The quarters given to Siilrava and his family were meagre at best. A diminishment from previous years. He took in the cramped tent in all its mundanity: The pocket room on the right that his daughter would have to share with her sister, the low ceiling with its sad conical lift at the centre, the squat furniture resting on worn-in red carpets, and, worst of all, the sickly lime colour of the canvas walls. He couldn't help but assume this was purposeful. A joke at his expense, to which the perception of his station in the Haemonine Government was the punchline. Indis burst into the tent, casting the flaps aside, startling Siilrava a little.

  'A thousand sorries sir, but they're asking for you sir, the ceremony starts very shortly.'

  'Fine. Out.' Returned Siilrava flatly. He didn't like talking to his personal secretary this way, never had. But it was ingrained in Haemonine custom that those of the highest ranks must treat their subordinates as such, even if they were their oldest friends. The theory went that it maintained the hierarchical order, signified the power of the rank. Indis was, at heart, a good man though. Slightly ditsy, but not one deserving of rudeness. It was one of the many things Siilrava disliked about being the second highest authority in the real of Haemonine. Another was what was about to take place, the reason why he and his family had had to make the uncomfortable journey to the far west of Oros and house themselves in this bilious tent: The yearly Innlandet Ceremony.

  Fress had been attending to the kids in their compartment, getting them dressed in their ceremonial uniforms and sashes. They looked ready but restless, she looked much the same. Siilrava watched her fixing the last folds on the clothes, taking the wooden beetle toy that his youngest had tried to hide in her pockets. He and Fress had been married 30 years now, more than half their lives. The love was dwindling, maybe gone for good. He only knew what his own heart was telling him, and couldn't bring himself to ask her, in a moment of brutal honesty, how she felt. He felt weak for evading it, particularly as he already knew the answer by the changes of tone, the formality of her words, the cold way they embraced. But while the love was gone, what remained was a deep history, a mutual respect weaving them together still.

  They'd decided on children late on in their lives by Haemonine standards, and it turned out that old, played-out adage was true - it was the best decision they ever made. This topic they did discuss openly and with immutable happiness. First came Brenna, now ten, and then Rumi, who turned seven last month. He watched them with such adoration. Whatever love had gone from he and Fress must've been redirected to their children, he sometimes thought. He just wanted to stay there and forego the ceremony, but duty must. It was unavoidable. Former High Chancellors and deputies of years past had had to attend while days from death due to illness. Some had even died on the journey. Such was the reverence with which the Innlandet ceremony was viewed. Siilrava, however, retained that it was barbaric.

  He caught his reflection in a looking glass, studied the heavy brow, white whiskers at the cheeks, stress lines. Age was making itself known. Fress and their daughters joined him on the dusty rug in the centre of the tent. 'Ready?' She asked with a lidded smile.

  'Yes.' He sighed.

  Siilrava opened the flap for his children to walk through, taking care they didn't knock their hair and unfurl all the work Fress had put in. They were met with a pale glare and a sea of activity. The canvas of the tent, for all it's faults, had acted as a perfect sound barrier. Before them was a milling of people, a temporary town built at the base of a slope at the far west of Haemonine. Dressmakers ran about with piles of unsewn cloth so high that their view was blinded, undara-powered carts, loaded with uncooked food and wine and beer for the feast later that evening drove up and down the makeshift side streets that ran between the rows of tents. Haemonine Knights and even some Vakt Warriors marched in perfect order amongst the chaos. Stretching out to the far left were the bleak mists of the Innlandet and rising upwards to the right were the beautful steep frosted peaks of The Hul Sjel Mountain, known as Little Sister. Siilrava's eight warrior guards, who'd been standing sentry outside the tent entrance turned and saluted him and his family.

  'Let's go, we're late for the judgement procession.' He said to Portway, his Head Guard. While he found it odd to speak to Indis in such a curt manner, it was even stranger with Portway. It was like chastising a child twice his size. But Portway took it as a normality, and he'd been a noble guard; Once a fierce Vakt Warrior in his youth having even fought beside the legendary 'Bilge' Tig Axater, who'd now earned his place protecting the highest authorities.

  They started walking down the slope towards the Innlandet with four guards abreast, two behind, one ahead, and Portway performing the duty of moving distracted punters out of their way at the front. At one point, Siilrava spied Indis trailing behind them, dodging eager merchants and young messenger children sprinting down the paths. He only had one protector, who kept a quick steady pace.

