Reports from Pentateul suggest that a newly established trade organisation, The South Oceans Company of Larn, has been established with royal approval to establish trade links with a previously unknown people, said to be called the Yaraquncha.
Believed to be a jungle-dwelling, human civilisation, the Yaraquncha are said to have welcomed the Company's first voyage warily, but without hostility.
Merchants in Pentateul are downplaying these events, saying that the ocean crossing is far too hazardous for regular trade. However, many suspect that this might open up new opportunities for colonisation, conquest or profit.
Reporters from the Herald have interviewed peoples from across the coastal strongholds to gauge their reactions.
In the Kingdom of Tal, royal officials expressed no surprise, but cryptically noted that "the maritime nation of Tal cannot be expected to be without a strategy in the south."
In Freeport an official announced that "the Illyria Trade Council always welcomes new frontiers for commerce, new sources of profit. And so we invite healthy young people with ambition and resolve to come forward to help us to establish trade centres amongst this new people. Of course, considering the dangers if the ocean crossing, we would prefer to recruit unmarried men and women, whose deaths will not leave widows and orphans begging recompense from us."
Around the tower of Stormstone, babbling prophets and ranters warned that all venturing south should "beware the heirs of the Silver Light", claiming that "for a thousand years he protected us from that evil!", and offering similarly incoherent warnings.
Only in Hanlif did the news cause no surprise. "My grandmother was Yaraquncha," one Windseeker told a reporter. "The winds blow north and the winds blow south, and it carries us as leaves wherever it blows. But perhaps it would be better if nobody had told the people of Larn. The south is not a friendly land. It is a cursed place, a broken land."