By midday on Day 71, the thin mountain sun beat down upon the eastern edge of the displaced grove, warming the damp blue clay until it gave off a thick, humid vapor that smelled of bog iron and wood turpentine.
After marking the drainage lines for Bram’s foresters, Kezra Venn led the party along the eastern outer edge seam of the sixty-four-pace square. Here. There, the imported red gravel met a steep outcropping of native dark grey rock shale, the ground showed evidence of a fully different kind of disaster. One that had unfolded not over weeks of slow rot, but within seconds of Ulvan Dret’s activation chime.
Half-buried in the churned, dried mud directly across the eastern border lay the shattered wreckage of a heavy four-wheeled logging sled.
The sled was built from seasoned mountain oak, heavy with heavy wrought-iron corner braces and thick steel-shod runners designed to haul multi-ton timber trunks down the rocky mountain chutes. Yet now, the massive six-inch oak runners were snapped like brittle dry twigs, splintered into thousands of ragged shards that jutted up through the clay like broken ribs. The front blade collar had been crushed fully flat, tightly packed into a two-inch layer of crushed wood fibers.
