And lo, with the sun still stitched high upon the cloudless tapestry of the azure sky, we came out onto a vista. There below, we beheld the great city of Magalat, resplendent behind its proud walls, adorned with its lance-like towers of onyx and iron. Banners fluttered from its battlements, heralding the green and white hawk of the baron, and all were greeted at its gates by handsome knights in thrice-polished armour, whose valour did gleam as rightly as their spears.

That’s what I’m going to tell Carrie. I’ll try my best to keep a straight face as I do.

Here’s how we actually happened upon Magalat.

With Alicia still struggling to walk, it was a slow plod west. She rocked in the saddle more often than not, so Mirra and I took turns at her side, ready to offer support. Consequently, my shoulder was killing me. Alicia isn’t exactly large, but propping up an adult perched well above head-height was not prescribed exercise in anyone’s books.

It’ll probably be a bit disappointing for anyone I regale this story with to learn that I actually didn’t pay much attention towards the end. What can I say? Nothing I haven’t already. It was long and boring. My surroundings were green. Behind was green. I’d seen lots and lots of green.

I guess we did start to spot a couple of new and foreign plants, but they didn’t stand out as much as you might think. I only know because Alicia commented on a grossenfunger tree at some point, noting that it produced quite a tasty nut if you could be bothered to roast it for forty-five minutes — she must have been even more bored than I was. Otherwise, I don’t recall noticing. If the flora was different, it wasn’t suddenly-walking-on-its-roots different. That I think I would have noticed.

Around mid-morning we bumped into a pair of trappers with half a dozen hares dangling from their belts. They startled us but we didn’t phase them one bit. They said a warm good morning and set off towards Magalat, outpacing us by an embarrassing margin. The three of us shrugged it off. Clive noted that it was good for rabbits to be taken down a notch.

It soon became clear why the trappers weren’t exactly elated to see another flesh and blood human. Not half a turn later we came across some foragers, who were all warm smiles and flushed cheeks. A half-turn later and it was lumberjacks. Now, these we found in force, and they were not in a smiling mood.

Every town and village nibbles a little into the local forest for the timber to erect its houses and keep its fires going. This was a different level though. This was an operation.

Scores and scores of lumberjacks were felling trees in a line that stretched for a fathom each side of the road. They worked methodically, with each man at a set station, and overseers managing their time and breaks. One team would trim branches, one team would chop, one team would saw, another haul, and further down the way others still would strip the bark and breakdown the logs into chunks or planks.

I’d never seen anything like it. It was efficiency the like of which isn’t even talked about in a village. In Braxus, it makes little difference if you take a morning to pick your vegetables or a week. They’re not going anywhere, and you have more than you need anyway. Here the workers were berated if they overlooked a sapling, or if they were not expedient enough in felling a great drakebirr. It was truly a sight to make the Anvil proud.

Encroaching on the graveyard of stumps and upturned roots, were some rudimentary camp buildings. These were mostly slapdash temporary huts, offering a bit of shelter from the sun or the rain as nature dictated. I did have a little giggle at the irony of chopping down a tree — famous for providing shelter — in order to build a shelter, but nobody wanted to share in my joke.

More permanent structures sat behind the bivouacs and lean-tos. Here the more serious processing went on, and I guessed at this point it was critical that the wood remain dry. There were also transportation stations, where carts drawn by huge drays were loaded with lumber in various states. The carts invariably trotted off towards the city itself, either to traders or to building sites, I would imagine.

Beyond this last layer of workshops were scattered residences, and even a few shops and taverns to support them. There were far too few for the multitude of workers I had seen, but still enough cabins for every resident of Braxus to have four each. The jacks who didn’t live nearby were dropped at yet another station. Fresh-faced, bright-eyed, clean-shaven men were ejected from canvas covered wagons, to be replaced with gritty-eyed, drooping-shouldered, sweat-soaked cadavers. It was a good advertisement for owning a little vegetable patch and living in the middle of nowhere.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

So we’d hit life, but we hadn’t yet hit Magalat.

After the lumberyard there was a little strip of grassland — more churned mud than actual grass — then a village was like an amped up version of Braxus. It wasn’t unfamiliar in its setup or appearance, but it buzzed with an energy that was frankly uncomfortable. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. I have no idea why, they seemed to be doing exactly what we in Braxus did, just faster.

