Dulavin

Grass, Soil and the Turning Year

Grass runs unbroken around Dulavin, and the city has never pretended to be anything other than what that grass makes it. No harbour serves it and no navigable water reaches it; the wells and the sky provide, which in this part of the continent is enough and not a drop more. Farmland begins at the last house and continues to the horizon in long worked strips, and the calendar is simply the state of that land — sowing, green, cutting, threshing, then the slow accounting of stored grain through a winter nobody hurries. Granaries are the buildings that matter.

Old Hands on Flat Ground

Dulavin counts among the original elven foundations, and its people have worked the same acres long enough to know each one by its behaviour — a real advantage when the memory doing the knowing outlasts the fields' worst decades. Grain is what the city sends out and grain is what it is judged by. Dulavin belongs to the bloc seated at the Glacial Dominion, and settles that account in the only currency it grows, year after year, in carts.