Three years changed things.
Not all things — some things remained exactly what they had always been, stubbornly and completely themselves regardless of what the years did around them. But the shape of Arameor had changed in the specific way that places changed when they were well-governed and well-loved and had survived enough to understand the value of the surviving.
The markets were louder. The outer wall was fuller. The trade agreements that had stalled during the wars had been renegotiated and expanded and the expansion had produced the kind of quiet prosperity that did not announce itself dramatically but showed up in the details — the quality of the goods in the market stalls, the confidence of the people moving through the streets, the specific energy of a place that had been afraid and had come through the fear and had decided to live fully on the other side of it.
Arameor thrived.