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  Soon the density of tents and pop-up shacks and horses started to thin, and the ground began to level. What came next was an all-too-familiar sensation, the passing into the mists of The Gronn Har - the thin stretch of swampland that lined the entire western edge of the Haemonine realm. It measured just half a mile wide at its thinnest points, but hugged the Haemonine foothills for countless miles from the cliffs of the cloud walk at the Ruskelite border in the Orosian North West, to the Collosean borderpoint at the very southern tip where the marshes stop and become the shore to the boiling sea.

  The air in the Gronn Har was unlike any found elsewhere in Oros. It was simultaneously cool but humid, thick but fluid. It seemed to brush the skin like a soft hand as one moved through it. There were several processions waiting for Siilrava and his family when they crossed over the mist wall. The sacrificial damned had entered earlier with their escort, as was tradition, then Chancellor Gilethe and his family, and next was Siilrava, holding up the queue.

  'Speed it up.' He said to Portway, and they went out on the mossy trodden path with a brisk pace. Quickly the silver fingers of the mist crept over them. He checked on the children. Brenna loved the Gronn Har, while Rumi hated it, as was written on their faces, but Rumi was persisting. She had understood from an impressively-young age the unyielding nature of duty, while Brenna still loved to ask 'why?' in response to most instructions.

  Siilrava himself found the place to be wonderous yet chilling. Unlike their destination, which lay ahead just a mile away now, the Gronn Har was a tapestry of life. It was a marshland, upon which grew a vast range of botanicals; mosses, shrubs, spotted patches of baby blue-barked trees that grew to a man's height and no further, flower buds of vivid purples and pinks that were so light they floated above the leaves on natural tethers as thin as human hairs. There was even a Vusius River not far from where they were walking, a natural phenomena so rare that each Realm possessed only one or two each. Its dark, shimmering waters have been shown to cure some of those enflicted with certain madnesses, and returned them to a lucid state. Some arcane flora also grew only out of these sodden soils, which were tended-to by specialist marsh gardeners and protected by tightly secured cordons. All of these oddities could be seen with an strange clarity, despite the haze, as if the mist wanted the trespassers to witness the beauty of its lands.

  In an act of known futility, Siilrava looked up. There was no sky in this place, just gradients of expanding grey. Legend went that monsters as tall as redwoods walked the thin line of marshland on spindly invisible legs, and plucked ignoble wanderers who ventured these lands. He was avoiding the inevitable: The sight of the Hul Sjel Line that was fading into view like an endless, weaving, ghostly grey snake. When he dropped his head again he saw it.

  Anyone who would look upon this land without knowing of its history would likely find a keen interest in the asymmetrical black line that had been tilled in the earth from the south to the north, as well as the ancient stone wall behind it that matched the path of the trench like an unmovable shadow. The wall itself was becoming clearer to Siilrava with each step, despite his near-sightedness. He remembered it vividly anyway. The wall, made of lichen-pocked grey stones set by a pale mortar, was of a modest height considering its purpose - just small enough so that Siilrava with his five-foot-seven

  stature could peer over the top.

  He learned in school, as did his parents and his children, that the ploughed line in the earth, which measured around ten feet in width, was formed by design into a raised bank, so as not to be filled by the natural waterways that ran through the swamp. It also contained well-designed drainage engineering to ensure rainwater did not collect. The soil within it was of an absorbing reddish-black colour, and the centre of the groove was perfectly level, so much so that it resembled a black woollen carpet when viewed from the temporary grandstands that the Haemonine officials were to stand atop during the ceremony. This smooth black surface was kept this way as a mark of respect to those who lay beneath it, and was preserved by Bondemen, experts in the art of gravedigging and ground maintenance. Siilrava spotted a few of these Bondemen, who were standing with their heads hanging low, with hands resting on newly-made shovels, as he and his family reached the wall, and solemnly climbed the steps onto the wooden stages.

  The Bondemen also carried out careful repairs on the more ancient of the gravestones that lined the base of the wall at irregular but frequent increments. The graves themselves spanned the entire length of the wall, Siilrava was once told, for there were few places along this western Haemonine border where, at some point in time, curiosity or the desire for fame had not driven doomed souls to cross the line of the Hul Sjel and enter into the Innlandet. After all, as Siilrava and Fress looked out beyond the wall, each holding a their daughters hands, the terrain itself looked no different to the habitable side, save for the bodies that lay hither and thither beyond the little wall, which, despite some being centuries-old, looked as though they fell just that morning.

  Over the next hour, the remaining attendees arrived in order of rank, until all were present and the ceremony was to begin.