With our northern and western territories solidified by the Iron Road and our eastern flank secured by the kingdom's paralysis, my gaze, and the Confederacy's ambition, turned south. The intelligence gathered from the Ashen tribe spoke of lands far beyond their own, of a "Green Deluge" where the desert gave way to a different world. It was time to explore it. The Expand the Confederacy quest still had one slot open.
I commissioned the Great Southern Expedition. This was not a trade mission or a military patrol; it was a pure voyage of discovery. Its purpose was to map the unknown, to make contact with new peoples, and to understand the world beyond our immediate sphere of influence.
Kai, the son of Anya and co-commander of the Desert Rangers, was the natural choice to lead. He possessed his mother's wisdom and a young man's boundless curiosity. I gave him a company of fifty of his best Rangers, a dozen of our Oakhaven Freighters packed with supplies and trade goods, and our best cartographers from the Lyceum.
They traveled south for more than a month, far beyond the traditional grazing lands of the Ashen tribe. They crossed a vast, sun-drained plain of red rock and entered a region of dense, thorny scrubland, a transitional zone that teemed with strange new wildlife.
Finally, after forty days of travel, they found it. The air grew heavy with moisture. The sky, which had always been a harsh, pale blue, softened. And then they heard it: the impossible sound of rushing water. They had reached the Great River Delta, the 'Green Deluge' of nomad legend.
It was a world utterly alien to them. A vast, flat plain of lush, emerald green, crisscrossed by a thousand slow-moving streams and shaded by strange, broad-leafed trees. The air was thick with the buzz of insects and the cries of exotic birds.
The people who lived here were different as well. They were a slender, dark-skinned people who lived not in tents or stone houses, but in villages of huts built on stilts above the marshy ground. They poled through the waterways in long, narrow canoes and fished with intricate nets woven from river reeds. They were the River-folk of the Sanguine Delta.
First contact was a tense but peaceful affair. Kai, following the diplomatic protocols I had established, made a respectful camp far from their largest village and waited. The River-folk, who were wary but not aggressive, sent out a party of warriors in their silent canoes. Their leader was a woman with intelligent eyes and skin adorned with tattoos depicting fish and herons.
Kai did not try to impress them with iron or intimidate them with force. He understood that these people's wealth was not in metal, but in the bounty of their river. He offered them a simple gift: a large sack of pure, refined salt from the Crystal Flats.
To the River-folk, who lived in a freshwater world where salt was a rare and almost mythical commodity used only for preserving small amounts of fish, this gift was a treasure beyond price. It was a sign that Kai understood their true needs.
The chieftainess invited them to her village. For a week, they lived among the River-folk, learning their ways. They were a peaceful, deeply spiritual people, their lives governed by the rise and fall of the river. They had an abundance of food—fish, fruit, edible roots—but they had no stone, no metal, no salt, and no livestock other than domesticated birds.
Kai saw the potential for a new, powerful alliance. He showed them the wonders of an iron cooking pot that wouldn't shatter, a steel knife that could gut a fish with a single stroke. He offered them a trade treaty: our tools, our salt, and our textiles in exchange for their exotic woods, their medicinal herbs, and, most importantly, their knowledge of the river, which formed a great, navigable highway to lands unknown, including, they said, the great southern sea.
The chieftainess, seeing the immense benefit for her people, agreed. A new artery of trade and knowledge was opened. Kai's expedition returned to Oakhaven months later, not with plunder or prisoners, but with maps of a new world, samples of new resources, and a treaty of friendship with a new and valuable ally. The world of the Confederacy had just doubled in size.