The boundary was a single, unbroken line drawn across the frozen dirt.
To the south. There, the mules stood stamping their hooves in the rising sulfur mist, the mud still possessed texture. Clods of brown loam, strands of bleached winter grass, and the faint, greasy sheen of marsh oil. To the north, exactly one inch beyond the line, the world became slate.
There were no stones. There were no pebbles. There were no tracks.
The earth was covered in a smooth, uniform carpet of fine, powdery ash. Not black like coal soot, but a pale, curdled grey like powdered bone mixed with lead shavings. Above it, the sky lost its dual suns. The copper orb and the razor-thin crescent blurred together into a flat, milky glare that cast zero shadows across the plain.
“The Spirit vein of Ash,” Chrono-Scribe Ren said, stepping down from the cart’s driver seat. His boots hit the mud with a wet slap, but he halted three inches short of the line. “Beyond this threshold, linear causality doesn’t merely fluctuate. It terminates. You’re entering the unformatted sector.”
Ren Vale walked to the edge of the line, his hand resting on the handle knob of his mammoth ivory awl.
