Sergeant Hella Ironfoot's patrol had been walking for seven days when they found the village that shouldn't have existed.
The forest west of Ashenveil was, according to the Ministry of Stone's cartographic records, uninhabited. Sixty kilometers of old-growth woodland — ironwood, silveroak, and a species of enormous moss-draped pine that didn't have a name because no one had cared enough to name it. The forest was marked on the maps as "Western Reserve — unclaimed, no resource assessment" — the Ministry of Stone's shorthand for terrain too dense, too remote, or too economically uninteresting to warrant a formal survey.
