The border crossing was not announced by trumpets nor by the command of a guard which, in that desolate stretch of the plain, simply did not exist. It was, rather, a profound and disturbing change in the air. At the instant the wheels of the first wagon left behind the last grey stone markers of Athelgard's administrative limit, the world seemed to lose its color.
Kai, mounted on Valira, felt the change before anyone else. With his senses sharpened by recent combat, he caught an immediate heaviness in the air. In Athelgard, energy was like a constant, life giving breeze; here, it felt like a stagnant swamp. He looked back over his shoulder, watching the group of twenty-two refugees cross that invisible line. Their faces, marked by the fatigue of the Silver Crows' final siege, turned even paler under the sky of Terminus, a firmament no longer blue, but a leaden and oppressive hue, as if the clouds were heavy with volcanic ash cooled eons ago.
