The autumn wind off the northern crags smelled of damp iron filings and ancient coal smoke.
Across the vast depression of the Ashen Basin, three hundred thousand refugees huddled in canvas lean-tos and sod huts.
They had fled the scorched southern provinces, driven northward by scorched-earth decrees and failed harvests, seeking the safe hall of Haven-Hold. What they found instead was an endless sea of cold, oily mire that sucked at cart wheels and dissolved boots down to the stitching.
Giles Croft stood on the rim of the western embankment, his woolen coat buttoned against the biting draft. He adjusted the eyepiece of his brass sighting scope, centering the crosshairs on a striped leveling rod held half a mile away in the freezing muck.
Before his left eye, an amber display flickered against the leaden sky.
“The developer who designed this biome has a sick sense of humor,” Giles said. He didn’t say it loudly.
The habit of talking to his internal user screen had persisted through six years of frontier governance. At first, he had been certain this entire world was an unreleased survival sandbox simulator. Now, as he watched a shivering refugee woman adjust a ragged woolen shawl around her toddler’s shoulders three hundred paces down the slope, a cold knot tightened in his ribs.
