Across Days 156 and 157, the character of the journey underwent a quiet, deep transformation.
The long column of eighty-five evacuees from Alderfast Basin didn’t march down the western carrier highway as a helpless, uniform mass of refugees. They were weavers, stonecutters, orchard keepers, and miners—men and women who had sustained a functioning community under siege for two years—and as the highway dropped into the fertile, populated river valleys of the western provinces, the web of their new lives began to unfold naturally at every crossroad.
On the morning of Day 156, the road crossed the broad stone arch of the Eastford River Bridge. The river town of Eastford was a thriving market settlement of three thousand souls. It was surrounded by sprawling apple orchards and terraced hop fields. The broad river flowed calm and slate-grey beneath the arches, carrying freight barges loaded with winter timber and autumn grain toward the coastal ports.
Waiting at the eastern bridgehead was a crowd of forty local townspeople. They were wrapped in colorful wool shawls and heavy coats. Weeks earlier, Joric Thane’s swift carrier couriers had carried Kezra’s letters and the basin census ahead to the river settlements, notifying relatives that the siege had been lifted and their kin were walking out in safety. Lodging tokens and transport passes had been arranged through Joric’s dispatch offices, ensuring that no arriving family would be turned away as vagrants at the town boundary.
