Mid-morning light broke over the eastern crags of the Spine, burning away the rime-frost from the terrace walls and filling the basin with the rich, moist scent of thawing compost, damp earth, and cold limestone silt. Down from the southern gallery, Kezra Venn walked alongside Adra Pike, Voss, and Fellis Dain. Their heavy boots stepped in steady all at once along the central gravel terrace path that wound between the winter cabbage plots and the dormant root beds.
All around them, Alderfast was moving into its daily working rhythm. Two women in heavy sheepskin coats were hoeing winter weeds from an irrigation furrow. Three miners were carrying a timber balk up toward the No. 3 drift. And an elderly grower was inspecting the dry-stone retaining wall of the third terrace. He tapped the slate thin wedges with a wooden mallet to check for frost heave.
The communal seed store stood on the middle eastern shelf of the basin, thirty paces clear of the nearest residential cottage. It was a stout, square vault ten paces on a side. It was built from dressed dove-grey limestone cut stone and roofed with thick, overlapping slate slabs quarried from the southern ridge. Behind the vault, an eight-foot dry-stone heat-wall built from dark iron-bearing shale curved in a gentle arc, absorbing the direct morning rays and streaming that stored warmth against the building’s rear wall through the freezing highland nights.
