The courier team carrying the Keystone fragment reached the border of the wild lands on the seventh day.
Behind them, the kingdom of Threia receded into the haze of distance ...its ordered farmlands, its guarded roads, its illusion of civilized permanence fading like a dream upon waking. Before them stretched a landscape that belonged to no nation and obeyed no human law. The wild lands were a buffer zone between the kingdom's eastern frontier and the territories claimed by the orcish tribes, a region of dense forest, broken terrain, and the kind of absolute silence that existed only in places where predators had eliminated everything capable of making noise.
