A Dance with Stone Giants

Expedition

As the waves crashed the sides of the ship, the men yelled out and jumped for their lives as the boom swung from side to side, the rain stang like wasps in our faces, and the thunder crackled hard all around us. There was chaos all around, but as I looked down upon his face; never had I seen a calmer man, calm as the breeze on a summer day in Chambéry, he stood; dancing his dance with Stone Giants

— Anne Belyea on her watch in the Crow's nest during The Dance with Stone Giants

During an exceptionally harsh storm in 854, the entire trade fleet of Queensvale was led astray into the sea mountains northeast of Désert de Feu. Their crew and ships were lost here, seemingly forever, for despite, the Senate putting up the mission most people thought this to be pure suicide.   However, seemingly out of nowhere, a relatively unknown man by the name of Arthur Raoult, had just three months prior received his own ship and the title of captain accepted the task. Having already proved his worth to his crew, most went with him, and what he lacked he hired out of his own pocket. Arthur had been in the army for quite some time and had studied the mountains and how they had formed and postulated that he knew how to navigate through them.   After months of searching, keeping their distance to the cliffs and mountains themselves, they finally found wreckage from where the ships had crashed against what the crew described as "Giant Stalagmites rising out of the water towering like Stone Giants ready to smash us if we dared to enter their domain". The crew urged Arthur to turn around; no man in their right mind would voluntarily try to travel through that, but Arthur was no normal man. He convinced his men to stand by his side and not let their fellow sailors die in this godless tomb.   For three days and three nights, Arthur stayed at his post by the helm shouting orders, out against the wind and rain, as if he could wield the elements themselves with his voice. He cranked the ship to its limits and the men even further in what would later be described as "A Dance with Stone Giants" by the crew. In the end, they found the crew or what was left of them, battered, tired and hungry, but alive, in a cave carved into the foot of one of the mountains behind the rock forest. They managed to load the survivors onboard and safely travel back into open waters. On that fated day, not only was 83 citizens of Plaisir saved but the name "Arthur Raoult" was written into the history books with ink, never to be forgotten.