SOREN
The transition was not announced. There was no iron gate to pass through, no stone marker to signify we had crossed from the Border Territories into the Winter Plains, the supposed agricultural heartland of this empire.
There was only the feeling of the air changing, turning from the sharp, metallic tang of the capital's unrest to something heavy and stagnant.
The land spoke before any man did. It spoke of abandonment.
On either side of the road, the winter wheat stretched toward the horizon, a sea of pale gold that should have been humming with the sound of the harvest. Instead, it was silent.
The stalks stood too long in the ground, beginning the slow, wretched process of becoming something else... rot, or fodder for crows.
Left unmanaged, unharvested wheat was not just a lost season; it was a curse. It choked the soil, inviting pests and disease that would haunt the next planting, and the one after that. It was a wound in the earth.
