The Ashwall was not beautiful.
Commander Ryla Fenward — Gharrek's niece, Gnoll, thirty-two, assigned to the southern border command for the past six years — stood on the wall's observation platform and looked south. The view was the same view that every Ashwall officer saw, every day, for the duration of their posting: a flat, brown-green expanse of borderland stretching to the horizon, where the colors shifted — the vegetation changed, growing denser, greener, lusher. The line where the Sovereign's territory ended and Demeterra's began.
You could see it. That was the thing that newcomers didn't expect. The divine border wasn't a line on a map — it was a line on the earth. The Sovereign's land was managed, ordered, productive. Demeterra's land was alive in a different way — wilder, thicker, the growth domain pushing the soil's output beyond what natural agriculture could achieve. Her forests were taller. Her grasses were denser. Her rivers were wider.