There was another strip of plains after that village, and then another which was surely more of a town now. This one had multiple grocers and multiple smiths and was my first introduction to a concept I was hitherto unfamiliar with: shopping around. People didn’t just go into the grocers and pick up bread and beans; they went into one shop for bread, grumbled about the price, then went next door for the beans. They grumbled about those too, but they must have been cheaper. Grumbling was just part of the dialect here.

After this joy-forsaken place, there were three or four towns/villages just like it. Each time the stretch of grassland between settlements grew narrower. Each time the grumbling intensified.

The pattern continued until, boom, Alicia declared we were in Magalat.

There were no high walls. There were no handsome guards in gleaming breastplates. We just arrived.

The onyx and iron spires were real — although that whole day I only managed to glimpse the top of one at the end of a winding alley — and I hadn’t fibbed about the green and white hawk being the sigil of Baron Eggerth. The good baron was not exactly well represented though. What few banners there were did not so much fly as they did flop. Many were torn and tattered at the edges, and some had even been defaced.

Other than the occasional splashes of patriotic and a-patriotic colour, there wasn’t much to distinguish Magalat from the towns that orbited it like flies around a corpse. Not until we got deeper, anyway.

The further we pressed into Magalat, the more cramped it got. Houses went from having slithers of space between them, to being clustered in twos and threes, to being joined at the hip like the pair of twins Masie Oxter had birthed — sadly never to breathe even a mouthful of Braxus air.

It got cramped. It got crowded. It got hot. By the Glade, did it get smelly.

The people of Magalat had no qualms about dumping their rubbish wherever they stood. Worse, to my horror I discovered — the hard way — that they dump their refuse right there on the street! Literally chuck it out of the window to form little streams of stool specked sludge that stagnate at the foot of their dwellings until the rain comes and does them a solid by whisking away their solids. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, and I pray to the Anvil that it remains the most disgusting thing I ever will.

Next most notable were the people themselves. Far from meeting and greeting your neighbours as I was used to, nobody shared a smile or even a polite nod as they passed. Everyone surged away on their own path, with surly faces and storm clouds above their heads. Pleases and thank yous were rarer than unsoiled surfaces, and the only thing that flew readily from people’s lips were curses. I lost count of the number of times I saw people shoulder one another in their imagined hurry to get from somewhere to nowhere, only to stand and accuse the other like they had caught a thief or an adulterer. They were a miserable bunch. The people made me homesick in a way the travel hadn’t.

Alicia had an innate compass that I couldn’t fathom the workings of. She led us down broad streets, through winding roads, across insanely packed squares and through districts that were distinct to me only by how many or how few cobblestones were left to trip us.

I felt a sense of relief when we turned into a semi-affluent part of town, where the river of human waste at least stuck to narrow channels dug on the roadside — mostly. I thought then that we might enjoy some semblance of civility for the duration of our long exile.

But, no.

We were just crossing through this area, to get to our little suburb. This part of the city looked like it had been something before it became nothing. The houses were largely wooden, and even had a lick of paint on them. The paint was so cracked and flaky, though, that the buildings looked as though a necromancer had been at them.

There were shrines to the Anvil dotted about, suggesting this might have been a commercial or industrial hub at some point, but these were mostly left uncared for. A few of the shrines had fresh offerings on them, but nobody bothered to sweep the ledges or fill the cracks in the crumbling arches.

Some of the buildings had decorated fascia along the rooves, or even miniature statuettes on the corners. This suggested an immigrant population from Faiser or maybe Dbhorin had resided here, obviously before the barony all but closed its borders to outsiders.

The only positive about this dreary, time-worn part of town, is that it was nowhere near as popular as the other districts. Shop owners here sat on stools in front of their stores, their wares at their feet. They called half-heartedly for passersby to inspect their goods, and were not surprised in the least when nobody did. Whatever reputation the area — Sostain — enjoyed, it was not fashionable.

At long last, Alicia brought us to a halt down a dingy, quiet — still pretty pungent — sorry little street.

“Here we are,” she said, a mix of dark-humour and apology basting her words, “home sweet home.”

The shop was three-stories tall, painted in a greenish blue that made me think of baby clothes. It was broad compared to its neighbours — a haberdashery and a chandlers — but sank in on itself like a horse trying to hide in a field of donkeys. The whole thing leaned slightly into the street, so much so that I wondered if I might one morning find I had been deposited from my bed into the gutter below.

Above the door, in beautiful, curling brushstrokes of golden paint, were painted the words:

Iffan’s Herb and Tonic Emporium

Really, Iffan? Seriously? Way to keep a low profile.