Down past the heather-fuzzed highlands, over the Thousandfold Estuary and its port cities, and far, far to the south-east through the Storm Wall and across the heaving black oceans, there is a small chain of islands. Sprawled out under a tropical sun in its basin of crystal blue water, it thrusts its sheer white cliffs, sprouting into lush green at their terminus, up into bottomless cloud-flecked skies. Some say its seam of jagged mountains is the spine of a titanic stone wyrm which roamed the face of primordial Tellus; others, the scar left when ARAGK, the thunder god of the trolls, cast the body of his felled lover down into the ocean in a fit of rage and agony with the force of eight hundred mangonels. A small body of Sablearnean scholars, meanwhile, maintain that Vatheia was thrust from the earth long before records began in a great geological heave. Regardless of whom we choose to believe, it must be imagined that to see the inception of this obscure little nation would have been most dramatic indeed.

Six islands compose the principal mass of the archipelago - tracing a curve from north-west to south-east, they are: Pharos, the fourth largest, stopover of pilgrims; Mytella, the largest and flattest, home to the nominal capital Mytellana; Diurne, the second largest, holy island of the smith-temples; Exos, the third largest, pocked with quarries; Kalis, the fifth largest, blanketed by nigh-impassable jungle; and Skyros, the smallest, host to the Grand Expedition. To their north-east lies shattered Eberis, and scattered about their environs are an uncountable number of tiny islets, strewn across their azure bed as if by the hand of some great careless giant.

While each of these largest islands bears host to a degree of civilisation, settlements are almost universally small, rural, and huddled together in the crook of some gully or drawn out across a snaking clifftop; even in the artificial demesne, it is impossible for a moment to forget that civilised creatures could never hope to define the true shape of this uncompromising land. Sprawling Mytellana (although unquestionably unique), among all the towns in the Isles most resembles the vast bustling cities far back north. Its streets, squeezed between vine-strangled stone edifices as though pushed through solid rock by the roots of an ancient tree, are thronged with folk of all ilk, and festooned with the hard-won blessings of sea, forest, and craft, such that the entire city itself manifests into one cacophonous cornucopia.

In summary, Vatheia is not a realm which should be overlooked. Upon first arriving on its shores, I can truthfully recount feeling as though I had entered some other plane of being, struck suddenly by the impression of having slipped through the cracks of Tellus' foundation and found myself stranded on an alien sphere. Although I have, of course, grown more acclimatised to these Isles over the course of my extended stay, there is some kernel of that initial feeling of which I have never been able to divest myself: indeed, though it does lie in the southern oceans of our world, it could be said that Vatheia comprises a world all its own. However, my intent to provide context has begun to impinge on my conviction to document the story of my being here with neat linear chronology. Thus, I will spare you, reader, any further expositing. Allow me to tell you a Tale of storms.