whale bone tents. At the end of the day when one sun set and another began to rise, the Norsemen built a fire next to their rain catcher and sat idly on the hill inside their own walls, staring up at the sky. Hrollaug would study the stars and moons silently while Ale stirred up an kettle of onion soup with an iron dipping ladle, listening quietly as the band of vikings drank Albatross beer and told poems or sang Old Norse folk songs about their favorite heroes.