prelude

Vast fields of corn and wheat.

A well-trodden path of gravel. Gravel quarried as stone, hammered, crushed, strewn about the ground. Deep enough that tire tracks and hoof marks had worn their way down.

Fuzzy, unripe bristles, covered in dried mud. They’d grow too close to the path, get tread on, pop back up. The dirty wheat and corn were covered in flies, who seemed content to hop and crawl, rather than fly. Was the summer heat so enervating? It was but an average summer day. Though, it had rained yesterday, scorched ereyesterday, stormed the day before; the bugs may be tired from the sky’s capriciousness.

“Penbarrow, 10km,” said the tall, wooden sign. It had been installed a year ago, and before most in the area were capable of reading at all.

Only the plants adjacent the path were dirt-covered. A few steps in, there were periods of tall, green stems, and the periods of uniform grass; both were vibrant. The wheat’s yellow-green and the corn’s green-green were cheerful, shockingly so. One could argue their cheerfulness was unearned, but one would be arguing with a plant. Most plants (though not all) tend against argumentation. They lend an ear regardless.

Alongside the plants, there were plenty of bones. A farmer would trip over a femur in the mud and find someone who socially outranks him to complain to. He didn’t care about the skeleton, but his lord might, and maybe he’d get rewarded. There were plenty of lost aunts and uncles and cousins unceremoniously squashed in fieldmud. It was usually just a cow, though. Or occasionally some manner of artificial skeleton, when the necromancer had reached a bone shortage. Or a lamb leg from a wolf. Or a lamb leg from a werewolf.

There tended to be too many possibilities for one to worry about all of them. A farmer walking along the gravel path shouldn’t concern themselves with wayward bones. Let the farmer worry about farming, the bone-ologist worry about bone-ology. Find the nearest literate person, have them write a letter to the academy of Northpoint, or of Felkner, or of Blisbane, and add to the ever-increasing backlog of false-positive sophont bones that need to be categorized.

There was a patch of blue wheat. It was wheat, but blue. Blue wheat didn’t tend to live very long after having been turned blue. The blue wheat was nonetheless cheerful. It was contributing to thaumology! It was proud!

Assuming this was a magical-experiment-induced blueness, rather than some manner of decay. Decaying wheat would probably agree with One-Who-Argues-With-Plants that it should not be cheerful.

One could spend their whole life asking questions of wheat, corn, gravel, flies and bones, and walk away feeling enriched. Maybe. Most didn’t. Most seemingly didn’t want to.