On a warm morning in early Ocei, as Angelica’s radiance crests over the horizon, a bustling crew lashes Mydra’s Kiss to the dock of Vivecta’s busiest port. The vessel brings cargo from Riftwood’s Atravana, and after its long journey, it bobs restfully in the harbor. Dockworkers joke in a Denhørt slang, while transferring the craft’s freight into a wagon.

“Where is this?” asks a to’reshian sailor, far from home. “Won’t you stop and tell me of this place?” she asks in a language that moves the tongue like gentle waves at sea.

The industrious hrothi blitz below deck, above, then elbow past the womann. If early morning fatigue doesn’t slow these workers as it does her, then neither could Croçais. “This isn’t home,” she sighs in her language, so uncommonly spoken in Ashland’s southern hills, she is virtually a mute to all but her absent captain.

Keep sentry, she recalls him ordering. She reflects on his message—her mind’s illustrations before her: You cannot trust those stubby-fingered paws. Their hands, she sees, heft only the heavy cargo. Mann up here—they’re not like us. What did he mean? Different in form, yes, but like us, are descendants of Ne’ran, yet Captain cautioned, These menn are deceitful.

They tell lies: Virtues and Vices—such are conjured only by straying from the truth, she recalls Captain saying. This is the home of the Virtori—she knows this much. They’ll lord over you. They’ll fault you not believing as they do. But contrasting her brief experience, nary a peep from the locals, and bubbling in her, a yearning to learn more that idle sentry in port could not grant.

Erupting behind her, a curse—and she steps aside.

“Sorry,” she says, with a look wandering off task. From the beelining locals, her sight floats over glinting waves, then across angelic slopes. Upon these hills, from coast to nearby peak, the town rises in a patchwork pattern sewn into a skirt of trees, unlike any she’d seen in the south of the continent. She wonders why, provided they’ve a verdant beauty, quite reminiscent of her jungle home. Kernos seeds every corner of Elyria with his elegance, she muses. Her hand slides along the palm-oiled railing of Mydra’s Kiss, and the sailor returns to momentarily oversee the task of unloading the ship. Nearly done.

She resumes her longing. A fleeing fog reveals sights beyond the port, showing a distant structure amidst the low-grown garden of a park, like a monument to the coast, or perhaps their local heroes. She taps a dockworker, who takes this moment to pat off his dusty palms—and she points to the monument, “What is it?”

He smiles, recognizing her inquisitive look, and replies in his local tongue, with a gesture to the monument, then sweetly clutches his chest.

“Thank you,” she says, taking what she could from his meaning.

“All. Done,” says a local, clumsily in Croçais. He drives the cart into the town, leaving Mydra’s Kiss with no occupants but herself.

She locks up, then strolls past a tavern—at least, she infers it could be nothing else from its drawn tankard sign. He would have gone to the market, she tells herself, as she links behind a chattering group of menn, and marches over brick-paved streets.

She discerns a homely merging of both nature and craft, as interspersed along the pathways are well-kept local flora, for which she has no name, and wafting from afar must be the odor, unmistakably shed by livestock. A welcome breeze from the sea casts the smell adrift, and meeting her glance back at the ocean is the sight of a very tall-ship’s sail, waving, as it enters into port. To her ears, the market cacophony, and then she hears it: “Fresh fish! Fresh provisions....” a town crier’s advertisement, not just in her language, but the languages of all this town’s migrants.

Her pace quickens toward the crier. “Where am I,” she asks. He does not notice her. “Where am I,” she repeats.

With a bothered look, he answers, “Sanctasiduuryn Seleükeia!” He continues his callings, “Latest books! Test your luck at the gauntlet, with the best odds in your favor!” He shouts more phrases in other languages.

What does it mean, she wonders to herself, then asks the crier.

“I’m working here,” he answers.

“What does it mean?! This place!”

“Eh?! You pester. Something, like uh,” he pauses, “Holy diligence of, uh, the Seleücrei? Not sure how say in Croçais. Welcome, girl,” he says, “Welcome to Sanctaphandri.”