(http://www.shakespeareinamericanlife.org/images/009567W5_l.jpg)<br/><br/><strong>Upon An Unfamiliar Shore<br/>Involving: EVERYONE</strong><br/><br/>It is said that there are born men whose fate is kept close by the gods, whose purpose shall come to sway the world, and whose names are written on the very face of the stars. We have heard these names, these men of greatness, and the names of their sons and daughters and the wonders that they build in stone and in blood. It is said that the gods whisper in the ear, urge wind to sail, and gift light into the dark when the night is cold and perilous. This, however, is not a tale of men who were born to bring wonder to the world. This is the tale of those who were meant to be forgotten... but would not so easily be undone.<br/><br/>The Dread Horizon bound for the port of Waterdeep, and her belly fat with trade and travel. Those aboard familiar, but their secrets are their own. They sleep by cot and roll and dine by barrel and ladle, lanterns in long and narrow corridors grim even the fair, and wide and low berths rocked and cradled often aired with moans. The Captain is a black haired grimace with a wide hat and which to the whip or pistol, whichever best to keep an ordered line. Aboard a bag of odds and ends - merchants, whores, soldiers, and the undeclared.<br/><br/>She is three days from port when rising comes a most unnatural storm, its wide shadow as the fingers of a great and terrible hand to grasp the globe and shake their little sea. Below deck the whole of it sounds a world away, a muffled roar like the neighbors fighting or fucking on the far side of a wall just thin enough to tell. It is not until she first rolls deep and all the little things without tether or nail jingle and chime, and men and women in their cots are tossed back and forth and up onto the wall that the screams and shouts begin.<br/><br/>She is a strong and sturdy lady, but even the proudest girl can be broken.<br/>When she moans its in her boards and the flutter in her sail.<br/>And so in comes the sea.<br/><br/>There had been many and now but a handful. The taste of salt and the crunch of sand in the teeth, the low roar of rolling waves at night, the shine of two moons through the tops of strange and foreign trees of an unfamiliar shore, these are proof of life. Broken wood and broken bodies drowned and beaten sway with the waves while tiny crabs pick at the dead, and now and then the living too. The silver shine of the moons are generous to eyes newly returned from death. A sharp and rocky surf bleeds into gray sand and then up toward the edge-line of a sea-side forest of dull trees. Behind there is a glimpse of mountain tops reaching up toward the low and rushing clouds.