Location:Greyvale Ridge — Maren Harren's Farm
Date/Time:TC1856.07.04 (Afternoon)
The kitchen table was old oak. Scarred by decades of use — knife marks, heat rings, the worn patches where elbows had rested through thousands of meals eaten alone since Maren's husband died. She set bread on the table. Butter. A jar of preserves that glowed with the specific amber of fruit ripened by something more than sunlight.
Raven and Mira sat across from her. The farmhouse was quiet except for the sounds that farmhouses make — the settling of stone walls, the creak of a roof beam, the distant hum of bees in an orchard that shouldn't have been flowering.
Maren poured tea. Her hands were steady. The hands of a woman who had been up since before dawn baking because the ground told her today was important, and who had spent seventy-one years learning to trust what the ground said even when it made no sense.
"Ask your questions," Raven said. "I'll answer what I can."
