Five days northwest.
The road changed character twice—first leaving the flat commercial terrain that connected the eastern cities, then climbing into hillier ground where the substrate ran closer to the surface and the ambient between zones had a different quality, thinner and more variable. Soren kept his notebook open for most of the journey. He was recording the ambient characteristics of uninfluenced terrain, the path-energy density at regular intervals, the way the readings changed with elevation and geology. He didn't explain why. He was building a reference dataset for comparison against what he would read inside Brennan's Gate's zone system.
