Robert noticed this without being troubled by it. It was simply the world being what it actually was rather than what proximity to home had made it appear to be.
The Osborn Clan's growing reputation, which had felt significant from inside Magical City's borders, was a local fact rather than a regional one.
Beyond a certain distance, the name meant nothing at all, and the recognition of that was not discouraging so much as clarifying. The world was genuinely larger than anything he had been able to see while standing in the middle of the thing he was building.
On the fifth day of travel, the group arrived at a city that made Magical City's scale feel modest by comparison.
It was called Riverstone City, named for the wide, slow river that ran through its center and had, according to a caravan driver who mentioned it in passing the day before they arrived, been the reason for the settlement's original founding centuries ago.
