With a sound like walking on dried eggshells, the iron-rimmed wagon wheels ground over a brittle, splintering surface.
It wasn’t river gravel or crushed granite beneath the timber spokes.
It was a field of bleached human femurs and shattered ribcages, pressed flat into the frozen mud of the royal highway.
Five days south of the Weeping Pass, the northern mountain wall had faded into a jagged gray dark shape against the northern horizon.
Here, on the northern plateau of the Great Yong Dynasty, the eternal frost of the border had loosened its grip, giving way to cold, sucking mud and stale marsh water.
Yet the road was not alive.
Three hundred years ago, the Great South Highway had been three carriages wide, paved with dressed river stone and lined with weeping willows every ten paces.
Now, every willow tree along the embankment was a dead, splintered stump, its bark stripped away down to the pale wood by the teeth of starving refugees.
